All posts by rileytinney

Project Update 4/22

The Future of Homelessness and the Shelter-Industrial Complex

On Friday, Brett and I went to a meeting at the Picture the Homeless office. We met with Eric, Ryan, and Jenny Akchin, who’s a new policy organizer with PTH. We gave them a summary of what we’ve done, and they gave us a lot more direction about how we can help them.

First we discussed the white paper. Jenny is working on researching the ways that buildings can be converted to to CLTs. She explained four main paths: eminent domain, 3rd party transfer, a 7A administrator, and an alternative enforcement program. Briefly, eminent domain is when the city takes buys a building from its owner to use it in the public interest; a third party transfer is when a non-profit takes over a building and then turns it into a CLT; a 7A administrator is when a building is so badly run that they city assigns an outside organization to manage it and make repairs that are paid for by the owner (this often results in the owner relinquishing the building, because it’s very expensive for them); and alternative enforcement is when owners are given deadline by which they have to repair serious problems, and if they don’t a tax lien is placed against the property. We agreed to do more research on these to see how they might work. We’ll include this information, and anything we discover about policies that might make more buildings become CLTs through these methods, in our white paper.

I asked Picture the Homeless specifically about what power city council has to create CLTs, and they said that one thing city council could do was outlaw using rent-stabilized buildings for cluster-sites. This would effectively outlaw cluster sites, because market rate buildings would be too expensive for the city to turn into shelters. Jenny also said that the city council has been passing lots of harassment laws recently, so they could define poor living conditions as harassment (or maybe they already are harassment, I wasn’t clear on that point) and then say that the consequence for this harassment is that the building comes under administration by a 7A administrator. As I understood it, this would effectively increase the number of buildings that fall under 7A administration, and then hopefully become CLTs. In our white paper, we’ll explore these two ideas for policies to suggest to City Council.

I anticipate these new research goals being challenging, because they seem to get deep into the specifics of New York housing law, which is not something that any of us are experts on. We’ll do our best, and ask Jenny for help when we need it, and hopefully we’ll be able to get some useful information. I found this nyc.gov site (http://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/owners/compliance-housing-quality-enforcement-programs.page) that had a clear overview of a lot of the different types of housing quality enforcement, and it looks like there’s a lot of information in links on that page, so hopefully that helps, although none of it will address conversion to a CLT specifically.

We also discussed what they would like us to do for a popular education project. Ryan told us that the main need they have is for a brochure explaining the problems with cluster-site housing. They want something short and attention-grabbing that they can hand out to people. We brainstormed about that, and decided that what would be best is a single sheet of paper folded into thirds that will tell rent-stabilized tenants in cluster site buildings, cluster site residents, and the general public how cluster site shelters affect them. Our proposed format is three sections titled something like “what you need to know about cluster sites if you’re a… cluster site resident” “…rent stabilized tenant in a cluster site building” “… New York City taxpayer.” Then on the back of the brochure we’d explain what Picture the Homeless wants to happen. They have a Prezi that they made about shelter site housing that they shared with us to give us ideas about how to talk about these issues, and they’re also going to share their list of demands for the campaign, which we will also mention in the brochure. We decided that we would give them a draft of the brochure on May 4th. On that day, at 5:30, we’ll have a meeting at their office to discuss our draft and what changes we can make.

Eric also mentioned that it would be helpful to have a website for the cluster-site campaign that they can use to post popular education tools and information about all the organizations that are sponsoring the campaign. We said that we’d look into how difficult that would be, and if we could do it. I was just looking around WordPress to see how it worked, and I started a site called https://endclustersites.wordpress.com/. I haven’t added anything to it, but it does look like it’s pretty easy to use, so we’ll keep working on it.

We want to have a group meeting soon to talk more about the white paper and the popular education materials, and coordinate our efforts.

Tasks

graphic design of the brochure- Brett, Bethany, Annalise

designing the website and putting information on it- Brett, Bethany, Annalise

Brochure text (all of these will be very very short)

info for shelter residents- Riley

info for rent-stabilized residents- Riley

info for the general public- Corrin

Picture the Homeless’s goals- Corrin

White paper

research paths to turn buildings into CLTs- Omar

research policy proposal about making it illegal to use rent-stabilized buildings for cluster sites- Zumana

research policy proposal about giving 7A administrators to more buildings- Anna

 

Reading Response 5

The Right to the/Just City, Uncategorized

This chapter of Rebel Cities by David Harvey was really challenging for me. I think I got a lot out of it, but there were concepts I struggled with. I wasn’t really confident that I understood what the author meant by “to produce a surplus value capitalists must produce a surplus product” and in general, the concept of surplus product that was so important throughout the text. My understanding of how capitalists make profits, or surplus value, is that they sell products or services for more than the products or services cost to make, which doesn’t exactly fit conceptually.

I tried to figure out what the author was saying, and this is the best I could come up with:  there’s a certain quantity of output that firms could produce that would mean they would just exactly break even (they’d cover their costs but not make any profit) and any level of production higher than that is what we’re calling surplus production. If I’m understanding this right, it’s a shift in perspective, because that’s not generally how economists would describe it; this higher level of output is being demanded (in economics, this just means consumed) by consumers, so the output isn’t surplus. But this does seem to make sense with generally how Harvey talks about surplus product. It seemed like his concept of the “capital surplus disposal problem” is similar to what an earlier author called the “growth machine,” the idea that capitalism requires endless expansion and has to be always selling more things to more people for higher prices. To constantly create this growth, taking real estate away from low-income communities and selling it for higher prices to rich people is a popular tactic, as we’ve discussed before.

The idea that the amount of production that makes a profit for producers is ‘surplus’ is interesting, because the break-even point for producers has no significance for consumers–there’s no reason that from their perspective consuming more than this amount is ‘surplus’ or unnecessary. The examples the author uses, like a ski resort in Dubai, seem stereotypically excessive, but there’s no obviously bright line between that and the common practice of making snow to put on mountains at ski resorts when it isn’t snowing, or even having ski resorts in the first place, or all of the endless things we spend money on that aren’t directly related to survival. In our current economic system, we decide how much should be produced based on the supply and demand model that producers use to chose the level of production that will make them the most profit. This system results in ski resorts in Dubai. In another system, how would these decisions be made? What would be defined as ‘excess’, and who would get to define it?

The author thinks that social movements should “converge on the singular aim of gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus.” Again, I’m not sure what this means. Would it be some sort of system where producers still decide how much to produce in order to maximize profit, and then these profits are heavily taxed or somehow redistributed? Or would some sort of governmental or non-governmental organization interfere in the process of creating the surplus, so that producers don’t make decisions based on profit maximization, and excesses aren’t created? It seems like if social movements are looking for control of the surplus then the surplus is still being created the same way it is in the current system, but I don’t know.

This article was definitely an intellectual challenge for me. I was really interested in the questions it raised, and would be interested in reading more by this author to get a better idea of what he’s arguing.

Discussion question: Given how different consumption is across cultures and time periods (people in the 1800s would see indoor plumbing as unnecessary; people in all other countries use less gas than we do in the US ) how could we ever decide on a sustainable level that balances the needs of others, ourselves, the environment, and the workers?

Reading Response 4

The Politics of Place, Oppression, and Privilege
Iris Marion Young, in her article “Five Faces of Oppression” came up with a list of criteria for defining if a group is oppressed, meaning that they experience structural injustices in our society. Throughout the article she frequently applied her terms to women and racial minorities, and I was interested to see how they would work applied to the homeless people who are the focus of my group’s project.

I really appreciated the definition of exploitation provided here, because I realized that I’ve often heard and used the word without having a clear, concrete definition for it. The idea that transferring of the results of labor from one social group to the benefit of another is exploitation is a concept that I think is really powerful. Homeless people might not seem to be victim to exploitation, but only to someone who believes in the stereotype that homeless people don’t work. The Urban Institute says that about 45 percent of homeless adults have worked in the past month, which makes them some of the clearest possible victims of exploitation. If they are being hired, that means that someone is profiting from their work somehow, but they aren’t getting even the most basic benefits from this work–a stable place to live–so they are clearly being exploited.

As for the other 55%of homeless people who haven’t worked in the past month, they face the second type of oppression- marginalization. Young says that these people who the system of labor will not use are “expelled from useful participation in social life.” I thought the feminist analysis of that idea was so interesting that I’ll return to it later, but to first take the concept at face value, it is obviously true that homeless people, because of their lack of economic power, are systematically excluded from many kinds of social participation. The example of this that I thought of was the ability to hear their concerns addressed and taken seriously in the mainstream political discourse. In many issues in politics, both sides are at least treated as if their concerns are real and they have the legitimate right to their opinion. In contrast, in housing policy politicians hardly even mention the concerns of the homeless, and their voices aren’t generally heard, as is pointed out by Picture the Homeless’s motto “don’t talk about us, talk with us!” (Two other groups stuck out to me as being similar; the way that the voices of the disabled are often left out of disability policy (and their similar motto, “nothing about us without us”) and the way that the opinions of prisoners would never be seriously considered in designing prison policy, which is an interesting way of looking at what groups we see as being ‘other.’)
Powerlessness is also experienced by the homeless, and the limitations to free expression imposed by it–always working to execute the plans of others, lacking status in the world and autonomy at work–are clearly faced by homeless people with and without jobs, given that their jobs are often minimum wage jobs.
Cultural imperialism against the homeless is interesting, because I think it matches us very closely with what we’ve talked about in class as the “culture of poverty.” Cultural imperialism says that white middle class culture is normal, and others are “stereotyped as deviant,” so of course it looks like poor people are poor because of their culture, because we just defined their culture as inferior.
Systematic violence is also clearly experienced by the homeless, most obviously and extremely in the form of brutal policing tactics that criminalize things like loitering. Young also defines it more broadly as degradation and humiliating treatment, which is also clearly experienced by the homeless, and linked to their powerlessness.
Ultimately, an idea that stood out to me throughout this article was the way that so many of these forms of oppression link people’s economic value in a capitalist system to their inherent value, and their treatment by others. In the section on marginalization, when Young said that people who aren’t part of the labor force are excluded from “useful participation” in communities, at first I thought she was stating a fact, these people aren’t able to contribute to society in useful ways. The view that ‘useful contribution’ is any contribution that is rewarded by our economic system is something that’s often taken for granted, but in reality it ignores care-taking and any other activity that’s under-valued by the market, as well as our inharent value to each other just because of our basic humanity. The fact that the homeless often are excluded from useful participation isn’t a necessary result of their lack of economic power, it’s a result of the way our capitalist system works and who it prioritizes.

Discussion Question: What kind of policies or economic systems might result in a society that more fairly values the non-economic contributions and value of oppressed people?

Reading Response 3

A Time of Crisis, Uncategorized

When we watched the documentary Whose Barrio? last week I had conflicting feelings about it. The idea that goods should go to whoever is willing to pay the most for them is basically the foundational idea of our economic system. I was kind of thinking, as I listened to people talk about losing their apartments and having to move, ‘well, it is sad when you want something you can’t afford, but that’s what capitalism is.’ Losing your neighborhood, community, and, in a sense, homeland, really is an awful, traumatic thing, but gentrification just seems so woven into the fabric of how our society works at the most basic level that how can it ever be stopped?

This article by Samuel Stein made all the efforts of housing organizers around this question suddenly clear to me in these lines: “[Affordable housing] can’t be done in a way that benefits both capital and workers in equal measure… We need housing policies that confront capitalism.” For me, this section brought home how truly revolutionary anti-gentrification movements are. Trying to find a way of allocating land and resources that respects and values communities based on something besides what they can pay really isn’t a small tweak to a limited part of a basically solid system, it’s a whole new paradigm.
I think that’s the basis of the article’s critique of De Blasio’s plan, and inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning is based on the idea that when the market fails to solve a problem satisfactorily we can slightly adjust the rules and the incentives, and the market will then be able to give us the best possible solution. The efforts of Picture the Homeless around community land trusts and other permanent housing solutions propose an alternative that isn’t based on profits or the free market at all.
For me the significant concept from this reading was the idea of “confronting capitalism,” instead of uncritically accepting the lens of capitalism and seeing everything through that set of assumptions, as I had initially done with the movie.
Discussion questions: Is it possible to structure our society so that capitalism is only used in situations where it’s appropriate? What would those situations be? What sectors of our society would benefit from more “confrunting” of capitalism?

Reading Response 2

Roots of Community Planning

The Root Shock article was a really great explanation of the consequences of the urban renewal projects in the second half of the 20th century. I was especially interested by the connection that was pointed out between being removed from a stable living situation and experiencing homelessness later in life. There’s public resistence to the idea of ‘just giving’ homes to the homeless, but if you look at it from the perspective of all the ways that the government has prevented some groups of people from accessing housing, maybe rehousing programs could almost be seen as reparations.

Beyond historical repercussions following us into the present, this article is also relavent today because things like this still happen, and the insights from the article don’t seem to be commonly understood by people in power. I read an article recently about the Buena Vista Trailer park in Palo Alto, which is the only significant community of low-income housing within the borders of Palo Alto county, one of the richest counties in the country. A Stanford professor named Amado Padilla did research on the community in a way that seems similar to some of the PAR techniques we’ve talked about in class, and found that the mostly Hispanic community was thriving. High school students from the park have almost a 0% dropout rate, whereas the rate for Hispanics elsewhere in Silicon Valley is 29%. The resident of the park have annual Christmas parties and many of them have lived there for most of their lives.
Since there’s so much demand for land in Palo Alto, the company who owns it wants to remove the residents, rezone it for higher density housing, and sell it for a huge profit. The residents have organized to try to fight against this, and want to buy the land from the company, but for a lower value then the company could get for it if it were rezoned. The case is currently in court to decide if the compensation that the company plans to offer the residents is adequate.
The main line of argument from the residents is that the company isn’t planning to pay them a fair value for their homes, and that it’s not fair for them to have to leave Palo Alto county and it’s excellent public services, in particular a very well-funded public school system. These points are very important, and probably are the ones a judge is most likely to take seriously, but the Root Shock article shows all the other harms communities suffer when they are displaced. Things like keeping people with their neighbors and support systems, letting children remain in the place they know as home, and offering people stability and some control in their living situations aren’t being taken seriously by decision makers.
Discussion Question: When trying to financially compensate people for the loss of their homes is there any way to fairly account for intangible variables?

Reading Response #1

"The Patron Saint" and "The Git'r Done Man"

As I read “The ‘Patron Saint’ and the ‘Git’r Done Man,’” I noticed the reappearance of a theme that first interested me in the “Welcome to the Gilded City of New York.” In that article, the authors explained that Mayor Bloomberg believed that the most important thing a city needed to do was attract talented, creative people. He believed that talent would attract capital, and so would lead to a successful city. To achieve this, he built a city that would appeal to successful professionals by catering to their desires for personal freedom, diversity, and a rich cultural scene. As the article pointed out, he often achieved these priorities at the expense of other groups of New Yorkers.

Many of the victories of the Bloomberg administration—like bike lanes, tree planting, and increasing the presence of the tech industry in the city—disproportionately addressed the priorities of middle and upper class residents, while he frequently worked against the interests of working class people—by cutting social services, fighting against unions, and instituting stop-and-frisk policing practices. All of these things were consistent with his vision of who the city was supposed to be for; since his goal was to make a great place for upper-middle class people to live, all his decisions fell in line with that.

“The ‘Patron Saint’ and the ‘Git’r Done Man,’” explains the conflict between two other visions of the city. Robert Moses is praised for having expansive picture of what New York City could be, and working efficiently and forcefully realize his plans. His efforts resulted in the construction of many of the buildings-like the United Nations, Lincoln Center, and Shea Stadium-that turned New York into a cultural, financial, and commercial capital. His priority was to secure New York’s status on the world stage.

Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, often served as Moses’ antagonist, because of her radically different vision for the city. Her emphasis was on the neighborhood level, and she championed the diverse, livable community as the highest good of a city. From one perspective, the main issue between them was whether it’s more important for a city to play a central role in the world, or to be a good place to live for the people who live there.

Ideally, of course, we want a city that’s attractive to rich people and supportive of poor people; that’s a sustaining place to live and a world capital; that’s a fair place to be employed and a thriving place to be an employer; that’s safe and also fair; that welcomes immigrants but not at the expense of citizens; and many more things besides. But inevitably these goals come into conflict with each other, and decisions have to be made about what we value the most, and what our vision is of what the city should be.

Discussion Question: If you were designing a city from scratch, what are the top goals you would want your city to achieve? What would you be willing to sacrifice?