Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hip Hop Revolution Exhibition Reflection

April 28, 2015Uncategorizedhip hop revolutionashwinijchawla

The factors that go into the creation of a cultural era are explored and brought to life in the Hip Hop Revolution exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibition includes multiple seen and unseen facets of the contributions to the hip hop culture that arose in New York City in the early 1970s. The exhibit is divided by the respective photographers and their own perspectives of the revolution. Janette Beckman’s photographs incorporate the popular, mainstream images of the faces behind the movement, or rather the artists that perpetuated a new era of music. Photographs autographed by some of hip hop’s top artists such as Salt N Pepa, Afrika Bambaataa, LL Cool J, and Flava Flav welcome the viewer upon entering the exhibit. Additionally, Beckman’s photographs reveal a different side to hip hop, for its origins began as an outlet to promote positive messages to the youth.

It was interesting to see that the early development of hip hop was supportive of anti-drug campaigns, and some of the earliest pioneers sought out to promote this to the youth, such as Big Daddy Kane who went on to tour throughout New York City high schools with this anti-drug sentiment. This sharply contrasts what hip hop’s reputation encompasses today, for many songs promote violence and the acquisition of drugs, money, and women.

Of course, not every movement is ushered in without a few obstacles along the way, and so the second part of the exhibit, photographs by Martha Cooper and Joe Conzo, display the realities behind the struggles for those in the hip hop revolution. One photo in particular by Martha Cooper caught my attention, for it showed transit cops holding confiscated items from break dancers.

Often times, the gatherings for early hip hop goers were considered to be riots by the authorities. In Cooper’s photographs above, authorities found weapons and graffiti paraphernalia at one such “riot” in Washington Heights. The realism of hip hop came to light as such gatherings became more popular.People came together to celebrate a new platform for new talent and musical innovation but were met with charges of public disturbance in the process.

Hip hop brought a voice to address issues of racism and prejudice which eventually led to its success, as a genre and culture that people could relate to. Hip Hop has expanded today to serve as an outlet for contemporary emotions for artists of all races and genders, and sometimes this means serving as a platform for promoting negative messages. However, the origins of hip hop serve as remnants of ideas of positive messages to address issues that call for action.

RR: PAR

April 20, 2015On PAR, UncategorizedBrett Barshay

The reading, Banking on Vacancy: Homelessness and Real Estate Speculation, a report by Picture The Homeless (PTH) effectively summarized the many issues with the housing crisis. The data and statistics discussed in the report are all incredibly striking. It introduces the topic with the statistic of vacant buildings and lots and the amount of people that potentially can be housed in these spaces: 3,551 vacant buildings and 2,489 vacant lots can house a total of 199,981 people. How can a city permit this to happen when homelessness is on the rise?

The city has been developed to promote a free-market economy and the commoditization of property. These spaces are primarily privately owned buildings and lots, with a mere 10% of these properties being owned by the government. Even the vacant publicly owned buildings are not being renovated and developed into function public spaces or affordable housing. The vacant spaces that are privately owned are nearly impossible to overturn into affordable housing and remain as unusable structures. These real estate tycoons warehouse these properties as investments that they sit on until the market deems it profitable to convert these spaces into market-rate real estate. Frequently these buildings will have a commercial tenants, but vacant apartments because the owners obtain enough profit from the store-front without dealing with the “hassle” of residential tenants. Property warehousers do not provide any benefit to the community, they only neglect the needs of the community and the people by maintaining these properties for their personal gain. Additionally, PTH points out the correlation of the location of homeless folks and vacant property. The 10 community districts from which the majority of homeless folks come from also have the highest density of vacant property in the city. Finally, the expense of the government for the homeless shelter institution is dramatically excessive. The city spends about $3,500 a month to house someone in a shelter which accumulates to an annual expense of $856 million. Clearly, the system in place does not solve the housing crisis, but simply diverts it with temporary housing. The government must begin developing permanent affordable housing for homeless folks which will ultimately reduce the annual expenses of the city for the shelter system.

Picture The Homeless’s report also details numerous solutions and policies that could be enacted to solve the housing crisis. Their recommendations, as listed in the report are: end warehousing, pass legislation that would mandate a city wide count of vacant property, introducing three year vacancy limit on private property, developing more Community Land Trusts, make information on housing and ownership more available, altering the Area Median Income policy for affordable housing, exposing the true identity of private owners of vacant property, and cataloguing a thorough data set of partially vacant building. All of these recommendations must be set in place in order to adjust the housing system to provide better housing. However, not all of them can be enacted on at the same time. In my opinion, the most effective method would be targeting the government’s budget for the homeless shelter system. There has to be a progressive rotation of shelter properties into affordable permanent housing. Before affordable housing is developed, the city must localize the AMI policy so that the rents are not incredibly skewed by higher income residents as well as introducing an annual vacancy count. Once all affordable housing is truly affordable, then the government should begin developing affordable permanent housing from the vacant properties that it owns as a way to test out if it is effective. Once it is proven to be an effective policy, then the government should begin acquiring properties that have been vacant for excessive periods of time so that private owners begin renting out vacant apartments and more affordable housing can be developed from the appropriated properties. Thousands of New Yorkers have been anticipating the adjustment of the housing system in the city, which is finally so close to happening.

Response 4

March 30, 2015UncategorizedAndrew McAllister

Steven Wishnia’s Gothamist article “How Your Tax Dollars are Wasted to Build Luxury Apartments” is intriguing and informative. Many of the issues raised in the article come up at community meetings and are referenced in our other class readings.

Familiar issues are raised again at the outset of the article. Of nearly 4400 apartments built under the 421-a program, about 260 were officially designated “affordable.” That’s about six percent. Of those, 31 were actually affordable to a family making $41k per year (the average for NYC renters in 2014). The numbers may be different, but the principle is the same: not enough affordable housing is available, and what little is isn’t actually affordable. The article is almost overflowing with accounts of 421-a subsidizing luxury buildings with one story noting that with the subsidies one building received, its eight affordable units (compared to 306 luxury) cost the public fund $642k each.

The article also tackles the loopholes in subsidy laws. Essentially, one unit can be used to apply for a basically unlimited number of programs. So each affordable unit is counted toward numerous government subsidies and programs at the same time. The same apartment used to apply for 421-a as well as any number of other loans, bonds, and tax credits. This sort of “double dipping,” as the article calls it, should be prohibited as one of the article’s proposed reforms of 421-a. If a developer receives subsidies form two programs, it stands to reason that they should be setting aside twice as many affordable units.

The first reform would be to make affordable units mandatory for any construction project receiving the tax break (currently, this is only mandatory within certain zones). One group suggests that, for lower Manhattan, half of any new units should be dedicated for the $25k-$50k income level.

The next reform is essentially an overhaul of AMI. The problem with affordabe housing is that it isn’t. These units need to be designated for a much lower income level than they are now. AMI takes into account areas outside of the city, artificially inflating the perceived average income of the area. The result is that affordable housing may be affordable and priced below average income based on AMI, but this is not refelctive of the state of affairs in New York City.

The last reform should seem obvious: affordable housing should be affordable permanently. There is a trend of affordable units converting to market rate after their subsidy expires, leaving low income residents in danger of eviction. If developers want to reap the benefits of these subsidies, the benefits that they provide to tenants shouldn’t be only temporary.

In 1998, Congress passed a law that effectively prohibited the construction of new public housing. The effect was that avenues besides private development have been closed.

In 2013-2014, just over 1/12 of apartments that received 421-a were “affordable,” while over 100k truly affordable ($5-900 per month) have been lost since 2011. Soon, both rent regulation laws and 421-a will be on the floor in the state legislature. The article puts forth a likely situation: 421-a will be used as a bargaining chip to protect and strengthen rent regulation, and vice-versa. While opponents call 421-a deeply flawed and say that it puts money in the wrong places, they concede that if its renewal leads to better rent-control laws, it would be a victory.

Although I haven’t been able to look into it, it is entirely likely that East River Plaza will receive 421-a subsidies in addition to many others. In effect, while trying to ensure that some amount of “affordable” housing is created in New York, 421-a in fact serves first and foremost the profit margin of big developers.

Reading Response 5

March 29, 2015The Right to the/Just City, Uncategorizedrileytinney

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?

3/25: Data and Research Findings

March 26, 2015Uncategorizedhillcaldwell

On Wednesday we did a methods module on Data and Research Findings in Participatory Action Research, which you will use to develop your Public Engagement products and Policy Recommendations. Each group shared their most urgent/valuable pieces of data (raw information- quotes, descriptive statistics, field notes, interview transcripts, photos, archival info- both primary (produced by you) and secondary (produced by others). Groups then used these pieces of data to suggest initial research findings (stories, arguments, explanations that you produce by weaving your data together; findings are based on key assumptions and are developed through data analysis using concepts and theories that help to illuminate your argument. Each group should have data that grounds/can be cited in the historical overview of the problem, and to support your suggestions around what can/should be done in response. The purpose of yesterday’s exercise was to take stock of what you are finding and able to argue thus far, and of where there are gaps in your argument/evidence base. Please use what you learned in this exercise to further specify the parameters of your projects and data collection methods/instruments. Here are some guiding questions to help you with this:

How?

…can you document or better understand (the problem/potential responses)? Do you need “hard” numbers (quantitative data) and/or stories of personal experience (qualitative data) or both?

…are you going to give legs to your research? What strategies could you employ to make the research and report as impactful as possible?

Who?

…are the stakeholders in the issue? Who has interest? Who is affected?

…needs to have their voice be heard?

…are you trying to influence? Who has power over the issue?

…is your target audience (community members, elected officials, media)?

…will collect your data?

Where?

…can you find the people you need to talk to get your data?

…can you find existing information that is relevant to your research?

…can you go for support and assistance (non-profits, universities, government agencies)?

If you take the time to answer these questions as a group, you should have a pretty clear sense of what else will be needed to complete your data collection!

Politics of POP

March 23, 2015The Politics of Place, Oppression, and Privilege, UncategorizedLaura Benasaraf

The politics of Place, Oppression, and Privilege are all connected in a metropolitan city like New York. Hayden discusses how “space is permeated with social relations; it is not only supported by [them] but it is also producing—and produced—by [them]. A “Place” can denote both an aesthetic history, and the cultural history—even long after the group that resided there has left. A city is organized by the biases and perspectives of the organizer; we see segregated neighborhoods, areas divided by race and social or economical inequality, because history is written in a way that neglects minority histories (Hayden, 9).

in “Privileged Places,” we read how the segregation, sprawl, and concentrated poverty of Post World War II urban development led to uneven development and racial disparities throughout the country. In the separated communities, even education—known as “the great Equalizer”—is not up to par in poorer neighborhoods and cities. Additionally, in “Five Faces of Oppression,” we are given criteria for an “oppressed race” (Young).

In our last class, we discussed what we thought the main issue being discussed was. I chose segregation (not knowing what the next week’s reading would bring). There has been uneven development throughout New York City, which leads to the underrepresentation and thus inattention to certain communities and neighborhoods that could really use some help.

Squires and Kubrin (Privileged Places) discuss how both class-based policies and race-based initiatives must be used to even out the city. They use the term “colorblindness” to describe legislation that is technically universal in character but has clear racial implications. One such form of legislation is inclusionary zoning, as proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Inclusionary zoning and other forms of fair housing law enforcement will be necessary to reduce the racial segregation throughout the city.

Discussion Question: Hayden mentions how New York City (meaning, the center of global culture, finance, et cetera) would not be complete without Harlem and the Bronx. Is the unintentional class system and the society that follows a characteristic of a metropolitan city—and thus, would New York City be the same without it?

Without Compromise

March 10, 2015The Capital of Capital, Part 2, UncategorizedOneeka Khan

It appears even when community issues have gained awareness from the big powers, neighborhoods are still short-handed. The inclusionary zoning plan was supposed to be a game-changing plan, both during the De Blasio administration now as well as the Bloomberg administration years ago. However, Stein’s article demonstrates the contradiction of this plan and how it actually leads to an overall downgrade in the status of affordable housing. The more articles that I read about zoning and development plans, the more it becomes prevalent that the community interest really has no significance to city planning and real estate commissions. They implement certain policies and plans in order to appease the public, however they have every intention of keeping profit a priority, even at the expense of the public. Therefore, it seems as long as profit is in the picture, which it will always be, there really may be no compromise for the working class.

Stein touches on the exciting claims of inclusionary zoning to create 20% of affordable housing for every construction project, which would at first glance seem to increase affordable housing. However, it almost seems as if the logistics of the plan work to have loop holes. If built on a vacant lot, inclusionary zoning will indeed raise the number of affordable apartments. But at the same time, the ratio of market-priced or higher than market-priced housing is still greater than affordable housing, which only serves to encourage gentrification in the targeted areas. What is worse is that plots with existing affordable housing may be bulldozed for more modern housing, which results in more displacement in net loss in affordable housing; an occurrence completely contradictory to inclusionary zoning’s projected goals.

The transformation of vacant lots into modern developments can be related to the community gardens issue. Gardens fostered by the community are being destroyed in the name of zoning. Even though this isn’t technically a decrease in affordable housing, it is a loss of something very significant to the community, a place where people can get together, as well as a benefit to those struggling with finances (gardens cut the cost of food because of locally grown produce). One big reason for this is because these gardens appear as vacant lots in many city planning maps. So if a change were to be made, it would start with the acknowledgment of gardens as a used space and not a vacant lot.

Reading Response 3

March 9, 2015A Time of Crisis, Uncategorizedrileytinney

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?

The Future of Homelessness and the Shelter-Industrial Complex

February 10, 2015Uncategorizedhillcaldwell

Homelessness is at record levels and on the rise in NYC, despite multiple administrations promising to address it. Recent press has raised the public profile of this “hidden” issue through investigations into terrible shelter conditions, which are extremely costly for taxpayers: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/28/hidden-city?currentPage=all, http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1. Meanwhile, the NYC Community Land Initiative, led by members of Picture the Homeless, is advocating for NY City and State to fund “Homes Not Shelters” https://indypendent.org/2014/02/25/homeless-folks-have-real-solutions-housing-crisis;http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/01/new_york_has_mo_1.php.– And are working together with people who have housing but are threatened by displacement to develop alternative proposals for need-based homes rather than market-driven housing and shelters. NYCCLI is trying to build a policy campaign around moving money from the shelter system into permanent homes, and to show how this could work in their people’s plan for East Harlem. Can you help?

Zumana Miyfa, Annalise Armenta, Omar Nagaria, Riley Tinney, Anna Kornak, Corrin Chow

Community Engagement Tools

February 10, 2015Resources, Uncategorizedhillcaldwell

Community Tool Box: a set of 16 online tool kits for doing community work. Each kit outlines a particular process/series of activities and provides examples from actual projects. #2: Assessing Community Needs and Resources and #3: Analyzing Problems and Goals will be most relevant to your group projects, but you might find others of interest as well.

Research for Organizing Toolkit: a toolkit for Participatory Action Research created by the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project; includes a step-by-step timeline for doing PAR, case studies, example activities, and example tools.