All posts by Libby Ho

Defining “Community”

Clarifying Key Concepts

As we continue to learn more about various community issues in NYC, including gentrification, redevelopment projects, rezoning plans, etc., it’s interesting to realize that none of us really have a concrete definition of what a “community” is. Perhaps the definition is implicitly understood; a community is a group or organization of people devoted towards some common cause. However, in The Community Development Reader, James DeFilippis, Susan Saegert, and Harold DeRienzo argue that there’s more to a community than just a group of people with common interests. A community is the most basic, fundamental unit through which people interact, sustain their familial lives, and act collectively to face commonly shared issues. Communities are entities that both shape people’s individual lives and perspectives, and serve as the grounding support for the larger-scale organizations of economy and government. In this sense, communities are an essential bridge between people and larger organizations and systems. When the larger economy fails to provide for these communities, the people are thus motivated to organize and bring about community development that can better serve their needs and desires. Hence, all community organizing efforts have an underlying goal of continually transforming their communities to better thrive in today’s ever-changing political and economic context.

Such a definition for community can also be applied to the NYC mental health “community”. This community, comprised of people dealing with mental and behavioral challenges, their families and friends, and professionals involved with helping these people deal with their difficulties, has a common goal of addressing the issues of mental health disabilities. Concurrent with DeRienzo’s requirements for a community, there is also a clear interdependence between the members of this community and the economy. Many patients suffering from mental disorders do not have comprehensive access to mental healthcare services, largely because of how unaffordable such services are, and the lack of government funding to increase the availability and effectiveness of these services. The inability of the larger economy and government to provide for these needs thus drives the mental health community to organize and demand for increased accessibility and affordability to mental healthcare services. Currently, such organizing efforts have been focused on the government initiative, Thrive NYC, which many feel is ineffective in its methods to efficiently arrange for comprehensive mental healthcare. Many mental health activists are calling for a more defined and established mental healthcare system that can create standards that ensure access to affordable, personalized comprehensive care for each mental health patient. Understanding and being informed about the economic, social, and political circumstances surrounding this community is therefore highly important, since such community development efforts must properly fit and function within the modern economic and social environment.

Discussion: For each of our group projects, who are the members of the “community” working to address the issues of each of our topics? What economic, social, and political factors are driving the need for community organization, and how can these efforts be catered to both fit the needs of the people and thrive successfully in today’s economic and social context?

3/23 Project Update

Updates - Mental Health

Key Project Activities / Progress Points

So far, we’ve initiated the first steps in conducting research about the state of mental health in New York City. Because our topic covers a very wide breadth of information, we first gathered a strong list of useful online databases, archives, and other informational resources pertaining to: the history of mental health in New York City (as well as New York State and the nation in general – many federal and state laws have most certainly influenced how New York City has dealt with and handled mental health issues), Thrive NYC, Parachute NYC, other modern city government initiatives, major community organizations working with mentally ill citizens, mental health statistics, etc. We’re still in the process of consolidating all of this information, but we generally plan to utilize these data sources to supplement our historical narrative and our overall understanding of what mental health is like in NYC today and the issues that people suffering from mental disorders are facing in terms of accessibility to mental health resources and services.

A clarification about our overall research topic: ACCESS and COMPREHENSIVE CARE are the keywords for our research project. These components are two of the most major issues concerning mental health today. More specifically, accessibility to mental health services is becoming increasingly limited in New York City, and mentally ill patients often have inadequate information regarding what services are available to them. Many, especially in poor, minority communities, also have difficulties affording any of these services. In addition to a lack of access to affordable mental healthcare services, these services are often not comprehensive and may not effectively help the mentally ill. The problem lies with a lack of communication and coordination among social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Psychologists typically engage in talk therapy, psychoanalysis, and other non-prescriptive services, while psychiatrists provide the psychopharmacological services (i.e. drugs and medications) that psychologists do not have the authority to prescribe. Social workers work primarily to help the mentally ill deal with societal and life difficulties and ease their way back into society during or post-treatment. All of these services are essential for a mentally ill patient; unlike a typical disease that can be easily cured without any residual effects, mental illnesses often stigmatize many patients because of societal standards and ideals. It is thus important not only to properly treat the mentally ill but also to help them function normally in society. However, there currently is no standard or system that allows for the coordination of social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists to provide a comprehensive, personalized treatment to each mentally ill patient. As a result, many patients constantly switch off among different professionals, but do not get the individualized and thorough attention they need to get better and move beyond their illnesses. Our goal is thus to examine why there is a lack of access and comprehensive care for mentally ill patients and perhaps propose possible solutions to begin addressing these two essential issues. We begin by looking at Thrive NYC and other government initiatives and observing whether they properly address this lack of accessibility and comprehensive care.

Hence, we’ve been working on our historical narrative and highlighting major movements and policies that have governed the state of mental health from the 20th century to beyond: Many of the city’s earliest mental health policy reforms were initiated by the early and mid-1900’s mental hygiene movement, in which people began exposing mental health institutions as miserable, neglected, and controlling of the mentally ill. As a result of increased mobility against the improper maintenance of, and service provided by such institutions, the city, state, and even federal government responded with policies that funded better mental health facility construction as well as increased access to mental health treatments, trained professionals, and other services and resources. One important result of these policies was an increasing movement towards community-based mental health programs (CBMH’s) that still play an extremely important role in today’s mental health situation. Just like social workers, these programs provide mental health services, social and life counseling, personal and professional development workshops, and other community activities that can help patients more easily maneuver their lives in society. Often, they provide the emotional support that psychologists and psychiatrists, who focus only on treatment of the disease on a scientific level, don’t. Fountain House, Families Together, Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project, and other community contacts we have been trying to get in touch with, offer examples of such CBMH’s, and we thus find it very important to learn more about these programs and how they can be better incorporated in mental health policy and government initiatives.

Overall, we have: 1) clarified and further explained in detail what our research topic is, 2) gathered a list of useful online databases and sources for our information collection, 3) consolidated a part of this information into our historical narrative, to further our own understanding of how mental health in NYC changed and evolved to present-day

Challenges Faced / Tasks Remaining / Group Dynamics

The biggest problem we have right now is keeping in touch with our community contacts. We have emailed a large number of potential community contacts, and we only got one successful contact – Families Together (though we are still waiting on this contact’s reply to some of the questions we have for our research). We also want to find one or two other contacts to supplement our community knowledge, though we are having trouble getting in touch with other such organizations and groups. In addition to maintaining increased communication with community contacts, we need to begin speaking with individuals who suffer from mental illness and gathering qualitative data from both professionals and patients about Thrive NYC’s effectiveness, and the problems revolving lack of access and comprehensive care. We also need to continue expanding our research to better understand what services Thrive NYC is providing and work on scheduling visits to mental health organizations to see how mental health services are provided firsthand. Once we have done more research and actually interacted more with community organizations and individuals, we will begin working on our white paper and public engagement product (likely a flyer, unless we come up with something more creative).

In terms of group dynamics, we’ve had a couple of meetings so far to go over our basic plan and conduct further research. It’s often hard to work around our different schedules outside of class, though we do our best to accommodate for each other. In general, the people who have some free time together work on the project as a group, and whoever may have missed out looks over the work that was done and adds to it with their own perspectives and ideas. We communicate extensively on Facebook and through Google Docs, and we update each other constantly about new community contacts, posts, etc. Overall, I think we’re doing fine as a group, though we may need to pick up the pace once our community contacts and ideas for outside community engagement are finalized.

The Power of Power (Real Estate and $$$)

Contemporary Planning in NYC

Near the beginning of the semester, when we were first exposed to Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, many of us expressed thoughts about combining their two opposing ideologies to help improve the way urban planning fits the needs of both the people and major corporations. Chapters 5 and 6 of Scott Larson’s Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind introduce two real-life models, the Regional Plan Association’s Third Regional Plan and Mayor Bloomberg’s planning and redevelopment agenda, that try to do just that. Yet even though these plans aimed to incorporate both Moses’ and Jacobs’ ideologies into urban planning, they’ve ultimately exacerbated New York City’s affordable housing crisis and encouraged gentrification and the displacement of poor, minority communities.

So what happened? A lot of the problem has to do with something we’ve seen come up over and over again in our discussions of NYC development: whoever has the money and the power controls the direction with which urban planning is conducted. The merging of Mosaic and Jacobsian ideals in urban development is indeed a powerful method that can both encourage city growth and preserve neighborhoods and small communities (if executed in the right way). Yet for planners and developers involved with the Third Regional Plan and the Bloomberg administration’s redevelopment agenda, the underlying motive frequently seems to be solely economic development. Larson repeatedly mentions the influence that real estate and the wealthy have on urban development; such projects are almost always geared towards “enhancing real estate values and attracting the sophisticated, highly compensated workers needed to keep New York City’s information-based, globally oriented economy humming.”

Larson presents zoning as a clear example of this phenomenon. Through the regulation and separation of land uses, zoning regulations often aim to raise the value of the land to encourage redevelopment and economic growth. Such regulations also boost real estate prices and generate numerous economic opportunities for the real estate industry, which profits tremendously from these development projects. As a result of increased land values, housing prices and rents continue to rise, thus making housing even more unaffordable for many New Yorkers. Even inclusionary zoning, which tries to increase the number of affordable housing units available to the public, is subject to the discretion of developers and appears to favor wealthier, upper-class families, who quickly occupy these “affordable housing” units and contribute to increased gentrification in developing neighborhoods. Hence, the New York affordable housing crisis, gentrification, and the displacement of poor families who cannot afford housing can be interpreted as an adverse effect of the real estate industry’s influence on modern urban planning. Even though urban planning tries to incorporate both Moses’ and Jacobs’ ideals (in fact, zoning actually seems to contradict Jacobs’ principles of mixed land use and neighborhood preservation), its methodologies and executions are becoming increasingly more predisposed to fit the preferences of the real estate industry and upper-class, wealthy communities.

Discussion: How can the government, city organizations, and individuals weaken the real estate industry and the wealthy’s influence on urban planning? How can urban planning be changed to fit the needs of the hundreds, thousands of people who cannot afford housing because of inflated real estate prices?

Underneath the Euphemisms: Racism and Discrimination

A Plague on Houses

So far in the class, many of our readings, especially our latest one from A Plague on Houses, have highlighted a common misconception that improvement and development can only happen with the destruction and removal of struggling, under-resourced neighborhoods. Perhaps, as was the case with Robert Moses, this destruction had good intent; by razing homes and buildings in dilapidated and disadvantaged communities, room could be made for new infrastructure for industry and urban renewal. In other words, it was this idea of starting from scratch – completely eradicating all the bad and replacing it with new, idealistic development projects that would wholly transform a community for the better.

Undoubtedly, there are numerous flaws to this notion. One of the most obvious flaws, as we’ve discussed previously in class and as we see described again in this reading, is the question: where do the displaced people go? It’s a question that persists today, as rezoning and redevelopment projects continue to force poor, nonwhite communities out of their homes to make way for industry and new housing initiatives.

Underneath this problem of displacement and relocation also lies a persisting racist point of view. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Rand Institute exemplify this perspective. Improperly interpreting and analyzing statistical data, and disregarding numerous other variables that affect the incidence of fires, they targeted poor, nonwhite communities as scapegoats for a larger, much broader problem of unsuccessful and ineffective urban planning and policy-making. They characterized such neighborhoods as sick and irreparable and used their statistical misinterpretations as the faulty justification behind limiting resources and facilities that were originally meant to serve and protect the people. Ideals such as “benign neglect” and “planned shrinkage” were thus euphemisms for discrimination and neglecting the government’s most fundamental role of keeping all citizens, regardless of race or income, safe.

It is thus extremely ironic, yet unsurprising, that Moynihan’s and Rand’s cuts in the public service and fire safety sectors actually led to an increase in the incidence of fires and neighborhood deterioration. A lot of this, in large part, was due to their drastic oversimplification that poor neighborhoods were the cause, rather than the effect, of urban decay. Additionally, their extremely poor use of statistical data and mathematical models only proved to exacerbate the problems Moynihan and Rand had originally sought to fix. Hence, by wrongfully interpreting data to accommodate for underlying racial and economic discrimination, Moynihan and Rand not only failed to decrease the incidence of fires and improve neighborhood conditions, but also created even more problems that negatively impacted poor and wealthy communities alike.

Discussion: How can we prevent policy-makers from targeting poor, minority communities for displacement and relocation? In other words, how can we limit the racial and economic discrimination that appears to persist in urban planning today?

Research Problem

What's the Problem? - Mental Health

Research Plan: Our plan is to analyze the current state of mental health issues as they exist in NYC today, and to examine the strengths and weaknesses of city programs and measures, for instance Thrive NYC and Parachute NYC, that are trying to address these issues.

Currently, we already have a short list of possible community contacts we could work with: connections with Thrive NYC and Parachute NYC, the Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project, and Fountain House (an organization that provides support programs to help people with serious mental illnesses recover). We’ll be writing emails to reach out to these organizations and see if they’re willing to help. Alex also does research at a clinic that’s very involved with mental health illnesses, so we’re going to try to find some connections there as well.

Research Problem/Current State of Mental Health: The physical and financial accessibility to mental health services. Consequences: statistics show that at least one in five New Yorkers experience some mental health disorder in a given year, increased risk of emergency hospitalizations because they don’t access to mental health counseling beforehand, larger population of people who can’t join the workforce because of debilitating mental health illness.

Academic Knowledge: The current state of mental health (i.e. what mental health issues are most prevalent in NYC today), and city initiatives/policies that currently exist to address mental health issues. Most of our academic knowledge will be acquired through in-depth research and information gathering from NYC government and other organization websites. The following links provide relevant information: Thrive NYC White Paper (info about current state of mental health in NYC), Thrive NYC Roadmap (gives information on what Thrive NYC aims and plans to do).

Community Contacts/Knowledge: Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project, Fountain House, Families Together, etc.

Knowledge from Experience: Alex.

Power Relations/Politics – Ideas: The criminalization of homelessness, affordability/accessibility (insurance laws and policies – here’s a NYTimes article on this, home services for the physically disabled, etc.)

Brainstorming Session

Uncategorized

Hi guys!

We need to start brainstorming ideas about how we’re going to focus in on our topic. Since mental health is such a huge topic, it’d be great if we could narrow down what exactly we’ll be reading, researching, and learning more on. Do any of you have any particular aspects of mental health that you really want focus on? We could look at Thrive NYC and other city mental health initiatives that are trying to deal with the situation and examine their pros and cons, what their plans are, etc. Or we could look at our topic on a more personal, community level and do research on what local communities and organizations (e.g. Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project) are doing to provide services and counseling for people struggling with depression and other mental illnesses. Or we could do a combination of both or something else?

I don’t have much of a preference myself, so do tell us if you have any mental health topics that you’re really itching to focus on! Comment under this post and let’s get this conversation going!

Moses and Jacobs: Applied Today

“The Patron Saint” and the Git’r Done Man”

As many of our fellow classmates have already discussed, Scott Larson’s “The ‘Patron Saint’ and the ‘Git’r Done Man'” emphasizes the dichotomy between the ideologies of Jane Jacobs, a leading figure and critic of urban design and planning, and Robert Moses, the “master builder” who brought about a massive transformation of New York City through infrastructure construction and redevelopment projects. While both may have their own flaws and critics, there is a recurring theme within the text that hints at the harmony that can arise, should elements of the two seemingly opposing viewpoints be applied concurrently. This theme of “balance” – understanding the importance of Moses’s contribution to New York City’s status as a thriving, modern metropolis, and incorporating Jacobs’s emphasis on neighborhood diversity and small-scale, localized developments – is something both Larson and many classmates have underscored.

This reading also so happens to relate quite significantly to the current issues of rezoning that New York City faces today. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s citywide rezoning plan, which includes the creation of about 80,000 affordable houses through mandatory inclusionary zoning (i.e. developers can make their buildings bigger or set up new projects, so long as they set aside a certain portion of their buildings for permanently “affordable housing”) has recently come under a lot of fire from many neighborhood organizations and residents. Does it sound a little like something Moses would do and Jacobs would hate? Perhaps.

Though Larson’s excerpt was written primarily concerning Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s redevelopment agendas, the Moses-like systems that prevailed with the Bloomberg administration undoubtedly remain at work today. That’s not to say they’re necessarily a bad thing, seeing the achievements Moses helped bring to fruition in the past. However, the negative consequences of Moses’s projects: gentrification and the displacement of hundreds, thousands of people, particularly in the low-income sectors, are two of the most major issues affecting NYC today. It thus comes as no surprise that neighborhoods and local residents are so concerned about being displaced and not actually being able to afford “affordable housing” (which is another major issue worth discussing). So what’s to be done? Maybe we have to incorporate Jacobs’s ideologies for a street- and neighborhood-level approach, just as we see implied in the reading.

Discussion: How can we do that? How can we use the ideas that Jacobs proposes and implement them in today’s rezoning plans, so as to prevent further gentrification and the displacement of numerous NYC citizens?

An Optimistic Perspective

Situating New York City

As we read in the excerpt from Macionis and Parrillo’s Cities and Urban Life, New York is a constantly evolving city that has had a long history of problems and issues. Nowadays, media and community organizations have turned a lot of attention towards gentrification, housing problems, homelessness, rezoning issues, financial, economic, and cultural inequality, and a variety of other issues rampant throughout the city. Numerous critics of city government policies and programs have highlighted how, despite all the grandeur and allure NYC might seem to effuse on the outside, that gold coating doesn’t show the many problems still affecting New Yorkers every day.

It is, however, important to note that we’re actually a lot better off than we’ve been in the past. Optimistically speaking, our city conditions are better than before; we have access to clean, fresh water and a sanitation system that keeps public spaces and the streets fairly clean. Technological developments throughout the past century or so have granted us access to public transportation, high-speed telecommunications and information networks, and countless innovations that have made our lives far easier and more comfortable. The postindustrial economy has also supplied more white-collar jobs for the working class, and has helped neighborhoods like the South Bronx revitalize and improve for the better, as Macionis and Parrillo describe.

Of course, NYC is still far – very far – from perfect, and it probably never will be. But I believe there’s something to say about the fact that this city was able to survive through multiple economic recessions, poor city conditions, and numerous other issues to become the thriving megalopolis it is today. Indeed, the city is still lacking in many ways and suburbanization and decentralization continue to negatively affect its circumstances, but the mass “exodus” of people trying to forge better lives elsewhere has slowed down. Now, more people, especially minorities and the poor who are unable to move elsewhere, are staying within NYC and improving their lives and communities step by step. Near the end of the excerpt, Macionis and Parrillo briefly discuss individuals who have worked to revitalize and improve their neighborhoods, and these small, but important, developments ultimately lead the way towards progress and growth in the future.

Call me an optimist, and maybe even somewhat ignorant. I’ll admit I’m not all too familiar with the issues that rack the city today, but I do think it’s sometimes good to just take a step back and look at how far we’ve already come. There’s still much work and a lot of improvement to do, but at least we got somewhere a little bit better, right?