Category: 2/9/16

As of 2010, 60.8% of the Community Board 1 area is made up of white non hispanics, 27.2% are hispanic, and 5.2% are black/African American non hispanic (New York City Community Districts, 1990 to 2010). The main issues faced by the people who live in this area were caused by the 2009 tsunami. These include construction and safety issues, transportation and environmental concerns. There is also a surprisingly large section about the difficulties in obtaining liquor licenses for businesses and also a section on the lack of affordable housing. These issues are obviously diverse and conflict may arise. The generally white “bohemian” population has different interests than the lower income working class residents (Naked City). This is reflected in the extensive section on liquor licenses for businesses contrasting with the sections about affordable housing. Business may argue that their concerns are important because they have a right to make a living while lower income residents may not be concerned with the development of chic bars and instead would like funds to be channeled into the building and repairing of housing projects.

I believe that this is the pressure “from above” is businesses owners arguing for their right to make a living. These owners are not particularly concerned with the gentrification that follows when new nightclubs and cafés are formed. This will help their businesses. However, the interests “from below”, namely the working class community, are very concerned with gentrification as they are being pushed out of their community by a new, wealthier population. For this reason they place more weight on housing and their right to remain in their community. This also ties into the conflict between apartment owners and renters. Owners are raising their monthly costs as they see that the new population that will pay these exorbitant prices. Old renters can no longer afford to live in their homes and are being driven out of the community.

The Community Board 1 area comprising the neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint are home to a very diverse population. The majority of the population is non-Hispanic White, but a significant minority population resides there as well. Recently, the area has been undergoing gentrification. The neighborhoods’ reputation as a rough and crime-laden area has been usurped by the hip and modern look cultivated by the many artists that reside there. As a result, there has been a “flood” of new rich inhabitants willing to pay top dollar for an apartment in the area as well as increasing tourism. Many consider this reverse in outlook a revival of the once-deteriorating neighborhoods. Others, mostly long-time inhabitants, consider this a tragedy. Old residents, many of which have been living in the area for several generations, are being priced out. The very artists who helped “revive” the neighborhoods are also moving out since ironically the very reason they lived there was for the area’s low rents. There has always been racial and social tension in the area, the original source being crime. Now the source of tension is gentrification. Not every Community Board 1 resident is against gentrification. Many residents see the old industrial complexes of old Williamsburg and Greenpoint as outdated and in dire need of an update; they see the residents who oppose the recent changes as zealots who oppose improvement. They enjoy the support of the city government who see the neighborhoods as a great place to attract more wealth. The new, wealthy residents and the government are the pressure from above. The old, lower-income residents are the pressure from below. Whether or not these two groups can compromise relies mostly on the trust both groups place on the government and the government’s ability to meet the needs of both groups. The views of each side are not completely irreconcilable, there is room for compromise. The government is capable of modernizing and maintaining the neighborhoods while providing adequate affordable housing. Unfortunately, broken promises have destroyed the trust that residents had for the governments. The government’s complete disregard for the Community Board 1’s views in regards to rezoning have certainly reinforced the distrust of government. Certainly, the community boards in their current states have little influence over the future of their communities.

The changes in Williamsburg and Brooklyn over the last 10-20 years have completely changed the needs of many communities. The Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods have been especially effected by these changes. The demands that the community board has laid forth are mostly reasonable and consist of things that i’m sure they have been listing for at least the last five years. Affordable housing, proper maintenance of public space, low zoning laws and accessible transportation are all things that assume most New York neighborhoods would like more of. The gentrification in Community Board 1 is what separates the content of their statement from that of other community boards. The area is transitioning from the gentrification of young people and artists in search of the holy grail of authenticity to a “super gentrification” that will be followed by the rise of condos and luxury oriented businesses.  They won’t have to worry about the bars and the public safety after the areas gets inhabited by the super rich. Once the city recognises that the area is full of important citizens transportation will improve. If it doesn’t the influence of those people and their money will change things pretty rapidly. Families will exist there but not the same kind that are there now. Families like those who live on the Upper East Side and compete to send their kids to private school will live there now. The Polish, Italian and Puerto Rican past of the area will slowly fade into history and be replaced by a new narrative until a fresh cycle of crash and flight changes the area completely. The poorer people who live their now should know that they are not safe from an increase in their cost of living. Even if rents are stabilized or more affordable housing built, the area is trending in one direction and will continue going that way until the market is externally influenced. Prices for good and services are just as effective a tool at driving people out as real estate values are.

The kind of affordable housing that has been built in East New York is the kind that New York will have to build to keep some part of the middle class. As long as the economic trends in New York continue and the housing market sustains itself, (the quest for authenticity pushing the pioneers who are followed by those who search for luxury) there will be continued gentrification of any NYC areas within reach. Making middle class enclaves or areas where the poor can try to sustain themselves is important in the coming years. We should not give in to the European way of public housing which involves pushing all undesirables to large housing complexes outsides city limits to continue to attract tourists. New York is a brand but it is also a city full of people who need to survive and have a right to live in nice areas that are not constantly being threatened by the ravenous real estate market.

The “Community Board One State of District and Community Needs” is a curious document. This is partly due to its unexamined grammatical errors and questionable diction, yet mainly because it attempts an awkward form of lyric poetry and sustained metaphor regarding the 2009 tsunami, the effects of which, along with other sinister “waves” apparently continue to cripple and plague the communities of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Indeed, this natural event seems to be the locus of the entire document, and is blamed by the author for the problems of  abandoned housing and business, community flight, and an inflated rent market. The twin villain to this marine menace is the influx of luxury development and gentry to the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area, which displaces the majority demographic of the neighborhoods, poor, working class people, to be replaced by urbane, market-price paying hipsters. This pressure “from above” to develop the area leads not only to a usurpation of territory, but a stress on municipal services, who, as the author insists, are already “overtaxed.”
To ameliorate these and many other problems, the author presents a list of demands, including an insistence that the affordable housing process in the area be restructured to better reflect the means of its constituents, as well a requirement that a reasonable proportion of new residential development include affordable housing units. By doing so, lower class flight may be forestalled in the area, and the existing community may be able to entertain a traditional sense of identity as they gradually fade into history.

The majority of people living in Greenpoint and Williamsburg are non-hispanic whites who make up about 61% of the population while the rest of the population living there is comprised of different ethnicities. From an economic view, the people living there range from living below the poverty line to the working middle class. I think the main issue they face while living there is affordable housing. As demand for living spaces increased, so did the prices, thereby decreasing affordability for many people. People are being forced to move either to smaller and poorer quality living areas or even forced to move out of the Community Board 1 area completely because they could not afford the rent. Since, around 86% of people living there are renters, this is a major issue for the community living there.

As for your question about whether I would anticipate conflict between the different groups living there, I would say that I do. With the yearly incomes of residents ranging from living below the poverty line to middle class, there are differences in the needs of the residents. The poorer population support lowering prices of rent and would support rent controls while the landowners would fight against this because this would decrease their income from renting out their land. It’s issues like these that the Community Board 1 has to decide on and compromise on.

I think the pressure “from above” is the pressure coming from the the minority, the landowners and people with more money who may have more power over the decisions made in the community while the pressure “from below” is the renters and the people of lower income who are pushing for their needs and interests to be met. It is the job of the Community Board 1 to reconcile between the two pressures in order to make the community they live in the best that it could be and try to compromise between the interests of the two groups.

According to the website for Community Board 1 (Brooklyn), Community Board 1 represents Williamsburg to Greenpoint. I think that Williamsburg is home to some upper-class people. Williamsburg has condos, chains stores, and many tourist sites. However, there is also a more bohemian, indie, and working class demographic to Williamsburg. As mentioned in “How Brooklyn Became Cool,” from Naked City, Williamsburg had a “gritty” style and substance starting in the 1990s. As for Greenpoint, I think that there is a large Polish background and a large middle class demographic that live there. The main issue for the people that currently live there might be gentrification because with a growing white population, gentrification can also expand and develop. Although there might be an ethnic blending in neighborhoods, gentrification means a loss of authenticity and maybe the movement of certain ethnic groups or the original group not being able to afford their living anymore.

I would definitely anticipate conflicts between the interests and demands of different groups that live in the Community Board 1 area. This area is composed of many different demographics of people ethnically and economically, which will definitely make it difficult to appeal to everyone’s demands. The only way I can think of to reconcile the interests of different groups is compromise or willing to appeal to the majority with respect to the minority. With the up-scaling of Williamsburg, loft-condos and townhouses become more prominent which appeals to an upper-middle class population, but there needs to be a preservation of old communities and respect to those who were originally settled in Williamsburg before its new wave of authenticity. In Greenpoint, the median income for a household in the neighborhood was $33,578 compared to the Williamsburg median household income of $23,567. About 17.7% of the population lies below the poverty line compared to Williamsburg’s 41.4%. These statistics make it hard to satisfy the interests of both groups. More dramatic measures need to be taken in Williamsburg to alleviate the poverty issue and there might be a more demanding issue that needs attention in Greenpoint, even though this issue also needs light.

I think that the “pressure from above” might be those with more power or money, such as city government and private businesses. The “pressure from below” could be the people who are unhappy or dissatisfied with conditions and policies. Perhaps the “pressure from below” makes up the majority of a population. However, just because community boards only have an advisory voice on planning and zoning issues, this does not limit their potential to shape their community and influence the “pressure from above.” Community boards are the voices for people in the neighborhoods and can address problems by different groups of people that maybe city officials would otherwise not know about. They play an important role in voicing opinions and possible solutions to issues in their board area because city officials should be interested in what the people living in a certain area view as problems and how they would go about possible solutions. Community boards have so much potential to change and shape a community if their concerns and advice is heard properly. How can a city official who does not live in a certain area know the areas problems as well as community board members?

I think that Williamsburg and Greenpoint, although very close to each other and similar in some ways, are also very different. Their populations are composed of different groups of people and political officials might just group them together and not understand that each area has different concerns, groups of people, and possible solutions.

Charlotte Gardens, South Bronx caught my attention because it differs from the stereotypical look of affordable housing. While most affordable housing attempts to house as many people for as little cost as possible, the focus of Charlotte Gardens seems to be to provide an aesthetically-pleasing, spacious neighborhood that provides a healthy environment for those with lower-income. This look completely differs from what South Bronx was back in the 1970s when it was literally burning. South Bronx used to be the typical affordable housing neighborhood: large buildings with a large amount of residents. It was once dominated by Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants who mostly worked in factories. However, the combination of economic decline, the outflow of newly-middle class residents, the inflow of impoverished residents, and systemic neglect by landlords caused the neighborhood to decay. In the Washington Monthly article “Guess Who Saved the South Bronx?”, Robert Worth points to the government as one of the biggest catalysts for the decay of the South Bronx with its policy of rent control which made running apartment complexes in the area unprofitable for private landlords, meaning they also did not have the funds to maintain basic services and the quality of their buildings. The final nail in the coffin was what caused the South Bronx to literally start burning to the ground. As housing prices in the area fell and the maintenance of housing in the area remained unprofitable, landlords began burning down their own buildings in an attempt to salvage whatever money they could get from insurance payouts. Also, the government offered tenants grants if they were burned out of their homes. As a result, residents themselves began burning the buildings down. Many other events would plague the neighborhood, but the end result was the complete destruction of what once was a thriving community.

The current South Bronx seems to be the exact opposite of what South Bronx was, even before it began falling apart. What were once large high-density apartment complexes are now single-family ranch-style houses. What were once manufacturing plants are now stores. The goal of these changes are to encourage residents to care of their own neighborhood as the higher quality of the units and the more opportunities means each resident has a bigger stake in the community. These changes suggest that we need to employ new techniques to revive the broken down neighborhoods of New York City as what once worked in the past may not work in the future. Unfortunately, Charlotte Gardens does little to address the rapidly growing demand for cheaper housing, which is what the ordinary model of affordable housing aims to accomplish. If this strategy is replicated for other neighborhoods, it seems that in the future most of the people that need affordable housing the most will be forced out. Also, current issues like high inequality and the fall of both economic opportunities and real wages still impacts the neighborhood as half of the residents are still low-income. As such, it seems that the real permanent solution to the housing crisis could only be an economic one.

Although many of the features of the exhibit intrigued me, I was drawn to one feature in particular; “El Barrio’s Artspace at PS109”. The building pictured had once been a public school built in 1898 but in 1995 was boarded up and abandoned. The abandoned building was then renovated and used as subsidized housing for artists and their families. I was captivated by this building because I love the idea of using already exhausting space for a new, more beneficial purpose, and, like I said in my previous post, maintaining and fixing existing space before building new structures. It maximizes space and stretches the budget for government funding for affordable housing. The government had repurposed this abandoned, boarded up building to help struggling artists and their families. Moreover, I really like how the exterior of the building remained remotely the same, still giving the look of a school building, maintaining its charm and history, while being used as lofts for families in need.

I was immediately drawn to the Waterside Plaza subsidized housing project due to its asymmetrical elegance and richness of architectural character, which contrasted starkly with many of the monotone brick, plain-jane facades typical of many subsidized/public projects. It seemed at first glance to be a place that would be  almost luxurious to call one’s residence: stylish, clean,  handsome, towering, and overlooking the East River– a guaranteed glorious sunrise every day. Since its proposal in the 1960’s, the project has faced draconian headaches, only receiving permission to begin building in the early 1970’s. Once built, the project faced its share of criticism as well– many were concerned that, judging by the appeal of the structure, it would be biased toward middle-class renters. However, ameliorating efforts were made in response, to the end that Waterside Plaza is rather remarkable amongst housing projects in that it is designed to attract and sustain residents of diverse economic backgrounds, including lower, lower middle, and middle class occupants, with varying prices to match. In so doing, the Plaza serves not only the role of affordable dwelling, but the role of socio-economic regulator, discouraging the ghettoization of neighborhoods by income brackets.  It continues to thrive to this day, adored by architecture critics and the public alike, and due to its appeal as a space, hosts many public events throughout the year. Waterside Plaza, despite its past controversies, is a testament to the moral, aesthetic, and  practical potential of Affordable Housing, and hopefully will serve as partial precedent for akin future endeavors.