Struggle for affordable housing heats up

Recently, over a five-day period, housing activists here held two important rallies and issued a call for a moratorium on the use of eminent domain.

Over 350 tenants and advocates from all five boroughs gathered July 24 in front of 552 Academy St., in Manhat tan’s Inwood section, to release a report and launch the new “Fix It Now” campaign. The tenants there have been in a bitter fight for years with their landlord over repairs to their building.

Fix It Now, affiliated to Housing Here and Now, is a city-wide initiative endorsed by over 100 community, labor, social hous ing groups and social service agencies.

Organizers of the Fix It Now campaign expose and target “New York City’s worst 10 landlords” to force them “to immediately fix their most serious code enforcement violations.” (www.nycworstlandlords.com)

On July 25, State Sen. David A. Paterson called for a moratorium on the use of eminent domain. Paterson’s district includes Harlem and the Upper West Side, both impacted by gentrification and loss of rent-stabilized housing.

His call for the moratorium was spurred by the June 23 Supreme Court 5 to 4 decision that allows the seizure of private homes and small businesses by local governments, which can then be handed over to corporate developers to be torn down to make way for large retail chains or luxury housing.

Residential communities in Brooklyn and Manhat tan have been fighting to keep their homes as the Bloomberg administration has plotted the building of sports stadiums and shopping malls.

Nellie Hester-Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council, a leading force in the struggle against the gentrification of Harlem, was alongside Paterson at the media conference. Hester-Bailey was one of the key organizers of a July 31 rally at Marcus Garvey Park where hundreds came out to demand money for housing, not for war.

Housing coalition gains

“We thought we could win more if we came together,” Jennifer Flynn told Workers World. Flynn is executive director of New York AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), one of the main groups within the Fix It Now Campaign.

According to Flynn, many of these groups within the coalition are long-time neighborhood tenant associations that were fighting their own particular housing battles. Many had never worked together before, let alone worked with this many advocacy groups, labor unions or social services agencies that came into the coalition.

But by coming together for the purpose of coordinated city-wide direct action campaigns, they were able to force politicians to broker a deal with Mayor Michael Bloomberg for more affordable housing.

The five-point platform of the Housing Here and Now Coalition includes enforcement of the city’s promise to raise $1 billion from the luxury housing at the Battery Park City complex to go towards building affordable housing. The platform also stresses the enforcement of housing code standards and the building of permanent housing for people living with HIV and AIDS.

According to the website of Housing Works! Inc., a leading New York City AIDS organization, Bloomberg announced in May that he was adding an additional $187 million to the 10-year capital plan of the city’s Department of Housing Preser vation and Development (HPD) to build supportive housing for people with disabilities, including HIV/AIDS.

Bloomberg also announced that the Department of Health had earmarked $25 million over five years toward development of supportive housing for people with AIDS, allowing more than 240 housing units to be built or renovated. (www.housingworks.org) These promises must be kept.

The coalition also demands inclusionary re-zoning of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg areas of Brooklyn, two areas where gentrification has devastated affordable housing, forcing out their multi-national, working class communities.

According to the Here and Now Coalition, “The Mayor has begun an effort to re-develop much of New York City by proposing the re-zoning of dozens of neighborhoods in all five boroughs, including the West Side of Manhattan, Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Flushing, Queens, and the South Bronx. … Inclu sionary Zoning requires that, in exchange for the ability to build larger buildings or convert a manufacturing area into a residential area, a minimum of 30 percent of the units created be affordable to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.

“The community in Greenpoint-Williamsburg is calling for a 40 percent guarantee of affordable housing, given the low-income and working class makeup of the community and projected displacement from the re-zoning.”

On May 11, Bloomberg announced the building of 3,500 affordable units in Greenpoint-Williamsburg. His press statement suggested this was “the most aggres sive affordable housing strategy in the City’s history.”

According to the Pratt Institute for Community and Environmental Devel opment website, one of the groups that worked in solidarity with the grassroots Green point-Williamburg movement, “What they won is significant: fully one-third (33 percent) of the housing created by this re-zoning will be affordable to low- and moderate-income people (about 3,500 units out of 10,900 total, over the next 10 years).”

Next: It took struggle!