Guest Post: Desecration in the Slope
We’re on vacation this week and frankly don’t plan on logging a whole lot of hours in front of the computer. So we were happy to see this ready-to-run post show up in our mailbox yesterday. Anyone else is welcome to submit this week, too. Pictures preferred. To make a long story short…On a beautiful…
We’re on vacation this week and frankly don’t plan on logging a whole lot of hours in front of the computer. So we were happy to see this ready-to-run post show up in our mailbox yesterday. Anyone else is welcome to submit this week, too. Pictures preferred.
To make a long story short…On a beautiful Park Slope brownstone block, the city owned a house: 384 Bergen, between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. It apparently had been taken for back taxes owed, the city then gave it to a community development group, the 5th Avenue Committee, to renovate for housing. This took many years. Now the renovation is complete, and the building sits empty, collecting garbage. It was developed using typical city housing projects specifications: it appears to have been stripped of details inside, the entry is aluminum sash, corridors have fluorescent 2×2 lighting fixtures, bright yellow high intensity parking lot style fixtures in back. What is the future of this building? Will the future residents have an interest in its context? What will it take to get public agencies to be more sensitive, or at least: first do no harm?
Linus, you raise a good point — maybe selling at market rate could allow more families to be housed elsewhere. I just think it’s a complicated situation (more families housed in old-style projects probably not worth it, while more families housed in Nememiah0-type construction probably a good idea), and I think there was a certain arrogance in the original posting on this topic that didn’t recognize the complicated history of this type of housing. As if, how dare the city sell this architectual gem to poor people who destroy its beauty, without recognizing the backstory of this section of the Slope. Also, if the building was sold to FAC a number of years ago, it might not have been worth enough at market rate (maybe $400k in the late 90s) to build much additional housing elsewhere.
Anyway, complicated subject with few easy or good solutions, as the discussion of FAC’s no displacement zone clearly shows.
By the way, in fairness, the FAC does say that they give priority to fighting rent increases by absentee landlords rather than neighborhood residents. I don’t know if that’s true in practice but their website says that.
I’m not sure that makes it any better: to me it’s the height of smugness to appoint yourself to decide who has the moral right to charge market rent and who doesn’t.
The “displacement-free zone” has been a big part of the FAC’s program for years, and it’s responsible for much of the ill will toward the group. And rightfully so. They act as if it is uniquely immoral to make money by renting property. If people can command the highest price they can get for a watch or a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas, fine. But if people try to do that with property — they must be stopped!
If society has an obligation to house the poor, then society should share that burden. But it is obnoxious and patently unfair to expect affordable housing to come out of the pockets of one group, landlords, who should not be allowed to make a greater profit than the FAC deems moral. (And not even all landlords, mind you: if you can afford a building above 6th Avenue, you’ve got the FAC’s blessing to charge out the wazoo.)
Basically, the FAC takes one group and says: We’ve drafted you to pay for the solution to the affordable housing crisis. If your neighborhood improves so that you could get more for your apartment, forget about taking the profit: you’re going to donate it to your tenants. That’s where they lose the support of this otherwise fairly bleeding-heart Park Sloper.
The Fifth AVenue Commitee is a bunch of thugs under the guise of a community development oganization.
They have made life miserable for small (3-family) building owners. Over the past few years they have picketed and attempted to strong-arm folks who have made an investment in themselves and the neighborhood, sometimes at considerable cost (depending on the year of the bubble) to improve and live in a building. Then because they need to raise the rent to cover more of their costs, the FAC shows up to “shame” them into subsidizing (that’s the city’s job) the living arrangements of people, who for better of for worse are unabale to manage their own financial lives (blame BUsh and the Republikudniks for eliminating subsidies). If it’s rent control or even stabilization, that’s one thing, and the new owner should have done their due dilligence. But when the controls don’t exist, it should not be the “problem” of the LL to manage or mitigate the financial and dwelling well being of individuals that can’t afford a market rate rent. Rents have been steadily going down for christ’s sake.
Let the FAC step in and subsidize the difference if that is their concern, but to blame the party that is in fact improving the neighborhood by better managing a once dillapidated property is nothing but offensive. There is nothing that says a private landlord should be responsible for paying some or a really large part of someone else’s freight. If you can’t afford to live somewhere, then maybe it’s time to move somewhere else. Diversity in the community is just some BS excuse to extract concessions from the “haves” to the “have-nots”. That line of thinking has done wonders for our school system. And shit, haven’t you seen the articles about even illegal aliens getting mortgages these days. All you need is a pulse and someone will loan you money. If you can’t afford it here, then do it somewhere else. Hemogeny isn’t so bad if the crime rate comes down and property values go up.
Welcome to the United States of Whatever.
Sloper, re the dispersed strategy of affordable housing: my concern is that by turning a pretty valuable brownstone into affordable housing, you are providing a windfall for a few lucky tenants who get to live there. But by selling the place and using the proceeds toward affordable-housing goals — be it building housing, providing rent subsidies, or whatever else — you could help more people, albeit not as extravagantly. (I guess one advantage to selling to FAC is ensuring that the rentals in this one building stay affordable, but only so many people can live there.)
I can see the value, ideally, of enabling lower-income people to live in places like Park Slope, so the classes aren’t totally insulated from one another. But in terms of unrealized cash, this seems an awfully expensive way of doing it. Is it worth it, when the cost is helping a few tenants to live in an expensive neighborhood instead of helping more (albeit in a cheaper location)?
Even within Park Slope I would think there would be ways of spreading the money more efficiently so that more needy tenants could be helped. But I don’t claim to be an expert.
I think there’s a larger debate going on here — I had not heard about the “no displacement zone” campaign, and I agree with what I think David is saying… it seems like it punishes homeowners who have stuck with the neighborhood for many years. For more info:
http://www.fifthave.org/Organizing/DFZProgram.htm
As I mentioned in a previous post on this topic, my family doubled the rent on the apt in our brownstone in the 80s, contributing to gentrification and housing pressures, etc. I’m clearly not opposed to the right of landlords to raise the rent.
Back to the initial post by Brownstoner, it seems like a much better idea to allow the city to auction off brownstones like the one at 384 Bergen to community groups for affordable housing (even with a crummy renovation), then to allow the problem to get so bad that tenants organize and fight rent increases. As to why FAC is pursuing both strategies, I dunno.
I don’t know much about FAC, as I said earlier. I just support the idea of abandoned brownstones sometimes being turned into affordable housing, even if it’s aesthetically disappointing.
“…frankly back then the issue wasn’t affordability it was safety (since it was unsafe it was pretty affordable).”
I’d have to disagree with that. Affordability is always an issue for people who are scraping to get by, and in the 70s and 80s, rents throughout the Slope were going up due to the gentrification of the center Slope. The neighborhood was just getting more popular and so rents were increasing, and in addition, rent control buildings and SROs were being converted to two-family houses.
For example, we rented one floor of a brownstone for $300 in 1984. A few years later, we rented a different floor for around $700. Though it sounds low to us now, the rent more than doubled. These sort of increases made it increasingly difficult for long-time residents to stay in the area. I’m sure Fifth Ave near Baltic also felt these pressures, as despite the crack and the violence, it was still safer than many other crack-affected neighborhoods.
[A bit of an aside… most Brooklyn neighborhoods were affected by crack back then. There was a crack house on Carroll Street between 8th and the park, which was one of the fanciest blocks and prime real estate. It was just a question of the extent of the crack. So when I say Bergen and 5th was “crack central”, that’s doesn’t mean there weren’t crack houses in the rest of Park Slope, nor that there weren’t worse crack areas in the rest of Brooklyn. Just that for the Slope, that street had the worst crack activities. And I’m so happy that drug’s not popular anymore…]
one more comment about why the city transfers to a nonprofit instead of auctioning off at top dollar–i think that if you transfer the building to a non-profit group, you can require the organization to use the property as affordable housing. if you auction off at top-dollar to a for-profit developer, you’re not in a position to require the developer to house low-income tenants in perpetuity. some of the city’s policies around these issues are (as sloper says) products of a different time, when neighborhoods like this one were not desirable and you really couldn’t get the private sector to invest because there was nothing in it for them–and, granted, times have changed, and maybe now the money from auctioning could help to buy or build more property, but there isn’t much land to build on and there aren’t many buildings to buy.
also: FAC does and has done a lot of good work. it’s true that 20 years ago the neighborhood might have needed more gentrifying–that is, better housing conditions, more economic development, lower crime–and, now, FAC has an anti-displacement zone and is fighting the gentrification that is in some way the fruits of its labor. this happens: neighborhoods change. no simple solution.
Hey, maybe I jumped the gun on FAC. Sorry, but I think it’s pretty offensive to not return emails and phone calls – and they are the ones who solicit for volunteers in their ads and annual report. So, that gave me the impression that they were one of those orgs that exists to essentially leach off taxpayers, while only providing nominal lip service to the community mission. I have had no interaction with FAC because they are not approachable – its not for lack of trying. And no, I am not going to bother to walk into their office, if they can’t be bothered returning my call/email. Gimme a break.
I am very interested in issues of affordable housing in my community. And forgive me if I am interested in learning more about what they do as well as happen to think I have something I can offer them – even if its simply participating in the literacy and job programs they profess to need volunteers for.
But, despite the offense, I agree, I shouldn’t have made certain assumptions and I don’t doubt they’ve done a lot of good for the community in the past. I am going to try contacting them again (it’s been a year since the last attempt). And I’ll let you know how it goes.