Goodbye hotels, hello homeless?

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
December 26, 2010

Goodbye hotels, hello homeless?
by James Panero

Thanks to a new law against SRO hotels, the UWS is at risk

If you want to stay at the Alexander, a boutique hotel on 94th St. on the upper West Side, you better book your room soon. With plush bedding, sparkling renovated bathrooms and a welcoming staff, this hotel has received great reviews online. Problem is, the only guests who may stay here in the new year could be the homeless.

Because of a change in New York law, starting in 2011, single-resident-occupancy buildings (SROs) such as the Alexander will no longer be allowed to rent rooms for less than 30 days unless they get a new certificate of occupancy and, in most cases, a zoning exemption. So out goes this legitimate hotel, its hardworking employees, the happy tourists and a revenue engine for the city.

In comes Samaritan Village. On Dec. 10, this Queens-based substance abuse and mental-health center gave notice to the local community board that it intends to run a 200-bed homeless facility out of the Alexander, according to community sources and confirmed by a spokesman for Samaritan.

The conversion of a welcome local institution into a shelter for the city's indigent population may sound like deja vu all over again to longtime residents of the upper West Side like me. Unfortunately, it may be the beginning of a broader attack on urban sanity and gentrification throughout the city.

For decades, my neighborhood - like neighborhoods in Harlem, Chelsea and the East Village - has borne an unfair burden of New York's supportive housing industry. Despite the "fair share" law in the city Charter that requires social service facilities to be evenly distributed through all neighborhoods, W. 94th and 95th Sts. alone, next door to where I live, have seen half-a-dozen such institutions proposed in recent years, from homeless shelters to drug treatment centers to halfway houses. The residents of these two tree-lined streets - with their public schools, nursery schools and family residences - must wonder what they did to deserve such generosity.

State Sen. Liz Krueger has largely kept supportive housing out of the wealthiest portion of her district, the upper East Side, but she has championed legislation in Albany amending the multiple-dwelling law that could result in more than a dozen new supportive-house facilities opening in the old SROs on the upper West Side.

Krueger and her political allies - including Councilwoman Gail Brewer and State Assembly members Richard Gottfried and Linda Rosenthal - may believe they are protecting tenants' rights by preventing the proliferation of small hotels into SRO buildings. Instead, their beneficence has only managed to clear these buildings of useful small businesses, while protecting the special interests of the hotel workers' union, since the targeted SRO hotels generally employ nonunion labor.

The landlords will chase the dollars still available. Many vacated rooms can be expected to enter contracts with organizations operating with the Department of Homeless Services or other city agencies. The presence of these facilities and the undesirable groups they import, in turn, will push out industrious neighbors, rich and poor, or at least those who can afford to leave, along with local retail.

If Samaritan Village is allowed to open on the upper West Side, it will be the first of many such conversions here - a sad sign that the local political complex appears interested in anything but the rights of a community that has fought for decades to make its streets safer, better and more beautiful.

Other parts of the city should beware. By Krueger's own tally, once the new legislation goes into effect in 2011, it will impact 280 buildings citywide.

Only in New York would politicians complain about the blight of middle-aged European tourists asking for directions. Force out one population, and you leave a hole for another one to fill. You only hope your new neighbor isn't the next Larry Hogue.

Symbolic Ground Zero

A model lobby from Twin Towers II

James writes:

As we mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the controversy of the Ground Zero Mosque has given rise to a conversation that should have occurred many years ago. Beyond question of the proposed Islamic community center’s proximity to Ground Zero, the debate has also brought to light several unanswered questions about the nature of Islam and its relation to terror: Given the radicalization of mosques and Islamic community centers in Europe, how do we know such meeting houses will not foment such behavior here? If the American Islamic community is immune to radicalization, what differentiates it from such communities in the Netherlands and France? How has the moderate American Muslim community reckoned with attacks carried out in the name of its faith? In sum: To what extent is Islam itself to blame in the extremism of the “Islamist” terrorists?

Following 9/11, a certain dogma of permissible rhetoric took hold that did not allow such questions to be answered or even to be asked. Criticize Islam and you recruit more terrorists. Have faith in moderate Islam and you destroy al-Qaeda. Maximal tolerance from us, it was thought, equals minimal hate from them.

A similar dogma took hold in the plans to rebuild Ground Zero itself. These beliefs quickly played out in the strong-arming of a sacred site by the ideologues of tolerance. Long before the attacks of 9/11, so-called enlightened urbanites bemoaned the outsize scale of the Twin Towers. They resented the superblock of the World Trade plaza for interrupting the street grid. The buildings, to them, were symbols of hubris. They objected to the same monumentality that the terrorists set out to destroy.

When an unelected claque of bureaucrats called the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation nominated itself to redesign the site immediately after the attacks, they sought to undo all of the wrongs of the people who had designed the original towers. They redrew and replaced the street grid, ensuring that the World Trade Center would not be reconstructed as it had been. They tapped a grief-mongering architect, Daniel Libeskind, to design the new buildings. They selected the falling water design of Michael Arad  for the 9/11 memorial--when completed, a monument of negation that will aestheticize the sight and sound of the falling towers into a permanent replay of the attacks.

I used to assume that the redesigners of Ground Zero were oblivious to the symbolism of the site. But of course they were fully engaged in replacing the Twin Towers with a symbolism of their own: that of maximal tolerance. Thanks to them, they believed, no longer would the sins of the Twin Towers attract the ire of terrorists.

The problem with this approach is that it began with a dangerously untested premise--that maximal tolerance does indeed lead to minimal hate. But does the radicalized Islamic world capitulate to tolerance? Or is tolerance perceived as our own form of capitulation, engendering further attacks? Do we defeat Islamic terrorists by defending Islam--the conventional wisdom? Or would questioning Islam as does Ayaan Hirsi Ali break a code of silence that engenders radicalization? We never got the opportunity to ask.

So too with the designs for Ground Zero. Polls taken after the attacks of 9/11 showed that a majority of Americans wanted the Twin Towers rebuilt as they once stood. Meanwhile a team of architects independently submitted plans for new Twin Towers that could withstand future attacks. I regret that in 2002 we could not have engaged in the conversations we are having today. Had we I believe that Twin Towers II would have been built through popular mandate--because a vast majority of Americans understand their greatest defense is a strong offense. To rebuild the offending Twin Towers, stronger and taller, would have left us with a monument to unflinching national character, rather than a washbasin of grief.

The defenders of the “Ground Zero Mosque” have relished taking up the arguments of tolerance in advancing the community center. At least one prominent writer I have read wants a mosque moved inside the new World Trade complex itself. But this time a vocal majority, uneasy with the symbolism, I believe, of Ground Zero’s general redevelopment, has started to ask the unanswered questions. I regret this process did not begin in time to rebuild the Twin Towers. Yet on a tragic anniversary, I am still thankful for the new national conversation.

New York’s Pioneer Zones

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CITY JOURNAL

Summer 2010

New York’s Pioneer Zones
by James Panero

Residents of formerly blighted neighborhoods deserve the city’s support.

Imagine government officials sweeping through your building one night, rounding up you and your neighbors and tossing you out on the street. It might sound like something out of the Stasi handbook, but it played out a few years ago on the forlorn boundary of two of New York’s outer boroughs. On an October evening in 2007, the Department of Buildings, along with the New York City Fire Department, forcibly removed over 200 tenants living in a low-slung warehouse building at 17-17 Troutman, on the border of Ridgewood, Queens, and Bushwick, Brooklyn. The FDNY had reasons to shut down the facility: it had issued numerous fire and safety violations against the Troutman landlord, who had failed to address them. But the root of the crisis was the city’s antiquated, growth-hindering zoning laws, which continue to put hundreds of young, creative citizens at the mercy of poor living conditions and eviction.

Gotham’s zoning codes, which distinguish between residential and industrial areas, weren’t originally intended to function as they do today. When the first zoning resolution went into effect in 1916, city elders understood the need to protect residential neighborhoods from the encroachment of heavy industry. The city’s disastrous 1961 rezoning turned this protection on its head. In a failed effort to protect a dwindling industrial base, the 1961 resolution artificially enlarged the manufacturing zone to depress the cost of industrial rents. Swaths of the city became off-limits to residential redevelopment. Industry fled anyway, driven out by the high cost of labor and the city’s suffocating tax burden.

Though modified since, the 1961 policy remains in force, and it has created shadow economies and shadow lives. Landlords covertly lease the warehouse and factory space to residents, absorbing whatever modest financial penalties the city imposes. Superintendents maintain off-the-books waiting lists of prospective tenants. What results is a state of impermanence for residents. People who might otherwise wish to improve their buildings and invest in their neighborhoods are left with uncertain futures, forever fearful of a midnight knock on the door from the Department of Buildings.

The residents of 17-17 Troutman are a good example. They accepted slumlike surroundings in exchange for inexpensive housing (several were working artists in need of large space). They brought vitality to a neighborhood that had seen generations of flight and decay and was struggling to rise from the ashes of rioting in 1977. These urban pioneers were part of a wave of gentrification that helped transform a forgotten neighborhood, devastated by crime, arson, and misguided urban policy, into a fashionable, bohemian district (see “The Death and Life of Bushwick,” Spring 2008). But by paying rent on what was technically a commercial lease and living in their apartments, the Troutman tenants were violating an irregularly enforced law. And their landlord had never converted the building safely into apartments, because [why? need a clause explaining connection between legal limbo and failure to bring building up to code]. Hence the residents’ eviction in 2007.

The city knows that such warehouse buildings have occupants. One need only look up in neighborhoods like Morgantown, an industrial-zoned district in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to see the curtains. But rather than thoroughly enforcing current building codes or changing them altogether, the city has practiced a policy of don’t ask, don’t tell. “It is basically a Wild West,” says Laura Braslow, a student of urban planning who runs the volunteer organization Arts in Bushwick. “You have a lot of people in buildings and they have no real tenant rights, so you may have unsafe conditions. You have people putting resources, time, and energy into a neighborhood that they will never reap the benefits from. Everyone on the ground is expecting to get kicked out at some time.” Braslow’s colleague, performance artist Chloe Bass, describes her building’s substandard conditions: “I have been living in Bushwick for the last three and a half years in an apartment zoned for commercial space. Our apartment has no fire exit. Our building is probably not up to code. We have one door in and out, and no other way to get out unless you jump out of the window.”

“They are pioneers,” says Deborah Brown, a mid-career artist who has opened a gallery in Bushwick called Storefront, of residents like Braslow and Bass. “They are living in places no one would want to live--industrial areas with few services and fewer amenities. They create neighborhoods and make it safe for the rest of us to follow.” A painter who has exhibited a critically praised series of local landscapes developed in her Bushwick studio, Brown is representative of the artistic community’s attempts to put down local roots. She now serves on a community board and, with her husband, has opened an orthodontic clinic in the neighborhood.

The solution to the zoning problem, of course, is to rezone industrial areas to permit new residential use. City Councilwoman Diana Reyna, like many of her constituents in Bushwick’s Hispanic population, opposes rezoning, mistakenly believing that manufacturing (and the jobs it brings) could return to the community’s blighted industrial zones. But this summer, a battle for political control between Reyna and powerful state assemblyman Vito Lopez has led to an encouraging development in the zoning crisis--at least in Bushwick.

Lopez rules Bushwick with an armada of subsidized social programs through which he extracts political fealty; in general, he has little interest in zoning reform that doesn’t expand his control of existing and new subsidized housing. But he also recognizes a new constituency when he sees one, and Bushwick’s struggling artists are just such a constituency. So in Albany, the assemblyman proposed an extension of New York State’s 1982 Loft Law, which was a temporary solution to the same problem the city confronts today--though back then, it involved artists living illegally in converted loft space in downtown Manhattan. The Loft Law didn’t rezone these districts, but it did grant legal status to industrial buildings with a recent history of tenant occupancy, thus ensuring that the buildings got brought up to code. Lopez proposed to apply the law to three more parts of the city, including the artist areas in Bushwick and East Williamsburg. In a midnight deal on June 22, Governor David Paterson signed Lopez’s new Loft Law over the objections of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who argued that it “would prevent the City from taking measures to preserve even small islands of industrial businesses.” The law is a step in the right direction, though a small one, since it fails to rezone a single industrial district for residential use.

The artists of Bushwick were surely breaking the law by living in buildings zoned for industry. But the real injustice has been the city’s unwillingness to embrace market demand for housing by rezoning warehouse districts for residential use. Meeting that demand could continue to revitalize some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods--and in the process, welcome New York’s next generation of creative talent.