The Future of the Upper West Side

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In the summer 2012 issue of City Journal, I examine "The Unending Battle of the Upper West Side," the Manhattan neighborhood's decade-long fight between the forces of gentrification and the social-services industry.

When I adapted this essay into "Homelessness, inc: The war on the Upper West Side" for The New York Post, I led off with the latest round in the battle: an "emergency" plan to move 400 homeless into a new supershelter on the residential block of West 95th Street by an organization called Aguila. In yet another example of the revolving door that exists between government service and the homelessness industry, Aguila is run by none other than New York's former commissioner of homeless services Robert Hess.

In recent years, the blocks around this Aguila facility have seen half a dozen proposals for homeless shelters and "supportive housing" for the mentally ill and chemically addicted (MICA). Currently on 94th Street, the Lantern Organization is nearing completion on the conversion of St. Louis Hall, which it announced in 2007 is being designed in part to house MICA patients.

On August 7, the office of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer called a press rally on 95th Street and West End Avenue to oppose the Aguila shelter. Speakers included New York State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, New York State Senator Adriano Espaillat, Nick Prigo from Community Board 7 Housing Committee, and Marti Weithman from the SRO Law Project. The assembly on the street included Neighborhood in the Nineties president Aaron Biller along with Mel Wymore and Ken Biberaj, both candidates for the City Council's sixth district. Videos of the speakers are below.

For anyone who cares about the continuing betterment of the Upper West Side, the pushback against the Aguila shelter is admirable and warranted. New York City's homeless and mental health policies are broken. Yet what was absent from the discussion are the steps that need to be taken to fix them.

The rally against the Aguila shelter is an uncanny repetition of much of what we saw in early 2011 for a building known as the Alexander on 94th Street. Many of the same politicians showed up saying much of the same things. In the Alexander's case, community resistance led to what appears to be the abandonment of the plan to convert the building into a 200-person shelter. This was a victory for the residential stakeholders of the neighborhood, especially for the working middle class and poor who reside in this building.

One now hopes that the neighborhood's energy can be summoned again to oppose the latest incursion. But the case of deja vu also shows how such proposals will continue until several underlying issues are addressed.

The neighborhood's politicians have been reluctant to look at one most obvious factor, because their own legislation has contributed (inadvertently, they say) to the crisis. In 2006, Brewer, Rosenthal, and other local and state politicians formed a "Working Group" to legislate against what they saw as the "illegal hotels" that were being operated for budget tourists out of the neighborhood's SRO (for "single room occupancy") apartment buildings. Once their legislation passed, the owners of these buildings lost a business model that could compete with the exorbitant tax-funded rental rates (up to $3000 a month per resident) that social services can command by warehousing the homeless and mentally ill in the same buildings, which opened the door for the organizations to move in.

In either case, the hotels and the shelters operate side by side with the SRO's existing long-term residents. In one case the building services improve through the introduction of hotel amenities. In the other a homeless, often drug-addicted population shares the hallways and bathrooms. Since the "illegal hotels" legislation directly precipitated this latest encroachment of social services providers, one obvious solution is to roll back the law and allow the SRO buildings to function again as tourist hotels while still honoring the leases of the existing tenants.

A second issue is the "fair share" mandate in the city's charter--a mandate which says that each neighborhood should carry its fair share of social services and that no one neighborhood should bear a disproportionate burden. With nearly 2,000 supportive housing units now on the Upper West Side compared to less than 100 on the Upper East Side, "fair share" is woefully disregarded. By calling a shelter an emergency facility, social-services developers can also bypass even the most basic community approval process and impact analysis. They can bus in hundreds of homeless, often in the dead of night, with little more than a letter of warning to the Community Board. If "fair share" had teeth and could be enforced, developers would be compelled to ensure that their facilities are distributed equally across neighborhoods in a "fair" way. Additionally, the "emergency" provision, which allows for no community review, must be abandoned.

Beyond fair share, another issue concerns the housing of dual diagnosis or "mentally ill chemically addicted" (MICA) populations, many of them homeless, in residential neighborhoods. While all neighborhoods might be expected to carry a fair share of social services, no residential community should be expected to take in this explosive population.

 "What's your solution to the mentally ill" has been a rhetorical weapon used against areas that oppose the social services industry, even though finding a solution to a problem the mental health community created should not be a residential neighborhood's responsibility. 

Here it is possible to see a sad narrative going back to the exposure and closing of Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. First the Kennedys and then Geraldo Rivera on ABC in 1972 publicized the truly deplorable conditions at this institution for

mentally retarded children. The backlash following these reports led to the mass deinstitutionalization of the state's mentally ill population and the movement towards community based social services. Meanwhile institutionalization became socially

stigmatized and advocates pushed for the "liberation" of the mentally ill. 

But now we see the disastrous outcome of this policy, as the pendulum has gone the other way. Community services for the mentally ill is a failure of its own. While the cost of community care is purportedly lower than institutionalization, not enough thought is ever given to the collateral damage to communities that must absorb it--increased crime, drain on other municipal resources, diminishing property values and tax base, plus the mental tax on community stakeholders. As Heather Mac Donald has written for City Journal, deinistitutionalization has led to "re-institutionalization," as care for the mentally ill have been transferred to the criminal justice system. At the same time, the industry designed to help at-risk populations has instead been helping itself to taxpayer money while failing to give their charges the care they need.

With the failure of deinstitutionalization, an argument can be made that what really needs to happen is the development a new generation of mental health institutions along with the political will to institutionalize a broken population. In fact, a movement in this direction is already taking place, and proponents has called it "FORMICA," because it is the one solution that would actually help the MICA population while also junking the failed community based mental health system.

But finally, the Upper West Side should look to its future. While the neighborhood spends its energy opposing the remaining forces of the social services industry, it also needs to consider how its wants to develop into the future. What are the kinds of people and businesses it hopes to attract? The cooperative revolution, and the neighborhood's beautification that has resulted, has already taken the Upper West Side far along in recovering its grandeur of a century ago. But with the outer boroughs now attracting a large share of the city's young talent and energy, the Upper West Side needs to find ways to compete with these other vibrant neighborhoods. One place to look may be the very SRO buildings that have been the cause of so much concern. With their tiny apartments, these SROs already have a dorm-like arrangement that would lend themselves to student living. With Lincoln Center on one side and Columbia University on the other, the city's young creative class is already drawn to the Upper West Side. Why not think creatively about these SROs and carve out new housing for a creative population?

A generation ago, the Upper West Side was a center for cultural innovation, much as neighborhoods in Brooklyn are today. Through new initiatives, the cultural legacy of the Upper West Side could be reinvigorated. But for that to happen, the leaders of the community need to advance a forceful forward direction that the rally on 95th Street regrettably lacked. 

Upper West Side Madness

CITY JOURNAL
August 8, 2012

Upper West Side Madness
by James Panero

A neighborhood suffers under New York’s housing policy for the homeless and mentally ill.

For years, the Upper West Side of Manhattan has been the site of a war between the forces of gentrification and the social-services industry. In July, for example, the neighborhood saw two murders over consecutive weekends in homeless shelters in the West Nineties. Now comes an organization called Aguila, which is in the process of moving 400 homeless people into a building that it has rented on West 95th Street, where the homeless will be housed alongside existing residents. On August 7, the office of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer held a rally to oppose the plan. Though the rally was welcome news, it was disturbingly reminiscent of a 2011 controversy over a similar plan to convert a building called the Alexander, on 94th Street, into a 200-person shelter. The Alexander plan seems to have been abandoned—a victory for Upper West Side residents—but the repetition shows how such proposals will keep popping up until politicians confront some real problems with New York’s treatment of troubled populations.

One of those problems is a piece of 2010 legislation backed, as it happens, by two of the politicians who attended the August 7 rally: New York State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal and New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer. The legislation banned the Upper West Side’s SRO apartment buildings—“single-room occupancy” buildings whose small apartments lack their own kitchens and bathrooms—from operating budget hotels. The law meant that the owners of SRO buildings lost a way of competing with social-services organizations, which try to buy or rent the same buildings and use them as warehouses for homeless or MICA (“mentally ill, chemically addicted”) populations. When you realize that the government pays the social-services organizations up to $3,000 a month per resident, you’ll understand why the hotels legislation opened the door for the organizations to move in.

Though intended to protect existing SRO tenants from being evicted by landlords in search of higher profits, the law has made tenants’ lives worse, not better. When a landlord decides to run an improvised hotel in his building, the building’s services generally improve through the introduction of hotel amenities—a 24-hour concierge, for example. But when a shelter opens in an SRO building, tenants find themselves sharing hallways and bathrooms with a homeless, often drug-addicted population. Since the hotel legislation directly precipitated this latest encroachment of social-services providers, one obvious step is to roll back the law and allow SRO buildings to function as budget hotels once again, so long as they honor the leases of existing tenants.

A second problem involves the “fair share” mandate in the city’s charter, which says that each neighborhood should bear its portion of social services and that no one neighborhood should shoulder an excessive burden. That mandate is clearly being disregarded when the Upper West Side hosts nearly 2,000 “supportive-housing” units and the Upper East Side fewer than 100. In fact, in recent years, the blocks around the Aguila facility have seen half a dozen proposals for homeless shelters and “supportive housing” for MICA patients. “Fair share” should be properly enforced, compelling social-services developers to distribute their facilities equally across the city’s neighborhoods.

A third issue is a remarkable loophole that social-services developers have exploited. By calling a shelter an emergency facility, they can bypass community-approval processes, busing in hundreds of homeless—often in the dead of night—with little more than a letter of warning to the local community board. That’s what happened in the Aguila case. The city should scrap the “emergency” provision.

Fourth, we should start asking why MICA populations are being housed in residential neighborhoods at all. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Kennedy family and then Geraldo Rivera, on ABC, publicized the deplorable conditions at Willowbrook State School, a Staten Island institution for mentally retarded children. The backlash following these reports led to the mass deinstitutionalization of the state’s mentally ill population and a move toward providing social services for these people in smaller facilities located within residential communities. A generation later, we see the disastrous outcome of this shift. While community-located care is purportedly cheaper than institutionalization, one wonders if the cost calculations include the collateral damage to communities: increased crime, drain on other municipal resources, and diminishing property values and tax bases, not to mention the mental tax on residents. Another gigantic cost is borne by jails, which house many of the people who would once have been institutionalized. The time may have come to abandon residential care for the mentally ill and replace it with a new generation of mental-health institutions.

Finally, the Upper West Side needs to look to its future. It needs, for example, to find ways to compete with the outer boroughs now attracting a large share of the city’s young talent and energy. One place to look may be the very SRO buildings that have been the cause of so much concern. With their tiny apartments, these SROs already offer a dorm-like arrangement that would lend itself to student living. With Lincoln Center on one side and Columbia University on the other, the Upper West Side is a natural magnet for the city’s young creative class. Why not reconfigure the SROs to carve out new housing for this population—and in the process, reinvigorate the Upper West Side’s impressive cultural legacy? For that to happen, the community’s leaders need to advance genuine solutions to its problems. And those solutions weren’t on view at the rally.

For more, see my article "Homelessness, inc" (New York Post). My longer article on the Upper West Side appeared in the Summer issue of City Journal and will appear online soon.

Here is complete video of the 95th Street Rally of August 7, 2012:

Homelessness, inc.

The bad old days: Larry Hogue, "The Wild Man of 96th Street," in 1993.

NEW YORK POST
July 27, 2012

Homelessness, Inc.
by James Panero

The social-services industry’s war on the Upper West Side slows, but it never ends.

Just last week, Robert Hess of the homeless-housing group Aguila informed Community Board 7 that he means to build a 400-person “super shelter” on West 95th Street.

So what? you say. The neighborhood has never looked better.

I agree — and I’ve lived there most of my life.

Yet I recall how, starting in the 1970s, the neighborhood descended into chaos — because a coalition of politically connected developers, nonprofits, labor unions and government agencies did its utmost to turn the area into a dispensary for social services.

Under cover of compassionate rhetoric, the social-services industry used public funds to turn the Upper West Side’s private residential buildings into welfare hotels, homeless shelters, halfway houses and methadone clinics — inundating the neighborhood with crime, homelessness and drug abuse.

Today, the balance has tilted toward gentrification, but several recent reversals show that we can’t take the gains for granted.

Whenever real estate stagnates, the industry spies an opening. In a depressed housing market, it has greater purchasing power. Back in the 1990s recession, New York magazine declared, “Small business is no longer the dominant industry on the Upper West Side. Homelessness is.” The city was going broke, yet there was “explosive growth of the social-service sector.”

The influx of undesirable new residents drove rent-paying tenants out of their apartments. The worst off were forced into the streets and thus into the hands of the homelessness industry — which housed them at four times the cost, sometimes in the same buildings they’d been driven out of in the first place.

The rising disorder helped the industry buy up Upper West Side housing more easily. The obvious public presence of a mentally ill population also let politicians claim that the need for social services was growing. In fact, the rise of the social-services agencies was what had introduced that population in the first place.

Lately, the industry has zeroed in on the neighborhood’s SROs — buildings with “single-room occupancy” apartments. It aims to import and house the most destructive populations it can find — like people with both mental-health problems and drug dependency, a dual diagnosis known in the industry as MICA (for “mentally ill, chemically addicted”).

Placing a MICA population in what is known as “supportive housing” secures the highest possible government funding. The agencies also plant these profoundly troubled new residents alongside the remaining SRO tenants to drive them out.

Aaron Biller, president of the local group Neighborhood in the Nineties, describes the fight as a game of Whac-A-Mole: The industry pops up in one building after another.

Take St. Louis Hall, a six-story residence on 94th Street, just steps from Riverside Park. The Lantern Organization, a nonprofit housing developer, and its for-profit wing, the Lantern Management Group, bought the building to convert it into a MICA facility. Even as it adds another story, Lantern is now trying to push out existing tenants by threatening to house them side by side with the MICAs. For each “special-needs” tenant that Lantern can squeeze in, investors can earn more than $3,000 a month from government agencies paying to house them.

For a while, SRO owners tried to keep their buildings out of the industry’s hands by turning them into European-style budget hotels. The regular tenants often cheered the change, since it meant new amenities and added security and staff. Local merchants welcomed the tourist trade.

But our local political leaders thought otherwise. In 2006, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer teamed up with state legislators Richard Gottfried, Linda Rosenthal and Liz Kreuger to outlaw the new hotels — leaving the SROs at the industry’s mercy.

Late in 2010, I watched as one building, the Alexander Hotel on 94th Street, signed a contract with Samaritan Village, a Queens-based substance-abuse and mental-health center, to convert it into a 200-bed homeless facility. The community fought that conversion to a stalemate. But now comes Aguila, out to put a 400-bed shelter on 95th.

Within the last two weeks, a deranged man, Bernardo Paulino, who’d been living in a shelter for HIV patients on West 95th, allegedly stabbed the desk clerk to death. Across town, Curtis Forteau, a schizophrenic homeless man, randomly attacked Sabatha Tirado with pepper spray and a knife, cops say.

Passing through a revolving door of city agencies, New York’s mentally ill homeless population is a time bomb. That’s why a “fair share” law in the City Charter requires that social-services facilities be evenly distributed through all neighborhoods. Yet West 94th and 95th streets alone have seen a half-dozen homeless shelters, treatment centers and halfway houses proposed in recent years.

A 2008 survey revealed that of the supportive-housing units across Manhattan, 21 percent — 1,978 units — were on the Upper West Side. The Upper East Side, by comparison, had 93 units.

The Upper West Side is known for its social compassion, but that compassion has long been abused by developers and politicians who profit off failure in the neighborhood. More and more, my neighbors have realized what’s going on.

For the moment, the neighborhood remains beautiful and vital — but the battle for the Upper West Side is far from over.

Adapted from the Summer issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

UPDATE:  As I mention in my article, the "dual diagnosis" homeless are known as MICA, for "mentally ill chemically addicted." They are most in need of assistance, but even when the gov't pays out $3000 per person a month to the homelessness industry, they don't get the care they need.

After this editorial came out, homeless residents from two different shelters independently called me up to express agreement with my piece. The policy of warehousing these people in residential communities is a failure--a short sighted government attempt to save money without consideration of the long term costs or collateral damage to communities. Willowbrook, a deplorable institution for mentally disabled children in Staten Island exposed in the 1970s, was a true disaster, but the mass deinstitutionalization that resulted has now gone to the opposite extreme.

One solution is that we need to reconsider re-institutionalization and put resources into modernizing our mental health institutions. Some observers have considered calling such a movement "FORMICA," because it would actually help these patients in need rather than just the social services profiteers.