New Yorkers participating (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Decisions around development are among the most controversial and consequential that our city leaders face. Whether a single building or an entire neighborhood, rezoning can change the face of a community for years to come. With New York’s desperate need for affordable housing and economic recovery competing against corporate profits and big developers, it is not surprising that these decisions are so contentious.
Yet as we recover from this pandemic, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to forge a new path forward on zoning decisions to put communities first and ensure new affordable housing that prevents the further displacement of low-income communities of color.
In my community of Sunset Park, the rezoning of a residential building at 737 4th Avenue provides a small but powerful example of developers succeeding by actually listening to the needs of the community and moving forward in partnership for the common good.
But this kind of responsible development is the exception in this city when it should be the norm. Without a commitment to community-led development, comprehensive city planning, and real reform to our land use process, we’re leaving our city’s future up to powerful corporate interests when it should lie with the people.
Over the past several years, Sunset Park’s waterfront has been the focus of many fights over large-scale development projects. As Chair of Brooklyn’s Community Board 7, I fought hard for community voices to have a seat at the table in discussions around the rezoning plan at Industry City that effectively fell apart last year. The project had the potential to create new jobs and spur economic growth, but from day one the private developer ignored the voices of the community. We held more than 25 community meetings on the issue and sought a comprehensive community assessment to inform the negotiations and understand the long-term impacts of the project. The developer refused to change their proposal and moved forward with the process in defiance of the community they hoped to fundamentally reshape, or, more accurately, replace.
The rezoning at 737 4th Avenue stands in stark contrast. From the outset of the project, the local developer participated in Community Board hearings, heard our concerns, and made key changes to the plan that will benefit our community for years to come. Sunset Park is incredibly diverse, and our immigrant and low-income families desperately need more affordable housing. By listening to advocates — the people who know this community best and want to see it thrive — the developer was able to focus on building much-needed apartments for families, not studios that would attract gentrifiers. Our recommendations helped us win a guarantee of 25% affordable housing and sustainable, good-paying jobs. Due to our efforts and the willingness of this developer to make responsible changes, the rezoning passed unanimously in the City Council.
While the plan isn’t perfect — we can always fight for greater affordability and more guarantees for the community — this process has proven that we’re being served a false choice by wealthy developers: jobs and economic opportunity in the midst of a recession or affordable housing and services for the community. We can have both — we just have to empower and engage communities in rezoning, and force the developers to take our concerns seriously.
First and foremost, we need a comprehensive, citywide rezoning plan. We need to stop reacting to one-off development projects, an approach that leaves community members playing defense against powerful interests. Our current approach favors developers and the well-connected and fails to center the needs of those most vulnerable to displacement, homelessness, and the effects of environmental racism. Year after year, we spend precious time and resources fighting harmful proposals like Industry City where developers have the upper hand and can take advantage of hidden loopholes. To build a stronger city, we need to plan for the long-term and enact our vision — the community’s vision — for sustainable, equitable city planning.
Next, we need to make the land use review process, ULURP, more equitable. If we want to level the playing field and create a real plan for New York City, we need to reform the process from the ground up. Throughout any land use process, our city government has to be open, transparent, and engaged directly with community stakeholders.
On Brooklyn Community Board 7, we’ve worked hard to make meetings accessible, offering simultaneous Chinese and Spanish translations, guaranteeing childcare for working parents, and providing food. To ensure real community engagement, not just the illusion of it, the city needs to provide funding and resources for Community Boards to hire experts, expand language access, and ensure residents can be involved every step of the way. Moreover, we should be utilizing ULURP to support a fully unionized workforce for any new project.
As with so many issues, this pandemic has created a pivot point in our city’s future. If we want to solve our affordable housing crisis, it’s obvious we need more development. And as we recover from this pandemic, we need to be thinking of new ways to spur economic growth and create more good-paying jobs. But that needs to be driven by the people who live in a community, not developers who would prefer to drive them out.
Projects like the 737 4th Avenue rezoning show us what’s possible when you view the community as key partners, not adversaries. When community voices lead, everyone benefits.
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César Zuñiga is a Democratic candidate for City Council in Brooklyn’s 38th District. On Twitter @Cesar4Council.
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A discussion with young adults (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photograph)
New York City Department of Youth & Community Development (DYCD) shelters and drop-in centers are specifically designated for youth and young adults ages 16-24. Yet, those same youth, when between the ages of 18-24, are not eligible to receive housing vouchers unless they move into a Department of Homeless Services (DHS) adult shelter. For its entirety, the de Blasio administration has withheld critical housing vouchers for young people in DYCD programs rather than provide a viable solution for permanent affordable housing to these individuals. When will it end?
The time for a solution is now – no more band-aids. Year after year, Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project witnesses youth in this age group cycle in and out of homelessness because they cannot readily access a housing voucher at the very facilities created for them. Our own overnight youth shelter cannot issue housing vouchers to our clients, a true disadvantage to them, and we must direct them to a DHS shelter to go through the “proper channels.”
This ineffective policy is hurting these youth in the worst possible way. Housing is a right not a privilege. To that end, access to housing vouchers and priority access to NYCHA apartments for this age group cannot be put on hold by the city administration any longer. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only heightened this urgency, especially when it comes to safety.
Our clients feel safer in DYCD shelters among their peer group. DYCD shelters were created specifically for young people because of their unique needs. This age group is at a different stage developmentally, socially and emotionally. DYCD youth facilities have staff trained in youth and adolescent development to support and address their needs as we prepare youth towards independence. It is critical to have this particular age group in a setting where staff is skilled in addressing their behavioral health within this specialized focus.
As a resource to young adults seeking safety, stability, and housing, we are faced with the harsh reality of having to tell them we cannot provide them with a housing voucher and have them go down the “rabbit-hole” of obtaining one which in some cases can take years.
A transgender client who recently came to our overnight shelter and felt safe staying with us had to make the tough decision to leave and go to a DHS shelter to possibly obtain a voucher. She is under 21, single with no children; criteria that makes it twice as difficult for her compared to others. Being transgender, she has already experienced rejection from her community. Being homeless and transgender, she is also at greater risk of harm on the streets, as well as at a DHS shelter, which is most often not equipped with the same staff or resources to make her feel safe.
The longer someone is homeless, the prolonged exposure to the violence and poverty only intensifies mental health needs, placing an unnecessary strain and burden on communities. For those who end up on the streets, public survival behaviors such as petty crime, substance use, and sex trade activity, often result in avoidable harm on communities, particularly those of color. Bias and discrimination against poor and homeless young people begets stigmatization, oppression, and consequential outcomes such as drug overdose, incarceration, and dissolution of families.
The ripple effect of leaving DYCD shelters to go to DHS shelters for the purpose of obtaining a housing voucher is another unnecessary step that further exacerbates the city’s homelessness crisis. Providers who offer shelter and services to homeless youth want to work in tandem with the city administration. Eliminating inefficiencies of the system, streamlining processes, making it less complicated to navigate the system, and leveling the field of eligibility for young adults are the keys to getting them into housing. Lack of investment in homeless youth does not benefit the adults they are to become, and it does not benefit the city they call home.
Equal access to vouchers and priority for NYCHA housing is a right for these individuals. They face the same challenges as others being homeless. Though age discrimination is deemed illegal by landlords, why are these young adults being subjected to it as a result of the systems created to assist them?
As New York City transitions into a new mayoral administration for the start of next year, a sound and resolute policy for providing housing vouchers and priority access to NYCHA housing to young adults while in DYCD shelters and programs is imperative. One simple step to accomplishing this is to have all DYCD and DHS shelter and program administrators report to one primary contact in the administration. This alone can streamline communication and align policy-making for equality to be a priority instead of division.
Everyone deserves a home. Everyone deserves an equal chance at obtaining housing. New York City’s young adults deserve to know that is a fact and an easily attainable reality for them, not an abyss of red tape that serves no one.
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Carolyn Strudwick, MSW, is Associate Vice President of the Streetwork Program at Safe Horizon. On Twitter @SafeHorizon.
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NYPD (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
As a City Council Member and Chair of the Council’s Public Safety Committee, I understand that people need to feel safe, particularly in their homes. One aspect of this safety is an assurance that authorities will not haphazardly burst in. This is enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which grants everyone freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. That means there must be probable cause to raid a home.
However, the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies seem to think otherwise. Because instead of substantive evidence, their burden of proof is often nothing more than hearsay from an informant, who may be compensated. Judges are willing to go along and issue warrants. And not just any warrant, but a no-knock warrant.
Having gained more attention since Breonna Taylor’s death, a no-knock warrant allows law enforcement to raid someone’s home without announcing themselves, often in the middle of the night or early morning, and using military gear. The justification is that the operation would be too dangerous or evidence would be destroyed without the element of surprise.
The NYPD has abused the use of no-knock warrants to an egregious degree, including in my own Southeast Queens district. Early one morning in March, the NYPD broke down the door of my constituent, Tijuana Brown, an African-American woman, on the grounds that her nephew was allegedly dealing drugs. They tore through her home and even cut a hole in her nephew’s bedroom wall, only to find a miniscule amount of cannabis, consistent with personal use. Her nephew was arrested for possession, but the Queens District Attorney’s office later dismissed the case. An officer at the scene allegedly remarked, “Well this was a bust.”
That “bust” traumatized Brown, who now has trouble sleeping, and also cost her almost $1,000 to replace her door, not to mention hours of cleanup.
This was not an isolated incident in my district. In 2017, officers burst into the Far Rockaway home of Nigerian-American husband and wife Isaac Okoli and Millycent Atuegwu in the early morning, pointing guns at them and their children, tearing off Okoli’s sleep apnea device and rolling him to the ground, and startling Atuegwu out of bed. Officers claimed they found cocaine and arrested Okoli for possession. He insists officers planted the drugs, a practice a former NYPD narcotics officer admitted is common. Regardless, the Queens District Attorney quickly dropped the charges. The search warrant listed someone else with the name Okoli at a different address nearby, suggesting the NYPD went to the wrong home.
These raids have got to stop. The justification, that people would be in danger if officers were to announce themselves, does not hold water. Strangers unexpectedly bursting into someone’s home in the wee hours of the morning has just as much potential for disaster, if not more, for everyone involved.
For example, in March officers also raided the Queens home of Debra Cottingham, an African-American woman who is a retired correction officer and former NYPD staffer, in search of her boyfriend’s son who no longer lived there. Cottingham owns two legal firearms, which she could very well have discharged at the sound of intruders. Then there was the 2003 case of Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old African-American woman with a heart condition, who died of cardiac arrest from the shock of NYPD officers breaking down her door and detonating a flash grenade. The officers were searching for drugs, based on an unverified tip, and found none.
Indeed, there have been many deadly incidents stemming from no-knock warrants: the New York Times found that at least 94 people across the country died in no-knock raids from 2010 through 2016. Of these deaths, 13 were law enforcement officers.
Unsurprisingly, these no-knock warrants disproportionately affect and target people of color. And before someone says, “Well that’s because they’re the ones committing the crimes,” consider the fact that law enforcement rarely uses them for white-collar suspects, who tend to be white people. And in a rare case where law enforcement does, like the FBI raid of Donald Trump associate Paul Manafort’s home, multiple legal scholars denounced it as excessive.
Why is it excessive? After all, one justification of no-knock warrants is that officers announcing themselves would prompt the suspect to destroy evidence, often citing that a drug dealer could start flushing contraband. Would the same not apply to a white-collar criminal, who could easily start deleting files and shredding documents in response to such a knock?
Encouragingly, state legislation to restrict no-knock warrants might finally pass after decades of floundering. The bill would limit the use of such warrants to cases where there is an “imminent threat to human life,” such as terrorism, human trafficking, kidnapping, or an active shooter. The bill would also require greater oversight of no-knock warrants.
However, even this legislation is probably not enough. Given the NYPD’s track record of what the department calls “threatening,” one can only imagine what inventive excuses police would make to claim there is an imminent threat. We need legislation establishing a burden of proof greater than hearsay, such as weeks of surveillance, as justification for a no-knock warrant.
It is true that law enforcement needs tools at their disposal to keep us safe. However, one of those tools cannot be bursting into people’s homes in military gear based on a sliver of evidence. No-knock warrants are an affront to our Constitutional rights, and must stop in almost every situation. Because a home is meant to be a safe place, and the NYPD must recognize and respect that.
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City Council Member Adrienne Adams represents parts of Queens in District 28 and chairs the Council’s public safety committee. On Twitter @AdrienneEAdams1.
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