In July, the Real Estate Board of New York went on a media blitz, touting their latest report blasting landmark preservation in New York City. This is part of REBNY’s ongoing campaign to paint our landmark preservation system, which covers a little over 3 percent of our city’s building stock, as “out of control” and “broken.”
In this latest attack, using Greenwich Village as an example, REBNY claims that landmarking makes New York unaffordable, and pushes the working and middle class out of our neighborhoods.
REBNY should tell that to the residents of Westbeth and 505 LaGuardia Place, Greenwich Village’s two largest affordable housing complexes.
Westbeth is the former Bell Telephone Laboratories, converted to subsidized housing for artists by Richard Meier in 1970. 505 LaGuardia Place, an affordable co-op designed by I.M. Pei in 1964, is part of a pinwheel-shaped trio of towers surrounding a giant Picasso sculpture.
Residents of both complexes are very committed to preserving the affordability of their homes, and both fought long and hard alongside the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation to secure landmark status for them.
In both cases, residents felt landmarking would protect the character of their surroundings and provide a bulwark against schemes to demolish their homes and replace them with something less affordable.
While they recognized that some obligations came with landmark designation, they saw that on the whole landmarking helped protect what they valued about where they lived (it should be noted that as a co-op, the residents of 505 LaGuardia Place are also the owners, who directly bear the responsibilities that come with landmark designation, while the owners of Westbeth, the non-profit board which runs the complex, also supported landmark designation).
REBNY should also run their argument by the residents of First Houses in the East Village. Built in 1936 as the very first public housing development in New York City, First Houses was landmarked in 1974. As in many New York City Housing Authority developments, residents often struggle to get needed repairs and maintenance.
But GVSHP worked with the tenants association to use the complex’s landmark designation to apply additional pressure for long-overdue repairs.
If REBNY was truly interested in examining Greenwich Village’s struggle with affordability, they would have also talked to residents of the far western part of our neighborhood. That part of our neighborhood, which until relatively recently mostly lacked landmark protections, also saw the swiftest rise in housing prices over the last two decades, and the most dramatic transformation from a mixed-use, mixed income community to home of the super-rich.
Quite contrary to REBNY’s assertions that landmark designation undercuts the affordability of our neighborhoods and stifles economic development, that un-landmarked area saw working factories and warehouses employing scores of people torn down and replaced by luxury high-rises that now largely serve as trophy homes for jet-setters who spend little time in New York.
Rather than increasing affordability, as REBNY would have you believe, the lack of landmark protections in this part of our neighborhood helped lead to a wave of ultra-high-end development the likes of which few parts of New York have ever seen.
Of course it might be easy to dismiss any claim by REBNY to champion the cause of affordable housing, since, in addition to dismantling landmark protections, the group has also sought to undermine the rent regulations that guarantee affordable housing for millions of New Yorkers.
And I have to admit, I take some personal umbrage with REBNY’s claim. In addition to serving as executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, I am also an affordable housing advocate, having sat on the board of several of our city and state’s largest affordable housing groups. I grew up in an affordable housing development in the Bronx, and spent most of my adult life in exactly the kind of affordable, rent-regulated housing as well.
In spite of this, I am glad that REBNY is shining a light on the relationship between landmarking and affordability, especially in an election year. I believe that a true examination of this relationship actually shows that landmark designation tends to help, not hinder, the cause of keeping our neighborhoods affordable.
But a true examination does not seem to be REBNY’s goal. In addition to alleging that landmarking causes unaffordability simply because neighborhoods like Greenwich Village are now both landmarked and expensive, REBNY also seeks to play upon the fear that landmarking adds prohibitive expenses to basic property maintenance.
While undoubtedly the extra layer of bureaucracy involved in landmarks regulation can add time and expense, REBNY’s approach is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather than joining landmarks advocates in calling for increased funding for the Landmarks Preservation Commission (the smallest of all New York City’s public agencies) to streamline this regulatory process, REBNY has instead sought to create a climate that would starve the agency and dismantle its portfolio.
In spite of this fear-mongering, the reality is that almost all repair and restoration work to landmarked properties merely requires a staff-level approval from the Commission, which can typically be secured in less than 30 days. And while there are cases where the Commission may require slightly more expensive materials for renovation work, these are often investments which pay off in the long term, with more durability that helps protect buildings from deterioration.
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What landmark designation also sometimes does, however, is create hurdles to developers trying to force long-term tenants in less expensive apartments out of their homes — which may be why groups like REBNY are so opposed to landmark designation.
For example, the East Village has seen a spate of “rooftop additions” where new owners seek to build additional floors on top of buildings while residents are still living there. Tenants frequently claim that the construction is aimed at making life intolerable and forcing them out, and it often succeeds in doing just that. But in landmarked districts, such additions are harder to build, and much less likely to be approved.
Similarly, developers sometimes use the “demolition clause” to get around the rent regulations that allow long-term residents to stay in their homes at relatively affordable rents. One of the few ways in which a developer can remove a rent-regulated tenant from their home is to demolish the entire building. But in landmark districts, such demolitions are rarely allowed.
Listening to REBNY, you would think that developers are regularly thwarted from constructing new affordable housing in places like the Village due to landmark regulations. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
An enormous percentage of our neighborhood’s remaining affordable housing stock is located within its landmark districts, which helps protect it from some of these more unscrupulous practices. And, in my 20 years of working on both landmark and affordable housing issues, I have yet to encounter a single example of an affordable housing development that could not be built due to landmark regulations.
By contrast, I know of many cases of affordable housing conserved or developed within preserved buildings, often using tax breaks and financial assistance available specifically for the re-use of historic buildings. Even without these incentives, re-use of existing buildings is often cheaper and more efficient than new construction, to say nothing of more environmentally responsible.
So while landmark designation may not be the answer to our city’s affordability crisis, it is certainly not the cause of it, as REBNY would have you believe.
Landmark designation provides a means to preserve the character of historic neighborhoods in all five boroughs, many of which currently face tremendous pressure, and in all demographic and socio-economic strata. Landmark designation does not directly regulate affordability, and its application can certainly have different impacts in different circumstances. But more often than not, I believe, landmark designation can help the cause of affordability.
Because it’s not just in the Village that landmarked buildings shelter a diverse range of people and businesses, including long-term residents who have put down roots and aspire to stay permanently in their communities. Landmark designation, in helping to preserve the buildings these residents and businesses call home, give them a fighting chance to stay as well, and can help ward off some of the more pernicious means by which they can be forced out.
Without landmark protections, these buildings are rarely if ever demolished to make way for more affordable housing or cheaper retail space. Instead, they are almost always lost to new luxury housing, usually with retail space for chain or big box stores, not small mom-and-pops.
This is one of the reasons we are seeing neighborhoods clamor for landmark protections throughout the city, from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge, Ridgewood to Richmond Hill, the South Bronx to Staten Island.
They are not doing so because they want to make their neighborhoods unaffordable. They are doing so because they want to preserve and perpetuate what they love best about the communities they call home.
Figuring out how to maintain the affordability and protect the character of our neighborhoods is among the most pressing issues facing our city this election year. Scare tactics and false equivalencies but forward by REBNY that mask hidden agendas are not the way to find solutions to these serious challenges.
A thoughtful examination of the facts is. And I believe the facts show landmarking and affordability are not only compatible, but more often than not, go hand in hand.
Andrew Berman is executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
The next mayor will be responsible for 1.4 million people over the age of 60 — a population larger than most United States cities. New Yorkers are living longer. Seniors vote. What should be on the minds of candidates?
For the first time in its history, the city will see a 45 percent increase of older adults by 2030.
Baby boomers began turning 65 in 2011 and will begin turning 70 in 2016 — during the term of the next mayor. The over 85 is the fastest growing segment of the city’s population. Older New Yorkers reflect the diversity of the city’s population as over 50 percent come from minority groups. Many seniors financially struggle with one one out of there living in poverty. There are also endless opportunities for using their life experience in positive ways.
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The next mayor needs to navigate this population tsunami with careful citywide planning. Older New Yorkers must be included as major stakeholders and not excluded as they often are. As a city, we must raise the bar on addressing ageism.
How does the next mayor take the helm and what are the issues?
Council of Senior Centers and Services has developed an extensive candidates questionnaire designed to address issues impacting the lives of older adults. Responses can be found at www.cscs-ny.org.
On July 11, over 400 seniors and others packed the first mayoral forum focusing on older adults. They came from over 80 neighborhood programs across the city. Five candidates attended: Democrats Sal Albanese, Bill de Blasio, John Liu and Anthony Weiner; as well as Republican John Catsimitidis.
It was a great opportunity for those who came to answer an array of questions. It was a lost opportunity for those who did not come.
The audience was engaged and serious — clapping, cheering and even booing at one point. They will talk about this with their friends at senior centers and other places, their families, and neighbors.
CSCS’ alert and the video of the forum let thousands of New Yorkers know what happened.
A broad array of issues was covered:
• Department for the Aging funding for community based services
• Elder abuse
• Retaining and building affordable housing with services for older adults, rent regulation and SCRIE
• Hunger and food insecurity and the under enrollment of older adults in the SNAP/food stamps program
• Public transportation – user friendly mass transit system and improving Access-A-Ride
• Emergency preparedness and disaster response for older adults
• Cultural sensitivity to elderly immigrants and LGBT seniors
Time did not allow for questions regarding supports for family caregivers, mental health services, and the increase of those with Alzheimer’s. These areas are covered in our questionnaire.
The next mayor needs to provide a variety of means to ensure the economic security of older adults. The platform presented in our questionnaire and at the forum is a roadmap to making the city a good place to grow old. Aging with dignity is what we want for ourselves, our loved ones and all New Yorkers.
Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy at the Council of Senior Centers and Services, can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. CSCS’ mission is to champion the rights of older adults to make NYC a better place to live.
Suppose there were 3,800 children living on their own or without homes in New York City, but only 250 shelter beds for them. According to the nonprofit providers of the city's shelter beds, some of those kids — sometimes hundreds and hundreds of them — are turned away each night because there's not enough space for them.
How would we address that?
One answer would be to cut the number of beds and turn even more homeless kids back to the street.
And that's exactly what had been proposed for the 2014 city budget by cutting $12.6 million to $7.2 million and reducing beds to an estimated 90.
Let me quickly reassure you that no cut was actually adopted. But that issue brought me to a rally last month on the steps of City Hall to talk about helping runaway and homeless kids.
It was an unforgettable rally. What moved me weren't the well-reasoned arguments and statistics of advocates like Jennifer March-Joly and Caroline Nagy of the Citizens Committee for Children of New York. Not even the heart-wrenching providers' stories of turning kids away each day as they ran out of beds — and can you imagine how that feels for the people who devote their lives to serving kids in need.
It was the kids.
The kids, all under 18, spoke about life on hard streets and having a safe place to lay their heads. But mostly they talked about the other kids, the ones on the streets who hadn't found a bed, "the turned away kids."
One young woman [girl] struggled to ask that those other kids get a safe place, too, questioning aloud if she was greedy to be asking. Another boldly said everyone should be able to get a bed and at least one meal a day. One. That teenager concluded, "I hope I'm not asking too much." Of course, he was asking for far, far too little.
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They're just kids. Most of them either escaped from sexual or physical abuse or got thrown out after "coming out" about a sexual orientation their parents wouldn't accept. They seemed scared and bewildered. Mostly they're hurt.
A recent Covenant House and Fordham University study of these runaway and thrown-away kids in New York City found 25 percent had either been "trafficked" in the illegal sex industry or involved in "survival sex" — trading their bodies for a place to stay or a meal. On the streets they're at constant risk of mental and physical health problems, especially violence or sexually transmitted diseases like HIV.
Jane Bigelsen, director of the Anti-Human Trafficking Initiative for Covenant House, told how pimps approach the turned-away street kids. He said they say, "The shelters are full. Where are you going to go? Why don't you come with me?"
Councilman Lew Fidler, the longtime, staunchest supporter of runaway and unaccompanied kids who will be term-limited off Council in January, asked, "For crying out loud, can't we find a shelter bed for every young person who needs one?" Fidler, too, said the kids who can't find beds are "forced in one way or another to sell their body, their soul, their dignity."
Providing beds for unaccompanied minors isn't without controversy. There are critics opposed to providing "opportunities" for kids to runaway, or who would place them in more restrictive institutions or other forms of government care.
Current providers do frequently reunite runaways with their families and they offer high-quality and varied human services and counseling. Many of the kids, who now self-report to these shelters they trust say they would avoid more restrictive programs. Surely this debate can't be between theoretical government care programs and non-existent shelter beds, while thousands of kids remain prey on the streets.
There is a more fundamental point. American public policy hasn't been kind to our children.
The poorest age group in America is children under 18. The Census Bureau reports 22 percent of children, over 16 million of them, lived in poverty in 2011. Kids make up 24 percent of the U.S. population but 34 percent of those living in poverty.
Over seven million children live in "extreme poverty," defined as living in a household with income less than half of the poverty level. That's currently below $11,511 annually for a family of four.
One in four (25.1 percent) of American children under 5 years of age live in poverty. It's one in three for black or Hispanic kids.
UNICEF recently published an alarming study of child poverty in the world. In one chart, they ranked developed countries on a measure of poverty they devised tracking the percentage of kids in families living below the national median income. Of 35 countries the U.S. came in 34th, beating out Romania. Finland ranked highest, but we also lost out to Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, among others.
The statistics in our city are grimmer. The city Health Department reports 20 percent of kids between 6 and 12 — about 145,000 city kids — struggle with mental health issues. Half of third graders read below grade level. One in every dozen babies born in New York City is underweight.
As sequestration cuts spending, and an austerity policy gnaws at the American safety net and our social compact to give all kids a chance, the programs being hurt the most are disproportionately programs for kids.
Sequestration has brutalized head start programs, cut childhood immunizations and federally funded child care. Cuts to the federal Maternal and Child Health programs will stop millions of families in need from getting access to that service over the next decade. The proposed SNAP food stamps cuts being debated in Washington would literally take food out of the mouths of babies.
We need a national movement to raise all children out of poverty. But let's start with an effort to make sure all the kids have a safe place to rest their heads at night. And maybe we can splurge for two meals a day.
Jeff Foreman is Policy Director for Care for the Homeless. Follow him on @JeffForeman2