Artist and educator Hatuey Ramos Ferminmoved to the Bronx in 2007 to jump-start his career in New York after completing his studies in the Netherlands. An enticing mix of affordable housing and teaching opportunities lured Fermin to the South Bronx. Four years later, he has yet to leave.
Since Fermin's arrival, he has become a fixture in the local arts community working as a teaching artist at the Bronx Museum of Art, and most recently, launching Hubs Spokes Conversation, a podcast project that initiates discussions on issues such as art, communities, culture and urban spaces.
Building upon a long history of community involvement, the Bronx arts scene has grown significantly over the years offering more services, resources and opportunity for artists in spite of economic crisis, geographic obstacles and escalating rents in popular artist neighborhoods.
"There are not many of us, but we all really try to get to know each other and when someone is new, we all want to know who they are. It is a very tight community," explains Bronx-based artist, Melissa A. Calderon.
The scene has remained largely under the radar even as developers and media outlets have sought to generate buzz with pithy acronyms like "SoBro" and to rechristen Mott Haven the next Williamsburg or DUMBO. These efforts to create comparisons to other trendy artist hubs throughout the city overlook the unique features, challenges and traditions that have shaped the identity of the arts in the Bronx.
"The cultural movement has always been here, but has been fragmented and unfortunately a little overshadowed by all the other problems in the Bronx," says Juanita Lanzo, director of http://www.bronxarts.org/lag.asp Longwood Art Gallery.
Trying to pinpoint the exact location of the Bronx arts community is a challenge. The major cultural institutions are sprinkled throughout the borough from Bronx Art Space in Mott Haven and Longwood Art Gallery at the southern tip, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in Concourse and the Lehman Center in Jerome Park farther north.
"The difficulty with the Bronx is the geography. Once you're in the Bronx, it is very difficulty to go from A to B. I think it is also the saving grace because development is a little bit slower," says Antonio Sergio Bessa, director of programs at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
This geographic sprawl might limit the ease and accessibility to various cultural activity happening throughout the borough, but on the flip side, it has kept hungry developers from over-building and has provided a large cross section of Bronx residents with the opportunity to experience and engage in art exhibits, open studios and live performances.
Mott Haven's position between the Willis and Third Avenue bridges and only one subway stop from Manhattan, has made it a prime location for artists.
Over the last decade, Mott Haven has emerged as the nucleus of the art scene. The rezoning of the area -- formally known as Piano Town -- in 1997 and again in 2005, allowed developers to renovate old factories into loft space including C. Riegler’s Sons Factory and the Clock Tower.
From the beginning, artists in Mott Haven and around the South Bronx have spearheaded a number community-based initiatives including open studio tours, exhibitions and art collectives such as the Bronx Blue Bedroom Project, Rebel Diaz Arts Collective and the Mott Haven Art School. In 2004,Calderon, along with Mitsu Hadeishi, launched CONVERSIONs, a series of art events held in lofts and spaces throughout the area.
"It is sort of this badge of honor that everyone wears on their sleeve. You're in Mott Haven and it is a little harder to be here and as new people come in, they become part of that community immediately," explains Calderon. "Even when people leave for Queens or Brooklyn, they still come back. It is like this alum thing and it really is this way. They are honorary Mott Havenites forever even though they’re not there anymore, even me. I still stay in touch because I really love it down there and I try my best to help the community any time I can."
Calderon now lives in Norwood behind the botanic gardens near a group of fellow artists including Ray Felix, Vidal Centeno, Ben Stock, and Barbara Korman.
Many galleries struggle to survive in Mott Haven, but the Bronx Art Space has developed a large following both locally and around New York. A current exhibition on abstraction put on by the Bronx River Art Center in West Farms at the Bronx Art Space drew a crowd from all over the city. (It closes on April 29.)
While a large group of artists have clustered in the Mott Haven area, many have been priced out by rising rents in recent years and have migrated to different parts of the borough including Longwood, Norwood and Concourse.
"A lot of [property owners] really see dollar signs when they see that there is this gentrification happening. I for one was priced out. I wanted to renew my lease and the landlord wanted to raise the rent $1,000. I had to go and that ends up being the story for a lot of people," explains Calderon.
Artists in the area also have an awareness of their own role in the cycle of gentrification.
"I am all for evolution and development and I think the arts community brings quite a lot to that. We always have to be mindful that when the process is too radical and begins to uproot a community that has been settled there for sometime, it is problematic," explains Bessa.
Many are eager to dub the Bronx art scene as "new" or "emerging" when it has a number of established art institutions and a rich cultural past producing artists like Fred Wilson, Vito Acconci, Margaret Bourke-White and DJ Kook Herc.
In recent years, though, the arts community has become more cohesive. Cultural institutions have expanded their programming to Bronx residents, while also providing better services and resources to artists.
Latinos and Hispanics represent 53 percent of the population in the Bronx, according to the 2010 U.S. census. As this community has grown in the borough, small art organizations and larger cultural institutions have launched new programs that focus on Latino art and traditions and provide resources to support local Latino artists.
At the impetus of director Eva Bornstein, the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, has more than doubled its box office income in the past six years from $700,000 to $1.5 million. When Bornstein arrived at Lehman Center, she noticed that the programming catered more to the "Riverdale crowd." The lineup now includes a greater variety of performers from El Gran Combo and Johnny Mathis to Swan Lake. "We've expanded the programming to include the diverse audiences of the Bronx," says Bornstein.
The Bronx Museum of the Arts launched the Artist in the Marketplace program, also known as AIM, 30 years ago to help artists learn about professional development opportunities and acquire the tools to better market themselves. The program has become increasingly competitive, and now, the Bronx Museum of the Arts gets 800 applicants for only 36 slots.
"Because of our roots in community activism, I think working closely with emerging artists is very close to our mission, so the museum has a lot of programs," explains Bessa. "We have a very tiny budget, but compared to other institutions, we actually commission much more work. We are very strong in providing educational programs to the community, especially teens."
On June 26, the museum will hold its first AIM Biennial showcasing the work of 72 artists from the AIM program both at the museum and Wave Hill. In addition, the museum has collaborated with the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation to commission site specific works by 10 emerging artists over the course of the summers of 2011 and 2012.
Many local artists also have utilized the resources of the Bronx Council on the Arts. The Longwood Arts Project (the contemporary art center for the Bronx Council on the Arts), serves as a critical space for emerging artists from the Bronx and greater New York. In 1991, the organization opened the Project Room to exhibit the work of Bronx-based artists. The city and state have played an important role in providing support for the Bronx arts community. Both Longwood Arts Project and Lehman Center for the Performing Arts receive funding through New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and the Bronx delegation of the City Council of New York.
"The Bronx Council on the Arts is doing the best they can in helping, promoting and fostering artists in all disciplines here. There are also organizations and places like The Point CDC, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Pregones Theater, the Bronx River Art Center, Bronx Art Space, Bruckner Bar, Lehman College Art Gallery, Longwood Arts Project, Bronx Museum of the Arts, just to mention a few that historically have helped foster the arts here,' wrote Fermin in an email. "Nevertheless, there could be more venues for showing or discussing your art, but with those limitations creativity comes into place and people start creating their own projects and venues."
Nicole Anderson is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her website is here.
With some claiming it stripped the borough of its namesake and others citing the former mayor's lifelong record of service to the city, the City Council approved renaming the Queensboro Bridge the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge on Wednesday.
The renaming was hotly debated on the council floor and throughout the city's largest borough. Just last week, a Quinnipiac poll found 70 percent of Queens residents opposed the renaming of the bridge, which spans from 59th Street in Manhattan to Long Island City.
The council approved the renaming by a vote of 38 to 12. Four members of the council's Queens delegation voted against it. Several other council members cited what they saw as Koch's mixed record on race relations during his tenure from 1978 to 1989 as the impetus for the opposition.
"I rise in defense of the Queensboro Bridge," said Councilmember Peter Vallone Jr., who led the opposition to the renaming. With petitions in hand, the councilmember said: "This is not about Ed Koch. It's all about pride, pride for our borough, pride for our bridge."
Detractors, including Vallone, argued the city would never attempt to rename the Brooklyn Bridge. Going after the Queensboro, they said, was borough discrimination. Vallone even suggested renaming the Queens municipal building after the former mayor instead.
The renaming was originally proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in December. Yesterday, in a prepared statement, he praised the council's action.
“Ed Koch is responsible for so much of the progress we enjoy and the renaming is a perfect tribute to one of our city’s greatest mayors," Bloomberg said. "He literally saved this bridge and began the process of reinvesting in then crumbling bridges across the city."
Council Speaker Christine Quinn, one of the mayor's closest allies who was also born in Queens, immediately pledged her support when the renaming was proposed. Quinn, a presumptive candidate for mayor in 2013, has also received political support from Koch.
When describing her support for the renaming Wednesday, the speaker said Koch was the "bridge to a better day" after the city's fiscal crisis in the 1970s.
"Ed Koch was the bridge that brought New York City back from the brink of bankruptcy to financial solvency. And many New Yorkers feel very close to him for that reason," said Quinn. "The City Council is proud to pay tribute to Mayor Koch and his decades of public service with this timeless honor."
Koch, who was born in the Bronx, served in the City Council and Congress before his stint as the 105th mayor.
When he took the reins at City Hall, it was possibly the bleakest time for the Big Apple. The boroughs, which barely avoided bankruptcy a few years earlier, were plagued by crime, unrest and a flailing economy. To his credit, said council members yesterday, the city pulled out of it.
"I think Ed Koch has a claim at being one of the greatest mayors of this city," said Councilmember Jimmy Oddo of Staten Island.
At the same time, Koch's record in office was not without controversy. One of only four mayors to successfully win a third term, Koch's final years in office are often associated with the third term blues or voter fatigue. His administration was mired in scandal. Koch became embroiled in a dispute with then presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, leading some leaders at the time to question his racial sensitivity. After overwhelmingly snagging a third term with more than 75 percent of the vote, he lost a fourth term to former Mayor David Dinkins.
At the Emigrant Savings Bank yesterday, the council's temporary home, some minority council members cited this record as the reason why they voted against the renaming. Councilmember Al Vann of Brooklyn said no to the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, citing the former mayor's negative comments on racial quotas and redistricting in 1980.
"It was Ed Koch that divided this city," said Councilmember Charles Barron, a former Black Panther. "If you want to name something after Koch name Rikers Island… he was a nemesis to the black community."
Since his mayoralty, Koch has remained in the limelight. He appears regularly on NY1 and recently led a campaign in Albany to get legislators to pledge to independent redistricting reform. His office did not return a call for comment for this story.
The two level, cantilever bridge was constructed between 1903 and 1909. It was the third East River crossing to be completed. Council officials said the city would not pay to change the expanse's signage. It would all be done through donations.
Manuel Zuniga has lived in Greenpoint since 1982. Back then the neighborhood was plagued with high crime, vacant buildings and a shortage of basic government services. But Zuniga was won over by the ease of the commute to Manhattan, the affordability and the close-knit immigrant community of mostly Latino and Polish residents.
Now with two kids in high school, Zuniga is thankful for the many improvements in the neighborhood over the last decade. "In Greenpoint, my kids got a shot at a good education ' and safety-wise, the crime is almost non-existent in the neighborhood, now you can walk around at night without a problem," he said.
But not all the changes have been positive for longtime residents. Since 2000, average market rents have doubled in Greenpoint-Williamsburg, and rent-stabilized tenants face increasing pressure from landlords looking to flip their apartments to the affluent young people now flooding the neighborhood. "It makes me angry about it because the people that are running these things, they don't see the whole picture, they only see profit. ... The only place I can afford if I move out of here, I can't take my family there, it's too dangerous," said Zuniga.
This was not supposed to happen. When Greenpoint-Williamsburg was rezoned in 2005, city officials and community advocates involved in the negotiations claimed that requiring developers to set aside 30 percent of new units on the waterfront for "affordable housing" would ensure that longtime residents like Zuniga would be able to stay in the neighborhood. They repeated the promise this year when they announced the deal for the redevelopment of the Domino Sugar Refinery site into a Battery Park City-style complex with 2,200 housing units.
Despite such promises, this public-private, affordable-luxury model of development has not produced enough affordable housing to meet the needs of longtime, working class residents. The flood of new luxury units has far outpaced the trickle of affordability.
This story has been told before. But what has not been examined is the possibility that the city's market-based affordable housing system may actually contribute to, rather than alleviate, this pattern of gentrification and displacement.
In rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like Greenpoint-Williamsburg, the city has promoted combining public and private investment, and linking affordable housing with luxury. The Bloomberg administration and many local nonprofits see this as an ideal compromise between real estate developers and communities.
The Community Preservation Corp., or CPC, is one of the city's largest private partners in this mission and is the developer of the Domino Sugar project. The corporation, a consortium of over 80 banks and insurance companies, receives city subsidies for affordable housing while also profiting from private market-rate real estate investments. In this way, it epitomizes the kind of hybrid entities that have grown out of the current affordable housing system.
CPC's record of investment in Brooklyn raises some disturbing questions about the results of these development practices. Despite the corporation's image as a developer of affordable housing, analysis of the city's public ACRIS property records reveals that since 2007, more than 65 percent of the $701 million invested in Brooklyn (including new loans and refinancing), have gone to market rate development. CPC has invested with some of Brooklyn's most notoriously unethical ' and in some cases criminal -- luxury developers. The investment in the luxury market is concentrated on the frontier of gentrification in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, South Park Slope and Prospect Heights.
On the other hand, CPC's lending for affordable housing is concentrated in neighborhoods on the outskirts of the borough like Brownsville and East New York, places of less interest to private for-profit developers.
Ironically, many of the community organizations and advocates one might expect to challenge this pattern of development actively support CPC. These community-based nonprofit developers often depend on private sources of funding from entities like CPC and compete for political favor with the city to receive public grants. These ties could make it difficult for them to voice any criticism.
By financing luxury development in gentrifying neighborhoods, concentrating affordable housing investment in the outskirts, and influencing the politics of local nonprofit organizations and political figures through its lending, the Community Preservation Corp. -- and the market-based affordable housing system it represents -- may actually be a major contributor to the accelerating gentrification of Brooklyn.
Although CPC was provided with the full ACRIS dataset and map of investments used for this article, the company declined to comment on the findings. And if one were to judge the company by its public testimonies and public relations, one would never know that CPC was anything but a generous funder and developer of affordable housing.
Every week, CPC publishes a newsletter celebrating its affordable housing projects and trumpeting the community benefits of its lending. But the numerous luxury condominium developments CPC has funded somehow never make these pages.
At the first public hearing on the Domino project in February 2010, CPC's project manager Susan Pollock stated, "The mission of the company is to build and preserve affordable housing. That's it, that's the mission."
During City Council hearings in August, representatives from several Brooklyn-based community development corporations and Catholic churches vouched for CPC. John Simon, director of housing at Catholic Charities, described CPC as "deeply committed to responsible community development." Reverend Julio Cruz Jr. from East Brooklyn Congregations proclaimed, "We have developed thousands of units of affordable housing with them, and we know that they provide the best possible and most affordable developments." And the executive director of Los Sures, a respected nonprofit affordable housing developer in Williamsburg, lauded CPC's "immaculate history."
These testimonials provided crucial public support for the approval of the controversial Domino development. And certainly CPC has funded many laudable affordable housing projects, such as the East Brooklyn Congregations' Nehemiah Houses and renovations of the Riverdale Osborne Towers, both in Brooklyn, and the Parkchester complex in the Bronx. But examining the complete record of CPC's lending in Brooklyn raises serious contradictions to its carefully cultivated image as a benevolent developer of affordable housing.
New York's ACRIS system maintains a publicly accessible database of property transactions for every building and lot in the city. Analysis of CPC's transactions in Brooklyn since 2007 reveals that is a major player in financing luxury development in gentrifying neighborhoods.
From East Williamsburg down to Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, CPC's luxury investments form a trench down the frontier of Brooklyn gentrification. Over the past four years, these investments account for over 65 percent of CPC's lending in the borough. With condominium prices ranging from $300,000 to over a million dollars, this housing is completely unaffordable to the vast majority of New Yorkers.
Some of CPC's luxury development partners have histories that put them at odds with CPC's clean image. Isaac Katan, CPC's investment partner on the New Domino project, is a Brooklyn developer notorious for building super-sized luxury projects on brownstone blocks in South Park Slope. While he was able to successfully build a CPC-financed 11 story condominium at 162 16th Street, the planned "sister" building at 182 South 15th St was halted by the Board of Standards and Appeals. Neighborhood residents spent over $100,000 in legal fees to prove that Katan illegally began construction without a permit while trying to rush to complete the building before the neighborhood was rezoned to rule out such massive structures.
CPC financed a luxury project at 147 Classon Ave. in Clinton Hill developed by Moshe Junger, who served four months in prison for the 2001 death of his worker Rogelio Villaneuva-Daza. Junger violated a direct government order in proceeding to demolish a Williamsburg factory without first surveying its structural integrity. Daza died when the second floor collapsed and he was crushed by a falling beam. Other developers with questionable ethics whose projects have been financed by CPC include Eli Karp, Yitzchok Schwartz and Abe Betesh.
Many of CPC's luxury projects were initiated in the speculative boom of 2005 to 2007. In the past year, CPC has gone back and refinanced some of these developments with mortgages insured by the State of New York Mortgage Agency.
The state's justification for backing these troubled luxury condominium developments is that doing so will "help stabilize neighborhoods put at risk by the debt crisis." But it is widely recognized that speculative luxury construction and the "housing bubble" were major factors in causing the debt crisis in the first place.
State-insured refinancing of troubled luxury projects by lenders like CPC allows developers to avoid participating in the Housing Asset Renewal Program, the city's experimental effort to encourage developer to convert ailing luxury projects to affordable housing. These refinancings enable the developers to warehouse the units in the hope that the market will recover; they are essentially a bailout. As a result, the Housing Asset Renewal Program has been a complete failure, with not a single empty luxury unit converted to affordable housing.
In contrast to the plans for the New Domino, where 100 percent of the affordable units will be on-site in Williamsburg, the vast majority of CPC's affordable housing investment has not been made in neighborhoods that are under threat of gentrification and displacement. It is instead concentrated in areas like East New York and Brownsville -- heavily segregated neighborhoods with high rates of poverty and crime.
Taken together, the populations of East New York and Brownsville are over 90 percent black and Latino. Almost half of all households have incomes of less than $25,000 and almost half of adults over 16 years old are "not in the labor force." Commutes by public transit to Manhattan are roughly twice as long as they are in closer neighborhoods like Greenpoint-Williamsburg. And the crime rates are the highest in the city and on the rise for the first time since the early 1990s.
Manuel Zuniga can keep his family in Greenpoint because he has a rent-stabilized apartment and is friendly with his landlord. But thousands of other families are not so lucky and must go wherever affordable housing is available, even if it means leaving a relatively safe neighborhood with good schools for one with lots of crime and poorly performing schools.
CPC's pattern of concentrating affordable housing investment in marginalized neighborhoods is typical of a larger national trend. Since direct public development of public housing ended during the Reagan era, affordable housing creation has been tied to the principles of the real estate market. At the federal level, the Treasury Department's Internal Revenue Service oversees the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, not the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
While the housing department operates under a mandate to further racial integration, the Treasury is not so bound. Its emphasis is to produce affordable housing at the lowest possible expense with little regard to location. Partly because of that, affordable units are concentrated in neighborhoods where property values are low and the for-profit market has little interest instead of in the gentrifying neighborhoods where they are needed the most.
Since the 1970s, urban planners and policymakers have emphasized the value of "mixed-income" development and diverse neighborhoods. It is widely recognized that governments made a major mistake in the 1950s and 1960s when they built huge public housing projects, concentrating and segregating large numbers of low-income people in neighborhoods with few economic opportunities and serious environmental problems.
Our current affordable housing policies may be repeating the same mistakes. Leaving affordable housing to entities like CPC that operate on market real estate principles leads to the majority of affordable homes being placed in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city, helping to reinforce racial and economic segregation.
The reality of affordable housing policy in New York is rather less rosy than the public relations efforts of the developers and the Bloomberg administration would have us think. But in Brooklyn politics, "affordable housing" has become a term like "freedom" -- something no one in his right mind could possibly oppose.
Affordable housing is desperately needed across the five boroughs, and the Bloomberg administration is constantly pledging to create more of it. But New York has actually experienced a loss of almost 200,000 affordable apartments, or 16.4 percent of the city's total between 2002 and 2008, according to the most recent city Housing and Vacancy Survey.
The single-minded pursuit of "deals" for a percentage of affordable housing in luxury projects like Domino Sugar may be leading non-profit community developers to overlook the role that the market-oriented affordable housing system is playing in gentrifying their communities. When confronted with these findings, John Simon from Catholic Charities said, "We supported the Domino project based simply on the fact that they guaranteed 30 percent affordable housing. 'We didn't do any intricate analysis."
Speaking on behalf of East Brooklyn Congregations, Michael Gecan defended CPC' for being a "central and pivotal part of investment and production" of affordable housing in New York City. "In an imperfect world ' [deals like Domino Sugar] are the best solution. Others may disagree or believe in wishful thinking. We operate in reality," he said.
The reality of Brooklyn real estate today is indeed very different than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s when neighborhoods like Williamsburg were ignored and redlined by private real estate investors. During that time, organizations like East Brooklyn Congregations and Los Sures had great success in organizing and pressuring the city for funding to rehabilitate thousands of abandoned buildings into tenant cooperatives and other forms of affordable housing.
Since the return of private market investment in the 1990s however, these organizations have had to compete and make deals with wealthy for-profit developers. Because government investment in affordable housing is tied into the public-private, luxury-affordable models, the community-based nonprofit developers need private dollars from entities like CPC to fund their work. All of the community development corporations and church affiliated groups that testified on CPC's behalf during the New Domino hearings have received loans from the company during the past four years, with the largest amount -- over $30 million -- going to the East Brooklyn Congregations' Nehemiah Houses project.
With the community housing organizations so heavily invested in this current "reality," there are few voices left to question whether this system -- and the tremendous amount of public money that flows into it -- really serves the best interest of all New Yorkers.
Since 2000, average rents have doubled in Williamsburg-Greenpoint and almost 40 percent of the Latino population has left the neighborhood likely because of the housing costs. Similar shifts are occurring all along the frontier of Brooklyn gentrification.
The market-based, public-private affordable housing system embodied by CPC is helping to create and preserve thousands of affordable units across the city. But looking at the big picture and tracing the connections between affordable development and the explosion of luxury construction reveals that it also may be fueling gentrification and housing segregation -- the very problems that the city and developers claim it is helping to solve.
Brian Paul is a fellow at the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development. He is currently working on an independent documentary film on real estate development and neighborhood change in Greenpoint-Williamsburg called "The Domino Effect."