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A H E A L T H P L A N T H A T DO E S W I N DO W S
Dr u g s a n d t h e Dr e a m
Can housing advocates defeat
the dealers in East New York?
City Limits
Volume XVIII Number 5
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2jMAY 1993jCITY UMITS
I j., i 1.1;1 i!j i
The Reagan-Bush-Dole Era?
T
he Democrats have a majority in Congress, but for now the country
is still ruled by the same old Republicans, who disguise their lack
of concern for clean urban air, shelter for the homeless, and care for
people with AIDS beneath criticisms of so-called pork-barrel
spending. Even New York's own Alfonse D' Amato is toeing Senator Bob
Dole's party line by joining the filibuster that is gutting the Clinton
administration's stimulus plan as City Limits goes to press.
D'Amato's failure to act independently of the party leadership will
likely cost the city tens of millions of dollars. There is clearly a desperate
need for housing with social services for people with AIDS who are
currently sleeping on the streets and in welfare offices-but apparently
D' Amato and Dole would just as soon ignore that fact. President Clinton's
original plan to invest $423 million in supportive housing and shelters
for the homeless is also on the chopping block, as is a proposed invest-
ment in mass transit.
Clearly much of the blame lies with the administration. Conservative
commentator Richard Brookhiser describes Clinton as a man interested
in a hundred policies and committed to about three. The President's
lackadaisical introduction of the stimulus plan to Congress last month
adds beef to that description.
The lesson for urban advocates is this: we can't count on significant
funding increases for programs that deal with our immediate crises. But
perhaps we can hope for innovative, longer term initiatives from the
administration that won't draw the Dole axis back into its filibuster
formation. One such initiative begins with the palatably small amount of
money Clinton has slated for community development banks in the 1994
budget. The plan requires congressional approval; fortunately, creating
loan programs and sources of credit for small urban businesses desperate
for capital is not the kind of thing Senate Republicans are likely to oppose
publicly.
But what members of Congress might try to do, as Associate Editor
Steve Mitra explains in his article, "Banking on Change," is to hand the
initiative to the corporate banking world in the form of large subsidies,
government guarantees for loans to small businesses and a rollback of
current regulatory requirements. The danger is not that large banks will
have a hand in community banking-they should and do have a role-but
that they could easily overwhelm the growing network of community-
based financial institutions by becoming the central player in the federal
program.
The proposed funding for the first year of the banking initiative is a
meager $45 million nationwide. But it's a start. Let's hope this is one of
those policies President Clinton really is committed to.
* * *
By the time you're done reading this issue, you'll have noticed the
byline of our new Senior Editor, Jill Kirschenbaum. She is familiar in
New York's magazine world as a writer for Newsday Magazine, Ms.,
Premier and a number of other publications, and we're pleased to have
her aboard. D
Cover photograph of Carey Shea and Anthony Carter by Suzanne Tobias.
FEATURES
Banking On Change
With President Clinton promising support for commu-
nity development banks, a look at what lies ahead: The
players in the arena, the rules of the game. 10
Drugs and the Dream
Housing activists try to rid one of the city's most violent
neighborhoods of dealers on the streets. 14
DEPARTMENTS
Editorial
The Reagan-Bush-Dole Era? .......................... ...... .... 2
Briefs
Recycled Opposition ............................................... 4
Credit Union Collapse ................................ .......... ... 4
Fort Greene Fallout .... .......... .................................... 4
Tenants' Tentative Victory ...................................... 5
Profile
The Fix-It Plan ......................................................... 6
Pipeline
Watchdog or Washout? ............................................ 8
Vital Statistics
Co-ops or Bust ........................................................ 22
City View
When in Doubt, Reorganize .............. , .................... 24
Reviews
Chinatown Portraits ............................................... 26
Keep Your Chin Up ............................................... 27
Letters ...... ................... ......... ..... ................................. 28
Job Ads/Classifieds .................................................... 31
Fix-It/Page 6
Banking/Page 10
Drugs/Page 14
CITY UMITS/MA Y 1993/3
11:1;11"11
RECYCLED
OPPOSITION
Almost a year after Red
Hook residents defeated a city
plan to build a sludge process-
ing plant in thei r community,
the battle lines are being drawn
again-this time over a pro-
posed recycling facility on the
South Brooklyn waterfront.
The Department of Sanitation
has proposed building a Materi-
als Recycling Facility (MRF) for
sorting, cleaning and packing
recyclable materials on the
banks of the Gowanus Canal,
two blocks from the Red Hook
Houses. The MRF is part of the
city's plan to recycle half of all
residential garbage by 1995.
Eventually six such facilities will
be built in the five boroughs,
says Department of Sanitation
Deputy Commissioner Andrew
Lynn.
But at a recent meeting with
officials, Red Hook residents
reacted with anger to the
proposal. At full capacity, the
MRF would be visited each day
by 80 trucks delivering recy-
clable materials, 30 tractor
trailer trucks taking processed
materials away, and 70 passen-
ger cars, according to numbers
provided by the city. The
sanitation department's pro-
posed route for the traffic would
send the trucks down streets
adjacent to the Red Hook
Recreational Area, a busy spot
in the neighborhood during the
summer.
"We have young people
going to the park. The ball fields
are jammed when the weather
gets warm," soys Beatrice Byrd,
a teacher at PS 27, which is a
few blocks north of the sight.
"I'm concerned for their safety."
But Lynn argues that the MRF
will generate 65 permanent jobs
for the community, as well as a
small waterfront park on the
south side of the site. He says
the five-acre Red Hook site is the
most suitable one available for
the facility because it is zoned
for industrial use and is easily
accessible to western and
northern Brooklyn.
''The bottom line is that
people in communities don't like
sonitation facilities and sonita-
tion trucks and there's no way to
get around that," Lynn says.
''We've really tried to do this the
4jMAY 1993jCITY UMITS
right way. We' ve spread these
around the city. The point is that
someone will be affeCted. "
The city plans to submit the
proposal for consideration
through the Uniform Land Use
Review Process (ULURP) this
summer, giving the local com-
munity bOard, the Brooklyn
Borough President and the City
Planning Commission a forum to
decide Whether or not the site is
appropriate for the project.
Community opposition is
likely to be fierce, says Alrice
Nembhard, chairman of the
Economic Development and
Waterfront Use Committee of
Community Boord 6. Red Hook
has 22 waste transfer stations,
the most in the city after
Greenpoint, he says. "If the vote
were taken today there's no
chance that the community
boord would pass it," he adds.
''The challenge is to come up
with an alternative site."
The recycling facility also
conRicts with recently-devised
community plans for the water-
front, says Nembhard. These
plans-which have not yet been
finalized-call for shoring up
the waterfront for maritime use
and public access, he says.
Tenants of the Red Hook
Houses, where 10,000 people
live, are also determined in their
opposition to the sanitation
proposal. "It's always us," says
Dorothy Shields, president of the
Red Hook East Tenants Associa-
tion. ''We don't want it, we
don't need it, and we'll do what
we have to not to get it."
Last year, Red Hook resi -
dents defeated a proposal by
the Department of Environmen-
tal Protection to build a nine-
acre sludge processing plant at
the site of the vacant Revere
Sugar Refinery on Beard Street,
also a few blocks from the Red
Hook Houses.
This time, local residents may
find themselves on the opposite
side of the fence from environ-
mentalists who have long
demanded new processing
centers for recyclable materials.
''We' d like to be able to support
this facility," says Marsha
Zeesman, who chairs the
Brooklyn Solid Waste Advisory
Boord (SWAB). "At the same
time we realize there are
important community concerns.
This is an important test case.
It's a really sensitive thing."
So far, one other site for an
MRF has been selected- the
Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten
Island--and Sanitation is still
looking for sites in the other
boroughs. 0 Steve Mitra
CREDIT UNION
COLLAPSE
A credit union established to
provide loons to low income
tenants in the Northwest Bronx
was closed down by
federal regulators because of
persistent bookkeeping prob-
lems and a high percentage of
delinquent loons.
''They were severely insol -
vent," says Anthony LaCreta,
deputy commissioner in the
regional office of the National
Credit Union Administration. "It
would take a millennium to get
back out of the hole they were
in," he explains, adding that all
820 depositors in the Northwest
Bronx Coolition Federal Credit
Union got their money back
within three days of the closing.
Brien O'Toole, executive
director of the Northwest Bronx
Community and Clergy Cooli-
tion, which created the credit
union six years ago, admits
there were problems. Foremost
among them was the lack of a
paid staff for the lending
institution, he says, explaining
that volunteers had until
run the entire operation.
But he says the coalition
hired a professional bookkeep-
ing service for the credit union
last summer, and the institution
was beginning to become
solvent again. ''We consider
[the closing] a mistake," he
says.
The credit union had made
57 loans totalling approximately
$120,000, and had expected to
get around $80,000 of it back,
according to O' Toole.
The Northwest Bronx Coali-
tion Federal Credit Union was
one of the smallest of about 20
similar community-based credit
unions in the city, according to
Cliff Rosenthal, director of the
National Association of Com-
munity Credit Unions. He says
the closing will damage the
reputation of other such credit
unions in the city, all of which
are geared towards helping
people who can' t borrow
money from traditional banks
because of their low incomes,
and can't afford to pay high
bank fees for small deposits.
''Whenever an institution like
this shuts down, it's tragic," says
Rosenthal. ''We're always
fighting against tremendous
odds." 0 Steve Mitra
FORT GREENE
FALLOUT
The city 6eQan
reorganizing its
shelter system in an effort to
prevent people from sleeping on
the Roors of city welfare offices,
and in the process has angered
a group of recovering drug
addicts who live on the eighth
Roor of the Auburn family
shelter in Fort Greene.
The city wants to move the
group out of the building, which
has been turned into an "assess-
ment center" where homeless
families are housed for one or
two weeks while their needs are
determined and long-term
shelter placement is found. The
city plans to other such
centers in each borough by this
summer.
The 20 recovering addicts
and their families refused to
leave the Roor when the city
emptied the rest of the building
in January, sending 200 home-
less families to other shelters
around the city. The residents of
the drug-free Roor were offered
rooms at the Saratoga Family
Inn near Kennedy Airport, but
they successfully stalled the
move by arguing that their drug
treatment and counseling
program at the Cumberland
Diagnostic and Treatment
Center, adjacent to the Auburn
shelter, was too far from there.
Now there is fear the city will
split up the group and send
them into areas where drugs
are rampant, says Elizabeth
Coates, who lives on the Roor.
"Mothers in drug programs
usually get shifted around and
shifted around again, and then
they stop going," she says,
at least another two years. The
current rent regulation statute is
scheduled to expire on June
15th of this year.
years," says Anne Pasmanick of
the Community Training and
Resource Center.
The Senate version is spon-
sored by Republican Senator
Roy GoOdman of Manhattan
and cosponsored by 20 other
senators, and is the first bill
proposing permanent rent
stabilization to be introduced in
the conservative upper house of
the legislature since 1985.
Still, the Republican majority
in the Senate has proven to be
strongly pro-landlord in the
past, and Senate approval of
the second bill appears unlikely.
C!yIng Foul: Fort Greene residents protest the city's conversion of the
Auburn homeless shelter into an assessment center.
Tenant advocates were
encouraged by the early pas-
soge of the first AssemblY bill, in
part because it was sponsored
by Assembly Speaker Saul
Weprin. "The tact that Weprin
is the sponsor sends a strong
message to the Senate that the
Assembly is serious about rent
stabilization," says Derek
Denckla of the Metropolitan
Council on Housins, a tenant
advocacy group. "[Ex-Speaker]
Mel Miller was for the most part
unmoved by tenant issues."
"The real estate lobby likes
the sunset clause [of the current
lawl because it gives them a
regular podium to bring up
other issues," comments Good-
man aide Kevin Davitt. A
number of proposals to exempt
all or part of the New York City
housing stock from rent regu-
lation nave been introduced at
both the city and state levels
during the last two years.
emphasizing the importance
that a stable place to live plays
in any recovery program.
A transfer is imminent,
however, according to Bert
Knaus, a s ~ k e s m a n for the
Mayor's Office on Homeless-
ness. Knaus says his office is
looking for a new site nearby so
the recovering addicts will be
able to continue their program
at Cumberland.
"Ideally we'd like to keep
that link," he adds.
But the Hoor's residents are
not convinced. For peaple like
Jose Rosa, a recovering alco-
holic who is also HIV-positive,
and Norvel Martin, captain of
the eighth Hoor, where she has
lived tor 15 months, a move will
threaten more than proximity to
services at Cumberland: it will
destroy the camaraderie among
eighth Hoor residents that has
become a crucial part of their
recovery.
Members of Community
Board 2 and tenants of the
Whitman and Ingersoll housing
pro/'ects, which border the
she ter, oppose the conversion
into an assessment center, and
they have lobbied city officials
to prevent the closure of the
drug-free Hoor. Niger
Campbell, president of the Fort
Greene Community Action
Network and the organizer of
recent protests criticizing the
shelter conversion, believes the
move by the city was iII-con-
ceived. She says that when
Auburn was a regular shelter,
families living there became a
part of the community and their
children were known in the
neighborhood and at the local
schools.
'When peaple are transient,
they have no concern for the
property," she says. "They are
just passing through." D Susan
Bymes
TENANTS'TENTATIVE
VICTORY
The politics of rent regulation
have shifted slightly in Albany,
following the State Assembly's
rapid passage of two bills that
would extend rent regulation for
More exciting still for tenants
is the Assembly's approval of
the second piece of legislation,
which would make rent stabili-
zation in New York City a
permanent protection so long as
the apartment rental vacancy
rate remains below 5 percent.
The bill was co-sponsored by
Democrats Howard lasher of
Brooklyn, chair of the Housing
Committee, and Sheldon Silver
of Manhattan. The bill's pas-
soge in the Senate this spring
would eliminate the political
fights over regulation that have
occurred every two years for the
last decade.
"Passing this bill would mean
tenants wouldn't have to go into
a tailspin of fear every two
Though tenant advocates are
not overly optimistic that the bill
can become law, they say it still
gives them a better fOothold
against anti-regulation lobby-
ists. The New York State Tenant
and Neighborhood Coalition
plans to encourage senators to
pass the bill during Tenant Unity
Day in Albony on May 18th. D
B.rbFedd ....
r----------------------------,
GUTSY. Il\TCISIVE.
PBOVOCA:I-IVE.
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bureaucracies besetting New York. But we don't think it's good enough
just to highlight the muck. City Limits looks for answers. We uncover
the stories of activists and local organizers fighting to save their
neighborhoods. That's why City Limits has won seven major journalism
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CITY UMITS/MAY 1993/5
By Lise Funderburg
The Fix-It Plan
Members of a Brooklyn health insurance program
for the elderly improve lives-and save money-
through community service.
A
few months ago, an early morn-
ing burglar smashed Clara
Kurowski's living room
window, climbed into the 70-
year-old woman's house and made off
with her VCR. The commotion awoke
Kurowski, who immedi-
ately bolted her bedroom
door and screamed out
the window for help. The
police arrived shortly,
but not in time to catch
the thief.
As soon as stores
opened, Kurowski called
around her southwest
Brooklyn neighborhood
to find a shop that could
replace the broken glass.
But it was Friday, and
none of the local shop-
keepers in her mostly
Orthodox Jewish com-
munity had time to make
a house call before clos-
ing for the Sabbath. That's
when she remembered
Elderplan, her health
insurer.
part because ofits community service
program called Member-to-Member.
Each hour that Elderplan subscribers
donate in volunteer time equals one
time dollar, which can be redeemed
for a discount on their insurance
on issues such as grief and loneliness.
Currently, there are meetings for
arthritis sufferers, singles and a
caregivers' support group.
Mashi Blech, senior manager of
volunteer services at Elderplan,
reports that nearly one third of the
health plan's 6,000 members use
volunteers' services each year.
Time dollar programs are sprouting
up allover the country. There are
barter systems for day care services,
pregnancy counseling, even deli
sandwiches. In New York City, 60
women have joined together to form
WomanSHARE, in which members
earn service credits cook-
ing each other's dinners,
fixing appliances, teach-
ing skills and providing
career counseling. An-
other group, SHARE New
York, offers members
steep discounts on gro-
ceries in exchange for a
few hours of community
work (see City Limits,
March 1993).
Since when do insur-
ance companies repair
windows? In the case of
Elderplan, since 1987.
That's when the non-
profit, government-
funded organization
launched a volunteer
Fair Exchange: Elderplan volunteers Norm Abrams and Clif DeBlasio repair
Clara Kurowski's window in exchange for "time-dollars."
At Elderplan, the idea
took some time to catch
on. "For a while this pro-
gram was a tough sell,"
says Blech, explaining
that most of the health
plan's subscribers felt
they gave enough to the
insurance company
when they paid their
bills. But eventually the
value became clear, she
says, when they saw
people like themselves,
and not some big corpo-
ration, benefiting from
the time dollar approach.
After Kurowski made
program based on the concept of "time
dollars," a barter system devised more
than a decade ago by Edgar Cahn, a
founder of the Legal Services Corp-
oration. Time dollars reward people
for performing community services
that normally would be oflittle value
in the traditional marketplace.
Elderplan's primary mission is to
manage health care for Brooklyn men
and women 65 years old and older
who are on Medicare. It is an experi-
mental social and health maintenance
organization, or SHMO, launched by
the federal government eight years
ago in an effort to control health care
costs and promote preventive care.
Elderplan has achieved that goal in
'/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
premiums or exchanged for an hour of
another volunteer's time even months
or years later.
One Hundred Volunteers
At present, about 100 subscribers
are Member-to-Member volunteers,
putting in an average of three hours of
community work each week helping
fellow health plan customers. If
someone needs an escort to the doctor,
a volunteer goes along. Or if a lonely
person needs company, or someone
needs errands run, a light bulb
replaced or a window fixed, partici-
pants in Member-to-Member help out.
In addition, volunteers run support
groups and provide peer counseling
fruitless phone calls to
local hardware stores and glass shops,
she called Mashi Blech, desperate.
Blech called volunteer Clif DeBlasio,
66, a retired contractor, builder and
building inspector who is Member-
to-Member's home repair coordinator.
He gets eight to 10 repair requests
each week-mostly about leaky
faucets, electrical outlets that need to
be replaced and the occasional
carpentry or plastering project. If he
isn't available, he contacts another
Elderplanmember,NormAbrams,72,
who used to work on power stations
for Westinghouse Electric.
DeBlasio hasn't spent any of the
70-plus credits he's earned in the 14
months he's been volunteering. "I'm
just enjoying myself," he says. "I have
come across people who really need
the assistance," he adds, recalling one
woman who needed her burned-out
light bulbs changed. "You'd think it
was a simple thing, but some people
can't stand on chairs or a ladder. She
had Parkinson's disease and couldn't
sit still a minute."
Comfort and Reassurance
While Kurowski is quite mobile,
she doesn't have DeBlasio's skills. He
finished replacing her window a few
hours after her call to Blech. "He was
such a comfort when he came," she
says of DeBlasio. "And when he was
done, I felt so good that at least 1 could
sleep in my house. " The solution to
Kurowski's predicament is a perfect
example of how the barter system
works. The cost of her window repair
was the price of the glass plus three
time dollars from her balance of 41,
most of which she earned visiting a
woman in Borough Park, the next
neighborhood over. "This woman was
very crippled up with arthritis," she
explains. "She didn't like to talk much,
but she liked company. I must have
told her my whole life story."
Providing comfort and reassurance
seems to be Member-to-Member's
most valuable commodity. "Helping
gives me great satisfaction," DeBlasio
says, explaining that many of the
people he assists seem to be struggling
just to survive. "There have been
people who are barely getting by, doing
what they can to put food in their
stomachs, much less taking care of a
repair," he says. .
When DeBlasio goes into homes,
he can't help but apply some of his
inspector's expertise. "I always ask
them, 'Do you have a smoke detector?'
Usually they do, but the battery's in
some drawer." He also points out
potential hazards like loose throw
rugs, which can slip underfoot.
Preventing a senior citizen's fall
can mean the difference between
staying home and moving to a nursing
home.
lndependentlJving
DeBlasio's dismissal of the credits
he earns is typical of most volunteers,
according to Blech. Credits come
fourth or fifth on the list of why people
do this, she says. More important to
volunteers is the knowledge that they
are helping people to live on their
own--sometimes for years longer than
they might have.
The purchasing power of time
dollars tends to be under-utilized,
mainly because volunteers are among
the healthiest of the subscriber group
and don't need that much help other
than the occasional home repair.
Those who do use the services often
are not in a position to earn the credits
to "pay" for them. Blech says she used
to describe time dollars as savings for
a rainy day, because as they get older
there may come a time when the
volunteers need help. But volunteers
like DeBlasio don't want to focus on
when they won't be able to take care of
themselves.
Still, Blech adds, the idea of the
credits has tremendous value: people
who wouldn't normally take charity
will take help from an Elderplan
volunteer because they know that, at
least in theory, the volunteeris getting
something in return.
There's another payoff, Blech says,
that may be less tangible but has a
positive impact on people's health--
the mission, after all, of Elderplan.
"Volunteers have a sense of being able
to contribute, to learn new skills, to be
in a social environment," she explains.
"Studies show that people who stay
active stay healthy."
Dorothy Gochal, 70, has earned
most of her BOO-plus time dollars by
co-chairing an arthritis self-hel p group
with 68-year-old Gloria Feldstein (461
credits). At a recent meeting, Barbara
Silverman, 73, explained what she
gets out of attending: "I've realized
that I have to accept my pain and grin
and bear it," she says. "But mostly I
enjoy the young ladies who are
running the group." 0
Lise Funderburg is a freelance writer
based in Brooklyn.
D.liv.r.d Vacant An Epic of Urban Transition
a film by Nora Jacobson
Vincent Canby of the New York Times calls it ... .. a fine, rich f:tlm ... an
urban epic." Gene Seymour of Newsday lauds it as ..... one of the most
touching histories we may ever get of what happened in America in the
last decade."
Starts friday May l B t ~ One Week Only
Cinema Village
22 East 12th Street, NYC
Call for show times: (212) 924-3363
Tenant Advocates!!!!
Are you assisting tenants who:
~ live in buildings with serious code violations?
~ have won HP actions but failed to get court-ordered repairs?
~ have brought the case back for civil penalties?
If the answers are all yes, we may be able to help you get the repairs
done by training you to participate in our Contempt of Court pilot project.
For information, call Cindy Roeser at The Citywide Task Force on
Housing Court, (212) 982-5512, after 2:00 PM.
CITY UMITS/MAY 1993/7
By James Bradley
Watchdog or Washout?
Could the Public Advocate be an investigator for the
people? Or will the office be just another sinkhole
for valuable tax revenue?
W
hat's the best way to spend
$3.8 million?
Ever since the City Charter
was revised in 1989, that's
the amount of money the city has
spent each year on the office of the
City Council president, a position with
little influence over the legislative
body for which it's named. As of
January 1, voters will have elected a
new politician to the job and, by order
of the council, he or she will have a
new title: Public Advocate of the City
of New York.
On its surface, the name change
means little; the office's few powers
remain untouched. But, along with
current City Council President
Andrew Stein's imminent departure
and the prospect of several good-
government reformers running for the
post, the change has sparked a serious
debate about the jobholder's potential
to be an ombudsman and investigator
keeping tabs on government agencies.
There have been many calls for the
office's elimination, not least from
Mayor Dinkins, who says the money
could be better spent elsewhere.
But there are those who disagree,
arguing that the millions of dollars
could be well-spent by an indepen-
dently elected official with no ties to
the current administration or the City
Council leadership.
"The public advocate can develop
an office that can monitor different
agencies, improve their services,
analyze the budget and work on offer-
ing alternative agendas," says Pete
Williams of the Center for Law and
Social Justice at Medgar Evers College.
"If you used the office's powers [fully]'
like the ability to monitor public
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8/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
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information and service complaints,
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Wide Access
The City Council presidency has
undergone dramatic changes since
voters adopted the revised New York
City Charter in 1989. Formerly, the
president had two votes on the Board
of Estimate, with which it wielded
substantial influence over land use
and budget considerations. With the
Supreme Court-mandated dissolution
of the board, however, the powers of
the City Council president were largely
eviscerated.
The president's few remaining roles
in the City Council are largely
ceremonial: to preside at its meetings
and to vote on legislation in the case
of a tie-an unlikely event in a council
dominated by a speaker as powerful
as Peter Vallone.
But some other potentially signifi-
cant powers are written into the job
description. According to the charter,
the council president "shall serve as
the public advocate," monitoring city
agencies, making proposals to improve
them, reviewing public complaints,
conducting investigations and hold-
ing public hearings. To facilitate the
president's investigations, the charter
imbued it with a number of powers,
including wide access to city agencies'
internal documents.
The discussion of whether or not
the office is as valuable as its budget
appropriation-already likely to be
cut back to about $2.7 million by the
City Council next year-comes at a
time when the mayor and Vallone
have steadfastly avoided implement-
ing a number of measures required by
the City Charter. These include the
creation of an Independent Budget
Office, meant to act as a "non-partisan"
research and analysis outfit similar to
the Congressional Budget Office in
Washington, D.C.; and the funding of
a Commission of Public Information
and Communication to improve pub-
lic access to government information.
Last month, following a two-year
battle by citizens' groups, the state's
highest court ruled that the mayor
must provide at least $3 million in
next year's budget to establish the
Independent Budget Office. The office
would enable citizens and dissident
City Council members to analyze
budget data without depending on
information carefully packaged by City
Hall or the City Council budget office.
l
Duplication?
Partly as a result of that court
victory, opinions on the future of the
public advocate post are not divided
along standard ideological lines. Not
all good government groups are in
support of retaining the post, because
they charge it could end up duplicat-
ing the work of the new budget office,
other agencies and nonprofit watch-
dog organizations. "It's a redundant
office without any real accountability
or power," says Penelope Pi-Sunyer,
director of the City Project, which
represents about 900 civic, labor,
religious and advocacy groups. "What
we want is an Independent Budget
Office that will give people informa-
tion on policy and budget," she ex-
plains. "That's what's really needed."
Henry Stern of the Citizens Union
also believes the public advocate is
not worth funding. "It's a ridiculous
office," he says. "The comptroller' is
supposed to be the public advocate."
Stern, a former councilman and parks
commissioner, believes the city can
use an ombudsman, but questions the
current method of selecting such a
person. "A political election is hardly
the best way to find a seeker of the
truth," he notes. "It's likely he'll end
up either a stooge or a rival of the
mayor, neither of which will be in the
best interest of the public."
Bureaucratic Tendencies
But Eric Lane, former counsel to
the Charter Commission, argues that
there was a clear motive for retaining
the job when the charter was revised.
"There was a belief that the presence
of an independently elected ombuds-
man would be a useful pressure against
the tendency of the bureaucracy to be
secretive," he explains. That's also
the view held by Pete Williams and
many others.
"A good public advocate could use
the position to develop an agenda for
municipal government, offer a
different perspective on how it should
operate ... and give council members
refuge for different ideas and agendas.
It could be the thinktank for municipal
government," Williams argues.
Chris Meyer, City Legislative
Director for the New York Public
Interest Research Group (NYPIRG),
agrees the office has a useful role. "It
could be a check on the power of the
Mayor," he says. "If you're having
trouble with red tape at City Hall, you
won't go to the comptroller. The
comptroller has specific responsibili-
ties delineated in the charter on how
the city spends money and other
financial matters, and the council
president is different.... The bottom
line is, when an issue cuts across
many agencies, how do you cut
through red tape and get a unified city
response?"
On which specific issues could a
Public Advocate make a real
difference? Meyer says the public
advocate could focus on issues that
involve a number of agencies, such as
lead poisoning. Williams wants the
public advocate to take the lead on the
city's public housing problems, par-
ticularly on the matter of community
policing.
Many criticize Andrew Stein's
tenure as council president and
believe that his performance has
contributed to the current cynicism
about the job. "We're all affected by
our image of Andy Stein," says Ken
Kimerling of the Puerto Rican Legal
Defense Fund. "We don't know what
that office could be like if we had a
real gadfly or an outsider [in itl."
Manhattan Borough President Ruth
Messinger, who is also in favor of
keeping the office, notes via her
spokesperson that "You have to look
at [the public advocatel as a 'can-be'
office rather than what it is now." 0
Applications Sought for fifth
Leadership New York Program
Leadership New York is a competitive fellowship program co-sponsored by the New York City Partnership and Coro. In
the nine month program, during which participants are expected to remain employed full-time in their current profeSSions,
participants explore the critical issues confronting New York City.
These include housing policy, the city's educational, social service, health care and criminal justice systems, infrastructure,
and the city's changing demographics and power structures.
Leadership New York welcomes applications, which must be accompanied by two letters of recommendation, from the
public, private and non-profit sectors. Candidates should have a demonstrated concern about New York City, a record of
professional achievement, and the potential to playa significant role in the city's future.
For further information and applications, please telephone the program's sponsors:
At Coro: Meryl Greenfield, Director of Leadership New York, (212) 683-8841
At the New York City Partnership: Eve Levy, Director of Leadership Development Programs, (212) 493-7505
Application deadline: June 11, 1993
~ N t w l " " ____ ---,
CITY UMITS/MA Y 1993/9
UJ
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A primer on President Clinton's community banking plan:
Bow it might work, and who's looking for a piece of the action.
Banking On Change
BY S"l"EVE MITBA
W
hen President Clinton stood before Congress
in February and announced his plan to ease
access to credit in poor neighborhoods, he
unleashed more than a decade's worth of
pent-up hopes among community banking advocates
around the country. Clinton's promise to establish 100
new community development banks had been nothing
more than a potentially disposable campaign pledge-
now, it had his official imprimatur.
"With a new network of community development
banks," Clinton said, "we propose to bring new hope and
new jobs to storefronts and factories from South Boston to
South Texas to South Central Los Angeles." Within weeks,
the administration pledged $45 million in the 1994
federal budget for the project's first phase.
It didn't take long for disagreements to develop between
the two groups that hope to have a central role in imple-
menting Clinton's community lending plan. On one side
is the corporate banking industry, a powerful player in
Washington that is eager to bury its reputation for redlining
and denying minorities credit, without exposing itself to
further regulation. On the other side are the small,
10/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
community-based credit unions, loan funds and banks
exclusively targeted at financing low income entrepre-
neurs and homeowners.
Both groups agree that sticking to Clinton's original
plan to set up 100 community banks would be too costly
and time-consuming. But beyond that, their agendas clash.
Community lenders in poorer communities read in the
administration's plan an opportunity to shore up their
own institutions, many of which have been struggling for
decades. The corporate bankers see an opening to rewrite
the rules by which big banks currently invest in low
income communities. Their call for new government
subsidies, incentives and loan guarantees that will assure
profits even in the most distressed neighborhoods is a red
flag to small lending institutions.
"In the most general terms we all agree in our support
for [the President's1 initiative," says Cliff Rosenthal,
president of the National Federation of Community Credit
Unions, which represents about 100 community-based
lenders. "But what [the corporate banks] have in mind is
entirely different from what we're getting at."
Community Lenders
At stake is one of the most important building blocks of
any community: access to credit. If small entrepreneurs
are unable to borrow money, they can't get a business off
the ground-much less expand and hire new employees.
That translates into less jobs, a smaller tax base, fewer
services, empty storefronts-a familiar story for many
urban areas.
In response to decades of redlining of their neighbor-
hoods by the mainstream banking industry, over the years
activists have created small commu-
nity development financial institutions
(CDFIs) that make loans in distressed
making the kind of money that attracts investors or
depositors seeking interest rates or dividends that compete
with mainstream banks. Even the widely praised South
Shore Bank of Chicago, the largest of the country's com-
munity development banks, took 10 years to become
profitable after its startup in 1973.
Now that community lenders feel they have a potential
ally in the White House, the coalition has put together a
report defining their industry, where
they see it going, and how the federal
neighborhoods, often with interest
charges well below market rate. Most
have lending pools contributed to by
charitable foundations, religious
groups, even some large corporate
banks seeking to comply with federal
laws requiring them to invest in their
depositors' communities.
Corporate banks
government can help. The report
includes a set of spending proposals
they say will make those roadblocks
easier to overcome. These include:
These lending pools range from a
few thousand dollars for loan funds to
tens of millions of dollars for the larg-
est community development banks.
Currently, the CDFI industry is com-
prised nationally of four development
banks, 100 credit unions and 42 loan
see an
opportunity to
rewrite the rules
Government money to open new
CDFls. Traditionally, start-up money
from charities or corporations has been
hard to come by. "Clearly, the biggest
need is for [start-up] capital," says
Kathy Tholin of the Woodstock
Institute, an activist and research
organization in Chicago that special-
izes in banking issues. "Clinton should
be talking about fostering institutions."
of community
investment.
funds, as well as a smattering of very
small "micro-loan" funds, according
to Mark Pinsky , a Philadelphia-area consultant who heads
an ad hoc coalition of community-based lenders and
activist organizations.
Community Capital Bank in Brooklyn is an example of
how successful CDFIs can be. The bank is a fairly young
institution-it opened its doors in January, 1991, a little
more than four years after Lyndon Comstock, its founder ,
started raising money. Today, it has $20 million in assets
and has made $7 million in loans to 30 borrowers, including
a $100,000 construction loan towards the Ben & Jerry's ice
cream store in Harlem.
Like a regular bank, Community Capital offers savings
and checking accounts and issues automatic teller machine
cards. But its main purpose is to lend money to organiza-
tions and individuals who are starting and expanding
businesses, developing housing or providing social services
in neglected communities. Among its clients are a Carib-
bean immigrant starting a soft drink business; the laid-off
employees of Flushing's defunct Taystee Bakery, who are
creating a worker-owned bakery of their own; and a
nonprofit group starting a nursing home for people with
AIDS.
Making loans to these kinds of clients is a labor-
intensive task, so Community Capital has created an
organization called LEAP, which stands for Lending
Education Assistance Program, to provide technical and
management assistance to its borrowers; LEAP helps them
with everything from managing their books to raising
start-up capital. "The range of management skills needed
is so broad-it's marketing, it's product knowledge-it's
too much for an owner of a small business," Comstock
explains. "We try to help with that."
Overcoming BoadblockB
The CDFIs frequently run into tremendous roadblocks
when it comes to raising capital. Their mission to invest in
community-oriented enterprises prevents them from
Government deposits in CDFIs.
Deposits provide the funds that
financial institutions lend to their
customers, and most CDFI directors
say they are constantly short on depositors. "Our pockets
are never deep enough to meet the need," says David Rice
of Neighborhood Capital Corporation, which provides
loans and technical assistance to entrepreneurs in low
income neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and
Los Angeles. Government deposits would also boost the
confidence of others who want to do meaningful, socially
responsible investing. "State pension funds, for example,
will feel more comfortable [making deposits in CDFIs] if
the federal government makes the same commitment,"
says Pinsky.
Employee-training programs. Traditional MBA
programs rarely produce people interested in community
development banking, according to Errol Louis of the
Central Brooklyn Partnership, which opened a new credit
union last month.
Technical assistance programs to help borrowers.
Many people in low income communities have never
borrowed money from a bank before. "The only way a loan
program is going to work is to give the borrowers the tools
for problem management," says Martin Trimble of the
National Association of Community Development Loan
Funds, based in Philadelphia. Currently, technical assis-
tance adds huge sums to the overhead costs of CDFIs and
decreases the chance for profitability, or even solvency.
Coalition members are quick to point out that any new
federal money should be directed at institutions and
groups that have already put in long years working in low
income communities, rather than take the form of subsi-
dies for corporate banks that have often ignored such
neighborhoods. "We don't think it should be directed
towards traditional banks," says Allen Fishbein of the
Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C. "CDFIs
know a lot more about community-based lending," he
adds. "We're talking about [serving] the mom-and-pop
enterprises, the small-time businesses that no one else
serves."
CITY UMITS/MA Y 1993/11
The Traditional Banks
That kind of talk has left
traditional commercial and
consumer banks scrambling for
a role in the Clinton plan. They
contend they have been ac-
tively involved fostering com-
munity development, espe-
ciall y during the last few years,
and consequently should be
key players in any new initia-
tive. "I really don't see the rea-
son for banks to be skipped
over," says Chris Rieck, spokes-
man for the American Bankers
Association (ABA) in Wash-
ington, D.C. "We feel that banks
are already doing community
development by law and by
choice."
ible and burdened with gov-
ernment controls. Besides,
says Willis, "We are now
where the community devel-
opment banks could be in five
years, if all goes well."
Willis suggests that the
federal government expand a
guaranteed loan program for
small businesses that nor-
mally wouldn't qualify for
commercial credit because of
insufficient collateral, for in-
stance. In addition, he says
Congress should create a sys-
tem oftax credits for commu-
nity-based economic develop-
ment, similar to the tax credit
currently granted to corpora-
tions that invest in commu-
nity groups building low in-
come housing.
The current impetus for most
bank lending in low and mod-
erate income communities is
rooted in two pieces of federal
legislation passed in the
1970s-the Community Rein-
vestment Act of 1977 (CRA)
and the Home Mortgage Dis-
Cause for Hope: The two-year old Community Capital Bank in
Brooklyn is helping to start small businesses in neighborhoods
larger banks have neglected, says founder Lyndon Comstock.
Other bankers go even
further by asking for direct
government subsidies, includ-
ing federal payments to
lenders who make low inter-
est loans. R. Scott Jones , presi-
closure Act of 1975 (HMDA). The former requires banks to
make credit available in the communities they serve, and
gives federal regulators the opportunity to judge compli-
ance whenever a bank seeks government approval to
expand or to merge with another bank. The latter, updated
in 1989, requires most home mortgage lenders to file
detailed records about whom they accept or reject for
loans. The government then makes the data public.
The mortgage data has proven to be a powerful tool for
New York community groups such as ACORN, which won
a five-year, $750 million commitment for lending in low
income communities from the newly merged Chemical
Bank and Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Using HMDA
records, ACORN revealed that even when potential
borrowers of different races had equal incomes, Manu-
facturers Hanover disproportionately rejected black
customers. The bank denied it had discriminated by race,
but signed an agreement with ACORN in 1991 to vastly
increase community development funding (see City Limits,
January 1992). Since then, Chemical Bank has boosted its
community development mortgage, loan and grant funds
from $750 million to $1 billion.
But bankers say they don't want community investment
forced upon them this way. Instead, they'd like an active
role in Clinton's development plan, a relaxation of banking
regulations, and a new set of loan guarantees, tax credits,
or subsidies that would make community investment
more profitable.
"If you want to make people more positive about
community development, the economics have to work,"
says Mark Willis, director of the Chase Community
Development Corporation, part of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Willis explains that banks are simply looking for safe
investments for depositors' money.
The bankers dislike Clinton's idea of creating a new
network of institutions specifically designated for com-
munity development because it could prove to be inflex-
12/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
dent and chief executive of Goodhue County National
Bank in Red Wing, Minnesota, and a board member of the
ABA, says that since small, inner-city borrowers need
below-market-rate-interest loans, the government should
pay banks for the difference. "The borrower would be
charged a lower interest rate, but the financial institution
would get the full market rate," he says. "There needs to
be some sort of subsidy."
PaperChaae
Of great importance to the ABA-as laid out in lengthy
testimony to Congress-is the scaling back of federal
regulations that limit the amount of money they can lend,
whether or not their customers have good credit back-
grounds. These regulations, put in place in the wake of the
savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s, require banks
to hold a higher percentage of their deposits off the loan
market than in the past, reducing the risks of speculative
investment, at least in theory. Regulators also instituted
overly strict rules regarding the appraisal of collateral,
limiting the potential loans banks can make, bankers say.
Meanwhile, the ABA is continuing its long-fought
battle to scale back CRA and HMDA regulations. It argues
that banks want to do more community lending-what's
holding them back is the extensive paper chase required
by the government to document their lending activities in
low income communities.
"The industry is really suffering," says Jones. "Our
recommendations would be to put less emphasis on docu-
mentation. Just think of the lending that could occur if
twenty-five percent of the paperwork were eliminated."
Activists point out that despite such complaints, banks
are not required currently to reveal the full extent of their
lending data. They do not, for instance, have to disclose
where or how they make loans to small businesses. Further
scaling back of paperwork shouldn't be allowed, they
insist, pointing out that it is precisely these regulations
that have helped community groups successfully chal-
lenge redlining of low income neighborhoods and lever-
age more than $6 billion in housing and community
development loans since 1978.
Also, Congress may have its own ideas on where it
wants community development lending to go. Two such
ideas are already being floated in Washington: Republican
Senator Alfonse D' Amato of New York, a member of the
Senate Banking Committee, wants to allow banks to buy
out of CRA requirements by investing in CDFIs. And
"It is categorically incorrect to say that paperwork is a
problem that's keeping [banks] from doing community
development," says John Taylor, ex-
ecutive director of the National Com-
Democratic Representative John
LaFalce, also of New Yark and head of
the House Small Business Committee, munity Reinvestment Coalition.
"That's simply not the case .... CRAhas
minimal paperwork, and the paper-
work has a purpose: it provides a mo-
saic of what the bank is doing or not
doing in a community. It's not that
people are trying to make them jump
through hoops."

Following his speech to Congress
in February, Clinton proposed annual
Activists are
bracing for
a letdown.
wants to set up a secondary market for
community development loans, in
which a government-sponsored corpor-
ation like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac
would be established to buy high-risk
loans from banks. These and other
proposals may conflict with adminis-
tration efforts.
increases in the initial $45 million investment in commu-
nity development banks, to a total of $354 million over
five years. Though this is far more than the Bush admin-
istration ever proposed for such a scheme, it is consider-
ably less than the $1 billion Clinton promised during the
campaign.
But even without congressional in-
terference, many activists lack confi-
dence that the Clinton administration
has the will to see its proposals get through Congress
intact. "Given the way this administration operates, what
starts as a grand proposal quickly becomes a demonstra-
tion project," says Rich Ferlauto, who directs the commu-
nity economic development program for the Center for
Policy Alternatives, a progressive Washington think-tank.
Community activists say they are bracing for a letdown
when the administration releases more concrete plans.
One fear is that any proposal on banking could be met with
strong pressure for revision from Congress: bankers are
among the top contributors to federal campaigns, with the
banking industry contributing more than $9 million to
1990 congressional campaign coffers.
Still, many activists' hopes are pinned on Clinton, if
only because his proposals have succeeded in introducing
the phrase "community development" into the main-
stream. Six months ago, observes Comstock, not many
people knew what CDFIs were.
"For the past 12 years we had no one to talk to," he says.
"At least Clinton's heart is in the right place." 0
NEW Y 0 R K
Expo Tech 93
An all-day expo on computer
technology with
workshops and exhibits
for small organizations and
firms-
DATE
Thursday, May 27
TIME
8:30 am to 4:30 pm
PLACE
New School for Social Research
65 Fifth Avenue (at 14th Street)
ADMISSION
$15-pre-registered
$20-at the door
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.
TELEPHONE 212-791-3660
Thirteen workshops will be offered throughout the
day, including these workshops of interest to not-
for-profit organizations:
10:45 am - 12: 15 pm
Issues In Computerizing Non-profits
Addresses special needs and concerns of not-for-profit agen-
cies. Fundraising, fund accounting, mail list management,
membership systems.
2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Using Public Access Databases for Grantwritlng and
Needs Assessment.
There is a wealth of information out there at little or no
cost. Learn how to access it.
2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Looking Good on Paper: Desktop Publishing
In-house print and presentation production with desktop
publishing systems and graphic software.
Other topics: Hardware Buying Tips; Focus on Windows;
Low Cost Direct Mail Techniques; Avoiding Disasters.
CITY UMITS/MA Y 1993/13
AND mE
Community groups rebuilding East New York are caught in a war of wills
with dealers on the streets. So far, the dealers are winning.
BY JILL KIRSCHENBAUM
I
n the springtime, Brooklyn's Alabama Avenue be-
tween Riverdale and Newport is like a block straight
out of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Budding trees
line the street of meticulously maintained houses;
residents sweep their stoops and tend their yards; a
vest pocket garden begins to bloom; children run about.
"You couldn't find a nicer block in all of New York
City," says Carey Shea, director of a nonprofit housing
development group that has renovated and managed 29
buildings in the area since 1991.
One would be hard-pressed to dis-
agree, if it wasn't for the fact that this
"You come into a neighborhood," says Shea, "and you
see all of these vacant buildings and shady characters and
you say to yourself, 'I'm going to rehab these buildings,
move in nice people, and they're going to be the dominant
force; and all these other people are going to slide off to
some other sleazy area because they'll feel so out of place
here.' In other places, you rehab the buildings and the
dealers leave."
But the dealers, she reports, aren't leaving, and fear of
the violence their presence breeds is making it difficult for
housing groups here to fill up their spotless, rehabilitated
buildings. It's also made it next to
impossible to organize local residents
to fight back. Day by day, the groups'
stretch of Alabama Avenue lies smack
in the middle of one of the most vio-
lent sections of notorious East New
York.
The district's reputation for danger
is well-earned. Since 1985, East New
York's crime rates have consistently
ranked among the city's highest.
Ninety murders, or one of every 20 in
the city, were recorded within the
boundaries of East New York's 75th
Fear has made it
next to impossible
to organize local
residents.
dreams of renewal are being chal-
lenged, and they know their chances
for survival are directly linked with
whether or not they can figure out
howto push the dealers offthestreets.
An atmosphere of unmistak-
able menace hangs over pockets of the
40-block domain of the UYC like a
venal dark cloud. Drug sales are carried
Precinct in 1992.
It's not as if Shea wasn't aware of
this when she and the East New York Urban Youth Corps
(UYC) , which formerly ran after-school and summer youth
programs in the neighborhood, decided to get into the
nonprofit housing business. But while revitalization ef-
forts in other parts of the city have had an impact on street
crime, particularly on the drug trade, that's not been the
case in this corner of East New York, where UYC and a
handful of other groups are scrambling for new ways to
dea,l ~ i t h problems far more intransigent than they ever
antIcipated.
14/MAY 1993jCITY UMITS
out in plain sight by clusters of jittery dealers affecting
stances of nonchalance; at 9:30 on a Thursday morning the
dealers and their customers are virtually the only people
in sight. Shea refers to the quadrant as "west of Pennsyl-
vania" because it is separated from the rest of East New
York by Pennsylvania Avenue. Deputy Inspector Joseph
Dunn, commanding officer of the 75th Precinct, identifies
it as the Western Sector. Most cops just call it the dead
zone.
Gunfire is a common. occurrence here. Anthony E.
.'
Desolation Row: Anthony E. Carter of the East New York Urban Youth Corps and a friend from the neighborhood in the Western Sector.
Carter, a DYC tenant and the assistant superintendent of
four of the organization's buildings on Williams Avenue,
says he has witnessed three murders and 15 shootings in
the eight months he has worked for Shea. One neighbor-
hood resident who considers herself lucky to live east of
Pennsylvania and who asked that her name not be used
says some streets-Alabama, Georgia, Newport, Sheffield-
should be avoided at all costs after dark. "At night it's so
packed over there with people and there's so much drugs
and so many shootings-it's like a western."
Still, even in East New York's wild Western Sector,
Shea had reason to believe that solid housing stock and
motivated, concerned tenants would make the difference.
Comparable development projects in neighborhoods like
Harlem, the South Bronx, even other sections of East New
York, are testament to that. For instance, one Harlem
group, Neighborhood Gold, has dramatically reduced
drug traffic in and around six buildings with a simple
strategy: organize tenants to create a climate less hospitable
to drug dealers, and the dealers will go. Broken mailboxes,
windows and intercoms and dimly lit hallways send out
the message that a building is vulnerable, and its tenants
are easy targets, says the organization's director, Ray
Laszczych.
Similar strategies in the Western Sector have had a
limited impact, though there have been some gains. One
ofUYC's apartment houses at the corner of Williams and
Newport avenues has seen a marked improvement since
the organization took it over, renovated it, and moved in
low income and formerly homeless families eager for a
chance to start a new life. The building, 584 Williams
Avenue, was one of the worst drug locations in the
neighborhood, says Shea.
"There'd been a big crowd there for years," she notes,
referring to the swarms of buyers and sellers that once
dominated the building. "[Dealers] had actually cut a hole
in the building and had set up a sort of fortress in the
vestibule when it was vacant."
Today, there are no dealers taking up residence in the
immaculate, nine-unit apartment house, its well-lit hall-
ways painted a bright white with soft teal trim. But steady
tenants and a well-maintained building have not stemmed
the illegal commerce on the sidewalk out front. In many
ways the dealers are still holding the building hostage,
stashing their drugs under the exterior window sills and
beneath cars parked by the curb, hassling tenants as they
come and go.
Carter stays inside his apartment at 584 Williams after
dark, protected by Snoopy, his stalwart pit bull. As the
superintendent, he maintains an uneasy peace with the
dealers who congregate outside; on more than one occasion
he has been physically threatened and falsely accused of
tipping off the police to their activities. "I go to stay with
friends in Manhattan on the weekends, just to get a chance
to relax," he says.
Other tenants have been unable to adapt to the pressure.
In April, after months of harassment and threats from the
dealers, a young couple that had rented an apartment in
the building took their newborn and three-year-old child
and moved out on less than a moment's notice.
"They just walked in and dropped off the key," says
Shea sadly. "Didn't even ask about the security deposit.
They were gone." They are not a unique case-it's hard for
UYC to find tenants willing to stay. At any given time there
CITY UMRS/MA Y 1993/15
may be as many as 30 UYC vacancies, and these are
affordable apartments; rents range from only $215 for a
studio to $590 for three bedrooms, depending on income
and whether or not a tenant is receiving public assistance.
Ralph Anderson, who has lived for three months in a
UYC building with his fiance and four-year-old daughter,
says he's fed up as well. He moved there from Bedford
Stuyvesant because he wanted to save money for a new
house, and UYC's low rents couldn't be beat. His is the
kind of moderate income family that the housing groups
hoped would help stabilize the area. But now, Anderson
is making plans to move as soon as he can. Home-buying
plans will have to wait. Any intelligent person, he says,
would do the same.
"How can they even ask us to pay rent in this situation?"
he asks. "The drug business here is a stand-on-line, drive-
up-all-day kind of thing. I've never seen anything like it-
only in the movies. But this is for real."
ACORN, another nonprofit group staking a claim to 12
buildings in the Western Sector, has had even more severe
problems. Last summer, a man hired to guard an ACORN
construction site on a particularly drug-riddled section of
Sheffield Avenue, two blocks over from Shea's basement
office on Alabama, was shot and killed. And last month,
a block down from a UYC apartment house on Williams,
there was a shootout outside one of the nine buildings
west of Pennsylvania managed by the Oceanhill
Brownsville Tenants Association (OHBT A). The violence
was apparently in retaliation for an ambush that had
occurred in a vacant lot
nearby just hours be-
fore-part of a turf war
between two rival drug
operations, Carter ex-
plains. In all, four people
were shot, two of them
fatally.
the low level dealers, but they don't target the suppliers
and they don't often trap the buyers who drive into the
neighborhood from allover the region to purchase cocaine,
crack, heroin and marijuana. And the police sweeps
certainly don't address the allure of big money, status and
opportunity that motivates the dealers in the first place.
Dave Nelson, lead organizer of East Brooklyn Congre-
gations, a group of churches and one synagogue that has
built approximately 1,050 single-family homes in East
New York since the early 1980s, says the TNT method
clearly isn't the answer. "The history of the area west of
Pennsylvania has been one of a lot of TNT activity, but few
closings of drug sites," Nelson states. "There are lots of
statistics, lots of arrest activity, but no closings. And only
the closings of drug locations are of any value to the
community." In fact, there have been three TNT operations
since 1989, and though arrest statistics have slightly
declined, the street-drug activity has continued unabated.
"They busted everybody," Shea adds. "But everyone
knows that you can drive to the corner of Williams and
Newport and buy drugs. It's been that way for years. So
even though the dealers were gone, the buyers kept coming.
And now there's a whole new group selling out there."
Currently there are at least half a dozen drug "hot spots"
in the Western Sector, which accounts for only a tiny piece
of the precinct. The corner of Williams and Newport is at
the top of the list, according to the police.
Assistant District Attorney Pat Gatling, chief of the
Major Narcotics Investigations Bureau in the Brooklyn
District Attorney's
office, agrees in part with
Nelson's and Shea's
complaints about the
shortcomings of con-
ventional enforcement
efforts.
"Large scale arrests
can slow down the
activity," she says. "We
can do buy and busts till
we're blue in the face.
We can lock up all the
sellers and all the buy-
ers. But there will be
others to replace them."
T here have been
many attempts by po-
lice to clean up the drug
traffic on the blocks of
the Western Sector. Most
recently, the police
department's Tactical
Narcotics Team (TNT)
spent the last three
monthsof1992 carrying
out repeated undercover
observation, surveil-
lance and buy-and-bust
en The key, says Gatling
~ and other law enforce-
~ ment officials, is to infil-
~ trate and bust the houses
;:5 where drugs are stashed,
1il the packaging locations,
Mister Roprs' Nelchboltlood: "You couldn't find a nicer block in all of New York and the distributors.
City," says Carey Shea of UYC. Identifying and infil-
operations, and made a total of 401 felony arrests. For a
while, the streets were quiet, confirming the expectations
of Shea and other community leaders who had encour-
aged TNT to target the area. "That was my Plan A. I really
thought that if we brought in TNT, we'd get rid of these
guys," she recalls. "I was so wrong." In no time at all, the
dealers were back.
The problem, says critics of the TNT method, is that its
solutions are only temporary and are not coordinated over
the long term with other police activity, like regular foot
patrols through the community. The street sweeps harass
11/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
trating drug distribution
rings is a slow process, however. Currently there are
several such investigations underway in East New York,
Gatling says, including one of the "A-Team," a gang based
in the Cypress Hills housing project and believed to be
long-time suppliers of drugs to the neighborhood. But
such news is cold comfort for housing groups whose
tenants don't have the luxury of waiting for down-the-
road solutions.
Meanwhile the war of attrition continues. In 1991, the
precinct was second only to Washington Heights in the
number of homicides that occurred there, and it topped
the list for assaults. Of
the 12,268 felony crimlls
committed there in
1992, more than one
third of the 3,942 cases
ending in arrests were
drug-related.
Darlene D., an
ACORN member who
asked that her full name
not be used, acknowl-
edges that even those in
the community willing
to participate in block
watches or patrols must
grapple with a poten-
tially crippling contra-
diction.
"People have to trust
the police. They said
they would teach people
en how to do neighborhood
~ patrols, and I'd do it,"
::; Darlene says. "But then
~ you have a situation like
~ the store at the corner of
T he inadequacies
of TNT notwithstand-
ing, housing advocates
are dissatisfied with the
daily coverage they've
received from the police.
Following the death of
their security guard last
July, ACORN held rallies
at the 75th Precinct and
at One Police Plaza
___ ~ e n Hendrix and New Lots.
Taldng a $bind: Darlene D. and other ACORN members convinced the 75th They've been selling
Precinct to increase the number of foot patrols in the neighborhood. drugs out of there for
"We've been pressur-
ing the police to provide more patrols" notes organizer
Lonn Heymann, "and we've been holding monthly meet-
ings with them for four months." The meetings have not
been in vain. In January, Deputy Inspector Dunn desig-
nated eight new Police Academy recruits to do foot patrols
in the Western Sector.
Still, even that's not enough. Knowing that the police
can't give the neighborhood round-the-clock protection,
many local residents have learned to live with the dealers.
"What develops is a culture of coexistence," says
Heymann. "The only way people can live their lives is to
establish some sort of relationship so they can coexist with
the dealers living on their doorstep, so they can go to work
every day with minimal threat."
But such fatalistic pragmatism means more traditional
methods for countering drug dealers, such as organizing
residents to take a stand by working in
tenant patrols alongside local police,
years. Why hasn't it been
shut down? The police have to be on the take .... There's a
lot of suspicion here about the police."
Just as the police represent a suburban presence in East
New York-many, like Dowd, live on Long Island beyond
the city's borders-so do the drive-up drug buyers, an-
other sticking point for residents here.
According to Sergeant Larry Nikunen, a supervisor in
the 75th Precinct's Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, at
least 50 percent of the buyers west of Pennsylvania drive
in from other neighborhoods-Canarsie, Howard Beach,
Bensonhurst-as well as Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester
counties. Some even come from as far as Connecticut and
New Jersey.
Housing groups have pressed police to try focusing
their efforts on the buyers rather than the sellers. But
they've met resistance from a law enforcement and politi-
cal culture that they say appears to
favor people who don't live in the
neighborhood. have gone by the wayside.
"We have to be careful," says Mar-
tin Dunn, UYC's director of housing
development. "The tenants are scared,
and if they get threatened, they move
out. So we try to take the lead on that.
We'relessofatarget." And, addsDunn,
his organization doesn't have much
faith in programs that call for tenants
"When we
take their cars
they're devastated"
A method that has been used spo-
radically in other parts of the city-
most notably Washington Heights-
has been the confiscation of buyers'
cars after they've bought their high
for the day. Shea would like to see
this become regular policy in East
to function as adjuncts to the police
force.
"The police always say [reporting information] is anony-
mous," notes Dunn. "But the cops come and tell the
dealers that a tenant called and made a complaint. So then
the tenants get harassed. We want a different strategy that
doesn't threaten the tenants."
There is also a more compelling basis for many East
New Yorkers' fears about the police. Last year, Officer
Michael Dowd and several of his colleagues from the 75th
Precinct were arrested on felony charges of conspiracy to
sell and distribute cocaine in Suffolk County. The arrests
threw the department into turmoil, and severely compro-
mised the precinct's integrity in the already jaundiced
eyes of many community residents.
New York.
"Pop the cars," she says. "Ifenough
of the buyers who drive into the neigh-
borhood have to walk out, the word will get around that
this is not a safe place to do business."
Deputy Inspector Dunn confirms that this has been
tried a few times recently; nine vehicles were confiscated
in the first three months of 1993. Two of the drivers even
tried to bribe the police to let them go, Dunn reports,
further compounding their legal problems. And Sergeant
Nikunen, whose unit was responsible for the car seizures,
is enthusiastic about the idea. A mere misdemeanor count
of possession, he says, is not nearly as effective.
"They just receive a desk appearance ticket with a court
date, and they're out in two hours. But when we take their
cars they're devastated. And we've taken some very nice
CITY UMITS/MAY 1993/17
cars-Lincolns, Blazers, Jeeps."
But Robert H. Silbering, the city's special narcotics
prosecutor, considers seizure programs problematic.
"What if the person driving the car is not the owner?
What if a parent has loaned it to a son? Is it fair to the owner
to have the car seized? They may not even know the kid
was using it. Should the bank holding the car loan be out
$20,000?"
The housing groups are cognizant of the tricky waters
they must navigate in order to defeat the street dealers and
protect their tenants' safety without sacrificing civil
liberties in the bargain. Residents, however, are fed up
with legal philosophy
and the rationalizations
of officials like Silbering.
"If you don't have the
right to live peacefully,
without the fear of being
shot, you don't have any
rights ," states Juanita
Fisher, a resident of the
Fiorentino Plaza hous-
ing project in the West-
ern Sector.
displacing long-time residents who can't afford to buy the
houses, which cost about $61,500 when last built in 1992.
And in fact, an estimated 249 families were displaced for
the project built east of Pennsylvania, according to the city
Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
On the other hand, the clean streets and row ufon row of
small prefab-style houses offer a sort of critica mass that
UYC, ACORN and OHBT A can only dream of because
their buildings are so scattered.
East Brooklyn Congregations is slated to break ground
on its development in the Western Sector early next year.
The group fought long and hard with the Dinkins ad-
ministration to get a
commitment for enough
land to build 750 to 800
homes. Originally, the
government was only
willing to give them scat-
tered plots of land, but
the organization rejected
the offer. The final go-
ahead is contingent on
City Council approval ,
according to Nelson.
Achieving critical
T
mass-whether it takes
~ the form of new housing
~ units or the consolidated
hough East New ~ effort of hundreds of 10-
York housing groups ~ calresidents-isimpera-
share many common ~ tive, says Nelson. "It's
concerns, to date they . en foolish to do scattershot
h h d l
'ttl Hope 011 the War. East Brooklyn CongregatIOns plans to bulldoze empty lots and d 1 t t f
. avbe ad' I e sUCh cess abandoned buildings to make way for hundreds of single family homes in the peve o p m e ~ wb es 0
In an Ing toget er, Western Sector. ennsylvanIa, ecause
pooling resources and of the nature of the drug
forming a coalition that can galvanize large groups of business there. We build houses around congregations
tenants and neighborhood residents and coordinate with roots deep and wide in the community."
activities more efficiently with the police department. A large part of the problem housing groups face is the
And that, say some community organizers and others vast number of empty lots and abandoned buildings in the
familiar with the problem, is the only way the war on area, giving East New York one of the lowest population
drugs in East New York can be waged with any success. densities in Brooklyn. On this point, Abdur Rahman
To make matters worse, local politicians have yet to Farrahkan, director of OHBTA, agrees with Nelson's
take a leadership position in the fight against drug dealers. assessment. "East New York is so spread out, it's difficult
City Council member Virginia Wooten is helping to de- to concentrate the resources that enable you to get the
velop youth programs in her district, but she admits she is dealers out and keep them out," he says.
not currently involved in initiating any kind of policy that
would directly address the problem of drug markets west
of Pennsylvania. Nor is the district manager of Commu-
nity Board 5, Walter Campbell. Instead, he believes the
answer is in a wholesale redevelopment of the neighbor-
hood, such as that planned by East Brooklyn Congrega-
tions for a stretch of land that straddles New Lots Avenue
right in the heart of the Western Sector.
Call it safety in numbers. The strength of East Brooklyn
Congregations' Nehemiah housing projects, supporters
say, is that they can create stable communities in impov-
erished, high-crime neighborhoods precisely because they
build hundreds of single-family homes in relative 1 y small,
centralized locations. In addition to tearing down dozens
of vacant or derelict buildings and bulldozing empty lots
in the process, Nehemiah developments (named for the
biblical prophet who rebuilt Jerusalem) introduce into an
area a stable, unified force of homeowners that is organized
and trained by EBC about how to address crime problems.
Critics have long charged that EBC achieves its ends by
18jMAY 1993/CITY UMITS
N o!far from Williams Avenue. a brigade oftenants
has things to worry about other than critical mass. The
Fiorentino Plaza housing project's tenants association is
busy with preparations for a play called "East New York
Revisited." It's about a time when three angels-Brother
Martin, Brother Malcolm and Sister Harriet-come back
to the neighborhood to see what the devil has wrought,
and it's the brainchild of]uanita Fisher, a retired hospital
worker and a member of the association's drug elimina-
tion program.
One ought not underestimate Juanita Fisher. After all,
she's the one who convinced two local teenagers known to
be hard core drug dealers to take parts in the play. Not only
are they now the star attractions (though they have only
minor roles), but they are also involved with the technical
aspects of the production-sound, lights, sets.
Fisher says her group will do anything it can, from
organizing tenant patrols to holding maintenance man
appreciation days, to get drugs out of the neighborhood.
"We pay children ten cents for every empty crack vial
they can find," she says. The dealers, she adds, only pay
them a penny. "Some dealers had kids holding their stuff
for them, little ones, 8 or 9 years old. We found out about
that and went to their mothers and told them what they
were doing. Now we have an after-school art program. We
[also] have people in the streets and they'll call me from a
store-'So-and-so is in the yard selling crack'- and I'll
call the police." Her group has peti-
tioned local businesses to meet with
building residents. It is a way of holding the police
accountable, says a coalition staff member, who asked that
neither she nor her organization be identified. The method
is working: When they last met with their local precinct
commander, he had with him a long list outlining exactly
what the police had done at each location on the Bronx
group's database.
Not all efforts are so extensive, but they can be effective
nevertheless. "Dealers prey on areas where the [tenants]
are cut off from each other," contends Laszczych of Neigh-
borhood Gold in Harlem. "If people are organized and take
ownership, dealers get the message."
The tactics of the Fiorentino Plaza
them in the hope that the merchants
will form a similar anti-crime group
of their own. "We're trying to get
across to them that they are respon-
sible too," says Fisher.
It's not as if such efforts haven't
worked in other communities. A
coalition of neighborhood groups in
the Bronx has gotten so well orga-
nized around the issue that they've
developed a computerized database
If people are
organized and take
ownership, dealers
get the message.
Tenants Association may seem so
small as to be almost meaningless in
the Western Sector, given the depth of
the problem. But Fisher's group may
be onto something with its holistic
approach, according to Robert L.
Smith, Director of Public Safety in
Tampa, Florida. Few American cities
have been as successful in their anti-
drug campaigns as Tampa, where more
of 60 drug locations. It is maintained
by a paid staffer who gathers informa-
tion from members and tracks the local drug business. In
addition to constantly updating news about each site and
monitoring drug sale patterns so the information can be
fed to the police, the group keeps track of police activity
in each location. They record where police have surveil-
lance efforts underway, when arrests have been made, and
how many search warrants have been served on apartment
than 150 outdoor drug markets and
crack houses were operating in 1989.
Within three years, the number of
active drug locations was down to 10, according to local
police and newspaper reports.
The campaign began when a high school principal and
Baptist minister rallied 4,000 community members to
pressure the city into confronting what they considered to
be an out-of-control drug crisis. In response, the city
designed a program called QUAD, for Quick Uniformed
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Attack on Drugs. In addition to committing 40 police
officers with mobile phones and canine units solely to the
task of eradicating drug markets, the city backed up the
squads by launching a full-scale assault coordinated with
every city agency and many community groups.
"The fire marshals, the parks employees, the building
inspectors-everyone was exposed to the QUAD pro-
gram," says Smith. "Recreation workers were trained by
QUAD on how to deal with suspected dealers in the park.
Every division of the police department, from traffic cops
to vice, was held accountable." Neighborhood clean-up
drives were organized. The city held community fund-
raisers to pay for treatment and preventionlrograms.
Meanwhile, the QUAD teams patrolle the streets,
taking calls on their mobile phones from residents who
reported drug market activity. Every neighborhood was
introduced to its QUAD officers. Quick response and
cooperation from residents was crucial, Smith says.
Results were so good in Tampa that by the end of '92,
the police department had started to use the QUAD squads
for non-drug-related community work. Before long there
was an uptick in street drug sales once again. Today the
QUAD officers are back on the drug beat and the public,
which had also become complacent, is back on the alert.
Some say the city went too far by instituting a local
ordinance against "drug-related" loitering. "There are a
significant number of people who see it as a way for the
police to harass young black males," says Tampa public
defender Dwight Wells, who has four lawsuits pending
against the city, including a federal civil rights suit, as a
result of the ordinance.
But for the most part, support for the Tampa program
has been strong.
"Initially there was criticism because the police went in
like gangbusters. One team was disbanded," recalls Joanna
Tokley, director of the Tampa Hillsborough Urban League.
The police department made the necessary adjustments,
Tokley says, and there have been few complaints since. "It
has really cleaned up the community."
T hem's neve, been a pmg,"m of even ,ernately
similar scale and coordination in Brooklyn. Instead, the
police department's efforts are fragmented between
different divisions, and coordination with community
groups and other agencies is nearly non-existent.
So while the politicians in East New York wait for
Nehemiah and the D.A.'s office continues to try to snake
its way into the inner sanctums of the neighborhood's
drug world, the leaders of UYC, ACORN, OHBT A and the
Fiorentino Plaza Tenants Association are still here, fighting
their own war.
For her part, Carey Shea is moving on to Plan B. She
wants to turn a basement space in one of her buildings into
a youth drop-in center staffed by off-duty police officers,
and she is urging Deputy Inspector Dunn to block off
Williams Avenue between Riverdale and Newport and
turn it into a play street. Shea would like to see it closed
permanently, but she'll settle for the summer. Dunn hasn't
said yes yet; neither has he said no.
"I hope it works," Shea says, "because I don't have a
Plan C."
It could be a long hot summer in the Western Sector. 0
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CITY UMnS/MAY 1993/21
Co-ops or Bust
A new survey shows that city-owned buildings
managed by tenants are better off than those
sold to private landlords.
T
enant control works, according
to a new survey of 2,700 tenants
of city-owned and formerly city-
owned buildings in the Bronx.
The survey, by Susan Saegert of the
Housing Environments Research
Group at the City University of New
York, shows that 'a 15-year-old city
program promoting tenant ownership
and management has resulted in better
quality housing, better management
and fewer drug problems than another
city program that turns properties over
to private, for-profit landlords.
The survey comes at a time when
the city is redoubling its efforts to sell
its stock of apartment buildings. More
than a year ago, the Dinkins adminis-
tration announced the city's latest plan
for getting thousands of apartments
offits hands and back on the tax rolls.
The city currently owns 6,112 resi-
dential buildings-many run-down or
abandoned-that were taken from tax-
delinquent landlords during the last
two decades. Among them are about
38,500 occupied apartments.
Dinkins plans to sell off nearly one-
quarter of these apartments during
the next four years. The buyers will be
community groups, or, when no group
is available, private landlords. The
motive behind the plan is nothing
new-the city has been trying to rid
itself of the burdens of ownership for
at least 20 years. Indeed, programs to
renovate and sell buildings to private
landlords, community groups and ten-
ant cooperatives have been in place,
off and on, since the 1970s.
A group of low income housing
advocates called the Task Force on
City-Owned Property is calling for a
reassessment of the city's new sell-off
plan before it proceeds. Instead, its
members are seeking a more far-
sighted proposal to preserve city-
owned buildings as a permanent
resource for housing the lowest-
income New Yorkers. The group plans
to issue a report this month that will
include the survey and recommen-
dations emphasizing tenant partici-
pation in building management.
The survey found that about half
the residents of tenant-managed prop-
erties said harassment was a problem
in their buildings, compared to more
than four-fifths of those in buildings
run by for-profit landlords. Even more
stunning were the responses to ques-
tions about drugs. While more than 40
percent of the residents in tenant-run
buildings reported that drugs were
"not a problem at all," only 12 percent
said the same thing in the landlord-
owned-and-operated buildings.
The survey also found that tenants
of buildings already sold by the city to
for-profit landlords and tenant coop-
eratives tend to have incomes at two
extremes: either their household
incomes are less than $10,000, so their
rent is likely to be covered in part by
government subsidies, or they earn at
least $20,000. The report suggests one
possible explanation for the dearth of
families with incomes between
$10,000 and $20,000: such families
may have too much money to qualify
for a rent subsidy, but not enough to
pay the rent-so they've been evicted.
Many ofthe survey questions have
a strong dose of subjectivity inherent
in them. The buildings were not
inspected by researchers to verify
tenants' answers about quality of life.
There is also some question as to why
different types of people live in the
different types of buildings: for
instance, residents of tenant-run
cooperatives are far more likely to
have a college education and to
participate in neighborhood groups
and tenant associations than those in
landlord-run buildings. Exactly what
the cause and effect relationship is
can only be surmised. 0 Andrew
White
No Middle Ground: Annual household incomes in current and former city-owned buildings, by program.
POMP
Co-ops
less than $5,000 $5-$10,000 $10-$20,000 $20,000+
Forty-one percent oftenants in city-owned and -operated buildings have incomes between $10,000
and $20,000. But in POMP buildings and co-ops, most tenants are at the extremes- they're either
very poor or earn more than $20,000. The disparity is most extreme in POMP buildings.
22/MAY 1993/Cm UMITS
Definitions
CM = Central Management. Buildings owned and
managed by the city's Department of Housing Preser-
vation and Development.
POMP = The Private Ownership and Management
Program. Formerly city-owned buildings owned and
operated by for-profit landlords.
nL = The Tenant Interim Lease program. City-owned
buildings managed by tenants associations in prepar-
ation for conversion to tenant-owned cooperatives.
Co-ops = Formerly city-owned buildings owned and
operated by tenant cooperatives.
Tenants prefer co-ops ...
S6%
Percent of residents in each building who describe
their building's quality as good or excellent.
Percent of residents in each building who describe
management as either good or excellent .
. and say private landlords can be hazardous to their health.
88%
Percent often ants who say harassment by manage-
ment or other tenants is a problem in their building.
Percent of tenants who say drugs are a significant
problem in their building.
CITY UMrTS/MA Y 1993/23
111'10'1111
By Elizabeth C. Darguste
When in Doubt, Reorganize
F
amily homelessness represents
a structural crisis in our city, a
crisis of economics, public
policy and a great deal more. It is
not a problem that is amenable to a
quick fix. Yet, despite countless
government task forces , commissions
and efforts to
create tempo-
rary shelters
and permanent
housing, the
city continues
to address the
homeless prob-
lem with con-
flicting ap-
proaches and
unexecuted
plans.
Following
through on rec-
ommendations
made by the
1992 Commis-
sion on the
m PlIII II
Ira IAUI 7 s ..
'$--'
'11.1111 .. tFre
I 'tIl .11
.... " . ., ...
...
Homeless chaired by Andrew Cuomo,
the Dinkins administration has set
out to create a new city agency that
will oversee the shelters and manage
services for homeless families and
individuals. The move surprises me,
not least because the administration
has yet to produce a comprehensive
plan that lays out exactly what this
new agency will do and how it will do
it. It is another example of a bureau-
cratic cliche: When in doubt, reorga-
nize.
Itis unclear whether the new agency
will materially improve conditions
for homeless families or increase
efficiency within the government. In
fact, I fear it could have the opposite
effect.
Shuftled Around
The families who come into the
shelter system have usually exhausted
all personal and financial resources
before resorting to a city shelter. They
have several needs that must be met.
Even to get basic help, they are shuffled
around to different city agencies: They
City View is a forum for opinion
and does not necessarily reflect
the views of City Limits.
24jMAY 1993jCITY UMITS
must go to the Human Resources
Administration (HRA) to get food
stamps and income support. To look
for housing, they have to deal with the
city's Department of Housing Preser-
vation and Development and the New
York City Housing Authority. If they
have children in foster care, they must
satisfy the regulations of the Child
Welfare Administration, a subdivision
of HRA, to get them back. Families
with preschool and school-aged
children must go to the Agency for
Child Development-also part of
HRA-to get day care services.
Now, with the new agency for the
homeless, the city is adding another
layer of bureaucracy, and it will not be
even nominally under the roof ofHRA.
In my view this means further
fragmentation and duplication of
services, bureaucratic complications
that aren't needed and shouldn't be
imposed.
The Real Solution
Worse yet, a new agency whose
mission is to coordinate operations in
the shelter system by definition
ignores the real solution to the prob-
With the new
agency for the
homeless, the city
adds another layer
of bureaucracy.
lem-the creation of affordable per-
manent housing. In response to
months of questioning and pressure
from advocates and the City Council,
the administration issued a report
entitled "The Revised and Updated
Plan for Housing and Assisting Home-
less Single Adults and Families." This
latest plan confirms my fears, for it
continues to emphasize the repair and
expansion of the emergency shelter
system at the expense of developing
permanent housing and community
support services.
The plan outlines a decrease in the
number of new apartments provided
to the homeless by the city's housing
department from 2,518 in the current
fiscal year to 1,804 in 1993-94. Yet at
the same time, the capital budget for
expanding the shelter system will rise
from $292.1 million to $337.2 million.
In addition, the agency's plan to
use "diversion teams" at city welfare
offices claims to focus on homeless-
ness prevention and service, but it
does not. Instead it is a cynical effort
to keep the shelter census down. These
diversion teams are authorized to use
any means-including returning
people to potentially dangerous and
unhealthy doubled-up apartments-
to keep families out of the shelter
system. Diversion is no substitute for
community-based social services and
tenant organizing programs in poor
neighborhoods.
Make the Agency Work!
We've been told by the city that the
creation of a new agency is the only
answer. Given that the city is deter-
mined to spend countless dollars to
create it, here are some suggestions
for making it work:
The new agency must commit to
a long-term plan that increases the
development and availability of
affordable housing and expansion of
community-based social services.
It must have the authority to
coordinate the efforts of all city
agencies serving homeless families
and individuals. Its caseworkers must
be able to overcome bureaucratic
constraints and speedily connect
people to services like income support,
day care and job placement.
The agency must become an
advocate for homeless families and
individuals in the city, state and
federal government.
To ensure that the agency
accomplishes what it is supposed to,
create an independent citizen's
advisory board. The city can't make
successful plans in a vacuum: It must
get advice from homeless people
themselves, their advocates, service
providers and community develop-
ment groups building permanent
affordable housing, among others.
Above all, we need to remember that
every day 10,000 children have no
place to call home. The new agency's
top priority must be to find them
one. 0
FIGHTING
THE GOOD
FIGHT.
Decent housing. Small business development. Worth fighting for.
That's why Brooklyn Union Gas started the Area Development Fund four
years ago. We committed $7 million to create a revolving fund and to
attract others to the cause.
In this good fight, we use equity investments; below-market loans for
site acquisition, pre-development costs, construction and business
expansion; bridge financing; letters of credit and venture capital.
To date the Fund has contributed $9 million for housing, small
business development, and capital projects for cultural institutions. We've
gained dedicated allies among several private and public
Their help has enabled the Fund to leverage $9 million to $300 million.
Come, join us in fighting the good fight ... shining armor supplied. Talk
to Chris Haun at (718) 403-2583. You'll find him working for you at
Brooklyn Union Gas, naturally.
c) Brooklyn Union Gas
CITY UMITS/MAY 1993/25
Chinatown Portraits
BY PETER KWONG
"Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed
Society, " by Gwen Kinkead,
HarperCollins, 1992, 256 pages,
$23.00, hardcover. Paperback due out
in June.
"Chinatown, The Socioeconomic
Potentia] of an Urban Enclave," by
Min Zhou, Temple University, 1992,
328 pages, $27.00, hardcover.
R
eaching a fresh understanding
of Chinatown is a difficult task,
for it requires weeding out
stereotypes that have taken
deep root in the minds of Americans.
As America began to pride itself on its
melting pot society, Chinatowns stood
fast as symbols ofinsularity. Although
their insistence on preserving their
culture and their unwillingness to
assimilate were due as much to
discrimination as cultural pride, the
presence of Chinatowns was taken as
an affront to the American way oflife.
Two recent books try to make sense
of this phenomenon, focusing their
attention on New York's Chinatown.
Gwen Kinkead, a reporter for The New
Yorker, uses all-tao-familiar brush-
strokes to reproduce a classical portrait
of Chinatown as a never-changing
ghetto where people of an alien culture
work like slaves and live lives devoid
of refinement. They lack social and
political commitments, and willingly
subjugate themselves to a mob-like
internal power structure. And as in
the past, they refuse to assimilate, as
evinced by their unwillingness to learn
English and to communicate with
Americans-that is, whites.
The single positive comment
Kinkead has for Chinatown residents
is in the introduction, where she
suggests that Americans could learn
from them the virtue of "frugality."
She then proceeds in the chapter
entitled "Work" to dehumanize this
characteristic. Kinkead can hardly
believe the astounding work habits of
the Chinese: "They work, work, work.
Working six days a week, from sixty
to eighty hours." Away from work,
they lead a "spartan insular life ...
enduring lonely, threadbare lives in
crowded, unsanitary apartments"
devoid of art or music. While their
hardships are obviously attributable
28jMAY 1993/CITY UMITS
to the extremely low wages they earn,
Kinkead is not interested in finding
an explanation for this deprived
lifestyle, only in exposing it.
Gambling American-Style
Kinkead further reveals Chinese
inscrutability in the next chapter,
"Gambling." In her exhaustive cover-
age of this subject, Kinkead interviews
dozens of people and even rides on an
Atlantic City casino bus with a group
of Chinatown residents, concluding
that "Chinese are born... to like
gambling"-although OTB, Lotto,
Atlantic City casinos and Belmont
racetrack are all-American institutions.
If, after working long hours at ridicu-
lously low wages, some find escape
through gambling, it is a habit they
share with other immigrants. But these
subtleties are beyond Kinkead.
She presents her material in a
fragmented, impressionistic style,
bombarding us with images that are
meant to rush us to a distinct, inescap-
able conclusion: the Chinese are dif-
ferent from you and me.
Kinkead devotes one-third of the
book to criminal activities, spinning
gruesome tales of Chinatown tongs
and gangs. Chinese underworld
culture and its murderous villains
have long kept American readers
entertained. Kinkead's construct of a
global Chinese criminal network does
not disappoint. She paints the network
as a shadow army saturating the u.S.
with heroin and smuggled illegal
aliens. The sophistication of these
criminal elements has supposedly
overwhelmed our law enforcement.
Kinkead puts the blame on Chinatown
residents and their unwillingness to
cooperate with police.
The problems of Chinatown are
American problems. As the u.S.
continues its development into a
multi-racial society, the false
dichotomy-us vs. them-must cease.
Kinkead's time-warp treatment of
cultural differences created by
circumstance precludes a new societal
order of mutual respect and under-
standing.
Economic Opportunity
By contrast, Min Zhou tries to
advance new understanding. She ar-
gues that Chinatown is not a ghetto
where poverty and urban diseases
)prevail; rather it is an "ethnic enclave"
thriving with dynamic economic .
activity. It is economic opportunity
that induces Chinese immigrants to
concentrate, not an unwillingness to
assimilate.
Zhou contends that such ethnic
enclaves present a new option for
immigrants. Unlike European ghettos
of the past or urban ghettos of the
present, enclave economy provides
the residents with a better opport-
unity to accumulate capital and
eventually launch their own enter-
prises.
Few would dispute that conten-
tion. The problem lies in her claim
that the prosperity of the community
is built on close-knit family and
kinship networks. Some garment
factories owned by Chinese immi-
grants, Zhou concedes, pay as little as
two dollars an hour and operate on a
60-hour week with no benefits or job
security. Zhou, however, insists that
"ethnic" social relations regulate
economic behavior to the benefit of
all. She justifies the existence of sweat-
shops by saying that Chinatown resi-
dents do not see them as exploitative,
because the "work ethic of immigrant
Chinese is built on a value standard
from the Chinese culture." What is
this value standard? That "substan-
dard wages, which are much higher
than wages in China .. . are regarded as
better than no wages at all."
Class Contradictions
Zhou sounds like an apologist (or
even a spokesperson) for the
Chinatown Chamber of Commerce.
She manipulates the notion of ethnic
solidarity to ignore the inherent class
contradictions of Chinatown.
Kinkead condemns Chinatown cul-
ture, and Zhou celebrates it. But their
conceit-that Chinatowns operate by
different rules from the communities
surrounding them-is a fallacy that's
invoked time and again by the media.
Gangster Joey Tai in Michael Cimino's
Year of the Dragon, sums up this view
best: "This is not New York. This is
not even America. This is Chinatown! "
The result is clear: Chinatown is
feared, and the Chinese are mistrusted.
Zhou and Kinkead might do well to
take note: unlike the very rich, the
Chinese are not, after all, different
from you and me. 0
Peter Kwong is the Cordoza Visiting
Professor at Yale University. This re-
view originally ran in A Magazine.
Keep Your Chin Up
BY ANDREW WHITE
"Delivered Vacant," a documentary
film by Nora Jacobson. Friday, May 28
to Thursday,June 3 at Cinema Village,
22 East 12th Street.
H
arry Wilson was a retired sea-
man from another time. He was
92 years old in 1984 when his
hometown of Hoboken stood at
the cusp of radical change. The same
year, filmmaker and Hoboken resident
Nora Jacobson began a project that
was to take eight years to complete, a
documentary on the politics and
speculation behind that New Jersey
city's evolution from a declining blue
collar port to a bedroom community
for Manhattan executives.
We meet Harry in his small
rooming-house apartment, sifting
through his past in a pile of black and
white photos. The rooming house is
about to be sold to a young developer,
but Harry isn't too clear about that.
"This is a good room at least for me,"
he tells the interviewer. "I've got the
ice box, I've got the gas stove if! want
to cook. ... "
The developer, Ezra Stillman,
doesn't much care for Harry or the
other old men who live in his newly-
acquired brick and mortar investment,
soon to be converted to luxury apart-
ments. After the tenants are forced
out, the building is gutted. Jacobson's
interview with Stillman sets the stage
for the rest of the documentary, and
the rest of the decade.
"My reaction coming into this
building was a sort of nausea," says
Stillman. "The odor and just the
appearance of the building was hor-
rible .... The heating system was fouled,
there were some incontinent old men
who were losing it." He smiles, as if to
say, "You know what I mean."
"I try not to respond too much to
the grossness," he adds.
Callous Speculative Spirit
Such snippets of raw arrogance spill
repeatedly from the mouths of
Hoboken's developers in Jacobson's
vital, well-edited film, to date one of
the only projects in any medium that
effectively captures the callous, specu-
lative spirit of the developer-friendly
1980s and its impact on poor tenants,
retirees, immigrants and artists. Her
film is about Hoboken, but it might as
well be about any of the large swaths
of residential Manhattan and Brook-
lyn that are utterly different today
from what they were ten years ago.
Landlords and developers did all
they could to move people out of their
increasingly valuable Hoboken real
estate during the 1980s, in order to
make way for the newcomers, the
boom-time financial industry profes-
sionals seeking to buy condos and co-
The centerpiece
is the activists'
futile battle
against
developers.
ops, often at the expense of the old-
timers who had lived in these neigh-
borhoods for decades.
There are two key facets of the film
that make it so revealing about the
wages of speculative development.
For one thing, Jacobson gets close to
characters on all sides of the game,
and she gives most of them plenty of
time to show their humanity. In spite
of their callous comments, the devel-
opers rarely come off as demons. The
yuppies, even less so. After all,
Jacobson herself is a newcomer to the
town. Her presence is itself a sign of
the changing times, and she seems
keenly aware of that.
Secondly, the long years spent
collecting characters and events is
central to the documentary's strength.
Over time, people change in funda-
mental ways. The spirit of activism
that sweeps the town in the mid-1980s
rises and falls with time; friendships
end, political goals that appear so
close early on are never realized.
Housing Justice
The film captures some stunning
moments. In 1985, activists and resi-
dents fearful of displacement rise up
and elect a mayor, Tom Vezetti, who
espouses tenants' rights and is eager
to serve the poor. Hundreds of people
march down Washington Street the
night of the election victory, a high
point in the crusade for housing
justice, anti-warehousing legislation
and developer set-asides for afford-
able housing.
Condo Conversions
At another point Jacobson sits in
on a meeting of mostly Latina tenants
living in a string of buildings at 11th
Street and Willow Avenue. They chat
and smile, passing around papers to
which they sign their names. In doing
so they are accepting a developer'S
buy-out offer of a few thousand dollars
apiece, allowing their homes to be
converted into elegant apartments for
the wealthy. Most don't speak English.
They aren't clear about their rights.
By the end of the evening, many of
them are crying as they consider the
enormity of what's just happened.
Beyond the political drama, the
film is an evocative tapestry of urban
life in Hoboken: kids on the play-
grounds, old folks in the bars, people
in their homes, their political clubs
and on the streets-even the execu-
tives' clean and suited, coming up the
stairs from the PATH trains that carry
them home from Manhattan.
But the centerpiece is the activists'
largely futile battle against the devel-
opers, whose disdain for the residents'
ethnic way of life and lack of respect
for the poor are revealed in their own
guilt-free words. When Vezetti dies
suddenly of a heart attack in 1988, the
activists' fight for affordable housing
is essentially lost.
Yet the developers take a hit as
well. Therein lies the most wrenching
irony of the 1980s experience. Ezra
Stillman, the developer who buys
Harry's rooming house and turns the
old man out, unwittingly puts foot in
mouth again as he leads the camera on
a tour of his renovated property.
"I feel pretty happy about the way
the place came out," he says. "Unfor-
tunately from a developer's perspec-
tive the job was a failure, in that I've
run over budget by about $100,000.
And because of the recent stock market
crash and the recent softening of the
real estate market in Hoboken, we
can't sell these for what we had hoped
to. We're literally going to make no
money, and maybe lose a little money,
but I'm trying to keep my chin up
about that." 0
CITY UMITS/MA Y 1993/27
Be Sensible!
To the Editor:
Your article in the March issue,
"The $207 Solution," was excellent. I
am myself a landlord and sometimes
have to evict people, and I place the
blame squarely on the fact that the
government does not allow fair market
rate rentals for people on welfare.

For example, take the case of a
tenant who loses his job and is forced
to apply for public assistance. The
money allotted by the government
for rent is so far below realistic market
rates that the tenant's landlord is
forced to evict. When the person
becomes homeless, the city has to pay
extraordinary sums of money to place
this person in temporary shelter-in
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28/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
some cases, up to ten times the amount
they would have paid to keep the
person in his or her original apart-
ment.
After shifting the homeless family
from shelter to shelter, senselessly
squandering thousands of taxpayeI:
dollars, the government then approves
market rate rents to any landlord will-
ing to take them. Plus, the landlord
receives a bonus of $2,300 per person
under the EARP program!
Common sense, not to mention
simple sixth grade arithmetic, will
tell you that if New York State would
adjust rental allowances to reflect
realistic fair market rentals they could
avoid thousands of evictions and
hundreds of thousands of taxpayer
dollars paid out for temporary shelters,
not to mention the bonuses paid to
landlords who provide housing for
the homeless.
John Baxter
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Positive Realism
To the Editor:
Thank you for your article, "Home
Improvement," (April 1993) that high-
lights services that help relocated
families make the transition to new
and often unfamiliar neighborhoods.
The article was fairly and sincerely
reported, capturing the essence of the
dilemmas faced when families move
to crumbling neighborhoods with
many needs and problems to solve.
Indeed, the problems do not end when
permanent housing is found; commu-
nity building is so critical, and
involving new residents in that
process is the challenge.
I believe positive articles such as
yours help promote a more open and
realistic view of what is possible with
families enduring impoverished living
conditions. They have strengths which
are too often missed in the "blame the
victim" articles that portray formerly
homeless families as the cause of
neighborhood violence.
Sarah B. Greenblatt,
Director
Intensive Case Management Project
Hunter College
IIDJ
o
East New York Savings Bank
is currently seeking a secretary/CRA organizer to assist the Community
Development Officer in developing and implementing the bank's
Community Reinvestment Program. Req: Strong typing and computer
skills, including extensive knowledge of MS Word or WPS.1, Lotus
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Salary: Mid-20s, excellent benefits. Send cover letter and resume to
Moira Smith at 41 W.42nd St. 28th fir, NYC 10036.
Management
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June 5 - June 11, 1993
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(617) 627-3549
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Professional training for
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* Fundraising * Management
* Community Organizing
and morel
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CITY UMITS/MA Y 1993/29
PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORY
ASHOKMENON
Attorney at Law
Representation of HDFC Coop Boards
Commercial Leases Coop, Condo & House Closings.
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New York, NY 10001
Tel: (212) 695-2929 Fax: (212) 695-1489
DEBRA BECHTEL - Attorney
Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-Profit Law
Title and loan closings 0 All city housing programs
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Advice to low income co-op boards of directors
100 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, (718) 624-6850
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Attorney at Law
Meeting the challenges of affordable housing for 20 years.
Providing legal services in the areas of General Real Estate,
Business, Trust & Estates, and Elder Law.
217 Broadway, Suite 610
New York, NY 10007
(212) 513-0981
WILLIAM JACOBS
CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT
Over 20 years experience. Specializing In nonprofit housing &
community development organizations.
Certified Annual Audits Compilation & Review Services
Management Advisory Services Tax Consultation & Preparation
Call today for free consultation
77 QUAKER RIDGE ROAD, SUITE 215
NEW ROCHELLE, NY 10804
914-633-5095 FAX-914-633-5097
3O/MAY 1993/CITY UMITS
TURF COMPANIES
Building ManagemenVConsultants
Specializing in management & development
services to low income housing cooperatives,
community organizations and co-op
boards of directors
230 Flatbush Avenue
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217
John Touhey
718/857 -0468
C ommunity D evelopment Legal AsSistance C enter
a proiect of the lawyers Alliance for New Yorle, a n o n p r o ~ t organization
Real Estate. Corporate and Tax Legal Representation to Organizations
Tax Syndications Mutual Housing Associations
Homeless Housing Economic Development
HDFCs Not-for-profit corporations
Community Development Credit Unions and Loan Funds
99 Hudson Street, 14th Fir., NYC, 10013 (212) 219-1800
COMPUTER SERVICES
Hardware Sales:
286/386/486 Computers
Super VGA Monitors
Okidata Laser Printers
Okidata Dot Matrix Printers
Software Sales:
Data Base
Accounting
UtilitieslNetwork
Word Processing
Services: NetworkIHardwarelSoftware Installation,
Training, Custom Software, Hand Holding
Clients Include: Acorn, ANHD, MHANY, NHS, UHAB
Morris Kornbluth 718-857-9157
David H. Grumer
Certified Public Accountant
25 West 45th Street, Suite 1401, New York, New York 10036
(212) 3541770
Financial Audits Compilation and Review Services
Management Advisory Consulting
Tax Return Preparation & Advice
Over a decade of service to community and nonprofit organizations .
Planning and Archileclure for Ihe Non-Profil Communily
Specializing in
Feasibility Studies, Zoning Analysis & Design 0/
Housing, Health Care and Educational Projects
Magnus Magnusson, AlA
MAGNUSSON ARCHITECTS
10 East 40th Street, 39th Floor, New York. NY 10016
Facsimile 212 481 3768 Telephone 212 683 5977
PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORY
lliANHAUSER & ESTERS ON
ARC HIT E C T S P. C.
Specializing in Pre-lease, Space Planning and Architectural Services
to the Non-Profit community with significant experience in HIV
Day Treatment Centers and Certificate of Need submissions.
95 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10003
(212) 929-3699 Fax (212) 929-9718
PUBLICITY PLUS
CONTRACTS TRAINING FINANCING PROMOTION
SELF HELP MATERIALS
Valerie White
PO Box 265 Huntington Station, NY 11746
718 279 5196
JOB ADS
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, Program for Homeless Families.
Candidate should have extensive knowledge of word processing,
pref. WordPerfect 5.1, and Quattro Pro or other spreadsheet;
background in administrative accounting a plus; excellent skills in
grammar, spelling and proofreading essential. Candidate should
be reliable, pay attention to detail, flexible, responsive to grantees,
take an interest in the affairs of the program and have a sense of
humor. Range of work includes prep. of extensive reports, relief of
receptionist, making travel arrangements, full prep. of large meetings,
etc. Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits package. Please
send resume, cover letter to Margaret Kenah, Office Manager, The
Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, 250 Park Avenue, NY 10177-
0026.
The Enterprise Foundation has openings for PROGRAM DIRECTORS
and ASSISTANT PROGRAM DIRECTORS in our Columbia, Maryland
office to work with neighborhood groups, CDCs, local government
and the business community to expand low income housing
resources. Experience in administering housing programs in local
government and/or nonprofit organizations is highly desirable.
Other qualifications include: technical knowledge of housing finance,
development and planning, familiarity with strategic planning and
the management of nonprofit organizations; the ability to write well
and speak in front of audiences effectively; bachelor'S degree, with
post-graduate degree in urban planning, real estate, economics,
finance or business preferred. Approximately 50 percent travel
required. Competitive salary, excellent benefits package. Resumes
to: Director of Human Resources, The Enterprise Foundation, 500
American City Building, Columbia MD 21044. The Enterprise
Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer with a strong
commitment to increasing diversity in our staff.
ACCOUNTANT/BOOKEEPER. FfTw/ nonprofit organization. Experience
in fiscal management, reporting with govt. agencies, accounts
receivable-payable, payroll, familiarity with PC accounting software
packages. Salary mid-30s, benefits. Resume to: RDRC, PO Box
1400, Far Rockaway NY 11691.
BUSINESS MANAGERJEDITOR. Monthly Brooklyn community newspa-
per with 12,000 circ. seeks fit business-minded manager/editor.
Newspaper is published by a nonprofit organization with a highly
successful community development program. Direct advert. sales,
editing, layout, dist. Reqs: strong interest in business management
and advertising, expo in or desire to develop editing skills, writing
experience and computer literacy; bilingual (Spanish) a plus.
Salary plus commission and benefits. Send letter, resume and one
writing sample to Michael Rochford, Exec. Dir., St. Nicholas
Neighborhood NPC, 11-29 Catherine St., B'klyn NY 11211.
ESL INSTRUCTOR for bilingual home health aide training program.
Part-time. Responsibilities include collaborating with fIt instructor
to: teach ESL class, develop and implement job-specific curriculum,
conduct participant evaluations, administer language test, interview,
recruit and assist in overall program development. 20 hours/wk, 12
month position. Prior teaching experience using non-traditionaV
participatory teaching strategies required. Bilingual (Span/Eng)
preferred. Competitive salary with benefits. Resume to Peggy
Powell, Home Care Associates Training Institute, 349 East 149th
Street, 5th Floor, Bronx 10451, (718) 993-7104.
HOUSING SPECIALIST. Forest Hills Community House, a community-
based multiservice center, has an opening in its Eviction Prevention
Unit located at the Jamaica Income Support Center. We are
seeking a person familiar with tenants rights, housing court, income
support systems, and fluent in Spanish. 27 hours/wk, Mon-Fri,
$20k. For info, call Christine Roland at (718) 592-5757.
PlAIINER to provide technical assistance and training to nonprofit
community-based development organizations in New York City
and vicinity and to undertake occasional research into urban policy
issues affecting low income neighborhoods both locally and nation-
ally. MS plus 5 yrs experience in hands-on low income community
development and related policy issues (or equivalent combination
of education and experience), plus facility with planning and devel-
opment computer applications (Lotus, Dbase, WP, Maplnfo, etc.)
required. Salary $33-35k (depending on qualifications), plus excel-
lent benefits. This is a grant funded position. Review of resumes to
begin immediately. Write to: Pratt Institute/PICCED, Planning
Search Committee/CL, 379 DeKalb Ave., 2nd Floor, B'klyn NY
11205. Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Women
and minority candidates are encouraged to apply.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. Hell's Kitchen community group seeks full-
time Tenant Organizer committed to empowerment of low income
tenants. Responsibilities: Creation of tenant associations; landlord
negotiations; rights counseling. Spanish helpful. Salary depends
on experience. Benefits. Send resume, cover letter to: Kyle E.
Stewart, Exec. Director, HCC, 777 10th Ave., NYC 10019.
CLASSIFIEDS
VISIONS OF HOME. Women and men in 50s & 60s for discussion/
action group focusing on reasonably-priced housing in cities.
Meetings coming up in NYC/D.C.lBaltimore. For particulars, send
stamped, self-addressed envelope (include your ideas) to: Visions
of Home, P.O. Box 65336, Baltimore MD 21209.
CITY UMITS/MAY 1993/31
T h e A s s o c i a t i o n f o r N e i g h b o r h o o d H o u s i n g a n d D e v e l o p m e n t
and
T h e C o m m u n i t y H o u s i n g A s s o c i a t i o n o f M a n a g e r s a n d P r o d u c e r s
Celebrate Twenty Years
of the New York City Community Housing Movement
Commemorating the 20th Anniversary
of the Community Management Program
W e d n e s d a y , M a y 1 9 t h , 5 : 0 0 P M
at the Brooklyn Borough Hall
209]oralemon Street
A reception for City Council members, the Borough Presidents,
mayoral and agency staff, the press, tenants and friends of the housing
movement will follow the program.
Call for additional information: (212) 463-9600
A s s o c i a t i o n f o r
N e i g h b o r h o o d &
H o u s i n g
D e v e l o p m e n t , In c .
236 W e s t 27t h St r e e t
N e w Yo r k, N Y 1 0 0 0 1
Sponsors:
ANHD and CHAMPwith a grant from Bankers Trust
and the support of the Borough Presidents and Brooklyn Union Gas