MEETING THE CITY HALFWAY
Hoff, Jeffrey
Meeting the City Halfway Manhattan's Lower East Side has always been a refuge for the poor. For more than 100 years, wave after wave of immigrants were tossed into the rows of tenements that line...
...For almost thirty years, a small community group has fought for the residents of the Lower East Side...
...In 1985, Cooper Square presided over the construction of 146 units of low-income housing in one of the more architecturally creative low-cost buildings in Lower Manhattan...
...JPC has filed suit to stop the project and led a demonstration last June against it...
...There would be more displacement of people...
...It's very difficult to work within the system and say things are really going to change," Chan cautions...
...After years of legal wrangling, Cooper Square was designated the tenant representative for 400 units in thirty cityowned and managed buildings in its small corner of the East Village...
...Cooper Square successfully resisted the plan...
...Young professionals spilling out of the city's more affluent districts bid up the price of apartments and displace the poorer residents...
...Skyrocketing real-estate prices allow landlords to earn fat profits by converting working-class homes to meet the lowered housing expectations of the upper middle class...
...In the late 1950s, the Cooper Square Development Committee faced its first struggle against gentrification when Robert Moses, New York's infamous power broker, sought to demolish some 2,000 units of low-cost housing and replace them with high-priced condominiums...
...In another project, the committee put pressure on the city for two years to designate an abandoned twenty-two-unit building for homeless families...
...Cooper Square is a very outspoken organization and has a sense of priorities and beliefs that are very explicit," says Lisa Kaplan, a member of the local Community Planning Board...
...The city had threatened to sell the buildings if Cooper Square did not offer an alternative...
...Today, a few of the initial Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants remain, while more recent black, Hispanic, and Asian arrivals dominate the neighborhood...
...Profits from rent or sale of these units would be used to renovate an equal number of low- or moderate-priced apartments...
...Today, Cooper Square has gone beyond saving old homes to creating new ones...
...The building was to have been sold to a developer, but Cooper Square bought it from the city for $ 11,000, managed the renovation, and opened it on November 1 as a publicly subsidized cooperative...
...At the same time, the neighborhood remains a haven for thousands of the city's homeless as Bowery hotels, two large city shelters, and a number of soup kitchens offer the few comforts remaining to the uprooted...
...Ironically, the rich and the poor now vie for space on the Lower East Side...
...Despite these setbacks, Orselli maintains Cooper Square has come a long way in dealing with the city...
...Cooper Square also has been instrumental in ensuring that new senior-citizen housing in the neighborhood is racially mixed...
...I think they were impressed that we came up with a plan that their experts said was viable," says Valerio Orselli, the executive director of Cooper Square...
...Like many community-development organizations across the nation once devoted to providing a broader array of social services, the group has shifted its focus to the costly but urgent task of providing housing...
...Under this so-called cross-subsidy plan, vacant city-owned land would be given to developers for market-rate units...
...After its battle with Robert Moses, for example, Cooper Square prepared a master plan for the community that sought to preserve the stock of low- and moderate-priced housing and allow for the revitalization of vacant and uninhabitable properties...
...For more than 100 years, wave after wave of immigrants were tossed into the rows of tenements that line the crowded streets...
...Jeffrey Hoff (Jeffrey Hoff is a free-lance writer in New York City...
...If it wasn't for groups such as ours, the tenement properties would not be maintained," says Elaine Chan, chairman of the Joint Planning Council (JPC), an umbrella organization of community groups in the Lower East Side...
...But this area of constant transition has succumbed to polarization as New York City's severe housing shortage exerts new pressures...
...For instance, the community board and the JPC jointly developed a plan to ensure that each unit of market-rate housing created in the Lower East Side would be complemented by a unit of low or moderate-priced housing...
...Kaplan, who is also a program officer for the Consumer Farmer Foundation in New York, was referring to occasions when Cooper Square insisted that buildings be designated for low-income households or the homeless though developers or other community groups wanted to save them for middle-income residents...
...But community groups say the Lefrak project violates the cross-subsidy agreement by not creating low-income units and increases gentrification in the community...
...All of these projects are in the less than rifteen-square-block region of the Lower East Side known as Cooper Square, served by the committee's eight staff members and $200,000 annual budget...
...Because of that it has often crossed paths with other groups in the community and developers and local landlords...
...But four years after it was announced, the plan has yet to be implemented, and the largest proposed city-subsidized project in the neighborhood violates the cross-subsidy concept...
...A 1,200-unit project proposed by developer Samuel Lefrak would include 400 units of market-rate condominiums and 800 subsidized-rental apartments for tenants with incomes of $15,000 to $49,000...
...They realize they can't get what they want without having cooperation from us...
...In its most recent project, the committee has almost completed negotiations with the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) for construction of 114 units of new low- and moderate-priced housing and the rehabilitation of 400 apartment units...
...Cooper Square organizers find that the city must constantly be pushed to maintain its commitment to housing low-income families and the homeless...
...The respect Cooper Square has earned within the city government and the Community Planning Board stems from the organization's willingness to perform functions the city was not willing or able to take on...
...We are not going to get everything we want but we are willing to meet the city halfway," he says...
Vol. 52 • December 1988 • No. 12
