Pratt Center for Community Development

Pratt Center eNews, Summer 2007

In this Issue:

• Community Planning and Beyond
• Cypress Hills Community School Gets Underway
• Meet the Pratt Center Staff: Andrea Anderson
• Brooklyn's Bounty
• Training: ABCs of Community Development
• Promoting Affordable Housing Through Smarter Subsidies
• PlaNYC's Opportunity for Transportation Equity

Community Planning and Beyond

A message from Pratt Center Director Brad Lander

On June 19, the Pratt Center sponsored an event that I found both exciting and frustrating.

Exciting, because it was exactly the kind of community planning the Pratt Center has been so effective at facilitating. At St. Mark's AME Church on Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights, we helped bring together nearly 200 Queens residents, workers and business owners for a workshop on the future of Willets Point. Located at the north end of Flushing Meadows Park, Willets Point has long been home to auto repair and wrecking shops, many of which depend on one another for business and services. The Bloomberg Administration proposes to acquire the entire area--via purchase or eminent domain--turn it over to a large developer, and make it into NYC's "next great green neighborhood," complete with convention center, hotels, office space, open space, and 5,500 units of "mixed-income housing."

The community workshop pulled in a broad spectrum of perspectives and ideas. Small groups at 18 tables brainstormed possible scenarios for Willets Point in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Residents of Corona, Flushing, Elmhurst and other neighboring communities weighed in, most vocally on the need for affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, and enough schools to accommodate a growing population. Local business owners and workers, who predominated at three tables, argued powerfully that they should be allowed to stay, and that their businesses could not survive relocation.

There were no easy answers. Yet those who attended seemed to share two core feelings. They were angry with the Bloomberg Administration's hubris in proposing to drop an "Emerald City"--one that looks a bit like a Manhattan neighborhood on green steroids--in between Flushing and Corona, with little regard for the hopes and needs of Queens communities. And participants had faith that communities, as a collective force, can have a meaningful say in planning.

There is no doubt that communities around New York City are planning like they haven't in years. Alternative, community-based plans were central to strong community advocacy in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning, the defeat of the West Side Stadium, and the opposition to Brooklyn Atlantic Yards. Community groups like Asian Americans for Equality have developed plans for rebuilding Chinatown, and earlier this month AAFE released a new community planning report on Flushing ("Will Gateway Give Way to Luxury Condos?"). And last week, the City Planning Commission began the official review process not only of Columbia University's proposal to build a new campus in West Harlem, but also simultaneously of Community Board 9's "197-a" community plan for the same area, which would give Columbia substantial additional space for development but as part of a much more mixed-use, mixed-ownership neighborhood.

These efforts raise some of the hardest questions facing New York City. Where and how should growth take place? What should be preserved--not only historic buildings, but spaces for manufacturing, and/or places for low-income people to live? How can communities achieve more of what they tell us they want--affordable housing, good jobs, parks, schools, and livable neighborhoods--when private developers say they mostly need to build market-rate housing, at higher-densities, with low-paying jobs in order to build anything at all? The Mayor's PlaNYC 2030 initiative does a good job at focusing on the broad challenges of environmental sustainability that the city's growth poses. (The Pratt Center generally supports the mayor's plan, including its most controversial element, congestion pricing.) But it does too little to involve communities in shaping a fair and balanced approach to the hard questions of how we'll grow.

What frustrates me is that that the community input, almost invariably, winds up being reactive. It happens in response to growth, and typically to large-scale plans put forward by developers or the City. No matter how much community planning the Pratt Center and grassroots organizations help make happen, no matter how many workshops and visioning sessions and community plans we create, developers and the City continue to set the terms on which development takes place. That's true even when the community does its work first. Community Board 9's 197-a plan was initiated more than a decade ago, before there was any hint of Columbia's expansion plans. And the community's plan was completed two years ago, only to sit dormant while the Department of City Planning permitted Columbia's planning to proceed without regard to the community's stated needs.

Can we get off of this treadmill? I hope so, but I'm not sure. I think that City officials fear that if they handed over the reins to community groups, we would oppose most new growth and development. And there is some evidence for this in the wave of downzonings across most Staten Island and large swaths of Queens and Brooklyn (where the Bloomberg Administration has been happy in too many cases simply to comply).

Stronger community planning will need to be balanced by a stronger effort to make sure that all communities see their "fair share" of both the benefits and burdens of growth--so that community involvement isn't simply a set of fights against things that people don't want ... a fight that wealthier and more powerful communities will generally win. Making sure neighborhoods carry their fair share isn't a new idea; in fact, the revised City Charter of 1989 insists on it: Section 197-a, of the Charter, which creates space for community planning, pairs that public involvement with new provisions to insure "fair distribution among communities of...burdens and benefits."

But we need to do something more to give new life to these aspirations. I believe that we can face up to the challenges of growth together, by

• acknowledging as citizens the need to do some hard things (like congestion pricing, and finding new room for development)
• developing a shared and proactive citywide plan that distributes the benefits and burdens of growth fairly, setting common standards both for things communities want (like affordable housing and good jobs) and things they don't (like waste transfer stations and power plants)
• investing communities in their future by including them in planning up front, rather than only after developers have been allowed to decide on what the plans look like.

All this will take ambitious and creative new leadership and action.

In the meantime, back at Willets Point, Pratt Center planners will be working with Queens community groups and businesses and unions and City Council members to hold more workshops over the summer. Even in this reactive space, we hope to bring people together around some shared priorities and plans for the future that will help shape what happens in this 61-acre corner of our city in a fairer way. We'll keep you posted on both the big and small plans.

Find out more about Pratt Center's work in Willets Point.

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Helping Communities Build
Cypress Hills Community School Gets Underway

This summer, construction is scheduled to begin on a permanent home for the Cypress Hills Community School. The $33.6 million project, initiated by Northeast Brooklyn parents, grew out of a community-driven process that brought Pratt Center architects together with the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation.

Parents eager to participate in developing a school's curriculum and in hiring and supervising its leadership founded Cypress Hills Community School in 1997. The school, serving about 250 students in grades K-8 with a dual-language curriculum, is run by a team of co-directors: one professional educator and one parent.

Yet on its tenth anniversary, Cypress Hills Community School still does not have a permanent home. It is currently in its third location, consisting of a few classrooms and trailers at a District 19 junior high school, with no access to a gym or library. In 2001, parents succeeded in getting a $20 million commitment from the City Council to turn an underutilized industrial building into a new school.

Like the governance and the curriculum, the new design of the new building was developed with active participation of parents and community members. Within the boundaries of what the New York City School Construction Authority will currently permit, the project's construction and use will be environmentally friendly. The school will be constructed with non-harmful building materials, and the redesign of the structure brings daylight to all classrooms and common spaces. Demolition debris will be recycled. Because the project reuses an existing building in a densely built location, many students and staff will be able to walk to school.

Pratt Center architects have completed plans for the conversion, which were recently approved by the School Construction Authority. Construction on the project is scheduled to start in summer 2007, with occupancy projected for September 2009.

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Equitable Development Policy and Advocacy
Meet the Pratt Center Staff: Andrea Anderson

The Pratt Center is pleased to welcome Andrea Anderson as our Director of Policy and Advocacy. This new position is part of the Pratt Center's expanding efforts to influence city and state policies in support of the community organizations and neighborhoods we serve.

Anderson's work will reach into areas of policy underlying the Pratt Center's collaborations with community-based organizations, including affordable housing, planning and zoning, and economic opportunity. "This position is a dream job for me," Anderson says, "because I have always believed that research can be an effective tool for advocacy and policy reform, I am looking forward to directing this body of empirical research because it blends my passion for rigor with my commitment to equity and social justice."

The director of policy and advocacy is starting with two new projects for the Pratt Center. One is a study on housing conditions and challenges for New York City's immigrants (in partnership with the NY Immigration Coalition and six community-based organizations). A second project, supported by the Independence Community Foundation, will explore ways for public housing residents to better share in the opportunities generated by New York City's growth and development.

Anderson notes that the Pratt Center's unique strategy of supporting citywide transformation through community-level planning, development and advocacy allows the groups who know the issues best to set an effective policy agenda.

"Community-based organizers and advocates, and residents themselves, are in a position to know exactly what policies need to be changed," she says. "We come in in the background to provide the technical and research assistance that can help figure out the right changes, and bundle together a compelling argument they can use public education and for constituency building. Solid research presented by impassioned grassroots advocates is the type of evidence of the need for policy reform that is pretty hard for politicians to walk away from."

Anderson comes to us from the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change, where she was a research associate for nine years. At the Roundtable, Anderson worked on training and technical assistance related to the theory of change approach to planning and evaluation, and, most recently, on analyzing community development challenges through the lens of structural racism.

Previously, she was a senior analyst in the housing, income security and employment division of at Abt Associates, a research and consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anderson has a PhD in evaluation and planning from Cornell University and a Masters Degree in Family and Community Development from the University of Maryland. Originally from Baltimore, Anderson now lives in Harlem with her partner, Victor Hamilton.

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Helping Communities Build
Brooklyn's Bounty

East New York Farms! opens for the season on June 30, bringing east Brooklyn residents to its farmers' market tents for collards, strawberries, fish and other fresh food. The market, in temporary space this year at the corner of New Lots Avenue and Schenck Street, runs every Saturday through November, selling produce from local growers as well as farmers from outside New York City.

Each season, 20 young interns help run the market, but their involvement goes far deeper. They also plant, harvest and supervise a local network of 10 community gardens producing vegetables for sale at the market, and till their own plots as well at United Community Centers' farm adjoining its headquarters on New Lots Avenue.

The Pratt Center has been involved in East New York Farms since 1995, when it helped facilitate a community planning process to envision new possibilities for the neighborhood. At a series of forums, local residents assessed the community's strengths and problems. One of most obvious was the vacant lots that pocked East New York at the time. But geographic information system analysis showed that many of these lots were being put to an important use: the neighborhood had the city's largest concentration of community gardens. East New York also had--and still has--a serious shortage of places to purchase fresh produce. Capitalizing on existing resources of land and labor, East New York Farms! was born. It is a partnership between United Community Centers, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and the Pratt Center.

With the help of Pratt Center architectural director Perry Winston, who worked on early plans for a forthcoming permanent space for the market, East New York Farms! is now reaching beyond its neighborhood boundaries. It is part of a new borough-wide farming network called Brooklyn's Bounty, which with support from the Project for Public Spaces is bringing together farms in Red Hook, East Flatbush and East New York to help the neighborhood markets better serve their communities. With rising public demand for the quality produce and community space farmers markets bring, and growing recognition of the need for healthy food in low-income communities, the number of farmers' markets in New York City has increased dramatically in recent years. Competition for vendors from the region's farms has grown especially fierce, and low-income neighborhoods in the outer boroughs--the very places that most urgently need farmer's markets--have found it extremely difficult to recruit enough sellers. Brooklyn's Bounty will help the farms' small self-run markets grow through marketing efforts to customers and recruitment of new vendors, turning them collectively into a more powerful force.

For more information on East New York Farms!, contact Sarita Deftary at 718-649-7979 or visit the East New York Farms! blog .

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Training and Education
ABCs of Community Development

On three Thursdays in May, the Pratt Center and the Association of Neighborhood and Housing Developers held a series of all-day workshops for staff and leaders of community development organizations who want to learn more about the context where they worked. The "ABCs of Community Development" brought 45 staff from community development corporations, supportive housing organizations, foundations, organizing groups, and financial intermediaries face to face with leaders and innovators in their field, who offered their behind-the-scenes stories of how they achieved community development victories and gave participants a better understanding of how to use tools from grassroots organization to collaboration to creative financing to increase their impact.

What did they learn? "That we need more legal muscle to back up our grassroots coalitions"; "what the acronyms stand for"; "innovative solutions to create and preserve affordable housing"; "the importance of coalition-building and points of opportunity for influencing decisions that impact communities" were just some of the responses. Responding to overwhelming interest, the Pratt Center plans to offer future opportunities for staff and volunteers to connect with and learn from leaders and peers.

To be notified about future training sessions, please contact Wendy Fleischer at [Sorry, display of this email address requires a Javascript-aware browser, in order to deter spam. Please use the general contact page instead.].

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Equitable Development Policy and Advocacy
Promoting Affordable Housing Through Smarter Subsidies

The debate over New York City's "421-a" property tax exemption program for new development has taken some twists and turns in recent weeks. After the City Council and the Mayor adopted a new law to reform the program in December, the spotlight turned to Albany. As the state legislature wrapped up its session in June, the Senate and Assembly reached agreement on a measure that would significantly extend the affordable housing obligations of New York City developers who use the 421-a tax exemption. But the bill, negotiated between Assembly Housing Chairman Vito Lopez and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), also includes new loopholes, the biggest one for Forest City's controversial Atlantic Yards project). These and other provisions that have HPD Commissioner Shaun Donovan calling for Governor Spitzer to veto the bill.

The bill would extend to all of Manhattan and large new areas of the outer boroughs the "exclusion zone" in which developers who receive the tax break are obligated to provide affordable housing (see map ). Today, the exclusion zone covers only 96th streets to 14th/Houston Streets in Manhattan; elsewhere, builders receive the benefit but have no obligation to produce any units below market rate.

Under the new measure, set to go into effect a year from now, 20 percent of the new units produced in buildings within the broader exclusion zone must be affordable to households earning less than 60 percent of New York's area median income, or $42,540 for a family of four (lowered from $56,000 in the City's law). The housing must remain affordable for 40 years (up from the current 20), and employees of buildings benefiting from the tax break must be paid a prevailing wage, as set by the city.

But in exchange, REBNY negotiated some large gifts and loopholes. The new rules won't go into effect until July 1, 2008, giving developers another year to take advantage of tax-breaks for nothing, so we'll likely see 12 months of frenzied building of market-rate housing at taxpayer expense. Forest City Ratner will get tax breaks even on its all-market-rate condo buildings worth at least $170 million (and possibly twice that much). Another loophole will reportedly aid mega-developer Toll Brothers, and other developers who can claim environmental remediation or litigation issues.

The Pratt Center has played a pivotal role over the past year in pushing for the 421-a tax program--which cost New York City $400 million in 2006--to produce much more housing that is affordable to low and moderate-income New Yorkers. The Center worked closely with ACORN, Habitat for Humanity, Housing Here and Now, Queens for Affordable Housing and others to campaign for reform. Pratt Center Director Brad Lander served on a Bloomberg Administration task force that explored potential reforms.

Task Force recommended extending the exclusion zone, ending the disastrously inefficient "negotiable certificates" program, capping the benefits on units outside the exclusion zone, and establishing an affordable housing fund with the new revenues. Pratt and allies called for even bolder reform. The City Council then passed a measure, largely based on the Task Force recommendations, but also lowering the cap on benefits and extending the exclusion zone to all of Lower Manhattan and much of Upper Manhattan, as well as downtown and brownstone Brooklyn, Williamsburg/Greenpoint, some of Bushwick, and the Queens waterfront.

Action is needed in Albany, because unless the law is extended the entire 421-a program will expire on December 31, 2007--in which case no new development could get a tax break, with or without affordable units. Assemblyman Lopez and REBNY are calling on the governor to sign the bill affirming their compromise. But HPD Commissioner Donovan, City Council Speaker Chris Quinn, and others are calling for a veto. HPD believes that the new exclusion zone goes too far, and is especially concerned that the state legislation would not allow HPD-subsidized middle-income housing developments to receive a tax break.

Affordable housing advocates and community groups find themselves in a tough bind. Many are distressed about the process, and angry about the loopholes and giveaways. At the same time, reform is sorely needed. The Pratt Center will continue to advocate for strong affordable housing requirements for developers who receive this tax break, or any government subsidies for development.

Find out more about Pratt Center's work on the 421-a tax program.

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Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Analysis for Action: PlaNYC's Opportunity for Transportation Equity

The Bloomberg Administration's ambitious PlaNYC 2030 initiative has created a precious opportunity to reshape transportation in New York City. The Pratt Center strongly supports Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for congestion pricing, which would charge cars and trucks entering the Manhattan central business district. Congestion pricing will reduce pollution in some of our most environmentally burdened neighborhoods. It will also generate funding that can leverage billions of dollars we need to invest in expanding and updating our transportation infrastructure, especially public transit. We urge our state legislators to approve congestion pricing in their July 16 special session, which will make the City eligible for $500 million in federal transportation funding.

But the plans for investing in transportation need to be fairer and smarter. The proposed new "SMART" authority to allocate congestion-fee revenues could be an opportunity to make sure that a fair share of the transit investments go to communities that most urgently need them. But as outlined in PlaNYC 2030, SMART would put the vast majority of its funds for new projects into high-cost, big-ticket items that will benefit relatively small numbers of (relatively wealthier) riders, while skimping on more modest improvements that would benefit larger numbers of average (and especially outer-borough) New Yorkers.

About $50 billion of transit expenditures are identified in PlaNYC. Fifteen billion is needed for essential road- and transit- maintenance projects, to achieve a "state of good repair," leaving $35 billion for new projects. Of this $35 billion, $30 billion would go to projects that enable or enhance major real estate developments, mostly benefiting white collar commuters. Just $5.3 billion will go to projects that directly improve mobility and quality of life for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers (see chart).

For example, at $7.5 billion, the proposed JFK rail link would benefit mostly affluent riders, and not very much: it would create a one-seat ride for about 5,000 airport riders and shave 5 minutes off the commutes of up to 100,000 Long Island Rail Road commuters. Meanwhile, less than $1 billion is anticipated for investment in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), even though the model promises to shorten commute times, especially for the more than 758,000 New Yorkers who now have commutes of an hour or more. BRT would initially be limited to a single route per borough, and will lack key features--such as physically separated lanes, and station-like stops where riders pay fares before the buses arrive--that make BRT work efficiently around the world.

Cutting out one or more of the high cost/low benefit projects would enable us to more than double that investment--bringing on real Bus Rapid Transit to neighborhoods where people now face commutes of 60 minutes or more; building a network of greenways and green streets that would make biking or walking viable options for ordinary folks, and linking lower-density neighborhoods to subway and commuter rail stations with new feeder bus service. New York City also needs to get serious about supporting the Cross-Harbor rail freight tunnel, a project that is conspicuously missing from PlaNYC. New York City will never reach PlaNYC's goals for reducing greenhouse gases and traffic congestion without diverting much of its truck freight off our highways and onto train tracks.

We have a unique chance right now to shift the city's priorities in a more sustainable direction--toward transit investments benefiting the entire city, especially those who need them most. The reality of transportation planning is that projects are bumped up or down the priority list by the force of interests who champion them. Communities that have the most to win or lose from these transportation choices will have to demand that the process by which transportation projects are prioritized become far more transparent and equitable than has been the case until now.

--Joan Byron, Director, Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative

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Events

• July 11: Community Economic Justice Film Series: "The House We Live In," documentary on ways U.S. institutions and policies advantage some groups at the expense of others, typically along racial lines. Sponsored by Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and followed by discussion with community groups and activists. Downtown Community Television Center, 87 Lafayette Street, Manhattan, 6 p.m. reception followed by screening at 6:30.
• July 25: "Does the Waterfront Work? Old, New and Endangered," Municipal Art Society boat tour of New York Harbor. Call 212-935-2075 for advance ticket purchase ($50; $40 members). Meet at Pier 83, 42nd St. and 12th Ave. Tour from 6-9 p.m.

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Contribute

Please support the Pratt Center for Community Development's vital work to help New York City's communities plan and build their own futures. Your gift enables us to continue supporting community organizations in pursuit of their visions, and to link their efforts to opportunities to influence city and state policies. To help us, visit our secure online donation page.

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