(Photo: Sipa USA via AP/Albin Lohr-Jones)
Joe Vazquez was leaving mass at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs church one Sunday in June when a stranger handed him a flyer for a community forum in his Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood. Vasquez, 34, had never taken part in anything he'd call political. But when he looked at the flyer and saw that the neighborhood where he had been born and raised could soon be rezoned for luxury high-rise apartments, he realized that his home-what he calls one of the last "relatively affordable" places in Manhattan-was in danger.
The person who handed him that flyer was with a neighborhood coalition called Northern Manhattan Is Not For Sale (NMN4S). The group formed this year to fight for affordable housing and against gentrification in Inwood, a working-class neighborhood that covers Manhattan's northern tip. NMN4S was protesting plans for a 17-story apartment tower slated for construction at 4650 Broadway-the address of a two-story parking garage on Vazquez's block.
Vazquez went to the forum and then quickly began joining in the group's protests to block construction of the high-rise, dubbed Sherman Plaza, which would have towered over a cluster of surrounding six-story buildings across the street from the 66-acre Fort Tryon Park. By the time Vasquez joined the effort, organizers had already scored one victory: pressuring developers to shrink the apartment tower from 23 stories to 17, with half of its 350 units set aside for affordable housing. But Vazquez and other activists feared that even the scaled-back project would pave the way for more luxury apartments, forever changing the face of the neighborhood. After months of rallies and petitions, the city council's land-use and zoning committees agreed, unanimously voting in August to nix the Sherman Plaza development.
It was a crucial victory for New York's affordable housing movement, which has gained momentum amid a city-wide development and gentrification boom that threatens to force out longtime residents. Sherman Plaza is just one part of a much larger effort to rezone and develop working-class neighborhoods in New York City. NMN4S first formed in January after Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a new rezoning plan. The plan, which took effect in March, cleared the way for up to 15 neighborhoods to be rezoned for residential growth or greater height and density. A hallmark of the plan is so-called Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), a requirement that developers include between 20 percent and 30 percent of below–market rate units in their new buildings. De Blasio has hailed it as major victory for his administration, and a key step toward slowing gentrification and increasing the city's stock of affordable housing.
But neighborhood advocates object that the required percentage of affordable units is too low, that even those units may cost too much for low-income families, and that de Blasio's plan will actually lead to more gentrification and displacement.
New York City faces crises of both affordable housing and homelessness. Over the last few decades, the city has lost 250,000 rent-stabilized units. As of July, some 60,456 New Yorkers, including more than 23,000 children, were sleeping in the city's shelters-87 percent more than a decade ago. Lack of affordable housing is the primary reason. Even more are sleeping on the streets:
In its 2015 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that the city's homeless population on a single night in January exceeded 75,000, accounting for 14 percent of homeless people in the entire country.
The Sherman Plaza case became a referendum on de Blasio's larger rezoning and affordable housing plan. Inwood was one of the 15 neighborhoods included in the plan. And 4650 Broadway was the first individual property to seek building approval under it.
Inwood, along with neighboring Washington Heights, is part of a New York City region called Community Board 12. Its residents' average income as of 2013 was $37,460, compared with a citywide average of $52,220 that same year. One-quarter of households live beneath the poverty line. And from 2002 to 2015, rent grew twice as quickly as inflation and increased much faster than household incomes. About 22 percent of area residents earn less than $18,540 a year, and another 21.6 percent make between $18,540 and about $38,000. In 2015, immigrants constituted 48 percent of the population; two-thirds came from the Dominican Republic.
In 2011, more than 86 percent of tenants lived in rent-stabilized apartments, meaning that their rents were below market rate. Stabilized apartments on one-year leases have enjoyed rent freezes in the last two years, but landlords still have many legal means to raise rents. These include raising the rent every time tenants leave or improvements are made. Once the rent reaches $2,700 a month, the apartment is destabilized and rent can jump up to market-rate.
Much of the debate around 4650 Broadway centered on the definition of affordable, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development bases on a calculation called Area Median Income (AMI). New York City's AMI takes into account not only the incomes of people living within its five boroughs, but also those of people in Westchester, Putnam, and Rockland counties, which are outside the city and on average have wealthier populations. Critics of this method argue that it skews the AMI upward, putting affordable housing out of reach for many city dwellers. AMI is currently $63,500 for an individual. In the original 23-story proposal, affordable units were reserved for those making 80 percent of the AMI-far more than what most Inwood residents earn.
"In what situation have luxury condominiums gone up and it's gotten better for the poorer people who live in the community?" asks Graham Ciraulo, an organizer with NMN4S, sitting on a park bench across from 4650 Broadway one evening in September. "It never does. What they're calling affordable isn't affordable."
According to Ava Farkas, an Inwood resident and executive director of Metropolitan Council on Housing, a tenants' rights organizations, affordable housing doesn't deserve that moniker if it isn't accessible to those with the most need. As she explains,
"The people who are having the hardest time staying in New York City and in our neighborhood are people making really low incomes."
Organizers say they worry that an influx of wealthier residents in new luxury apartments could lead not only to more luxury apartments but also to increasing rents throughout the neighborhood, and an influx of high-end retail. Pressure on rent-stabilized tenants, many of whom already face landlords anxious to kick them out in order to enact the legal rent increase, could also heighten.
"What we're worried about-this is people in my church, people on my block, people in the neighborhood-is a precedent being set," says Vazquez. "You've got one of these coming in and you have another one and you have another one and you have another one."
But organizers emphasize that they are not anti-development.
"We're actually pro working with nonprofit developers to build 100 percent affordable housing," says Ciraulo. "If it could be deeply affordable and there's enough of it, maybe it would work out." The likelihood of this happening, however, is not great. Nonprofit developers tend to rely on lower-paid, non-union construction workers. To pay union wages, developers would need larger government subsidies than the ones they already receive for affordable housing projects. For-profit developers also far outweigh their nonprofit counterparts, both in number and political power.
By August, NMN4S and other groups opposed to the Sherman Plaza development had so unified the neighborhood that the project had become a major litmus test for Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez, Inwood's representative. At a rally on the eve of the city council vote, amidst chants of "Ydanis, comprende, Inwood no se vende," he finally offered his opinion. "We have not been able to get to a point where I feel it is in the community's best interest to move this spot rezoning forward," he said. "Therefore, I tell you that as of this moment I will not be supporting the rezoning of Sherman and Broadway." The council has a tradition of deferring to the member from the neighborhood in question. The next morning, in keeping with this tradition, the other councilmembers also voted against the plan.
Community members attribute the victory to their widespread organizing efforts. "[Rodriguez] simply wouldn't get re-elected if that project was built. The neighborhood politics is somewhat segmented along racial and class lines, but there was really unprecedented unity against this project," says David Friend, who lives a block from Sherman Plaza and is a member of Inwood Preservation, another community group that joined the effort to block the project.
The victory at Sherman Plaza represents just one tiny step toward resolving New York City's housing crisis, but organizers say they are optimistic that its impact will be felt across the city. "It sends a big message to developers that community opposition is strong and that if you're going to come into a neighborhood, you better come with a better plan on the table," says Renata Pumarol, an organizer with New York Communities for Change, a group that supports tenants' rights in working-class neighborhoods. "If you're going to make millions and millions of dollars out of this rezoning, then it needs to be something that is convenient for us, that gives something back to the community. And that something is the affordable housing that we desperately need."
