Letter from the Editors
Dear Reader,
Our city is facing a crisis of displacement. Our mission for the Dispatch Against Displacement is to unite local issues into a Citywide platform against overdevelopment and its negative impacts on our community.
Mayor de Blasio campaigned on a promise of making New York “the fairest city in the world.” Yet four years into his tenure, his policies have raised rents and real estate taxes that make the city fair only for developers.
To appear to preserve housing, de Blasio provides a few barely affordable apartments while he rezones one neighborhood at a time in order to stop communities from coming together. We might win small battles locally by stopping an eviction or securing rent stabilization for a building. Yet without a citywide strategy, the fight against displacement remains daunting and those small victories can be easily rolled back, because the Mayor's political agenda remains untouched: it leads to the ongoing removal of residents, small businesses and workers.
What results is a loss of the very communities that people build up and sustain. People across New York City all face this crisis: losing the New York we have always known, the city where we have worked, immigrated to, grew up, raised our children or grandchildren, studied, slept, aspired, and loved.
This Dispatch serves as the official newsletter for the Citywide Alliance Against Displacement. A coalition of community groups across the five boroughs, we have come together as New Yorkers to unite local issues into a citywide platform against overdevelopment and its negative impacts on our communities. We demand an end to top-down rezoning plans that enrich developers, the sale of public land including NYCHA, the mass eviction of tenants, and instead, the passage of community-led rezoning plans that put people first.
Let’s unite to protect our city from erasure of the very people and neighborhoods that have always made New York, New York.
Yours in solidarity,
The Editors
Dispatch Against Displacement
Articles:
Hypocrisy in East Harlem
East Harlem Solidarity and Defense
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Hypocrisy in East Harlem Rezoning
In November 2017, the de Blasio administration boasted that the East Harlem Rezoning Plan would be the most progressive affordable housing effort in the country. This plan would incentivize developers to build new affordable housing for residents, while economically revitalizing the neighborhood and preserving its cultural identity.
Harlem Solidarity and Defense began working to demonstrate that this rezoning would be far from progressive, destroying the neighborhood instead of saving it. The plan does create affordable housing, but the metric used to determine the pricing does not reflect the true income levels of residents. It serves to accelerate, rather than combat, the rate of gentrification in East Harlem.
The impact of the rezoning on gentrification is two-fold: it both incentivizes developers to construct housing priced far above current residents’ financial capacities, and raises the property values of existing housing, thereby promoting displacement. The latter is the root cause of landlord harassment. Landlords refuse to repair their buildings, claim residents owe back-rent, and use other tactics in order to force out low-income and rent-stabilized tenants, in favor of wealthier ones. Therefore this “progressive affordable housing effort” in fact threatens the stability of already existing affordable units, and replaces them with marked-up prices for higher income tenants.
These issues are particularly daunting when placed in context. The majority of rent-stabilized and rent-controlled housing is set to expire between 2020 and 2040, a key deadline that the rezoning plan chooses to ignore.
Given the fact that the rezoning of East Harlem neither provides housing for its low-income residents, nor legitimately preserves the little low-cost housing that does exist, the notion the EHRP was implemented to develop East Harlem to benefit its current residents is patently false.
Refuting the claims of developers with deep pockets, and a Mayoral administration with deceitful tactics, is a daunting task. However Harlem Solidarity and Defense works in East Harlem with the understanding that collective power must be cultivated and deployed outside of the traditional systems of power in order to serve those that are oppressed by these systems.
For this reason, the fight against this rezoning will not be in a court. The laws are heavily skewed toward the interest of property owners, and legal arguments raised against the plan have already been raised and denied. When the Legal Aid Society’s Law Reform Unit challenged the rezoning’s claim that “only 27
Photo by Harlem Solidarity and Defense
residents, in 11 apartments, would be indirectly displaced,” the Supreme Court still ruled in favor of the developer-backed rezoning.
To combat misinformation and hopelessness, Harlem Solidarity and Defense seeks to educate residents in order to unify them around a common goal, and self-advocate for their rights to affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Work consists of bi-monthly food distributions at the corner of 110th Street and Lexington Avenue, where we conduct outreach to learn from residents about how gentrification and displacement are impacting their lives. This direct outreach to the people that live and care about their community has created a clear picture of the common struggles that tenants face in East Harlem.
Call to action: Join Harlem Solidarity and Defense at their bi-monthly (every other Saturday) food distribution on the corner of 110th Street and Lexington Ave. The next distribution will be on August 11th.