Housing "Cops"

C
uomo meets Clint Eastwood at the Justice Department, and
landlords shake in their shoes. Or so went the spin last month
when HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Attorney General
Janet Reno announced a new enforcement program targeting delinquent
owners of HUD-subsidized properties. The cabinet officials even
draped a "Get Tnugh" sign over the podium.
"If you misuse Federal resources, we will find
___ ---"'"' .. ,, - out, we will track you down and we will make you
pay," Cuomo said.

Let's hope he means it. The enforcement pro-
gram is needed, and Cuomo deserves a nod for
ED ITO R I A L looking more closely at landlords who receive sub-
sidies for low-income tenants-but fail to provide
them with decent housing.
It's appallmg, however, that such enforcement hasn't always been
routine. The problem Cuomo is addressing is an old one. Indeed, more
often than not, HUD officials have been complicit in landlord abuses.
Four years ago, City Limits ran a cover story titled "Malign
Neglect: The federal government gives landlords high rents .. . and lets
the buildings rot." We surveyed 19 privately owned, HUD-subsidized
properties managed by one Brooklyn company, BPC Management, and
found severely deteriorated conditions in eight of them. The manage-
ment company and the property owners were raking in millions of fed-
eral dollars on these properties. The owners of the 192-unit Willard J.
Price Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant received a $1.74 million annual
subsidy from HUD to provide low-income housing. But the place was
coming apart, with a leaking roof, broken-down kitchens, inconsistent
heat and little security.
At the press conference last month, Cuomo said he was setting up
new procedures to make it harder for landlords to hide their sins from
regulators. Problem is, these sins were never hidden. Regarding Willard
J. Price and other developments, HUD had stacks of internal reports
outlining the terrible housing conditions, including several that rated
the complexes as "below average." Did that slow the federal subsidies,
or bring aggressive demands by regulators for immediate repairs? Not
at all. HUD filed the reports .. . and accomplished nothing.
Corlandress Pittman, a 73-year-old tenant at Willard J. Price, tells
us little has changed at his housing complex since we wrote our 1993
article. The same management company remains in place. The stair-
wells have deteriorated, the leaks persist, the playground is an asphalt
lot bereft of play equipment.
"It's always been my opinion HUD's been working hand in hand
with the management;' Pittman says. "They never punished them. They
never did anything. They're all in cahoots."
More than two decades too late, HUD may finally be recognizing its
regulatory responsibility. The taxpayers help pay the rent for these ten-
ants through the federal subsidies. We all deserve to be assured condi-
tions are safe and decent, and that the landlords are not pocketing so
much in profit-or losing so much through incompetence-that their
tenants end up paying a horrible price.
Andrew White
Editor
(ity Limits
Volume XXII Number 4
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CITY LIMITS
APRIL 1997
FEATURES
7 Deadly Signs of New York City's
Unheeded Housing Crisis ~
Rents are rising, wages declining, and the pols in Albany are preparing
to slice and dice the city's number-one housing subsidy: welfare. As activists
battle to preserve rent stabilization, even greater threats to low-income tenants
lurk just around the comer. By Glenn Thrush
Burned Out
Is a home just a roof and four walls? Newark's 322 Irvine Turner Boulevard
was dilapidated and overpriced, but it was home to 20 families, a vessel
brimming with decades of memories. Until the day after Christmas, when
fire gutted the building. Photos and text by Helen M. Stummer
The Belles of St. Edwards
The politicians want welfare moms to pull themselves out of dependency.
But in the fall of 1995, with Congress crafting an end to the nation's guaranteed
welfare benefits, Philadelphia activist Cheri Honkala and an organized
band of homele s mothers took a more creative approach to "self-help" than
the politicians ever had in mind. By David Zucchillo
PIPELINES
Stop Payment ~
Scheduled cuts in Food Stamps and disability benefits have given legal
immigrants good reason to panic. By Adam Fifield
Showdown on Aisle Five
A church group leading Harlem's Bradhurst redevelopment project
is trying to convince the city of the perils of Pathmark. Superstore supporters
charge the group being power hungry at the expense of cheap food. By April Tyler
COMMENTARY
Cityview 12&
A Fitting Memorial By Charles Komano/f
Review 127
Eyeing Race By E.R. Shipp
Spare Change 130
Escape Grace By Glenn Thrush
DEPARTMENTS
Briefs &. 7 Editorial 2
Cloud Over Bronx Air Study Letters 4
Crew's Detention Period Professional
Dawn of the Cyber-Dole
Directory 28
Jail-In Vote Job Ads 29

Applications Sought
for Ninth Leadership
New York Program
Leadership New York is a competitive educational and leadership training pro-
gram co-sponsored by Coro and the New York City Partnership and Chamber of
Commerce. In the nine-month program, during which participants are expected
to remain employed full-time in their current professions, a diverse group of
mid-career executives from the public, private and nonprofit sectors explores
critical issues confronting the city.
Through site visits, interviews and panel discussions, participants study the
city's educational, social service, health care and criminal justice systems,
infrastructure, economic development and New York's changing demographics.
Leadership New York welcomes applications from candidates with a demon-
strated concern about New York City, a record of professional achievement and
the potential to playa significant role in the city' s future. The program beings
September 1997.
For further information and applications, please contact:
Carol Hoffman, Associate Director,
Leadership New York, Coro:
(212) 248-2935
Application Deadline: June 1997
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Ma .. ch P .. al
LETTERS i
,
The March issue of City Limits was
excellent. Your magazine is one of the few
publications I always read. However,
there are times that the magazine seems
not to pay sufficient attention to housing
issues. This issue was wonderfully com-
prehensive, balanced and representative
of the vast array of issues and concerns
confronting all of those engaged in com-
munity development and affordable hous-
ing. I have made it required reading for all
of my staff.
Harold DeRienzo
President, The Parodneck Foundation
New York, NY
F.b .. ual'Y,Too
I thought the piece on Father Gigante
in the February issue ["Murphy's Flaw"]
was very, very good. You're publishing
some of the best investigative pieces I see
anywhere. The entire magazine seems
more energized than ever. I look forward
to each issue.
lonathan Kozol
Byfield, MA
City Limits Is Mg ... to hM ..
f .. om you, whfth ... you Ilk.
.omfthlng w.'v. w .. ltt.n or
hat. u. for publl.hlng It. S.nd
you .. Int .... to: City Limits,
120 Wall Str t, 20th Floor,
M.w York City 10005 .
CORRECTIOM:
The March issue of City Limits
incorrectly stated that the organization
SRO Tenants United (SROTU) is
funded by the West Side and East
Side SRO Law Projects. In fact,
SROTU does not formally receive
funds from anyone, and depends on
volunteers. The group receives a small
amount of in-kind support from the
West Side SRO Law Project.
CITY LIMITS
t
Leroy and Kenneth Morrison
of Lemor Realty surveying
construction at W. 140th St.
CALL: CHASE REAL ESTATE
LENDING UNIT 212-622-3741
Moving in the right direction
Building like father, like son.
Leroy and Kenneth Morrison are a father and son team that is work-
ing with Chase's Community Development Group to make a differ-
ence in the community they ~ I I home.
The Morrisons are part of New York City's Neighborhood
Entrepreneur Program. Working closely with the city and the New
York City Housing Partnerst'\ip, Chase helped create this program,
which is designed to transfer ownership of clusters of city-owned
vacant and occupied buildings to experienced neighborhood-based
property managers/owners.
It all boils down to desire and commitment. The Morrisons' desire to
do the tough things it takes to be responsible contractors and build-
ing managers. The Chase Manhattan Bank's commitment to have a
long-term relationship with people who invest in themselves and their
communities.
Through innovative financing programs and relationships with people
like Leroy and Kenneth Morrison, Chase's Community Development
Group is redefining the concepts of affordable housing and local
entrepreneurship. We call that doing business right.
: ........................ ~ Community Development Group
CHASE. The right relationship is everything.
sM
Q 1997 The Chase Manhattan Bank. Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender r=:r
APRIL 1997


Last month, workfare workers at a Sanitation Department garage In the
Bronx told Michael Melendez of Borough President Fernando Ferrer's
office tlley thougll! the program was no better than 'legalized slavery"
ACORN organizers asked Ferrer to show, but he sent Melendez Instead
(LOUD OVER BRONX AIR STUDY
People in the South Bronx com-
munities of Hunts Point, Mott
Haven, and Port Morris say they
don't need a st udy to know they
have a problem with asthma. They
do wonder about the causes, how-
ever, and they are demanding
greater involvement in a new state
study designed to determine exact-
ly that.
Given the 31 waste-transfer and
garbage disposal centers in the
area, residents have long assumed
the high rates of upper respiratory
distress are a direct result of air
contamination. Yet they lack hard
scientific evidence. With an
$800,000 research grant from the
federal Toxic Substances and
Disease Registry, the state
Department of Health hopes to
change this. The agency is plan-
ning a three-year study, beginning
in May, to find the relationship
between specific air contaminants
Resour(es
PERHAPS THIS IS WHY MAYOR GIULIANI
WAS NEVER EXCITED ABOUT THE IDEA
of a nonpartisan city Independent
Budget Office (lBO): lBO's first salvo at
City Hall says the mayor's sanguine
budget predictions for 1998 through
2001 ignore a huge $700 million bud-
get gap for next year alone. Worse,

and asthma attacks.
But community leaders say the
project is seriously flawed
because its designers never
sought community input. "We have
something to add. There is a lot of
knowledge [about asthma) in the
community." says Marian Feinburg
of the South Bronx Clean Air
Coalition. " One of the things that
happened as a result of communi -
ty agitation [in the past) is that
there started being money around
for asthma prevention and
research .... lfs really important to
us that it gets done right. " She
says it took 25 persistent calls to
Albany justto get DOH representa-
tives to come to the Bronx in
February to explain their plan.
Coalition members fear the
study may be useless because of
where the air monitoring station is
located, on the roof of IS 155 on
Jackson Avenue. "IS 155 seems like
the IBO predicts a steadily rising city
budget deficit, culminating in a nearly
$4 billion shortfall in 200t
The agency, which Giuliani unsuc-
cessfully sought to kill, says the city
will likely bring in $258 million less
than predicted next year and will
spend $443 million more than
planned. IBO says part of the problem
is an underestimation of the impact of
welfare reform and an overestimation
7
(REW'S DETENTION PERIOD
New York City schools chief Rudy
Crew apparently didn't enjoy being
called in for a parent-chancellor
conference last month.
On March 3, Crew met with
around 2oo members of the Parents
Organizing Consortium, an umbrella
group of parents groups in
Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and
the Bronx. Meeting at a Tribeca ele-
mentary school, the parents posted
a six-foot-tall report card to record
Crew's responses to questions
about school construction projects,
textbook shortages and efforts to
give parents new powers in their
children's schools.
The meeting- which took place
after he postponed two previously-
scheduled POC pow-wows-was
contentious from the beginning. But
the most heated exchange took
place when Bronx parents com-
plained about the School
Construction Authority's long delays
on Bronx school projects. Parents
suggested that Crew, who is one of
the SCA's three trustees, make PS 54
in Bedford Park a "test case" for the
continued existence of SCA. They
urged Crew to call for the abolition
it may not be where the most pollu-
tion is and where the sick people
are," Feinburg says.
The state researchers will col -
lect air contamination data from the
South Bronx and compare it to
information gathered at Mabel
Dean Bacon High School in lower
Manhattan. They will compare the
data with local emergency room
data from asthma attacks. Over 16
contaminants thought to affect
asthmati cs will be measured,
including ones not previously mea-
sured in relation to asthma.
Faith Schottenfeld, a public
health specialist for the health
department, explains that the
process of obtaining grant money
of revenues from airport rent. Giuliani
predicts the city will bring in $310 mil-
lion from airport rent payments in IT
98 but the IBO says that number is
really closer to $40 million. For a copy
of the report call (212) 442-0629.
LOOKING FOR A JOB? ON THE FACE OF IT,
NEW YORK LOOKS LIKE A REASONABLE
BET, what with its economy growing
by 3.6 percent last year. But don't
of the independent agency ifthe 600-
student school now under construc-
tion isn't ready to open on schedule
in early 1999.
"You can't just issue ultima-
tums," Crew shot back.
The schools boss also refused
parents request to push the mayor to
reinstate funding for another Bedford
Park elementary school construction
project, which was defunded by
Mayor Giuliani early in his term. "The
answer," he intoned, "is no."
The multi-ethnic District 10,
which stretches from Riverdale
down to Fordham, is among the most
overcrowded in the city. Many par-
ents are angry that the problem is
not being solved.
"He was not respectful of peo-
ple's frustration, their fear or their
long suffering," says Lois Harr, an
activist with Northwest Bronx
Community and Clergy Coalition.
Crew wasn't exactly enchanted
by the encounter either. Referring to
future meetings, he says, "[Next
time, I want) a little more to do with
the agenda and how we hold the
meeting."
--Jordan Moss and Glenn Thrush
was so rushed that it was virtual -
ly impossible to involve the com-
munity.
According to Schottenfeld, the
site will not be changed because
there are no other state-certified
monitoring stations in the area.
After getting an earful of criti-
cism at the February meeting,
Schottenfeld said the state would
address some resident concerns.
For example, she said, the state
would consider collecting data on
particulate emissions from the
Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Waste
Incinerator in a bid to determine if
there are any links between the
emissions and asthma.
-Mary Blatch
start spending your paycheck till you
land that gig. Over the course of the
year, the total number of jobs city-
wide grew a paltry 0.7 percent. And
more people than ever are competing
for the few that are available. For a
sobering, fact- filled quarterly report
on the state of the city's finances, get
on the mailing list for Comptroller
Alan Hevesi's "Economic Notes." Call
(212) 669-2939,
CITY LIMITS

DAWN OFTHE
CYBER-DOLE
The state's massive effort to turn
food stamps and welfare checks
into ATM-type debit cards could
result in unforeseen dangers for
low-income New Yorkers, advo-
cates charge.
"It's not an inherently bad idea,
but it has a lot of scary problems
that are going to have to be fixed,"
says Liz Krueger, a welfare activist
who sits on the state committee
overseeing the implementation of
the electronic benefits transfer
(EBT) system.
Krueger and other welfare advo-
cates believe the new system, which
is mandated by the federal welfare
law and is due to begin in parts of the
city in July, should be carefully scru-
tinized before it is implemented.
Sarah Ludwig, executive direc-
tor of the Neighborhood Economic
Development Advocacy Project,
points to the fact that Congressional
Republicans eliminated all con-
sumer protections from the welfare
legislation, leaving welfare recipi-
ents liable for debits run up on
stolen cards. And while Congress
placed a ban on fees for use of food
stamps, they left open a loophole
that allows Citicorp-which will run
the system-to impose an 85-cent
fee on each welfare account trans-
JAIL-IN VOTE
A Harlem group is hoping to
ensure that people who are locked
up aren't unfairly locked out of their
voting rights.
The Community Justice Center,
founded by a group of ex-prisoners
concerned with criminal justice
abuses, is targeting a voter educa-
tion drive to the 30,000 people
housed in New York county jails, in
the hopes of getting the largely dis-
enfranchised group in touch with
their political power.
Short Shots
THE GREEN APPLE DOESN'T ROT FAR
FROM THE GRIZZLED TREE.
Last week, the New York Post
reported that young DeCosta
Headley, Jr" was fired for dipping
twice at the public trough-first as
an aide for deposed Brooklyn state
APRIL 1997
F
Council Speaker Peter Vallone tflPS to tell IllS side of the rent reuulatlon story to skeptical Queens tenant activists
shortly before the Council voted III favor of renewing rent stabilization and rent control last month The speaker
refused to go along With the tenants call for a roll back of vacancy and luxury decontrol measures that Vallone
pushed through the council III 1994 Still, the real rent regulation battle will be III tile state legislature, which must
renew the laws before they expire III June
action that exceeds the four free
withdrawals per month granted by
the company.
In addition, Krueger says, there
are no prohibitions against local mer-
chants from gouging welfare recipi-
ents who use their cards to buy gro-
ceries or other products off their card.
Under state law, convicted felons
are barred from voting for the dura-
tion of their sentence and parole. But
alleged offenders with no prior con-
victions who are awaiting trial in jail
are still eligible to vote. The problem
is that they rarely exercise their fran-
chise, says Eddie Ellis, a founding
member of the center.
"It's an invisible constituency that
can make a serious difference in
many local races," says Ellis, a one-
time Black Panther who himself
served 19 years in prison.
According to recent research, the
majority of men stowed away in New
Senator Howard Babbush, second as
a constituent services specialist for
Manhattan Borough President Ruth
Messinger.
The EBT contract is one of the
largest welfare privatization con-
tracts in the country. Under an
unusual arrangement, Citicorp has
received contracts with a consortium
of seven northeast states that will be
worth nearly $1 billion over its first
seven years, according to American
York City jails come from just nine
neighborhoods-Hariem, Washington
Heights and the Lower East Side in
Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant,
Brownsville and East New York in
Brooklyn, the South and Central Bronx
and South Jamaica, Queens.
"Given the extreme number of
people you've seen incarcerated
from poor communities over the last
20 years, it does begin to have an
impact on access to political power,"
says Bob Gangi, executive director of
the Correctional Association, an
advocacy and research organization.
Giving the vote to even a sma!1
DECOSTA THE YOUNGER, WHO WAS
FIRED FROM HIS MESSINGER JOB
when the news broke, happens to be
the son of East Brooklyn Democratic
power broker DeCosta Headley, Sr., the
featured subject of a February 1996
(jty limits expose about political cor-
ruption in East New York. The father,
we reported then, was fond of bro-
Banker magazine. In February, a
group of New York City check-cash-
ing vendors successfully sued to
block the system, but state
Department of Social Services has
the right to proceed with EBT until an
appeal is heard later this year.
-Glenn Thrush
percentage of the behind-bars elec-
torate could conceivably have signif-
icant political impact. In those nine
neighborhoods, which elect 20 rep-
resentatives to the State Assembly
and six to the State Senate, typical
turnouts for state races are 5,000 to
10,000 people. In contested races,
the margin of victory can be as small
as several hundred votes.
In the coming months, the cen-
ter's workers, most of them ex-cons,
will hold voter education sessions in
city jails. Eventually, they hope to get
the AFL-CIO interested in the project.
-Sasha Abramsky
kering jobs with his friends in govern-
ment. The son seems equally adept at
taking them-including a special-
election appointment to Community
School District 19, a position his
father once held. Ah, fresh blood.
B
Illna A rolovich
advocates for
Jewish immigrallls
from the former
Soviet UniOlL
:M
r
ens of thousands of New
York's immigrants are bracing
for the loss of disability bene-
fits and Food Stamps during
the next few months. As advo-
cates scramble to assess the damage and
roll back the worst of the cuts, they are
seeing some disturbing first signs of dis-
tress. Caseworkers at nonprofit organiza-
tions report receiving letters from elderly
immigrants considering suicide. And some
immigrant victims of domestic violence
are contemplating returning to their batter-
ers because they cannot otherwise support
themselves without Food Stamps.
In New York City, immigrants from the
Dominican Republic, the former Soviet
Union, China, and Korea will be among
the hardest hit.
Between April and August 22, food
stamps and SSI will be terminated for legal
immigrants unless they become citizens or
prove that they fit into one of the categories
of non-citizens who are exempt-refugees
who have been here five years or less, vet-
erans of the U.S. military, or people who
have worked in the U.S. for at least 10
years. About 80,000 immigrants statewide
will not be eligible for any of the exemp-
tions, estimates the New York Immigration
Coalition, an organization of 120 immigrant
advocacy groups and service providers.
Citizenship applications can now take
as long as nine months due to backlogs
resulting from criminal background
checks, says Immigration and
Naturalization Service spokesperson Mark
Thorn. And a recently announced INS rule
forbidding legal immigrants with mental
impairments, retardation or Alzheimer's
disease from taking an oath of allegiance
means that citizenship will be off limits for
some of the most vulnerable immigrants.
Losing Ben.,its
Since February, the Social Security
Administration has sent letters to 130,000
legal immigrants across the state-I 10,000
of them in New York City-who receive
Supplemental Security Income (SSn, an
income support program for people with
disabilities, notifying them that they could
lose their benefits starting this month.
Approximately 74,000 of the statewide
total are elderly and disabled; the other
56,000 are children and non-elderly adults
with disabilities. Under SSI, a single person
in New York state receives $556 a month.
In addition, the state is scheduled to cut
off Food Stamps later this year for 250,000
legal immigrants, 200,000 of whom live in
the city. Food Stamp benefits average $80
per person per month and $240 per family.
An alliance of public interest groups,
including the New York Legal Assistance
Group, the Legal Aid Society, the Center
for Disability Advocacy Rights, and the
Center for Constitutional Rights, is prepar-
ing to file a lawsuit in federal court on
behalf of legal immigrants against the U.S.
Department of Health and Human
Services. The lawsuit will contend that the
new welfare law violates the Fifth
Amendment and the equal protection
F
clause of the 14th Amendment by discrim-
inating agai nst legal immigrants in the
administration of benefits.
Cut-Oft Extended
Last month, Governor George Pataki
obtained a waiver from the Clinton
Administration which allows counties to
extend the food stamp cut-off date from
April until August. While some counties
won't take advantage of the option, Mayor
Giuliani does plan to use the waiver for
New York County, says Human Resources
Administration spokesperson Renelda
Higgins Walker.
The waiver is a good first step, says
New York Immigration Coalition
Executive Director Margie McHugh. "But
no one should be fooled. It does nothing to
help us with the long-term picture."
"It's not appropriate to give the gover-
nor kudos on this," says Liz Krueger of the
Community Food Resource Center. Pataki
is trying to claim the waiver is good for
immigrants, she says, but "these people
will get screwed sooner or later."
Pataki included an item in his state bud-
get that would provide $352 a month in
non-cash assistance to elderly and disabled
immigrants who lose more than $550 a
month in SSI benefits. The program would
pay for necessities such as rent, food and
medical bills. To be eligible, however,
immigrants will have to spend down aU
their savings and prove they are destitute.
McHugh's coalition is asking Pataki for
a food stamp contingency plan and a "seam-
less transition" for immigrants moving from
SSI to the proposed non-cash alternative.
It's unfathomable, says McHugh, that
130,000 elderly and disabled people "are
supposed to rise out of their wheel chairs" to
re-apply for relief. But Pataki, who has
appealed to President Clinton for a reinstate-
ment of benefits, has said he considers the
plight of legal immigrants a federal problem
that should be solved with federal dollars.
Giuliani has so far not committed any city
dolJars, says Immigration Coalition
spokesperson Mark Lewis.
Kalpana, an Indian woman in her mid-
thirties who asked that her last name not be
used, endured four years of physical and
emotional abuse at the hands of her hus-
band after emigrating here in 1991. "He hit
me and he hit our son," she says. "He
would lock me up when he went out. He
gave me no keys." She fled her batterer
and entered the shelter system in 1995; she
thought her nightmare of domestic abuse
was over. Now, faced with the loss of her
Food Stamps and not knowing how she
wilJ feed her 4-year-old, Kalpana says she
CITY LIMITS

might have to return to her abuser.
Inna Arolovich, who helps run a Manhattan-
based advocacy group for Jewish immigrants from
the former Soviet Union, says she has received
thousands of letters since news of the cut-off
began circulating. Many of them are frightening.
One elderly woman wrote: "I don't have any
choice [butl suicide. I measured already-and I
am short and can drown in my bathtub." The
neighbor of another woman who attempted sui-
cide the night before a naturalization interview
wrote: "That night...she cut blood vessels and lig-
aments on hands and legs. When emergency came,
she was in blood bath."
"This is government-assisted suicide," says
Arolovich. ''These people are Holocaust survivors
and people who were persecuted in Stalin's gulag.
Now they are persecuted by the American govern-
ment." After attaining American citizenship II
years ago, she says that for the first time in her life,
"I am ashamed to be an American." .
Adam Fifield is a freelance writer based
in New York.
New York
La"'Yers
for the
Public
Interest
provides free legal referrals for community-
based and non-profit groups
seeking pro bono representation.
Projects include corporate, tax
and real estate work, zoning advice, housing
and employment discrimination,
environmental justice,
disability and civil rights.
For further information,
call NYLPI at
(212) 727-2270.
There is no charge
for NYLPI's
services.
APRIL 1997
of
NEW YORK
INCORPORATED
Your
Neighborhood
Housing
Insurance
Specialist
For 20Years
We've Been There
ForYou.
R&F OF NEW YORK, INC. has a special
department obtaining and servicing insurance for
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community groups. We have developed competitive
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of the special needs of our customers. We have
been a leader from the start and are dedicated to
the people of New York City.
For Information call:
Ingrid Kaminski, Executive Vice President
R&F of New York
One Wall Street Court
New York, NY 10005-3302
212 269-8080 800 635-6002 212 269-8112 (fax)
CAl\IPAIGN FINANCE BOARD
{)FFERS HELP
F()R CANDIDATES
The New York City Campaign Finance Board is conducting a series of Candidate Information
Seminars for potential candidates for the offices of mayor, public advocate, comptroller,
borough president, and City Council member. The seminars are designed to help candidates
and their campaign staffs learn about NYC's voluntary Campaign Finance Program and
how candidates who join the Program can qualify to receive public funds to help finance
their campaigns for public office.
)1)97 C \:\DIDATE SK\IIN,\i{ SCHEDl' LE:
-Monday, April 7, 6:00p.m., Queens Borough Hall 120-55 Queens Blvd, Kew Gardens
Wednesday, April 16, 6:00p.m., Staten Island Bor ough Hall 10 Richmond Terrace, S. I.
-Wednesday, April 23, 6:00p.m., Campaign Finance Board"
-Monday, April 28, 6:00p.m., Campaign Finance Board"
"40 Rector St., 7th floor, Lower Manhattan
April 30, 1997 is the deadline for most candidates
to join the Campaign Finance Program
for the 1997 municipal elections.
o NEW YORK CITY
e CAMPAIGN FINANCE BOARD

PIPEliNE ,
,
Reverend Preston
Washington, CEO
oJ Harlem
Congregations Jor
Community
ImplVvement, ar
155th Street and
Bradhursr Avenue,
the alrernarive
Parhmark site PIV-
posed by HCCI
and Community
Board 10.
[ .
7
Showdown on Aisle Five
A Harlem church group says it won't surrender to the mega-market fans. By April Tyler
R
ebuilding Bradhurst has
always been a contentious
business, so no one expected
the development of the
neighborhood's first major
supermarket in years to go forward with-
out a fight.
After becoming a symbol of urban
decay in the 1970s, the section of Central
Harlem that stretches from about 140th
Street and Edgecombe and Bradhurst
avenues to 155th Street has been coming
back. Over the last 10 years, the neigh-
borhood has seen the rehabiUtation of
over 1,000 units of housing, commercial
revitalization of 145th Street and
Frederick Douglass Boulevard and the
renovation of Jackie Robinson Park.
No one can speak of this resurgence
without crediting the central role played
by Harlem Congregations for
Community Improvement (HCCI). A
coalition of 60 churches and mosques
created in 1986, the group has been the
primary movers of the Bradhurst
Redevelopment Plan, which has spear-
headed much of the progress. HCCI,
which wrested its initial funding from the
Koch administration and was heartily sup-
ported by Mayor Dinkins, stands out as the
only large-scale black-run low-income
housing developer in that part of Harlem.
HCCI also happens to have control
over one-square block of city-owned land
at the corner of 145th Street and
Bradhurst Avenue. Officials plan to devel-
op into a supermarket with housing above
it. And that has put them at the center of a
growing neighborhood food fight.
Last year, HCCI began work on plans
to build a small supermarket run by the
Krasdale chain, which already operates a
number of Bravo and C-Town markets in
northern Manhattan. The idea was to
construct a building that would accom-
modate the market as well as a string of
smaller stores to be filled by local entre-
preneurs.
For reasons that are not entirel y clear,
the city put forth a proposal last year to
rezone the site to accommodate the con-
struction of a much larger supermarket-
probably a Path mark, the only chain with
an established track record of building
mega-markets in inner-city neighbor-
hoods. On March 5, in what could be the
first step in taking the site out of HCCl's
hands, the City Planning Commission
gave the rezoning its thumbs-up.
Unlike the battle over the develop-
ment of the Pathmark on 125th Street in
East Harlem, the debate that has divided
Bradhurst is not about whether to have a
supermarket-but what size it will be
and who will get to control it.
HCCI and its CEO, Reverend Preston
Washington, are leading the opposition
to the rezoning plan. Washington, pastor
of Metropolitan Baptist Church, main-
tains the small market plan is the key to
Bradhurst being able to control its rede-
velopment and how the community will
look in the future.
"A large market on 145th would snarl
the economic development that is already
underway," he says. "We planned to have
a number of smaller stores on that site
and a small supermarket. That fits into the
neighborhood, not a megastore."
Community Board 10, which voted
against the rezoning scheme in December,
agrees with HCCI. "We want to develop a
more entrepreneurial focus within the
community. The commercial spaces
shouldn't be taken up by huge stores,"
says Willy Walker, the board's chair.
Price and Convenience
But the groups who support the
Pathmark idea are also gearing up to make
their case. Yuien Chin, co-chair of the
West Harlem Community Preservation
Organization, says price and convenience
for local shoppers should outweigh what
they consider to be vaguer concerns about
community control. The Hamilton
Heights Homeowners Association and
some members of Community Board 9,
which contains parts of Bradhurst, are
supporting Chin's position.
"This neighborhood can use a large
supermarket," she says. "Who is really
being served [by the small market]? If
it 's the community that we want to serve,
why hasn' t there really been an investi-
gation into all of the options and a survey
of the residents to see what they want?"
Pamela Fairclough of the Community
Food Resource Center, who has been
studying the placement of supermarkets
and their use by low-income communi-
ties, also thinks this is a perfect site for a
large supermarket. "It is rare that this
[quantity of land] is available in
Manhattan. And to have it right in a
neighborhood that historically has not
had its supermarket needs met makes it
an opportunity not to be passed up."
According to a study done by CFRC,
$50 million food dollars in the Bradhurst
area are lost to Westchester and New
Jersey because of the dearth of adequate
markets in Harlem. The group estimates
$117 million in grocery buying power
exists in the 70,000 households in the
area-while only $47 million of that sum
is currently recaptured by community
merchants. Fairclough also claims that
markets over 30,000 square feet typical-
ly offer more than three times as many
items as Krasdale-scale markets.
CITY LIMITS
That experience is echoed in other
studies. Recent findings by the city's
Department of Consumer Affairs showed
that poor people pay 8.8 percent more for
a typical food basket than their counter-
parts in middle-income neighborhoods. A
report by Consumers Union in California
showed that 92 percent of middle-income
people traveled five minutes or less for
shopping, while only 28 percent of low-
income people could get their goods with-
out a major trek. The majority had to trav-
el more than 15 minutes to get to a store.
Many in Harlem know this all too well.
"I shop in New Jersey," said Monique
Washington, a mother of three. "I would
like a large market in my neighborhood. I
come to Fairway [a 35,000 square-foot
store on l33rd St. near the Henry Hudson
Parkway] but they don't have everything
and it has a bad traffic problem."
But opponents of the Pathmark idea
say large stores don't necessarily mean
low prices or quality.
"It's up to the community to monitor
any store that is in the neighborhood,"
says Rev. Washington. His sentiments are
echoed by Michael Adams, a local histo-
rian who wonders why this community
needs superstores when other neighbor-
hoods in Manhattan have high quality
and low prices without large stores and
the off-street parking that they require.
"It's analogous to those hideous malls in
the suburbs that you don' t want to
encourage in an urban setting."
CB lO's Willy Walker believes the sit-
ing of mega-market would make middle-
class residents less likely to buy the one-
to-four-family homes being renovated
across the street from the market site. "No
one will buy a house right next to a huge
market with noisy trucks, vermin, and a
large number of cars all the time.
"It would destroy the efforts we have
made over the last decade to improve this
area."
Management Fees
Chin and her allies say such argu-
ments are a smoke screen. HCCl's real
agenda, she maintains, is all about the
group's determination to have control
over the project-and to capture manage-
ment fees that would inevitably flow
from the development of the smaller
retail spaces.
Rev. Washington admits he wants the
fees but insists a smaller market is better.
"We are under attack because we are
the major players here," he told City
Limits. "[People outside the community]
want to take that control away from us.
APRIL 1997
We are working for the empowerment of
the community, and some people don' t
want that .... We should have control and
ownership of the development in our
community as well as the revenue pro-
jects generate."
Whether Washington gets his way is
now up to the City Council. The coun-
cil's permits committee-chaired by
Harlem councilwoman C. Virginia
Fields, who reportedly favors the re-zon-
ing proposal-is scheduled to hold hear-
ings on April 8 .
April Tyler is a Democratic district leader
in Harlem.

Mega-Market vs. Supermarket
I
s having a huge Path mark in the neighborhood really much better than having a smaller
supermarket?
An informal City Limits price-check on March 17th suggested the difference is signifi-
cant but not overwhelming. We priced a typical food basket of 11 common items at the
Pathmark store on 207th Street in Inwood and compared the results with the prices at the
Bravo Supermarket on 148th Street in Central Harlem. The result? Pathmark items, totaling
530.03, were only 51.40 cheaper than Bravo's prices-a 5 percent difference.
What Path mark has that Bravo-which carries Krasdale brands-doesn't have is a
larger line of store brand products which are cheaper than the name brands. While cus-
tomers at Path mark can buy a pound of Path mark butter for 52.19, Bravo customers have to
shell out 52.99. In addition to its Path mark line, the store also has an aisle of "No Frills"
brand products that is even cheaper. And Path mark has more bulk items, like a 2 lb. 6 oz.
box of "Crispy Rice" for 54.69, while Kellogg's Rice Krispies of the same size go for 57.19.
But Path mark customers are not always there just for the price. "I'm not going to say
everything here is priced reasonably. Compared with other stores, maybe not, " says Sheryl
Smith, a 37-year-old telephone operator who lives in the area. "I shop at Path mark
because it is convenient and there is more variety. "
As for customers at Bravo, they also say they shop there because it is convenient to
where they live or work. -Mary Blatch
ITEM PATHMARK BRAVO
Gerber 2nd Foods Peas 4 oz 5.53 5.57
Whole Chicken (3 Ibs.) S2.97 (S.9911b. on special) 53.27 (S1.09/lb.)
Ground Chuck (3 Ibs.) 55.97 (51.9911b.) S4.77 (S1.6911b.)
General Mills Cheerios 10 oz 52.99 53.19
Family Size Chips Ahoy 11b, 8 oz 53.79 53.99
USDA Grade A Large Eggs, 12 51.29 81.49
Store Brand Rice 10 Ibs 83.49 (Path mark) 84.19 (Krasdale)
One Gallon Whole Milk 82.64 S2.79
Wonder Bread 11b, 6 oz S1.69 S1.69
Store Brand Enriched Bleached 8.88 (special) 51.79
Flour 51bs
Store Brand Sugar 5 Ibs
S2.49 S2.29
TOTAL Path mark: S28.73 Bravo: S30.03
_I
In New York City, crisis is routine.
But in the cotmtry's largest Rent-tropolis,
no c has becOme n e a r l ~ so routine
as the housing cnsis.
DEADLYS G S
OF NEW YOR CI Y'S
UNHEEDED HOU ING CRISIS
-
By Glenn Thrush
here wasn't exactly what
you'd call an air of revela-
tion in the old City Hall
Board of E$timate Chamber
when a tesfy throng of elder-
ly tenants, rumpled land-
lords, politicians and re-
porters gathered to hear the
official mid-March pro-
nouQcement from the
Giuliani administration that,
yes, the city is still in a housing crisis.
It's not as if anybody was there to do anything new about it.
The crowd had come to hear Richard Roberts. the new housing
commissioner, give a formal statement that the city s apartment
vacancy rate is still below 5 percent-and that therefore, by state
statute, rent regulations are still in effect.
Because upstate Republicans are threatening the elimination of
rent stabilization and rent control when they come up for renewal
in Albany this spring, Roberts' declaration marked the official
start of the triennial upstate-downstate contest over the future of
rent regulation, a sort of ceremonial first pitch.
The importance of the rent regulation fight is not to be underesti-
mated: more than half of New York renters live in a million rent-sta-
bilized or ren -controlled units. The loss or erosion of rent protections
would likely mean large rent hikes for multitudes across all econom-
ic and social classes. Yet behind this well-publicized political battle
lurk increasingly frightening warning signs of a much more substan-
tial crisis affecting millions of working-class and poor tenants.
"Everybody's focusing on rent regulations as the key issue.
Forget about rent regUlations-you have a huge problem looming
for affordable low-income housing," says Michael Schill, director
of NYU Law School's Center for Real Estate and Social Policy.
"You have rent increasing as a percentage of income and then you
add welfare reform. It all hits low-income people."
Schill's observation is backed up by the numbers. According to
eliminary data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Housing and
Vacancy Survey (HVS)--on which Roberts' testimony was
based-affordable housing in New York City is disappearing at an
alarming and accelerating rate. Rents are exploding, tenants' real
incomes are falling and proposed cuts in state welfare benefits-
which few people realize is the single most important housing
subsidy for poor New Yorkers-could force thousands of public
assistance tenants out of their homes.
All this, while the business of landlording has become almost
as profitable as it was before the deep recession of the early 1990s,
according to statistics just released by the Rent Guidelines Board.
The signs of the crisis are here. You just have to read them.
CITY LIMITS
I
In the last three y:ears,
the city has lost 113,000 of its
most affordable apartments.
The days of the $500 apartment are over,
even though many New Yorkers can't afford to
pay even that much.
The new Housi ng and Vacancy Survey
(HVS) found that the number of cheap apart-
ments has taken a huge plunge since 1993. In
fact, the number of units whose rent and utilities tallied less than
$500 dropped from 566,000 in 1993 to 452,000 in I 996-a pre-
cipitous 20 percent fall.
The greatest drop in numbers took place in the $3OO-to-$400
range, with a loss of nearly 40,000 of the 133,000 apartments that
rented in that low price range three years ago.
Analysts and community organizers say the numbers jibe with
tales they've heard of rent hikes in poor and working class com-
munities citywide. The loss is almost entirely attributable to rent
hikes. Other factors contributed, including the loss of 30,000 rent-
control units primarily due to the death or relocation of elderly
tenants. Under state law, those apartments automatically revert to
rent stabilization and are subject to significant rent increases.
It is surprising to hear that rents in poor neighborhoods would
be rising rapidly, especially when the HVS itself shows that local
poverty rates are apparently growing (See Number 3, below). The
rent hikes in low-income housing appear to be clustered in areas
that benefited from significant housing construction or renovation
in the 1980s and early '90s, such as Highbridge and Morrisania in
the South Bronx and Fort Greene and East New York, according a
Rent Guidelines Board summary of 1995 rent hikes.
According to an informal Daily News survey of 30 real estate
brokers, one-bedroom apartment prices in parts of the South
Bronx have shot from sub-$400 rents five years ago to an average
of around $650 today.
"If you want to move into a nice place you are going to have
to pay a lot," says Dana Broussard, a 30-year-old Highbridge res-
ident, who was forced to find a new apartment when her landlord
jacked her rent from $572 to $700 last year. Broussard, who had
been rai sing her four kids in a one-bedroom apartment on $1 ,200
a month in welfare and Food Stamps, was lucky enough to move
into a three-bedroom apartment in a tenant-owned cooperative
that costs around $450 a month.
Still , she knows many families who are stuck paying high
rents even though they can't really afford it. "If the building is
new and clean, people don't really mind. But people are paying
$700 a month for rat holes," she adds.
RENTS +
, WAGES
Z
Citywide rents
shot up 18.4 percent
since 1993 ...
Even if poor renters are suffering the worst, rents across the
board are rocketing skyward at a rate far outpacing inflation.
APRIL 1997
The HVS reports that the citywide median
monthly rent, not including utilities and other
expenses, increased 18.4 percent during the
three-year survey. Meanwhile, the national
Consumer Price Index inched up only 7.8 per-
cent, thanks to historically low inflation rates.
How dramatic is that rent rise? Between 1981
and 1993-a 12-year stretch-New York's medi-
an rent rose just $100 dollars in inflation-adjust-
ed dollars. But from 1993 to 1996 alone, the
median rent jumped nearly another $100, from
$501 to $593 a month.
This acceleration is a very recent phenomenon. Between 1991
and 1993 the city's median rent only increased by about 5 percent,
and rent increases actually lagged behind the consumer price index.
Again, the reasons for across-the-board rent rises can't be pre-
cisely explained until more detailed data comes in. But it is hap-
pening at a time when landlords have been taking greater profits,
perhaps to compensate for the lean years of the early 1990s.
"Unless you own a bad building in a really poor neighborhood,
it's a great time to be a landlord," says Ken Rosenfeld, a tenant
member of the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB). "People are taking
bigger profits on Wall Street and the economy's a little better now,
so I think landlords believe they, too, can take higher rents."
Landlord expenses are shrinking for the first time in years:
"[There has been a] remarkable drop in the 'core' rate of inflation
for owners' .... operating and maintenance costs," reads the RGB's
report titled "1996 Rents, Markets and Trends." This month, the
board-which is authorized under rent regulations to set rent
increase guidel ines for stabil ized and controlled apartments each
year-plans to release another report detailing the drop in land-
lord expenses and the increase in rent-hike profit-taking.
3
... while the real value
of people's paychecks
is going down.
If most people were getting steady pay raises, the big rent
hikes wouldn't be such a disturbing phenomenon. But the real
earning power of the average New York family continues to fall.
While Mayor Giuliani glowingly points to a growing econo-
my, the fact is real incomes for New Yorkers declined by 2.3 per-
cent between 1993 and 1996. There were killing blows leveled on
wage earners in the early 1990s, when the city lost 330,000 jobs
and real wages declined by nearly 12 percent adjusted for infla-
tion. And in 1996, the economy generated only 23,000 new jobs,
according to city Comptroller Alan Hevesi.
The net loss of jobs in the 1990s, combined with the continued
decline in the value of paychecks, means more people are becom-
ing poor even before the city embarks on federally mandated wel-
fare reform. Indeed, between 1993 and 1996 the number of rental
households with incomes below the federal poverty line increased
to 628,000, or almost one-third of all renters. This is 40,000 more
than in 1993, and all of them are barely scraping by.
4
Forget new hikes, people
can't even afford the rents
they're paying right now.
Add shrinking incomes to skyrocketing rents and what do you
get? A fast-tightening vise squeezing tenants' budgets.
In what is probably the most telling single statistic in the HVS,
the percentage of income New Yorkers use to pay their rent and
utilities has jumped from 30.8 percent to 32.8 percent in the last
...
--
three years. Factor in
the 2.3 percent
increase that took
place between 1991
and 1993, and you
have the most rapid
erosion of housing
affordability in New
York since the cata-
clysmic housing
abandonment era in
the mid-' 70s.
ironically, housing was a lot more affordable then, since at that
time rents typically cost people only a quarter of their income.
In fact, when held to the longtime federal affordability stan-
dard-which considers rents at an appropriate level if they are set
no higher than 30 percent of a family's income-New York is now
an officially unaffordable city. ''The bad news on the income-to-
rent ratio is the thing that really stands out this year," says
Columbia University urban planning professor Peter Marcuse,
who has long studied the city's housing policy. "There's the crisis."
Although neighborhood-by-neighborhood affordability informa-
tion hasn't yet been released, the picture in 1993 was dismal enough.
The poorest tenants, according to the survey, were paying nearly
three-quarters of their income on basic shelter, and some unlucky
souls were actually spending more on rent than they brought home.
Nor was the rent-income squeeze felt by the very poor alone: In
1993, working-class renters not covered by rent regulation were
shelling out, on average, nearly half of their pay in rent.
"And that's going to keep getting worse," Marcuse predicted.
But at least we're not alone in our suffering. "It's not just a
New York thing," Michael Schill adds. "It continues a trend in
cities throughout the United States. Paychecks are going down
and rents are going up."
5
Governor Pataki's
welfare cuts could
triple the number of
homeless New Yorkers.
Most people think of welfare as
walking-around money for food,
clothing, utility bills and other expens-
es. In fact, it's the city's largest but
least recognized low-income housing
subsidy.
According to two chilling new
reports, Governor George Pataki's pro-
posed welfare reform measure will
eliminate much of that assistance and
potentially throw tens of thousands of the poor onto the streets.
In addition to the federal mandate for a five-year lifetime limit
on benefits, Pataki has proposed cutting welfare payments for
longtime recipients by 15 to 45 percent over the next four years.
In addition, he has opted for a "housing allowance consolidation
plan" that will likely lead to the elimination of the $75 million
Jiggetts benefit, a court-ordered relief program that provides
much-needed rent payments to more than 25,000 public assis-
tance recipients threatened with imminent eviction.
The Community Service Society, a research and social service
organization, estimates that of the $2.4 billion paid out in welfare
benefits to nearly a million city public assistance recipients, $1.4
billion covers housing costs. Since most of those on the rolls live
in privately owned apartments, welfare tenants pay a remarkably
high 57 percent of their incomes on rent, according to CSS.
The Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a more business-
oriented housing research group, recently convened a committee
including representatives of the real estate industry and bank
executives-and they reached conclusions similar to those pre-
sented by CSS. Pataki's welfare scheme, CHPC said, "could dis-
place thousands of public assistance tenants."
If the Pataki cuts are enacted, CHPC predicts the number of
people seeking lodging at city homeless shelters will triple from
9,400 this year to 30,000 in 2002.
"The impact of [pataki's] welfare-to-work plan on housing
will be disastrous," says Frank Braconi, CHPC's executive direc-
tor. "It would be wonderful if you could move half a million wel-
fare recipients into well-paying jobs, as the governor plans to do.
But you look at the job market and you know there aren't enough
jobs for people to be able to pay their rents."
If that all sounds a trifle apocalyptic, then just look to
Michigan, says housing analyst Victor Bach, author of the CSS
study. He points to a 1994 report showing that when Michigan ter-
minated general assistance-the equivalent of New York's Home
Relief program for childless adults-the homelessness rate among
recipients rose from 2 percent to 25 percent.
"The city will experience an escalation in precarious doubled-
up situations and growing demand for emergency shelter," Bach
writes in the CSS report. "Neighborhoods with high concentra-
tions of assisted' households will suffer devastation as curtailed
rent streams worsen the spread of housing deterioration, owner
disinvestment and abandonment, and decline of the local retail
economy."
6
The city's In Rem policy has created a
"permanent underclass" of over 10\000
deteriorating apartment build-
ings in poor neighborhoods.
In a triumphant press release
accompanying the HVS, Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani trumpeted
the fact that vacancy rates for
low-rent apartments had
increased. "[T]he vacancy
[percentage] for low-rent
units increased considerably
between 1993 and 1996."
On the surface, that seems like
good news, as though it's easier for ................. ......
poor people to find cheap apartments.
But it's not. The administration's spin is deceptive. While the per-
centage of low-rent apartments may have spiked statistically, the
total number of low-rent units has dwindled to an all-time low.
The net result: There are fewer low-rent vacancies, not more.
Says Rosenfeld: "You've got poor people getting poorer.
You've got a shrinking low-income housing stock. You've got
landlords complaining that they don' t make enough money to
run their buildings in very poor neighborhoods. So, all of a sud-
den you have a huge rise in the vacancy percentages? It doesn't
make sense."
Part of the explanation is a statistical glitch. In 1993, because
of a one-time sampling problem, the city was unable to quantify
the number of vacancies for apartments renting for $400 a month.
In fact, an examination of the 1991 vacancy data compared to the
1996 HVS shows that there was actually a significant decrease in
the number of sub-$5oo vacancies over the intervening years.
And Peter Marcuse thinks he's found another, more ominous,
CITY LIMITS
Rental Anguish
A
t first glance, Patricia
Williams' two-bedroom
apartment in Central Harlem
seems like a pretty good deal. Two
bedrooms, right near the train station,
only 5430.30 a month.
But like a growing number of poor
and working-class people in New York,
the 43-year old single mother of two
pays most of her monthly income just
to keep a shaky roof over her head. In
addition to sending her entire 5352
monthly welfare check to the landlord,
Williams dips into the extra 5489 a
month in survivor's benefits she's been
receiving since the father of her
daughter died of a bad heart six years
ago. Williams hoped to save that money
to help the 12-year-old go to college.
"I feel guilty using that money to
pay the rent," she says softly. "Even
though it's for her also, to keep the
roof over her head."
In 1993, Williams quit her 520,000-
a-year job as a receptionist as she
struggled through a difficult pregnancy.
After her son was born, she decided
to stay home, take care of the kids,
and collect public assistance and Food
Stamps. Over the last three years she
has taken bookkeeping and computer
courses, but hasn't been able to get
oft' welfare. Her rent nightmare came
along with the welfare check. In New
York City, public assistance reCipients
spend an average of 57 percent of
their income on rent-a situation that
is likely to get even worse if Governor
George Pataki's massive reductions in
welfare benefits are approved by the
state legislature this spring.
"I have to pay my phone bill and
my cable bill," Williams explains. "I'm
lucky if I have 525 left. And with that
525 I have to buy detergents, soap and
everything like that. It's really hard ... I
can't even buy my children shoes or
clothes for Easter."
Her apartment is no bargain at any
price. Teal green wall-to-wall carpet
covers buckling wood floors in her living
room, where she takes a long drag on a
cigarette before starting her morning
job hunt. Her son usually sleeps with
her, and her daughter has a room down
the hall with no heat. Williams leaves
the stove on sometimes to stay wann.
The walls are blotched with paint and
plaster from a history of water damage.
"We were sleeping and the ceiling
fell on us at about three in the morn-
ing," she says, after showing a visitor
her bedroom. "We weren't hurt. My
daughter cried for like an hour and she
was frightened. "
Meanwhile, her applications for
subsidized housing have been tossed to
the end of the Housing Authority's
years-long waiting list. And no matter
how hard she looks in the private
rental market, Williams says she can't
find anything better in Harlem or the
Bronx, where she grew up.
"Rent is high wherever you go,"
she says. "For a three-bedroom
apartment-that's like 5650 and up."
-Beth Fertig
Beth Fertig is a reporter for WNYC.
explanation: some buildings are so bad no one wants to live in
them. "There's a good chance poor people just don't want to take
these units," he says. "We've allowed a class of buildings to run
down to the point where they are almost uninhabitable but not
quite abandoned."
third-party landlords or nonprofit groups, was foundering for lack
of funding and planning.
7
Worsening cutbacks in federal housing aid
mean less money to help fix bad buildings
The numbers seem to back him up. Although the vast majori-
ty of buildings on the survey reported tolerable structural condi-
tions, the HVS also reports slight increases in the di lapidation
rates and in the number of buildings with major maintenance
problems.
Marcuse argues that these numbers indicate there is a harden-
ing division between the good housing stock and the permanent
"underclass" of deteriorating apartment buildings in poor neigh-
borhoods.
The existence of the distressed buildings is borne out by an
analysis of tax records by Frank Braconi, who found the number
of apartment building in tax arrears has been at around
14,000 for several years. "I think that it's a good
rough measure of the number of buildings that
seem to be in trouble," he said.
or help the poor stay under a roof.
New York relies heavily on federal money to subsidize afford-
able housing. About 40,000 households on welfare receive
Section 8 vouchers to help pay their rent on the private market, as
do tens of thousands more low-income working people.
But the federal money faucet has been fitted with a new cut-
off val ve. Last year, for the first time in more than 20 years,
Congress and President Clinton zeroed-out a proposed increase in
the number of Section 8 rent vouchers. With no new vouchers
available, tenants have to wait for current voucher holders to die
or become ineligible under the income guidelines.
In New York City, the waiting list for Section 8
ouchers is 236,000 families long--every one
In years past, the city would have taken
these buildings under In Rem tax foreclosure
SECTION EIGHT
of them qualified for the program under feder-
al rules.
According to a recent analysis by the
National Low-Income Housing Coalition,
Congress cut funding for poor tenants from
$24.9 billion in 1992 to $15.7 billion this year.
and, over time, applied federal and city
funds to their maintenance and renovation.
But since 1994, when Mayor Giuliani
announced a permanent stop to tax-arrears
vesting, those buildings have languished in
limbo while the city figures out what to do
with them. Last month, City Limits reported that
HPD's anti-abandonment program, which would
have transferred many of these buildings to responsible
APRIL 1997
00
"If this continues, it's going to have dis-
astrous effects," predicts Jay Small, execu-
tive director of the Association for
eighborhood and Housing Development.
"Government has to recognize that providing
decent housi ng is a core function again."
-
--
I
I
s long as anyone living at 322 Irvine Turner
Boulevard in Newark's Central Ward can
remember, their building never looked good.
The facade was always worn and tired and no
matter how many times the brown and white
interior was painted, it always looked and felt
like a dungeon. The stairs were rotted, the
long, dark hallways were dingy and bleak, and the heat and hot
water were inconsistent. Even so, the rents were high-$350 to
$700 a month. Families doubled up or spent their entire welfare
check on rent in order to live there.
Until 8 p.m. on the day after Christmas, when Maxine smelled
smoke, the building was home to 20 families, including 45 chil-
dren. The fire department responded immediately, smashing
through the top-floor windows, breaking out the walls and ceil-
ings to expose smoldering wires. Water and smoke destroyed fur-
nishings, clothes, hopes and dreams.
Officials shut off the building's electricity, and that meant the
heat wouldn't come on. Candles, flashlights and gas stoves were
the only light and heat the families had for more than a week. "It's
I
The building is privately owned. A clerk at Newark City Hall
told me the landlord lives in Morristown, an affluent New Jersey
suburb. He had racked up several code violations on the build-
ing. But the clerk said that's nothing unique. After all, the fines
for code violations are very small, and aren't much of a bother
to the landlords.
I tapped lightly on an open apartment door and walked into
Mildred's first floor apartment. This frail, elderly woman had had
a devastating year. In May, her second foot wa amputated
because of diabetes and her only daughter, Cocoa, was shot to
death while walking on the street. "I don't want to move," she
kept repeating in her quiet voice. "I want to stay here. Cocoa's
memory is here."
As the building slowly emptied of its inhabitants, the families
carried away their possessions in large, black garbage bags.
Echoes drifted through the halls as old pick-up trucks loaded with
meager belongings pulled away from the curb. Afterwards, the
building became still. As 1 walked through one empty apartment
after another, I felt as gloomy as the dreary winter fog that sur-
rounded the area. All around me were signs of the fife: shattered
FORCED OUT BY FIRE, A GROUP OF NEWARK
TENANTS LOST MORE THAN THEIR HOMES.
THEY LOST A MEMBER OF THE FAMILY.
a nightmare," said Shmooze, Maxine's youngest son, a few days
after the power went out. "The halls are pitch black at night. It's
real scary. All the noises! You can't see anything!"
Many of the tenants had lived there for more than a decade.
Their children were born and raised in the building. Some of their
neighbors died there. It may have been expensive, but there was-
n't much else available in Newark, and few of them could afford
to move. To get a new apartment, they would have had to give a
landlord at least two and a half months' rent up-front, and no one
here had that kind of money to spare.
For 15 years I have been photographing this building and the
people who lived there amid the rot and decay. Over the years, one
by one, the other buildings along the block had fires and were
eventually bulldozed. At last it was 322's turn. The December fIfe,
and another that followed a few days later, have been termed
"accidental" by city officials, though many of the residents have
their doubts about that.
Maxine, who lived there nine years, told me how the Red Cross
came and put most of the families in a hotel. "I'm comfortable in
this place. I don't want to move," she said softly, as she leaned
against the broken door frame. "No one wants to move. My roots
are here. I'm used to this building. Why isn't someone responsible?
Why can't someone [LX it up?" Every tenant I spoke to in the days
after the fire was sullen, stoic or stunned. Some could hardly move,
as though paralyzed by fear, as they were forced to face one of the
worst realities of poverty: being "burned out."
glass, broken walls and ceilings, scattered remnants of clothes and
furniture, a forgotten Teddy bear. Some rooms still felt warm with
their history, their memories.
It was like photographing the last portrait, clinging to a need
for a keepsake or a document to remember a loved one's last
breath. Only the packaging was left, the superficial. The ingredi-
ents, the guts, the emotions, the life of the place was dying.
What is a home? Is it only a shelter from the rain and snow, a
pile of bricks and cement, boards and nails? Or is it a sanctuary? A
member of the family? A place where loved ones gather? A place
to live one's life, to see the children grow? A place with a heart-
beat, a spirit, a soul that heaves and sighs with hope and despair?
Over the years that I've spent with the people here, I have
shared in some of their moments, some of the sounds of their lives
and their tears and laughter. There are many memories: the first
and last days of chool, the long hot summers, the problems, the
joys, the deaths as well as the births.
And now, an empty shell, the place stands open to the ele-
ments, to the onslaught of scavengers and the city bulldozers. As
r turned to go, I whispered good-bye. r felt as though something
very important has been left behind. For a long time, I stared at the
facade, and wondered how easily a stranger could see only a sad,
tired, broken down old building.
Helen M. Stummer's recent book oJphotographs, "No Easy Walk,
Newark 1980-1993, " was published by Temple University Press.
PHOTOS AND TEXT BY HELEN M. STUMMER
CITY LIMITS
January 1997
e glar alarm was ringing, ringing, ringing. Leonardo, the soft-
spoken ca etaker of St. Edward the Confessor Church, wished it
would st p. It was the third time the alarm had sounded in the past
two days. t was probably pipers again, Leonardo thought. They
were alwa s breaking in, looking for a place to smoke crack or
scrounging around for something to steal. There wasn' t much to
take at St. Edward's. The massive old church was abandoned. And
it was Leonardo's job to guard it.
Leonardo stepped out from the rectory next to the church and
looked toward the stone steps of St. Edward's and its towering red
front doors. At the corner of Eighth and York, a few steps from the
church, he saw a young woman with flowing brown bair leading
a little girl by the hand. Behind them walked a group of about 20
men and women toting blankets and babies and placards. The
brown-haired woman directed everyone to the front steps of St.
Edward's, where they sat down. The alarm was still wailing, but
the people on the steps did not seem concerned. Leonardo walked
back inside the rectory to call the police.
In the brilliant morning sunshine, Cheri Honkala stood on the
pale gray church steps and addressed her most loyal supporters.
Mariluz and Elba, two homeless welfare mothers, were there with
their six children, including Mariluz' daughter Destiny, who held her
book bag in her lap even though she was not yet registered in school.
J.R. and Tara were there, holding hands. Katie was there too, smok-
ing a cigarette next to Aaco who, on this late September morning,
had loaded women and children on the back of his truck and driven
them to St. Edward's from an encampment called Tent City in a
nearby section of Philadelphia's notorious Badlands neighborhood.
CITVLlMITS
Cheri stubbed out her Marlboro. Then she laid out the plan.
"Listen up, people," she said, "the police will be here pretty
soon. Our message to them is: We are borrowing the church for a
while to keep warm and keep all our families together. The cops
will ask us to show permission to be here. I say that God gives us
permission to live in his house."
It was Cheri Honkala's idea to organize these homeless fami-
lies and-very publicly-provide them makeshift housing. With
great fanfare, she built Tent City earlier that summer on a vacant
lot near an old Quaker Lace factory. But as summer gave way to
autumn's cold winds, Honkala and the families needed warmer
space. She thought St. Edward's was perfect. The neighborhood's
recent church closings had generated extensive and not entirely
favorable publicity for the Roman Catholic archdiocese, and
APRIL 1997
Cheri thought it would be difficult for the archdiocese to evict
homeless families from an unused church in a poor neighborhood.
Cheri, founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union
(KWRU) and a welfare mother herself, loved to create politically
charged pectacles. This was the summer of 1995, when a newly-
elected conservative Congress was crafting the landmark legisla-
tion that would eventually end the nation's guarantee of welfare
benefits for children. Cheri was now at war with society over its
treatment of the poor, seeking new ways to dramatize how city,
state and federal policies had set destitute people adlift. She knew
journalists had lost all interest in Tent City. Taking over St.
Edward's would once again put the plight of the city's homeless
on the nightly newscast and in the pages of the local dailies.
After the group broke in, they set up cribs for the babies and
laid blankets on the tloor for the toddlers. Mariluz found a box of
pink plastic flowers and handed them out. Cheri gathered every-
body at the pulpit and led a brief prayer. Then everyone sat quiet-
ly and waited for the police. Cheri took Mariluz' hand and said,
"Keep calm." Within minutes, someone at the front door cried
out: "The cops are here!"
T
he newspapers called Cheri a homeless rights advo-
cate or a welfare rights advocate. The bureaucrats
responsible for welfare, housing and the homeless in
Philadelphia said worse things, chiefly that Cheri was
a publicity hound, that she lied and schemed, that she
was all mouth and no results.
It was not surprising that that they said such things, for Cheri
woke up almost every morning with a new plan to confront and
embarrass some poor city functionary. She would gather welfare
mothers in a city office and chant and scream until the bureaucrat
in charge came out to take a painful and very public tongue-lash-
ing. After the city spent millions to build a new convention cen-
ter next door to a soup kitchen, Cheri led a group of homeless
welfare recipients who bedded down for the night on the center's
polished marble floors. Later, she and a gang of homeless people
camped out a city housing official's front lawn. That same year,
Cheri issued an arrest warrant for the governor, saying he had
committed crimes against the poor. And just recently Cheri had
been seen chasing the mayor down a City Hall corridor, engag-
ing him in a rousing shouting match as press photographers
snapped away.
A big focus of Cheri's wrath was the city's shelter system. No
homeless person could receive housing assistance without first
going through the system, which the city used as a vast tattered
net to collect the homeless so they might be more easily sorted
and catalogued. Only then were they eligible to be placed on wait-
ing Ii ts, containing thousands of names, for scarce rent-subsidy
vouchers. By requiring all housing voucher applicants to enter the
shelter system, the city was able to determine not only whether the
applicant was truly homeless but also what mix of social patholo-
gies-<irugs, alcohol, mental illness, job loss, fire, domestic
abuse, AIDS, desertion by spouse-had contributed to their con-
dition. This process was called ceJtification.
Cheri despised the notion of a bureaucrat's certifying some-
one's homeless ness. She believed people knew damn well
whether they were homeless or not and that the last place they
needed to go was a homeless shelter. She regarded shelters as
dirty, dangerous, noisy, crowded internment camps. In a city with
27,000 abandoned properties, she argued, the homeless should be
placed in homes, not shelters.
For the last four years, Cheri had stubbornly tried to help peo-
ple bypass the shelter system. Famously, she and the "war coun-
cil"-a she called the Kensington Welfare Rights Union's ruling
Dm'id Zucchillo is a

reporter at the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
This article was
excerpted Jromhis
book "Myth oJthe
Welfare Queen ..
reeelllly published by
Scribner Press.
Adept at manipulating
both the police and
the press, Cheri
Honkala negotiates
with Capt. Herb
LouieI' on the day of
[he chureh wkeover.
-
committee-had recruited homeless people from the shelters and
helped them break into and take over abandoned houses. In 1993
and again in 1994, she forced the city to back down and award
about three dozen KWRU families rent vouchers for the privately
owned houses they had taken over without going through the shel-
ter system. But by the summer of 1995, the city had tired of
Cheri 's tactics. It was taking a stand. There would be no more
exceptions. Cheri's people had to go through the shelter system
like everyone else. Cheri responded by building Tent City.
A
t the church, Cheri was waiting for a police super-
visor. News camera crews, alerted by the police
radio, were milling around, filming sleeping
babies and taking long shots of the magnificent
cathedral ceilings.
Finally, Captain Herb Lottier of the 26th District appeared near
the altar steps. He stood with his hands jammed into his rear pock-
ets, gazing around at sculptures of the saints and the intricately
carved buttresses beneath the high windows. He saw Cheri below
the pulpit and asked, ''Who are you with?"
"The Kensington Welfare Rights Union," Cheri said. "We're
seeking shelter in the church. It's abandoned. It's got warmth for
the kids."
The captain stroked his chin. He seemed to be a man of few
words. He told Cheri that someone from his district was trying to
contact the archdiocese. He wanted to find out the archdiocese's
position on people living in church.
Cheri asked if the police intended to let the families stay.
"I'm not the ultimate authority," the captain said. He looked up
at the vaulted ceiling. "Who's to say who the ultimate authority is?"
At the offices of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the call from
the police caught everyone by surprise. It was late afternoon before
four church officials arrived. The four men asked Cheri if they
could "have a dialogue" beneath the pulpit, away from the reporters
and TV crews. Cheri summoned Mariluz, Elba, Tara and Katie, and
the women sat in a tight circle, facing the men from the archdiocese.
The men told the group they were breaking the law. They could
not stay. St. Edward's was not designed for habitation, particularly
for children. The families would be much more comfortable in
church-run hospices. There the families would have warm beds, hot
food and working toilets. They could put their names on the city's
waiting lists for vouchers for transitional housing. Wouldn't that
make more sense? Couldn' t Cheri be reasonable?
Cheri told the men they had missed the point. The point was
not the services the archdiocese provided for the poor. The point,
she said, was the city's failure to provide affordable housing to
poor families at a time when their primary source of income-
welfare-was threatened by politicians in Washington and
Harrisburg. Putting the families in church-run shelters was no
better than putting them in city-run shelters. They needed
homes, not shelters.
The men from the
archdiocese repeated that
Cheri was breaking the
law. Cheri raised her
voice and said, "There's a
higher law involved
here."
The monsignor said,
"Cheri, you're an educat-
ed person. You can't look
me in the eye and say our
laws aren't just."
"I'm saying our laws
aren't designed to protect
the interests of the poor,"
she replied.
The monsignor shook
his head. "You' re wrong,"
he said.
"I thought a man of
the cloth would want to
discuss spiritual and
moral issues, not the law,"
Cheri said. "You have a
very narrow viewpoint."
"You're not leaving,
are you?" the monsignor
asked abruptly. Cheri did
not respond.
C
hurch officials, sensing the makings of a publicity
nightmare, did not attempt to evict the families. This
was good news for Mariluz who appreciated the rela-
tive warmth and security of the church after living in
a tent on the Quaker Lace lot. The mother of three
young children-Destiny, Desiree and Demitre-she was on
KWRU's war council and with each passing month grew more
skilled at helping lead the organization.
Mariluz was finishing her fifth year on welfare. She was weary
of her own dependency. She had fallen into motherhood acciden-
tally, while addicted to crack. But she kicked the habit during her
pregnancy and her first child, Destiny, was born as normal and
healthy as a baby could possibly be, given her mother's circum-
stances. Mariluz had managed to stay off drugs since. She said she
was willing to pay for her mistakes, but it pained her that her chil-
dren were suffering because of her inadequacies. The longer she
stayed on welfare, she thought, the more likely it was she would
CITY LIMITS
condemn her children to the same sort of bleak existence.
As a result, she longed for a home and a job, the two stabiliz-
ing fulcrums of life she had denied her own children. She had
worked as a grill cook at Burger King and as a sales clerk at a
thrift store, but those were minimum wage jobs that did not pay
any more than welfare-and they did not provide medical cover-
age. If she ever found an affordable home, Mariluz promised her-
self, she would find day care for the kids and go back to school.
She wanted to be a pediatric nurse.
The statistics, however, were not in her favor. Altogether, more
than $2.4 billion a year in welfare benefits poured into
Philadelphia, much of it directed to North Philadelphia. At least
550,000 people, or one-third of the city's popUlation, received
some form of public assistance. Philadelphia's welfare outlay was
bigger than that of 38 states.
Despite the politicians' rhetoric, the chances of moving these
huge numbers of people from welfare to work were not good,
given the economic realities of the city. Philadelphia's three-
decades-old economic slide was accelerating, continuing to drain
the lifeblood of the poor-blue-collar and service industry jobs-
from the urban core. Since 1970, Philadelphia had lost a quarter
million jobs; since 1979, it had lost more than half its factory jobs.
Between 1985 and 1994, the city posted 68 consecutive months of
job losses.
At the bottom of the welfare pipeline were single, homeless
mothers like Mariluz. She wondered how anyone on welfare could
afford housing, much less food and clothing. She could only imag-
ine that they had family and friends to rely on, or husbands and
boyfriends who gave them money under the table. Mariluz had no
family, no boyfriend. Her only true friends were Cheri and Elba,
who were as destitute as she was.
L
ater that week, I encountered John Wagner, one of the
archdiocesan officials responsible for homeless and
housing issues. I asked Wagner what the archdiocese
intended to do about the families living at St. Edward's.
"I think the archdiocese has been wonderful about
this whole thing." He spoke in a weary way, tinged with the
earnest intensity assumed by church people when peaking of the
non-devout. "We want to help these people, not throw them out.
Just about everybody in there has some sort of special need-
AIDS, mental illness, drug abu e, alcoholism. We want to address
each person's needs."
His argument summed up perfectly the fundamental conflict
between Cheri and the people who run homeless services in
Philadelphia. The officials thought people's problems need to be
repaired before they could be housed. Cheri didn't.
I told Wagner that not everybody inside the church was an
addict or an alcoholic or a mental patient. While many of the
hangers-on were indeed former or current drug users, or suffered
from mental or emotional problems, I said the core leadership
consisted of sober, competent people. Their resourcefulness and
survival skills were obvious enough.
He agreed, but he added that the housing vouchers Cheri was
seeking wouldn't solve most of these people's problems. "You
think they're capable of handling a house and running a house-
hold, some of them? It wouldn't be fair to them. They have seri-
ous problems," he said. "Giving some of these people vouchers
would be like a doctor giving a cancer patient painkillers to make
him feel better but not doing anything to treat the cancer."
After speaking with Wagner, I decided to visit Bill Parshall ,
whose formal title was deputy city managing director but who
was better known as the city's "homeless czar." I wanted to
hear his views on Cheri and KWRU. I met him in his office on
APRIL 1997
the fourteenth floor of a drab Center City high-rise filled with
second-tier municipal agencies. He was pleasant and accom-
modating, eager to discuss his little niche of city services-the
thankle s job of dealing with the poor, the miserable, the lost,
the homeless.
Parshall stre sed what other city officials had been saying in
the newspapers. Cheri's days of circumventing the shelter system
were over. Her people had to wait in line with everyone else for
transitional housing vouchers. (The vouchers committed the city
to paying a portion of the rent in a private apartment, usually for
12 to 18 months, while a recipient waited for federally subsidized
housing.) Parshall pointed out that of the roughly 38 KWRU indi-
viduals or families who had received transitional hou ing vouch-
ers in 1993 and 1994, nearly half had later dropped out of the
voucher program. Many did not fulfill city requirements that they
remain drug-free and find jobs or further their education. "Now
we have a baseline position," Parshall said. "People have to go
through the shelter system to get the goodies."
As for Cheri's argument that the city should throw open its
27,000 abandoned properties for poor people to fIX up, Parshall
said most of the places were beyond repair. About 20,000 had
been abandoned 0 long that they had been stripped clean. It
M l l r i l u ~ . Ihe mOlher
oj Ihree, has spe/ll jive
years on welfare.
She plans 10 pursue a
nursing degree as
soon as her children
lire old enough 10 be
pUI in school.
-
Mariluz' SOil Demitre
looks 011 as KWRU
activists illegally move
the family illto all
empty HUD home.
--
would cost at least $100,000 each to make them habitable.
Another 6,000 homes would cost about $45,000 a piece to reha-
bilitate. That left only about 1,000 homes in good enough condi-
tion that only $5,000 to $10,000 in repairs would be needed to
make them habitable. But Philadelphia was a city with at least
24,000 homeless people and the waiting list for federally-backed
Section 8 housing more than 15,000 families long.
C
heri wasn't homeless herself. She lived in a row hou e
with her son Mark. At first, like the others, she had
survived on welfare. But eventually, Cheri found the
system's endless demands too time-consuming and
humiliating. While the group was still in Tent City at
the Quaker Lace lot, Cheri dropped off welfare and quietly took a
job in a local strip club. it paid the bills and allowed her to work all
day on the KWRU campaign. None of her patrons revealed this to
the press, which for Mark's sake she was grateful.
As fall gave way to winter, Cheri knew she would have to come
up with new homes for everyone living in St. Edward's. The war
council had a plan. For weeks, Katie and others had been scouting
out houses owned by the federal Department of Housing and Urban
Development. From HUD offices downtown, they had obtained the
addresses of HUD properties listed for sale or rent. These were
prime row houses, taken over by HUD, typically for foreclosure on
an FHA loan or failure to pay taxes, and considered in sufficiently
good condition to be repaired and put on the market. HUD owned
260 such homes, all unoccupied. Katie had scouted out the most
promising locations, carefully noting whether they had active gas
and electric hook-ups. She and Cheri prepared a list of 19 houses
they believed were ready for instant occupancy and could be bro-
ken into with little effort. The war council assigned the 19 address-
es to KWRU members who had been with the group the longest and
who had displayed loyalty and commitment to the struggle. The
fust names on the list were Mariluz and Elba.
Cheri set moving day for two weeks before Christmas. She
knew several factors
were in her favor. For
one thing, the savagely
cold weather made it
unlikely that HUD or the
city would try to evict
people from the takeover
houses, with homeless
people dying in the
streets and the shelters
full. For another, bureau-
crats were not inclined to
forcibly remove destitute
families from otherwise
unoccupied homes just
before Christmas. Cheri
imagined the newspaper
headlines: Officials Play
Grinch, Evict Homeless
Families at Christmas.
The day before the
move, Cheri held a war
council meeting at her
house on Randolph Street
to make final plans for the
operation. Cheri turned to
Mariluz and Elba. She told
them that their house
would be considered
KWRU's "public house."
"It 's going to be stressful for you two," Cheri said.
"Everything you do will be watched closely, right down to what
you put in your trash. Just remember it's important to let the pub-
lic know there are thousands of empty houses going to waste in
this city and you are willing to pay for the right to live in one of
them and fix it up."
The next day, people tore down the partitions they had built
inside St. Edward's from plywood and donated sheets, and packed
their belongings for the big move. Mariluz and Elba were driven
to their new home. As they walked up the steps, each with a baby
in her arms, they found someone from KWRU had already used
bolt cutters to slice open the HUD lock on the front door. A fellow
KWRU member appeared from the inside and threw open the
door and said, "Welcome to your new house!"
M
ariluz and Elba made plans for Christmas Eve.
They put the children's presents under the tree
and plugged in the tree lights. Elba cooked rice
and beans on the kerosene heater, and Mariluz
brought out salami and cheese and bread. As they
cooked, Destiny came downstairs and complained that it was too
cold in her room. Mariluz reminded her that she had worn her
overcoat and boots inside the church. Now she walked around the
house in her pajamas and sLippers.
Mariluz swore she would never go back to the church, even if
she got kicked out of her HUD house. "I think we can stay here
for a while. Katie told me she stayed seven months in a HUD
house. That would be paradise to me." As long as the government
did not cut her off from welfare, she said, she could survive.
"This is where I want to be," Mariluz said. "I'm going to have
Christmas Eve right here with my kids in my new home. That's
what I've been working for ever since we set up Tent City.
"We'll be the perfect little American family, at home, all warm
and fat, singing Christmas carols and opening the presents under
the tree." .
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APRIL 1997
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aa
By Charles Komanoff
W
ith the recent federal court convictions in the
1991 murder of Yankel Rosenbaum in Crown
Heights, it is time to address the death that
preceded his and helped provoke it-that of
7-year-old Gavin Cato, who died in what has
been euphemistically termed an "automobile accident."
Because Gavin was black and was run over by a car in an
Hasidic motorcade-one of many that habitually sped through
his predominantly African-American neighborhood-and
because the ensuing riots were violently anti-Semitic, every-
thing that transpired that day has been viewed in racial terms.
But if we lift the heavy veil of race, we will see that Gavin's
death, while not the result of an intentional or racially motivat-
appalling and arguably criminally negligent, resembled that in
dozens of other fatalities where drivers seeking to gain a few
seconds of saved time for themselves ended up grievously
harming others.
Our community suffers greatly from car violence, not only
in lives lost or injured but in the wholesale theft of our public
streets. Yet we maintain few restraints against automotive
endangerment. Excluding limited-access highways, police
issued fewer than three dozen speeding tickets a day in one
recent year. Motorists routinely encroach on pedestrians, intim-
idate bicyclists and otherwise operate their vehicles heedless of
their power to maim or kill with the flex of the gas pedal or the
flick of the steering wheel. Only a handful of those who actual-
ed act, was still an expression of vio-
lence, exerted through the crushing
weight of an automobile.
It was a Sunday evening in
August and Gavin was in front of his
house, tinkering with his bicycle,
when a station wagon, the third and
last car in the Lubavitcher
Motorists routinely
operate vehicles heedless
of their power
ly injure pedestrians or cyclists are
ever stripped of their driving priv-
ileges, much less charged with
crimes.
To this condition, which is both
a qUality-of-life di saster and an
unacknowledged crime wave, city
government typically responds
with victim-blaming and compla-
cency. A recent transportation
commissioner repeatedly decried
Rabbi 's weekly motor-
cade, accelerated through
a red light at the nearby
to maim or kill.
corner. The car collided with another vehicle and
careened onto the sidewalk, pinning Gavin and his
cousin Angela Cato against a window grate. Gavin
was killed instantly and Angela was badly injured.
The incident touched off a spate of mob behavior
that culminated three hours later and three blocks
away with the fatal stabbing of Yankel
Rosenbaum, an Hasidic Jew unrelated to the dri-
ver of the station wagon.
Lost in the aftermath of the Rosenbaum slay-
ing, and still overlooked almost six years later, is
the pervasi veness of the type of car violence that
killed Gavin Cato. In New York, a city where
car owners are a minority, automobiles most
often kill and maim persons unprotected by car bodies and
airbags. And they do so without regard to race. Of 609 traffic
fatalities in New York City in 1991, the year Gavin was killed,
296 were pedestrians and 21 were bicyclists. Among the pedes-
trians, 49 percent were white, 28 percent black, 18 percent
Hispanic and 5 percent Asian-a fair mirror of the city as a
whole. Based on available statistics, the racial breakdown of the
drivers in these incidents appears to have been similar.
Nearly one-tenth of the pedestrians killed that same year
were children, and a third were elderly. Fifteen of the dead,
including Gavin, were struck on sidewalks or in other "non-
road" areas that are supposed to be off limits to vehicular traf-
fic. The conduct of the driver who ran over Gavin, while
"drunken" pedestrian fatalities, ignoring that his agency's
threshold for citing pedestrian victims as alcohol-impaired was
JO times below the legal criterion for intoxication of a motori st.
The current commissioner calls comprehensive European-style
"traffic-calming" measures premature, citing a 20 percent drop
in pedestrian deaths of late. Yet aggressive enforcement of traf-
fic codes and licensing laws has cut pedestrian fatalities in
London by 50 percent, and the fatality rate in Paris and Tokyo
stands at half of ours.
There is a way to stanch the flow of pedestrian deaths in
New York. It starts with uprooting the sense of entitlement to
the road that drivers, tutored by the auto corporations and their
advertisers, claim as their birthright. This will entail not just
restraining-and grounding-irresponsible drivers, but over-
turning a motorist-centered culture of policing, criminal justice
and traffic engineering that has relegated pedestrians, the city's
lifeblood, to mere bystanders. It includes bold initiatives such
as implementing comprehensive road tolls to reduce traffic
flow and expanding the funding pot for transit alternati ves.
Earlier this year, former Mayor David Dinkins appealed to
New Yorkers to commemorate Yankel Rosenbaum and Gavin
Cato "as a starting point and not as a flash point." The convic-
tions in the Crown Heights riots have brought a degree of clo-
sure to the Rosenbaum family. But for young Gavin, whose
family received no legal redress, a fitting memorial might be a
city where other 7-year-olds can grow up free of the scourge of
automotive assault.
CITY LI MITS
Eyeing Race
By E. R. Shipp
"Color-Blind:
Seeing Beyond Race in
a Race-Obsessed World, "
by Ellis Case,
HarperCollins, 1997,
260 pp., $24.
Q
uick. Can you identify the fol-
lowing people? Madeline
Albright? Tiger Woods? Sandra
Day O'Connor? Toni Morrison?
I have been reading responses of
very bright college-educated people.
Albright was usually recognized as the
Secretary of State and O'Connor as a Supreme Court justice.
But Woods was almost invariably described as a black golfer
and Morrison as a black writer.
So much for ours being a color-blind society, despite what
you might have heard from con ervative Republicans hell-bent
on undoing the legacy of the civil rights movement, and from
Supreme Court justices who fmd it perfectly acceptable for
politicians to set the boundaries of congressional districts so
they protect incumbents, but not to increase the electoral
chances of people of color.
Ellis Cose, a prolific writer about race and a contributing
editor at Newsweek, tries to bring some honesty into the dis-
cussion with his recently published book, "Color-Blind." Its
subtitle states his objective while heralding the enormity of the
task. Race, he observes, "is an essential part of who we are
(and of how we see others) that is no more easily shed than
unpleasant memories."
His book continues a recent trend of intellectuals and journal-
ists examining race in the post-civil rights era. Among them are
Derrick Bell's "Faces at the Bottom of the Well" (1992), Jill
Nelson's "Volunteer Slavery" (1993) Cornel West's "Race
Matters" (1993), Tony Brown's "Black Lies, White Lies" (1995),
Manning Marable's "Beyond Black and White" (1995) and, in
1996 alone, Bell's "Gospel Choirs," Michael Eric Dyson's ''Race
Rules," Sam Fulwood's ''Waking from the Dream," C. Eric
Lincoln's "Coming Through The Fire," Clarence Page's
"Showing My Color" and Tom Wicker's "Tragic Failure." Cose
has himself contributed two books in this genre: ''Nation of
Strangers" (1992) and "Rage of a Privileged Class" (1993).
My shelves are groaning from the weight of all these books
and, I confess, I often wonder if these authors-though earnest
and, indeed, skillful-aren't really just preaching to the choir. Is
APRIL 1997
.----_..- ..... -
David Duke really likely to be reading any of
this? Is even Newt Gingrich, for all his self-pro-
claimed erudition?
There is no denying that we as a nation haven' t yet
mastered the messages of these books, and that is what
inspires Cose to try again. This is his critique:
"Racial crises, unfortunately, have a way of
reprising themselves, if not precisely with the
same notes. It is, perhaps, inevitable that they
do, given that we seem to be singularly uncre-
ative when it comes to talking about-much
less dealing with-race."
Cose attempts to offer creativity in two
ways, with varying degrees of success. First,
he examines how other countries, notably
South Africa and Brazil , have grappled with
race. Second, he offers solutions. But Cose is
a journalist, not a sociologist or an anthro-
pologist. He spent less than a month in South
Africa: a lot of time on one story if one is a
journalist, but very little if one is claiming to
be an expert. His analysis-of a move to
add "multiracial" as a racial classification
in the census, of presumptions about the
intelligence of blacks, of the failings of the education system
and of the future of affirmative action-is based on personal
observations, anecdotes and interviews.
That is not to say that "Color-Blind" is not a worthwhile
effort. To the contrary. Cose helps put the lie to the claim that
the United States is ready to embrace color-blindness as a guid-
ing principle. "Color-blindness, as it is most commonly prac-
ticed, is not a racial equalizer but a silencer-a way of quash-
ing questions about the continuing racial stratification of the
society and a way of feeling good about the fact that the world
of elites remains so predominantly white."
Cose argues, rather persuasively I think, that race neutrality,
rather than color-blindness, is a more attainable goal. Race neu-
trality means that my blackness should not limit my ability to
flag down a taxicab any more than another person's whiteness
should enhance their chances of doing so.
Cose outlines twelve steps for creating a race-neutral soci-
ety, a plan so simple that I was tempted to dismiss it as the lat-
est in New Age self-help pap. But, then, the Ten
Commandments are simple, too, aren't they-and oh so hard to
abide by! Among Cose's "commandments" are these:
No. I: We must stop expecting time to solve the problem
for us.
No.4: We must end American apartheid.
No.6: We must replace a presumption that minorities will
fail with an expectation of their success.
No. 10: We must keep the conversation going.
Simple, yes. But maybe a reader-friendly road map leading
from the tar pits of racism to the Oz of race neutrality is exact-
ly what this country needs .
E.R. Shipp is a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the
Daily News.
REVIEW
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C ommunity D evelopment L egal A ssistance C enter
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KOURAKOS & KOURAKOS
Bronx, N.Y.
(718) 585-3187
Attorneys at Law
New York, N.Y.
(212) 551-7809
DEBRA BECHTEL - Attorney
Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-Profit Law
Title and loan closings 0 All city housing programs
Mutual housing associations 0 Cooperative conversions
Advice to low income co-op boards of directors
100 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, (718) 624-6850
CITY LIMITS
PROJECT MANAGER. Creative self-starter for all phases of project development; inves-
tigation of potential properties, property acquisition, financial feasibility analysis,
and preparation of funding applications. Excellent communication and computer
skills required. Prior experience preferred. College degree in urban planning, public
administration and/ or experience in community housing or economic development
required. Competitive benefits package provided. Send resume and salary requests
to: St. James CDC, PO Box 9716, Newark, NJ 07104. (No phone calls accepted.)
DIRECTOR OF JUVENILE JUSTICE PROJECT. Seeking experienced activist for developing
and initiating advocacy strategies, preparing policy pape(s and working with govern-
ment agencies and the media; organizing a coalition; preparing publ ic education
materials; supervising staff; fund raising. Must write well , communicate effectively.
Experience in juvenile justice is preferred, but not required. Salary commensurate
with experience, plus benefits. Resume and writing samples to Robert Gangi ,
Executive Director, Correctional Association of New York, 135 East 15th Street, New
York, NY, 10003.
COMMUNrTY SERVICE COORDINATOR. Westhab, the leading provider of housing and
supportive services for the homeless, special needs and low income populations in
Westchester County, NY, seeks a Community Services Coordinator to create and
maintain resident associations and strengthen linkages between Westhab residents
and local community institutions. Ideal candidate will have a BA and at least 2 years
of relevant experience with excellent written, oral and computer skills and a demon-
strated ability to work independently. Salary high 20's with excellent benefits. Send
resume, with salary history, to: Director of Human Resources, Westhab, 85
Executive Blvd., Elmsford, NY 10523 Fax: (914) 345-3139. EOE.
EXECUTWE DIRECTOR. The Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association is a not-for-
profit manager and developer of resident-controlled affordable housing on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan. The Mutual Housing Association manages 20 buildings with
330 apartments and is two thirds of the way through the process of completely ren-
ovating all of its buildings in conjunction with NYC HPD. The executive director
reports to and works in partnership with the board of directors and is responsible
for developing and managing the organization' s $1.3 million annual budget, super-
vising a staff of 18, managing 20 buildings, monitoring building rehabilitation, pro-
viding education and opportunity for tenants to participate in governance, reporting
to HPD and HUD and raising funds. Qualifications: extensive experience working in a
nonprofit organization including supervising staff and working with a board of direc-
tors, bachelor' s degree and experience in affordable housing & development, work-
ing knowledge of nonprofit and real estate fiscal management and budgeting, excel -
lent communications skills especially as necessary to work successfully with resi-
dents, experience in fund raising; and maturity, creativity and energy. Send resume
and salary history to Search Committee, Cooper Square Mutual Housing
Association, 59-61 East 4th Street, 3rd Roor, New York, NY 10003 or fax to (212)
477-9328.
ASSISTANT CONTROllER, Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, a multi-fund-
ed non-profit organization in Washington Heights, seeks an Assistant Controller to
assist with computerized cash receipts, accounts payable, general ledger, payroll ,
record keeping, reporting, and budgeting functions. Minimum 3 years experience.
Familiarity with Fundware accounting system desirable. Salary from mid $30's to
early $40s. Qualified applicants should fax resumes to Kirkland Lindsay, Controller
at (212) 928-4180 or mail to 76 Wadsworth Ave. NY, NY 10033. Resumes kept
strictly confidential .
PROJECT DIRECTOR. For Community Food Resource Center's exciting new project to
organize coalitions in two local New York City communities to expand Child Nutrition
Programs. We want an energetic self-starter with good organizing skills, able to work
with people from all backgrounds, comfortable with computers, with a good sense
of humor_ MSW and Spanish-speaking preferred. Salary commensurate with experi-
ence and qualifications. Excellent benefits, congenial working conditions. Women
and people of color encouraged to apply. Cover letter and resume to CFRC, c/ o
Search Committee. 90 Washington Street, NY, NY 10006.
VISTA PROJECT COORDINATORIlEAD ORGANIZER. National Alliance of HUD Tenants
(Boston) seeks experienced organizer to coordinator a national tenant organizing
VISTA project in HUD assisted housing. Entails supervision of local VISTA volunteers
and technical assistance and field support to 22 NAHT VISTA sites. 3-5 years orga-
nizing experience, preferably in housing or ability to learn. Salary: Low 30's. Send
resume to: NAHT, 353 Columbus Ave., Boston, MA 02116.
LEAD ORGANIZER/ASSISTANT DIRECTOR. Mass Alliance of HUD Tenants seeks experi-
enced organizer to help build a coalition of tenants living in HUD assisted housing in
Eastern MA. Entails supervision and training of staff, organizing and providing tech-
nical assistance to tenant groups and organizing local campaigns. 3-5 years orga-
nizing experience, preferably in housing, supervisory and training experience and
knowledge of HUD housing or ability to learn. Salary: Low 30's. Send resume to
MAHT, 353 Columbus Ave. , Boston, MA 02116.
HOUSING MANAGEMENT SPECIALIST. Neighborhood preservation organization in
Northwest Bronx seeks housing specialist for revitalization program emphasizing
management and financial counseling to owners of residential properties.
Management specialist is responsible for an educational and technical assistance
program for owners of multiple dwellings and small homeowners. This program, cou-
pled with the existing tenant assistance program has been developed as a two-
pronged approach to prevent housing deterioration and promote community revital-
APRIL 1997
ization. Requirements: College degree or equivalent in experience. Knowledge of
community development and planning issues, bui lding rehabil itation and city and
state hOUSing policy and procedures. Excellent verbal and written communication
skills. Computer literacy, including Excel or Lotus 1-2-3, and drivers license a must,
car a big plus and knowledge of Spanish and 7 A Administrators Certification would
be helpful. Salary: High twenties plus fringe. Send resume and writing sample to:
Executive Director, Kingsbridge-Riverdale-Van Cortlandt Development Corporation,
5760 Broadway, Bronx, NY 10463. (718) 543-7100. Fax: (718) 543-3474.
LOAN COUNSElOR. ACORN Housing Corp/ NY seeks energetic, creative, hard working
individuals interested in identifying and creating opportunities for low and moderate
income people to become homebuyers. Job involves identifying homebuyers in low
and moderate income neighborhoods, conducting homebuyer and realtor seminars
and budget and credit counseling workshops, underwriting loans, working with real
estate brokers and banks. Please fax resume to Ismene at (718) 693-3367.
HOUSING DIRECTOR. New York Acorn Housing Company, Inc. seeks highly motivated,
creative individual who is interested in working to expand affordable housing oppor-
tunities for low income people. Individual must be interested in identifying housing
development opportunities for low income people, working with over 500 residents
to convert to limited equity cooperatives; create systems to maintain our housing
stock of 500 apartments and much more. Interested individuals must be highly orga-
nized, self-starters, must have prior experience in housing development and admin-
istration. Please fax resume to Ismene at (718) 693-3367.
HOUSING DEVROPMENT DIRECTOR. Neighborhood based organization in Fort Greene,
Brooklyn, seeks experienced self-starter to administer new and existing housing
development projects. Responsible for preparing applications, overseeing pre-devel-
opment and development processes and insuring program compliance. Three years
housing experience, excellent writing and organizational skills, and ability to work
well with government agencies, banks and other funders. Submit salary require-
ments and resumes to: Executive Director, PACC, 201 Dekalb Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
11205. Fax: (718) 522-2604.
DIRECTOR OF PROPERTY MANAGEMENT. Seeking experienced manager to oversee
1,000 units of affordable housing and to supervise a management staff of five and
28 building personnel. Requires minimum three years experience, with supervisory
experience strongly preferred. Salary to low $40's, full benefits. Fax resume & cover
letter, including salary history, by April 25th to: Exec. Director, Mt. Hope Housing Co.,
2003-05 Walton Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453. Fax (718) 583-6557.
PROJECT DlRECTORICOMMUNrTY ORGANIZER. Growing Brooklyn non-profit community
development agency seeks an energetic, creative self-starter to lead an innovative
national pilot crime and fear reduction program. Coordinate community needs
assessment, strategic planning, and creation and implementation of innovative com-
munity action plans. Strong community organizing, program development, and pro-
ject management skills required. Bilingual/Spanish and anti-crime organizing experi-
ence preferred. To $35,000 commensurate with experience. Mail/fax resumes to:
Executive Director, East New York Urban Youth Corps, 539 Alabama Avenue,
Brooklyn, NY 11207. Fax: (718) 922-1171.
LEGISlATIVE DIRECTOR. Track city, state & federal legislation for umbrella immigration
advocacy group; research, develop policies, background materials, strategies to
achieve humane policies for immigrants both documented and undocumented,
refugees and asylees. Coordinate briefings; write reports, testimony, media materi-
als; communicate with other advocates. Excellent writing, editing, analytical and com-
puter skills. 5 plus years nonprofit experience. Ability to work cooperatively with
diverse staff. MPA/ MBA, Bi/multilingual preferred. High 30's-low $40's. Mail/fax
resume, cover letter to Margie McHugh. Executive Director, New York Immigration
Coalit ion, at address below. CITlZEN EDUCATION AND ACTION COORDINATOR, Design
community education campaign to inform immigrants about U.S. government and
electoral processes; develop database of new citizens who have registered to vote;
organize issue/ candidate forums; motivate new citizens to expand civic participa-
t ion; supervise 100+ voter registration volunteers, 30 outreach workers; BA, 3 years
work experience with newcomers or low-income communities in NYC; ability to work
cooperatively with diverse staff, community leaders; excellent written, verbal , com-
puter skills; ability to handle multiple tasks, manage time; bi-lingual preferred. High
$20' s-low $30s. Mai l/fax resume, cover letter to Arseman Yohannes, Citizenship
Project Coordinator, New York Immigration Coalition, 275 Seventh Ave. , 12th Roor,
NY, NY 10001 Fax: (212) 627-9314. No phone calls.
DIRECTOR of Child Welfare Action Center. Develop a network of organizations
involved in child welfare reform; work on reform campaigns; monitor impact of
reforms. Qualifications: knowledge of social welfare systems and child welfare.
Organizational and administrative experience, previous work in reform campaigns.
Salary commensurate with experience. Letter, resume to: Esmeralda Simmons,
Director, Center for Law and Social Justice, 1150 Carroll St. , Brooklyn 11225. Fax:
718-467-1399. EOE
OFfICE SPACE. Statewide coalition seeks NYC office share or sublet with another non-
profit agency. Approximately 40Q.800 square feet needed. Lower Manhattan West
preferred. 3 phone lines and access to copy machine and conference room required.
Furnished office & storage space preferred. Rent negotiable. Please call the NPC of
NYS at (212) 255-9615.
Es
..... ~ ....\ , ; - ~
By Glenn Thrush
ining in the sulky shadows outside City Hall's circle of media and political power, I have a great deal of time
to star-gaze. Recently I have identified an attribute in one of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's commissioners that
makes me think she is the prototype for a 21st century leader.
I am talking about the city's new welfare commissioner,
Lilliam Barrios-Paoli. Described by The New York Post's
Andrea Peyser as a "50-year-old firebrand with the pep of a
cheerleader and a Ph.D."
Peyser's right in her assessment of Barrio -Paoli's energy
and intellect. But the cheerleader bit i as wrong as wrong ever
was. This woman is an All-Pro halfback, not some pom-pom girl.
In fact, she is the swiftest commissioner I have ever spo-
ken to, endowed with remarkable lateral dexterity. I am not
crafting a metaphor here. I'm talking about the way she moves.
The way she ducks when you ask her a question. Her corporeal
grace as she clambers up the ranks.
I have been awed, even beaten down, by the physicality of
politicians before. When I worked for a paper in Birmingham,
the Governor of Alabama, Guy Hunt, hired only former high
school football players as his press men (it was an all-male
entourage). The hulks would encircle the hunched Hunt with
their aircraft-carrier-deck shoulders and jam tape recorders into
your face as you attempted to heave questions over them to the
governor, who happened to be slightly deaf. ''The idea," said
one of the guys, name of Donnie, "is t'make sure ya'll writers
get it down right." But alas, their wall was ultimately breached
and Hunt was impeached for financial malfeasance.
Mario Cuomo was not one to let others eclipse hi s brains
with their brawn. He would barrel right up to his inter-
locutor and stand close enough so that his intonations flut-
tered your necktie. If you were taller than he was, he
would move even closer, giving the impression that, if he
so desired, he could pulverize your jaw with one violent,
upward skull-thrust.
But Barrios-Paoli is a subtler New-Age
breed.
The first time I met her, about a year ago,
she had just been appointed housing commission-
er and I wanted to know why she was allow-
ing City Hall to dismantle the agency.
Low-income tenants still needed help, I
said. What did she plan to do?
She began with an "Ooooh, I don't
know ... " that trailed into a "Well , of
course ... " I realized none of the sever-
al sentences she had spoken contained
verbs. "Excuse me," she interjected
and executed a flawless pirouette that
left me standing toe-to-toe with a grinning PR woman.
The next time I encountered her, after a conference at the
New School , she was hemmed in by a group of tall housing
advocates. She appeared cornered. I approached and asked my
question. This time I cut her off after the flIst verbless sentence
and immediately began a follow-up, looking down at my pad.
There was no response. I looked up. She was gone. Dust. A
supernatural wisp. Beginning to wonder if she had ever really
been there, I caught a fleeting glimpse of her slipping between
the wall of suits I bad deemed impregnable. What a talent.
Then, a few weeks ago, I unexpectedly found myself
standing next to Barrios-Paoli outside a City Hall press confer-
ence. She smiled graciously, making no attempt to flee. I
scoured my brain for a question. Nothing. Finally, she placed an
understanding hand on my forearm and looked me in the eye
for the fLrst time. "It was good seeing you." This time I was the
one who quickly walked away.
I began to understand that all this was part of an inge-
niously executed strategy when I read Peyser's article. She
quoted Barrios-Paoli saying: "I' d like to go down in history as
the least-known commissioner of all time." I bave a tough and
dirty job, she told Peyser. I scurry from crisis to crisis. If l' m not
careful, I get eaten alive.
She's right. After all , the head of the welfare agency does-
n't have a lot of good news to impart. What is she sup-
posed to brag about? Thousands of students
forced to quit college because they have
to travel halfway across the city to clean
40-ouncers out of Asser Levy Park?
The same thing goes for other bad-
news social service commissioners in
an age of City Hall-enforced austerity. If
you were they, would you just stand there
answering unanswerable questions? No.
You'd be barely seen and seldom heard, like
Barrios-Paoli. And you too might rise from
personnel commissioner to housing commissioner to head
of the country's largest city welfare agency in less than a
year, as she has.
Of course, you could instead be an advocate for the
people your agency serves. But then you might lose your job.
Then again, it's only after all your other
\
Vi rtues have been silenced that silence
itself becomes a virtue.
~ - - - - ~ ~ ~ - - ~ - - - - = = =
CITY LIMITS
APRIL 1997
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Spring 1997 Program Highlights
ANYTHING WE LOVE CAN BE SAVED
Join us for this special evening as Alice Walker
shares her thoughts on politics, culture, feminism,
race, religions, raising a daughter, writing and living.
Monday, April 21 7Pm
Amy Tan
LOLITA, GHOSTS &: YAPPY LITTLE DOGS
Join storyteller Amy Tan for an evening of tales and
dialogue about the sources of literary inspiration in
her writing as she explores the interaction between
life and fiction. This best-selling author has delighted
readers and audiences alike with her gifts of insight,
humor and belief in the human spirit.
Monday, May 6 r gpm
Strategies For Change
A CONFERENCE &: MAYORAL CANDIDATES'
DIALOGUE ON EDUCATION
Councilman Sal F. Albanese, Bronx Borough President
Fernando Ferrer, Manhattan Borough President Ruth
Messinger, and Reverend Al Sharpton.
(Moderator-Carol Jenkins.) Co-sponsored with
Advocates for Children, Education Priorities Panel,
Educators for Social Responsibility, IMPACT II,
The Teachers Network, Public Education Association,
P.S. 6, United Parents Association of New York City,
Youth Force/Youth Agenda.
Saturday, May 10 gjoam-4pm
Freeing the Local Media
BUILDING A LOCAL MEDIA ALLIANCE,
STRENGTHENING THE
CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
MOVEMENT
Friday, May 30 7Pm &: Sat., May 31 lOam-spm
Black Liberation in
Conservative America
RENEWING AFRICAN -AMERICAN
ACTIVISM
With Manning Marable, Bertha Lewis, Bill Fletcher,
Utrice Leid &: Friends.
Friday, June 20 7Pm &: Saturday, June 21 lOam-4pm
Community Organizing
Learn the nuts and bolts of community
organizing during this five-session workshop.
Susan Marloff-Director of Youth Services,
Forest Hills Community House; Kurt Hill-Director
of Anti-Arson Outreach Program, People's Firehouse;
Elizabeth Franqui-Assistant Director of Resident
Advocacy, East New York Urban Youth Corps;
Annette Hernandez-Executive Director, Neighborhood
Women of Williamsburg &: Greenpoint; Joan Ross
Franklin-Information &: Communication
Specialist, UNDP News.
Five Mondays, May 19-June 23 6:3o-gjopm
For more information on location, prices & to register, call the Learning Alliance at:
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