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eitJl Limits
Volume XIX Number 6
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Beverly Cheuvront, City Harvest
Errol Louis, Central Brooklyn Partnership
Mary Martinez, Montefiore Hospital
Rebecca Reich, Housing Consultant
Andrew Reicher, UHAB
Tom Robbins, Journalist
Jay Small , ANHD
Walter Stafford, New York University
Doug Turetsky, former City Limits Editor
Pete Williams, National Urban League
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2/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
~
r : f i J f f ' ~
Wall Street and Welfare
O
n page one of the Saturday paper, an article announces a new plan for
forcing women and men on public assistance to look for jobs. On
another page, a reporter explains why the Federal Reserve recently
increased interest rates for the third time in as many months. The two
stories seem unrelated, but they aren't: they provide insight into our eco-
nomic system, and explain very clearly why we need a strong, accessible
social safety net that does not drive people into even more extreme poverty
simply because they haven't got a job.
In Congress, the push is on to create a two-year limit for welfare, as well
as an additional time limit on the work programs that will have to be created
for men and women who can't find jobs on their own but are being dropped
from the welfare rolls nonetheless. In New York, the plan is to send welfare
applicants to job referral and training programs even before issuing them
their first welfare check.
Meanwhile, near panic hit Wall Street when the government announced
that employment went up by a mere 100,000 jobs in April. As unemploy-
ment rates decline, the specter of inflation raises its head, the pundits say;
as more people get jobs, they have more money to pay for more stuff, driving
prices skyward. Consequently the stock and bond markets took a dive-
speculators don't like inflation because it shrinks the value of their invest-
ments. The Federal Reserve quickly moved to boost interest rates to slow the
economy and put the specter back in its closet, helping market speculators
back to solid ground.
But higher interest rates also make it more difficult for businesses to create
jobs. And that throws a wrench into politicians' plans for welfare reform,
doesn't it?
The political establishment is speaking out of both sides ofits mouth when
it bases its economic moves solely on the interests of market speculators. Of
course, history shows that economic moves in the United States are always
based primarily on the interests of market speculators. How much more
obvious can it be, then, that we are never going to reach anything like total
employment, and that we should be doing what we can to preserve and
improve the social safety net, not shred it?
* * *
Unfortunately, City Limits is losing a longtime sponsor this month: The
New York Urban Coalition is folding its tent after many years developing
community-owned housing and providing technical assistance in neigh-
borhoods battling back from decades of neglect. Their programs will be
divvied up between the New York City Partnership and some other organi-
zations, although none of this has yet been finalized.
* * *
One of the New York housing movement's great motivators passed away
on May 20th. In the 1930s, Meyer Parodneck helped found the Consumer-
Farmer Cooperative, which brought cheaply priced milk into the city at a
time when poor families could not afford to buy it from grocers. In the 1970s,
Parodneck converted the cooperative into the Consumer-Farmer Foundation
(now the Parodneck Foundation), providing financing to numerous sweat-
equity homesteading projects and supporting other neighborhood housing
efforts. When he died, Parodneck was two weeks shy of his 90th birthday. He
was a friend and supporter of City Limits for many years. 0
Cover design by Karen Kane.
FEATURES
Blind Trust 12
You asked for it: The Emergency Repair Program counts on landlords'
voluntary compliance to keep their buildings up to code. The result?
Thousands of violations go unanswered. by Steven Wishnia
Toxic Revenge 16
Whose side are you on: New regulations designed to protect the city's
children from lead paint poisoning could end up pitting health activists
against low income housing developers. by Steve Mitra
Balancing the Scales 20
You have a right to an attorney: Trouble is, in Housing Court, you don't.
And that translates into dangerous living conditions, evictions and
homelessness. It's costing the city millions. The second of a two-part
series . by Hanna Liebman and JiU Kirschenbaum
PROFILE
Finding a Voice 6
Youth Empowered to Speak is giving Lower East Side teenagers the
chance to make themselves heard. by Alexia Lewnes
PIPELINE
City for Sale 8
Housing Commissioner Deborah Wright holds forth on the future of city-
owned apartment buildings. by Andrew White
COMMENTARY
Review
Race and Justice
8EPAIITMENTS
Editorial
Brier.
Fint Strike
Loehmann'e Returns
The Dirty 30
Promi8ee for
Projeet Zion
2
4
4
5
5
25
by Peggy M. Shepard
Lette1"8 27
Profeuional
Directory 29,30
JobAd.I
CIaa.ifiede 30,31
6
16
20
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/3
BRIEFS
First Strike
Tenants want out of auction plan
The Giuliani administration is
encountering stiff opposition from
tenants in a city-owned Manhat-
tan building slated for sale to the
highest bidder. The tenants say
they should have the rightto own
the building themselves.
A few months ago, residents
of 346 East 21st Street learned
through an article in New York
Newsday that the Department of
Housing Preservation and Devel-
opment (HPD) planned to auction
off their building, along with six
others previously taken overfrom
tax-delinquent landlords. The
seven buildings are in predomi -
nantly middle and upper income
neighborhoods.
But Ed Delgado, president of
the tenants association, says
many ofthe people in his building
receive public assistance. He adds
that residents are afraid that who-
ever purchases the property will
sharply increase rents and neglect
basic services.
"They will milk [the building)
and run off the way they did
before," he says. The property
fell into city ownership 15 years
ago, Delgado says.
The tenants are particularly
outraged by the plan because,
morethan a year ago, they applied
to HPD to convert their building
into a tenant-owned cooperative
underthe agency's Tenant Interim
Lease (TIL) Program. HPD did not
reply to their proposal until this
April, and then only to state that
the application was under review.
In the TIL program, the city fully
rehabilitates in rem buildings,
then turns them overto tenants at
minimal cost.
Since then, the tenants have
also applied to become part of a
Mutual Housing Association in the
East Village, an alternative form
of cooperative that combines
several buildings into a nonprofit
association responsible for own-
ership and management.
HPD spokesperson Cassandra
Vernon says that no final decis-
ion on the buildings had been
made and that tenants would be
protected, whatever the out-
come. She says that the depart-
ment may be "rethinking the
disposition ... . We haven't made
any decision aboutthis building."
During his campaign, then-
candidate Giuliani described
horneownership as "the most
Loehmann's Returns
Last January, a controver-
sial plan to build a 27,000-
square-foot department store
in the seaside community of
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn,
appeared to be dead in the
water. The city's Board
of Standards and
Appeals (BSA) had
rejected the
developer's re-
quest for a zoning
variance, ending
the possibility that
Loehmann's, a
chain specializing in women's
wear, could build a store on
the water- front.
lOWe thought the whole
thing was behind us," says
Steve Barrison, president of
the Bay Improvement Group,
which led a crusade of com-
4/JUNE/JULY 1994/CRY UMITS
munity activists against the store.
Not so fast. On May 10th, the
BSA unexpectedly decided to give
the developer, Emmons Avenue
Development Corp., another
hearing based on new
evidence. It is scheduled
for May 24th, as City
Limits goes to press.
"I can't believe
BSA allowed this,"
laments Anne
O'Driscoll of the
Fishing Fleet Asso-
ciation. The Sheeps-
head Bay waterfront, O'Driscoll
notes, was given special zoning
status in 1973 to protect it from
this kind of development. "The
law is supposed to be on our side. "
The reversal is the latest twist
in a long, tangled history. For
years, the Sheepshead Bay com-
Twenty-five colleges from around the country recently held a I'8Cl1Iibnent drive
for students at QuHnsbridge Houses, the country's largest public housing
project, in the first such effort _ organized in New Yortl Cit,y. Annie Lalidn
(above) picked up information 011 LaGuardia Community College as well as voter
registration forms for her grandson and his friends. The aD-day event was
organized by the QuHnsbridge Tenants Association.
specific and important kind of
investment that people can have
in a community." But agency
officials say they moved to
auction off the 30-unit East 21st
Street building because it is in an
upscale neighborhood where it
makes little sense for the city to
own apartments.
The Giuliani administration
h as repeatedly stated that it wa nts
to get out of the business of own-
munity has been bitterly divided
over how to revitalize Emmons
Avenue. After Lundy's restaurant
closed in 1979, the avenue dete-
riorated as empty lots and
boarded-up storefronts replaced
the strip's once bustling restau-
rants and tackle shops. The marine
community has suffered as well,
with the number of party fishing
boats docked here declining from
35 in 1979 to 20 today.
In recent years, much of the
strip has been bought up by
developers Sidney Steinberg and
Anthony Clemenza who, activists
charge, have driven out restau-
rants and store owners through
neglect and high rents. Clemenza
and Steinberg are also the devel-
opers behind the Loehmann's
project.
When the Loehmann's plan
was introduced in 1991, mem-
bers of Community Board 15
championed it as the com-
ing and managing buildingstaken
from landlords who have failed to
pay their property taxes (see "City
For Sale," page 8). If the auction
takes place, itwould bethe first in
several years of an occupied city-
owned building.
Meanwhile, the tenants of 346
East 21st Street have hung a
banner from the fire escape,
declaring, "Speculators Keep
Out!" Kate Lebow
munity'ssavior. "They're the only
ones that came in and said they
wanted to do development on the
waterfront, n says John Nikas,
chair ofthe board.
Indeed, many residents, frus-
trated by years of waterfront
decay, see Loehmann's as the last
hope for revitalizing the shopping
area.
But other residents argue that
the proposed store is simply too
big and is inconsistent with the
maritimecharacterofSheepshead
Bay. "If that store was built
according to zoning regulations,
it might bring life to the strip,"
says community activist Irwin
Fruchtman. "But the developers
want to expand the zoning by 800
percent. It's the worst kind of
project for the area. n
Fruchtman and other oppo-
nents of the plan have instead
proposed a smaller scale shop-
ping strip with an esplanade,
The Dirty 30
For now, it is peaceful outside
the crackhouse on West 149th
Street between Broadway and
Amsterdam Avenue.
Du ri ng the weeks afterthe April
shake-up of the "Dirty 30" police
preci nct, in wh ich 12 officers were
arrested and 11 suspended for
allegedly stealing hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of cash
and cocaine from local dealers,
this block has in some ways come
to resemble the cozier streets of
the Upper West Side. The police
have established a presence here,
barricading eitherend ofthe block
and temporarily halting the drug
traffic.
But many residents have little
confidence that changes at the
30th Precinct will have any last-
ing impact as far as the bustling
crack trade is concerned.
"Once the barricades are
down, things will be the way they
were before," says 24-year-old
Frisky Maclaster.
Cynicism runs deep here
among people who have long
been convinced that the police
had ties to the Harlem drug busi -
ness. "There was zero percent
surprise laboutthe arrests) among
anyone who isn't genetically pro-
cop," says Joe Center of the
Ecumenical Community Develop-
ment Organization, which devel-
ops and manages housing in the
neighborhood.
Like Maclaster, many young
men and women in the area
remain skeptical. Sitting on a
stoop in front of a bullet-riddled
doorway, 15-year-old Boo Smith
says he expects new police offic-
ers in the district to be just as
easily tempted by illicit money as
the old ones were.
Since the arrests, however,
residents have seen more police
on foot patrol in the community.
One of them, Officer Duane
Chalvison, insists that all the bad
apples have been removed from
the precinct and says he believes
that local residents will come to
trust the police again. "They will
feel okay coming to us for help,"
he says. "Theyalwaysdo, because
it's horrible to live in fear, locked
up in an apartment."
On West 149th Street, James
Thomas, a 78-year-old former
transit worker, and his neighbor
Maggie Burnett have been trying
to mobilize a block association
for seven years. Thomas says the
recent events have given their
organizing efforts a new burst of
energy. Teenagerswhooncewere
apathetic about the drug trade, he
says, have been approaching him
with fighting words like "Take the
community back" and "This is
our block, not theirs."
"I've known plenty of good
cops over the years," Thomas
adds. "I still believe in the system."
For now, though, Maggie
Burnett says she still plans to rely
on her two German Shepherds
for protection while she keeps a
close watch on the precinct and
the crackhouses. "I'll do what-
ever it takes to make sure things
stay the way they are right now,"
she say:;. Holly Rosenkrantz
BRIEFS
More ...... 900 ......... aI ..........,.. Ec.nenIcaI Coopei .... 1Dok pIIt III the
orpnIuIIon' ......... COIMIIIIon It St. John the BIpIIst IIamIn CaIhoIc Chun:h
III Bedford 5tuyweunt last month. n.., ""'1111 d ..,.,.. Rudolph GiuIMI ..... a
.......... for fInMIcIng the group'. plan III ..... 250 atrurdabIe apartmeats
by mId-l995.
Promises for Project Zion
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani en-
tered into an agreement last
month with Brooklyn Ecumenical
Cooperatives (BEC), an interfaith
organization whose membership
is drawn from 43 churches, syna-
gogues, schools and
hospitals, to provide
financing for the
group's plan to de-
velop 250 affordable
apartments by July,
1995.
This will be the
first phase of Project
Zion, afour-year plan
to rehabilitate 1,000
apartments in vacant buildings in
central, south and downtown
Brooklyn. The total cost of the
project is expected to be $86 mil-
lion, says Marvin Calloway,
codirector of BEC. So far, Giuliani
has committed to funding only
the first year'swork, but Calloway
says the mayor made a verbal
agreement to try and continue in
future years.
Giuliani announced his
support for the plan at the 12th
annual convention ofBEC on May
15th at St. John the Baptist
Roman Catholic Church in
Bedford Stuyvesant. The victory
for BEC leaders follows months
of lobbying that targeted Giuliani
even before he was elected last
November.
At the convention last month,
more than 900 BEC delegates
greeted the mayor. Following
prayers, several dozen families
living in BEC-developed units
approached the platform to be
recognized. AnnabelieAvila, who
lives in a 31 -unit, three-building
development owned by New
Communities, BEC's
housing arm, said
that her home, on
the border of Crown
Heightsand Bedford-
Stuyvesant, is "a
happy, safe one; all
the neighbors get
along."
Despite the
mayor's commit-
ment, there was some tension at
the convention. The organiza-
tion's delegates repeated a series
of demands they made last
October to then-candidate
Giuliani, in-eluding more effec-
tive police patrols in public hous-
ing projects, where many BEC
members live. Giuliani agreed to
set up a meeting between BEC
and Police Commissioner William
Bratton by July 1st.
"We are encouraged but not
satisfied," says Calloway. "There
are many issues that need to be
resolved."
"There was a lot of positive
energy from the delegates, which
is most important," adds John
Hall, a BEC delegate. "The mayor
was most agreeable, but politi -
cians say 'Yes' to everything. You
have to keep the pressure on."
Laura Washington
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JULY 199415
~
Finding a Voice
By Alexia Lewnes
Photos by Gregory P. Mango
A group of Lower East Side teens are speaking up and speaking out.
T
heir neighborhoods are dilapi-
dated; their streets, unsafe. They
are warehoused in overcrowded
schools and struggling to stay
alive in violent homes. Confronted with
obstacles and burdened with pressures
that would overWhelm most adults, their
talents are wasted on survival. They are
the runaways, throwaways and other
"at risk" youth of New York City.
One group of young people, Youth
Empowered to Speak (YES), has de-
cided to fight back. "We
need to be heard," says
16-year-old Dervis, a
member of YES. "Even
though we're young, we
have rights."
Advocacy is one of the
principle missions of the
group, which meets every
Friday at the Street-
Reach youth drop-in
center operated by the
University Settlement
Society on Manhat-
tan's Lower East Side.
Each week, YES
members get to-
gether to discuss
and define issues
that are important
to them and to
look for ways to
change things . Barely six
months old, the group is still hammer-
ing out which concerns they want to
address, but violence, sexism, drug use,
peer pressure and gangs are all high on
their list.
"YES members are learning about
the mechanisms for change," says Meryl
Berman, director of community devel-
opment programs at University Settle-
ment. "It's easy to say things should be
different, but they're learning how to
actually do it."
Poems and Raps
At their first public appearance at a
rally on the Lower East Side on Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, YES members
read poems and performed raps about
homelessness and violence. "We stand
here still growing-a small voice trying
to be heard," said 22-year-old Don Blair,
addressing the crowd. "Just like every-
one else, we're trying to find answers
a/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
that sometimes we feel we are denied.
Within YES, we try to find those an-
swers and ourselves."
The StreetReach drop-in center is a
safe house for any youth who needs a
break from life on the street, respite
from a troubled family or simply relief
from the mounting pressures they must
often shoulder on their own. The center
serves some 500 young people between
the ages of 13 and 21 each year. Some
have run away from home and live in
October 1993)-YES currently has a core
membership of 12 young people.
Working with Women as Resources,
YES has developed an eight-week
public speaking program designed to
help members cultivate their writing
and speaking skills, to prepare them for
future public gatherings as well as for
giving testimony at government hear-
ings and other forums. For the current
City Council budget hearings, YES
members have prepared two-minute
"A LOT OF PARENTS DON'T CARE ABOtrr THEIR KIDS.
presentations on a range
of issues, including jobs
for teenagers, urban
violence and child
welfare.
Many are on drugs and their kids end up on the streets,"
says 19-year-old Jennifer Morales, who left home
last year to live with the family of Edgar
Aquino, her boyfriend. "Government always
moves slowly and teen-
agers generally move
fast," Blair observes, out-
shelters.
Others have
been kicked out-"couch
kids" who move from house to
house, staying with relatives or friends.
Some still live with their families but
have one foot out the door. About 85 per
cent have dropped out of school.
Weekly peer group meetings at the
center provide forums to discuss a range
of complex subjects such as teen preg-
nancy, date rape, suicide and family
violence. It was during these sessions
that some participants began discuss-
ing how to present their concerns to a
wider audience. YES was the result.
Guided by Berman and modeled after
another University Settlement Society
group, Women as Resources Against
Poverty-an organization formed by
poor women in 1992 to carry out its own
antipoverty campaign (see City Limits,
lining one of the points
he plans to make to the
legislators. "Why not put
the two together to find a
speed that we all can work
with and get accustomed
to?"
Experiences of Abuse
For many YES mem-
bers, it is the first time
they have been encouraged to
investigate the social and
economic conditions that affect
their daily lives. In addition, the
weekly meetings at StreetReach
have taught them that they are not
alone in their experiences of abuse,
homelessness, violence and death.
"I saw my friend get shot, my
other friend get stabbed in school for a
pair of glasses, and another friend get
his throat cut," says 14-year-old Robert,
who has been living with his grand-
mother and uncles since his drunken
father threw him out of the house five
years ago. "I get scared. Maybe I'll get
robbed or stabbed or shot for a hat.
That's why kids have guns. They're
scared and they need to be protected."
Unfortunately, for many of these
young people, their own homes have
never provided safety from the violence
of the streets. "My mom and dad disci-
plined us with beatings," says Blair,
who recalls earning a broken arm for a
bad school report card when he was 16.
"GOVERNMENT
ALWAYS MOVES SlOWLY
and teenagers geMrally move fast,"
Don Blair plans to tel the CIty CouncIl at the
for her first year of
college, but this time
she may need a
scholarship to pay the
tuition.
"It is difficult to
create a supportive
environment for chil-
dren when parents them-
selves are overwhelmed
and beaten down by their
own hardships, struggling
their lives and perhaps the lives of
others. And in the process of defining
and articulating the fears and pressures
of urban adolescence, they are learning
about responsibility, coming to terms
with their own prejudices and learning
to respect themselves and others. It is
not always easy. "Respect is still a big
issue at the meetings," says Morales,
who is especially concerned about
sexism. "Respect between people in
general and respect between men and
women. Some of the guys make jokes
and talk when we're saying something.
It's like our ideas don't matter."
budget hearings this month. ''Why not put the two topIher
to ftnd a speed we an can wen with?"
with their own addictions,"
says Berman. Young people
in increasing numbers are
falling into the juvenile
justice system, the child
welfare system, or are being
left on their own, according
to government statistics. In
fact, advocates for the home-
One of the group's projects has been
to help StreetReach design a jobs
program for its youthful participants.
To take part, each YES member has to
create his or her own job description to
work at StreetReach or Project Home, a
University Settlement homeless preven-
tion program for families. They sign
contracts for the part-time jobs, which
pay $5 per hour.
Years later, his eyes still betray the pain
inflicted by his mother, a drug user and
dealer who Blair says physically abused
him throughout his childhood. "All my
life my mother was putting me down,
telling me I'm ignorant and stupid," he
says. "She didn't realize her words could
have such a powerful effect."
After walking out of his mother's
house in Baltimore three years ago, Blair
moved to New York to try and make it
on his own. Today, he lives in a transi-
tional youth residence in the Bronx that
is part of a network of programs that
arrange for emergency shelter and long-
term independent living situations for
young people. He is now completing his
senior year in high school and pursuing
his goal of becoming an artist, teaching
weekly art classes at StreetReach-a
place, says Blair, that has given him
something he never had before. "The
bottom line is kids are on their own
today," he says. "Most of the time, they
have no support."
Last year, YES member Jennifer
Morales left home to live with her
boyfriend's mother because her father,
an alcoholic who she says had been
abusing her mother for many years,
began hitting her as well. Morales is 19,
although she looks more like 14, and
she is pregnant, due in July. Her parents
don't know she's pregnant, but she feels
fortunate to have support from her
boyfriend's mother and her friends.
"Most kids have no one to turn to," she
says. "A lot of parents don't care about
their kids. Many are on drugs and their
kids end up on the streets." Jennifer is
on leave from New York University,
where she hopes to return in the fall to
major in journalism. Her parents paid
less say teenagers and young
adults are the fastest growing group of
homeless people living in the city's
shelters.
Finding themselves in increasingly
dangerous situations, today's runaway
teenagers are in urgent need of the most
basic medical
Thelma and Jasmine, both 13, are
organizing the library at Project Home
and StreetReach while putting together
services and
other forms of
support, accord-
ing to Kathleen
Connolly, direc-
MEMBERS OF YES INCLUDE HOMnISS RUNAWAYS AND YOUNG
people coping with domestic abuse. They are learning about
public speaking and comnwnity InvoIYement: Jasmine
tor of develop-
(left, and Thelma, both 13, are putting
topIher a storytelling program
ment at The
Door, a compre-
hensive youth
service pro-
gram that
works with
an average of
200 to 300
young people
between the
ages of 12 and
21 every day.
"Problems we're
seeing today are
for small children.
so much more life
threatening-
AIDS, more home-
lessness, more kids
coming in for emer-
gency food." For
Connolly the rising
incidence of AIDS is
particularly disturbing. "The increase
of mv in the teen population means
that in 10 years, we'll see an explosion
ofHIV in young adults," she says.
A strong sense of hope separates YES
members from many other children
'living on their own. They say they
believe they can change the course of
a storytelling
program for small children.
Robert is training to counsel young
people. And Morales is the founder and
editor in chief of MK ("More Knowl-
edge"), a new quarterly newsletter. The
premiere issue, due out in early
summer, will include a rap on date
rape, a review of "Tales of the Closet"-
a popular comic book series addressing
continued on page 29
em UMITS/]UNE/JUL Y 1994/7
City for Sale
By Andrew White
New York City's new housing commissioner discusses her plans
for selling city-owned buildings to local entrepreneurs.
W
ho is the most politically
influential landlord in New
York City? Donald Trump?
Mort Zuckerman? No, it's
Rudolph Giuliani. The mayor controls
the homes of about 150,000 tenants in
more than 3,000 apartment
buildings taken by the city from
landlords who failed to pay
property taxes. More than half of
the apartments in Central Harlem
are in the mayor's portfolio, along
with thousands of others in such
neighborhoods as the South
Bronx, Bedford Stuyvesant,
Bush wick and East New York.
Like Dinkins and Koch before
him, Giuliani has sworn to get out
of the landlord business. But he
plans to put a far more substantial
amount of money into the effort
than his predecessors: during the
next fiscal year, starting July 1,
1994, the Department of Housing
Preservation and Development
rHPD) plans to spend $122 mil-
lion on programs rehabilitating
and sellingoffcity-owned "in rem"
apartment buildings to private
landlords, nonprofit community
groups and tenant associations.
Over the next four years, total spending
on the effort is expected to be more than
$470 million. Much of the money is
slated for new programs that have yet to
be designed, including one that will
encourage "local entrepreneurs, " small
business people from low income neigh-
borhoods, to buy city-owned buildings.
City Limits editor Andrew White
recently spoke with HPD Commissioner
Deborah Wright about privatization and
the future of her agency.
City Limits: Can you give me a sense
of how far along you are in devising the
in rem privatization plan?
Deborah Wright: We're about half-
way there. There's a lot of homework to
be done. Nobody focused on this issue
for fifteen years, and now all of a sudden
everybody wants a solution yesterday.
This is not just about occupied build-
ings; this is about the whole neighbor-
hood. It wouldn't make much sense to
go in and fix the occupied in rem build-
8/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/CITY UMITS
ings and not deal with the rest of the
substandard housing conditions in the
neighborhood. That' s why it's taking us
a little while, because we want to do this
comprehensively.
Our hope is that we'll have some-
thing pretty well put together over the
next month, and we will go out and
spend some evenings with housing ad-
vocates and community boards and
make sure we're all in the same place
before we go forward.
CL: Do you foresee reviving some-
thing like the Private Ownership
Management Program? [Note: this
program, known by its acronym POMP,
sold rehabilitated city-owned buildings
to private, for-profit landlords during
the 1980s. The Dinkins administration
phased POMP out after widespread
reports of tenant harassment and
inadequate maintenance. Many land-
lords also found the program unprofit-
able.]
DW: No. What we're trying to do is
something fresh. There is strength in
the local not -for-profit community, there
is strength in the local entrepreneurial
community which hasn't been tapped
historically, and there's strength in ten-
ant ownership. The initiative we come
out with will have opportunities for all
three of those sectors.
I think the new view is that the
entrepreneurial sector has really been
ignored. The POMP program focused
on owners and managers outside
of the local community. What
we're trying to do is take the com-
ments from the housing advocacy
community very seriously, which
is to say we don't want to sell
property to speculators and
people who don't have a long-
term interest in those communi-
ties. There are some folks outside
the community who are respon-
sible private owners and we want
to give them an opportunity to
participate. [But] we want to try
to support the talented local folks
who have the greatest stake in
whether or not that community
prospers.
CL: The landlords that stuck
with POMP were the big ones from
outside the neighborhood. But
there were many smaller owners
who couldn't make a go of it. And
if you look back at who aban-
doned these buildings in the first place,
many of them were local owners.
DW: I'mnotsurethat'strue.Mysense
is that many of them were not local
people. They may have started out own-
ing a lot of property locally but they
eventually migrated out of those com-
munities.
If you are part of the local structure,
if you live there and you have to go to
church with the Reverend [Calvin] Butts,
and with [Councilmember] Virginia
Fields in the audience, it's a lot tougher
for you to walk away from the drug
problem in your building because you
know that on Sunday, or at your busi-
ness alliance meeting or whatever, folks
are going to tell you about it.
It's also important to note that these
buildings aren't like the POMP build-
ings. These are small, on average eight-
unit buildings that the larger property
owners and managers will be a lot less
interested in. It's uniquely attractive to,
say, the guy who is a local superinten-
....
dent who may want a couple of build-
ings and live in the ground floor of one
of them, as opposed to someone who
wants to buy up a thousand units.
CL: The advantage of a nonprofit or
a cooperative is that the "profit" comes
in the form of reduced costs and re-
duced rents. But if you have for-profit
landlords, they've got to make a living
off the building. How can they possibly
do that without increasing rents, driv-
ing out many low income tenants?
DW: There won't be displacement.
For one thing, we will deliver the build-
ings debt-free. Obviously the buildings
are in substandard conditions and need
to be upgraded. And we can't expect a
sophisticated or a small unsophisticated
property owner to be able to afford that
because the building income just won't
cover [the cost].
We have to deal with the tenants. We
have no intention of displacing people.
And in many cases we' ll have to use
rent vouchers, we'll have
to use tax credits, we'll
have to use other forms of
tenant support to make
sure that people can con-
tinue to afford to live in
their substantially up-
graded apartment.
ings on a day-to-day basis.
CL: You believe there are for-profit
buyers willing to work in partnership
with a nonprofit group organizing their
tenants?
DW: Absolutely. It's to their benefit.
Organized, intelligent tenants make
buildings run smoothly. There's no
question about it. And the for-profit
guys who don't want to do that are not
for us, because we're not interested in
folks whose only intention is to milk the
buildings. We want people who believe
in local communities. We have no
intention of walking away from the
tenants in these buildings.
I would think the tenants would be
thrilled [with this policy]. Let's face it.
Many of the buildings are in very dilapi-
dated condition. For the first time,
tenants will be able to call somebody
and get an immediate response, some-
thing they haven't had for fifteen years
in some cases.
CL: It's been a long battle to get HPD
to consider supporting organizing in
order to get more tenants interested in
cooperative ownership or management
by community groups or others. That
would be a real cultural change here.
DW: It won't happen internally.
There's a built-in tension based on fif-
teen years of history. It's easier for the
advocacy community to beat up on a
faceless bureaucracy than it will be to
roll up their sleeves and work with a
local guy who's trying to make it work.
It's a cultural shift at HPD, but it' s also
a cultural shift for the advocates that I
hope they'll be willing to make. It's a
commitment on both sides.
CL: How quickly do you hope to get
this going? I've heard reports that your
aim is to sell off 10,000 units a year.
DW: Oh no. We couldn't afford it,
for one thing. We're budgeted for about
2,500 units a year. We hope to do better
than that. But unless we
get increased funding
from OMB [the Mayor's
Office of Management
and Budget] we just won't
be able to upgrade the
buildings. We'll see how
we do this year and if we
do as well as we expect
to, then we'll feel com-
fortable going back and
asking OMB to help us
accelerate the program.
But we want to prove our-
selves first.
One of the things that
housing advocates have
told us is that they are
concerned HPD will just
sell these buildings and
walk away from them, and
not monitor how well the
programs are going. We
envision that even with
the entrepreneurial pro-
gram, we will have for-
profit owners partner up
with a local not-for-profit
organization that has the
capacity to organize the
residents and to have a
backup monitoring sys-
tem. Issues and problems
coming up on a day-to-
day basis [should] be
handled locally, instead
of this endless bureau-
cratic loop where people
feel like they have to write
either me or their local
public official because
they can't get a response
from HPD. I think there's
a much more effective
way of monitoring what's
happening in these build-
IN RECENT MONTHS, THE TASK FORCE ONCITY-OWNED
Property, a coalition of community organizations and ho
groups, bas Wnorganizing meetings &roun8 the citY to
tenants of HPD buildings to the Giuliani administration's
privatization agenda. When 350 people showed up for a
meeting at the Neighborhood Defender Service on May 3rd,
organizers from Action for Community Empowerment,
Ecumenical Cpmmunity
Abyssinian Development Corporation and other groups had to
shift strattlgies and turn the session into an outdoor rally. They
soon called a second meeting. held on May 17th at Saint
Mary's Church (pictured above) with about 250 city tenants.
CL: One of the ideas
that you have discussed
is using federal low in-
come housing tax credits
for the privatization of
occupied in rem build-
ings. How would that
would work?
DW: Tax credits are
the most flexible funding
we have for low income
housing because it's eq-
uity money raised from
corporations who need a
tax break. It can be used
for services , it can be used
as a reserve against losses,
and so that's why I have
mentioned it , because
many of these buildings
will run an operating defi-
cit. If we are going to pre-
the audience sought information abo ... ut buying their
bull' s through the Tenant Interim (UL) Progrpl.
"The city says you aren't interested in the program." shld
Robby Robinson, whose building recently joined Tn.. "But
that's because no one knows about the program. They keep it
hush-hush. They don't want you to know about it. But as far as
I'm it's the only program that works." AW
CITY UMnS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/9
vent displacement-and if we can't re-
structure the cost of these buildings by
getting tax breaks and water and sewer
breaks from the city, all of which we're
discussing-if we don't get that package
of incentives, then the tax credits are
something we'll have to seriously con-
sider.
CL: Tax credits would create a re-
serve fund that would be drawn down
over the years. Ultimately it would dis-
sipate.
DW: That's why we would prefer
something more permanent like a Sec-
tion 8 [rent) voucher, or a tax or water
and sewer abatement, so the costs match
the profile of the renters in the building.
CL: What's the outlook for waterand
sewer charge abatements for buildings
that have left city ownership?
DW: Tax abatement looks good. The
water and sewer abatement is a lot
harder. From a citywide perspective,
the fear would be, is this opening the
door to a wholesale set of applications
by other private owners who are also
stressed? I don't think that's something
the administration will want to do.
CL: Do you think that auctions are a
likely approach for privatization ofcity-
owned housing?
DW: No. Unless we can find a way to
make sure the people who are bidding
are financially qualified to renovate the
buildings and support the mortgage, it's
just not viable. It's something we want
to look at down the road because we
have a host of vacant brownstones we
desperately need to find a way to get
renovated. But there have been so many
problems with the auction program in
the past that I think we'll need to very
carefully study the problems before we
even think about doing it again.
CL: What about tenant ownership?
The word within HPD has always been
that advocates are more supportive of
the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program
than tenants. [Note: TIL trains tenant
associations to purchase their city-
owned buildings and manage them as
cooperatives.) In talking with tenants,
I've found that they are interested but
they find it onerous the way the system
is set up.
DW: TIL will continue to be a part of
what we do. It won't be the lead pro-
10/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
gram, because by definition it's driven
by tenant applicants. Applications for
TIL are way down. So there's a gap
between what the advocates say and the
reality of the applications in-house. Part
of what our research entails is explain-
ing the difference.
CL: I've heard that one of the main
reasons tenants fail to get into the TIL
program is because they don't show up
for training classes in downtown
Manhattan. A lot of people in bad
neighborhoods aren't happy about the
idea of leaving their homes after dark to
go downtown.
DW: What kind of commitment is
that if people won't go to a class that we
pay for? To me that seems like a fairly
small commitment to make to own their
own home for $250. At a certain point
people have to step up to the plate.
I'm committed to making sure TIL
continues. There are a number of
problems with the program that people
have pointed out to me. This is not just
about creating new programs, it's about
improving existing programs as well.
TIL will play a role. It's driven by
demand. And my view is driven by a
real gap in our product offerings, for the
local entrepreneur, and we want to give
that population a shot at participating
in our programs, which is something
they have not had.
CL: What do you propose as far as
creating training programs or incentive
programs for these entrepreneurs?
DW: They need the same things that
not-for-profits and tenants need. They
need resources, they need training, they
need introductions.
CL: Right now the city has stopped
taking control of buildings whose own-
ers have failed to pay their property
taxes. How long can that last?
DW: Part of our in rem strategy is to
determine how to prevent buildings
from becoming distressed so that we
don't end up in a position of having to
take them over. We want to focus HPD's
whole array of programs on the prob-
lem. Programs could be so much more
effective if they were targeted.
For example, we have the Participa-
tion Loan Program offering low-cost
loans for private owners to upgrade their
buildings, and 8A loans for the smaller
buildings, and even the Small Homes
Loan Program for three-unit buildings
and smaller. If we are going in to stabi-
lize a neighborhood, say four to six
blocks, it makes sense to renovate the
vacant buildings, but it also makes sense
to go out and grab those private owners
and let them know that we have low-
cost financing here at HPD. We've never
leafleted a community and pulled own-
ers in. Instead, we've just waited for
them to get through the HPD maze to
figure out if we've got something avail-
able.
In addition we need to target our
inspectors. We are way down in the
number of housing inspectors we have
and we've been talking to a number of
parties about increased financing.
We're lobbying very heavily at the state
level. We also sat down with HUD,
which historically has refused to allow
us to use federal money for inspectors.
But there is a little wedge opening. They
said that if we target the inspectors to
distressed neighborhoods, they would
reconsider. So, for example, if we had a
special team of inspectors targeted in
the neighborhoods where we are doing
our occupied in rem initiative, wouldn't
it make sense to offer stabilization of in
rem housing, renovation of vacant
buildings, and low-cost loans to private
owners, and have inspectors giving a
little nudge to the private owners who
aren't attracted by the incentive of low-
cost financing? It makes sense.
CL: When you were at the Housing
Authority, you worked on trying to help
public housing residents create small
businesses for in-house contracting. Do
you see anything like that to be created
atHPD?
DW: That's why I believe so much in
the local entrepreneurs. I think many
people are missing the point when they
focus on for-profit versus not-for-profit.
A person who is a local entrepreneur
hires people locally. It's going to be in
that person's interest because that's
where he or she lives and does business
every day.
One of the biggest criticisms of HPD
is that so much of the economic power
bypasses local communities. The ven-
dors are from outside of the community.
Many times the developers are. Even
some of the consultants are. People are
really emphasizing local participation
because we want to harness some of the
power of government expenditure and
attract private funds to create jobs and
some economic spin-off. We're not harp-
ing on this for nothing. I see it as a very
powerful tool. 0
May 1994
$1,000,000
Chemical Bank's subsidiary
Chemical Community Development, Inc.
is proud to announce the financing of a new community-based
water conservation initiative
to
Cooperative Technologies Services
International Corp (CTSI).
CTSI partners with community groups to market equipment conversion
to conserve water usage.
Y4CHEM/CAL
CITY UMIYS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/11
The city's emergency
repaIr program
gives landlords
the benefit
of the doubt-
and leaves tenants
to suffer the
consequences.
BY STEVEN WISHNIA
he three Crown Heights buildings have
elegant red and black brick mosaics and cement friezes on
their facades, remnan,ts of the decorative touches that marked
solid Brooklyn apartment buildings in the early part of this
century.
But first looks can be deceiving. On the inside, 1470, 1484,
and 1488 SterUng Place are thoroughly decrepit, with plumb-
ing so deteriorated the residents didn't have heat or hot water
for most onast winter. "The pipes were so rotten, they just
broke off in your hand," says tenant leader Eunice Davis.
And in an ironic touch, the lead paint that 60 years ago was
a sign of being able to afford the best is now a crumbling toxin
endangering the residents' children. Yet the landlord has
repeatedly failed to respond to tenants' complaints.
These buildings would have once been certain candidates
for intervention by the city's Emergency Repair Program
(ERP), part of the Department of Housing Preservation and
Development's (HPD's) bureau of code enforcement. After a
city inspection, work crews would have delivered fuel,
gotten the heat and hot water running and removed the lead
paint or sealed it up behind a new layer of sheetrock. And a
lien would have been placed on the property for the cost of
the work, requiring the landlord to pay up.
12/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/CITY UMITS
But two years ago, housing officials revamped the ERP
program. In response to budget cuts and countless com-
plaints by landlords of abuses in the system, the agency
decided to try a more accommodating approach, emphasiz-
ing cooperation rather than confrontation with property
owners. That's why in October, 1992, when inspectors found
peeling lead paint in a fourth-floor apartment where young
children live at 1488 Sterling Place, the city gave Regina
Tischler, one of the partners in the corporation that owns the
three buildings, the opportunity to repair the hazardous
conditions herself. On February 26, 1993, she filed papers
with HPD certifying that the work had been done.
Presumably, this was one of the successes for the new
policy touted in the Mayor's Management Report of Septem-
ber, 1993, which showed 60 percent of all landlords comply-
ing with repair orders-more than twice the rate of the
previous year.
Except for one problem. Tischler never did the work.
Today, more than a year later, lead paintis still peeling off the
walls, and Legal Aid attorney Judith Goldener reports that
several of the tenants' children have since been found to have
unusually high levels of lead in their blood. The landlord
could not be reached by City Limits for comment.
he situation at Sterling Place is not unique. In
00 s throughout the city, innumerable landlords
ed responding to emergency repair orders, not only
deadlines and filing false certifications, but, more
ct __ tv, by simply ignoring the city's demands that re-
p de. And the HPD policy that relies on voluntary
compliance has, it turns out, allowed serious problems to
linger for years on end.
Alison Cordero, a tenant organizer with the st. Nicholas
Neighborhood Preservation Corporation in Williamsburg
and Greenpoint, says landlords in the buildings she works
with comply only "after we drag them through the courts for
a year or two."
"We have not seen any increase in landlords keeping their
buildings up to code," adds Julio Batista, an aide to City
Council Member Stanley Michels, whose district encom-
passes parts of West Harlem and Washington Heights.
In fact, the city now concedes that the information in the
1993 Mayor's Management Report was inaccurate. In recent
interviews with City Limits, Lawrence Schatt, assistant
commissioner for code enforcement and the
official who oversees the Emergency Repair
Program, explained that an HPD audit per-
formed during the summer of1993 uncovered
significant flaws in the statistics. Department
representatives telephoned tenants in 1,000
buildings whose landlords had been counted
as in compliance and found that repairs had
not been done in about 25 percent of them,
says Schatt. The city has begun doing regular
phone surveys to more closely monitor
whether or not repairs have been completed.
Joel Weissman, a Brooklyn Legal Aid law-
yer who was a code enforcement attorney
with HPD from 1989 to 1992, says he doesn't
even trust Schatt's new figures. "Based on my
experience, 25 percent seems really low," he
says. "In a large number of buildings, the
repairs just never get done. The program is
just not there in any meaningful way."
The Emergency Repair Program has never
been considered a panacea for the ills of New
York's low income housing stock. Even in
1991, when the city hired private contractors
to make more than 45,000 repairs in privately-
And in a City Limits survey last month of 30 troubled
buildings in neighborhoods including Central Harlem,
Williamsburg and Washington Heights, most of the buildings
had emergency repair orders outstanding and few tenants
had seen repairs completed or inspectors returning to the
scene until more than a year had gone by.
ome buildings in poor neighborhoods have always
or kept. The deterioration of others reflects the
e 1980s real estate speculation boom and owners
flated prices for rental properties who are now
P"nnptlll'fwilling to maintain them. According to "Housing
___ - a 1993 report by the Community Service
Society, 7,500 buildings-one-sixth of the city's privately
owned rental housing stock-are at risk of abandonment, due
to either serious property tax arrears or impending mortgage
foreclosures. A 1992 survey by the city Department of
Finance found that 4,000 buildings were more than a year
behind in their taxes and thus eligible for seizure by the city.
Lydia Melendez and other tenants at 611
West 171st Street in Washington Heights have
been fighting with their landlord for repairs
for more than two years. Last winter, they
endured 10 consecutive days without heat
while temperatures hovered in the teens and
20s. The building has almost 300 violations
listed on the HPD inspection database,
including 62 categorized as immediately
hazardous. Many tenants' doors are broken
and the building is infested with rats.
Melendez has complained repeatedly to HPD
about conditions in the building, and a number
of emergency repair orders have been writ-
ten. But the landlord owes 18 months in back
taxes, and few of the repairs have been made.
Housing organizers say they see such build-
ings regularly. "We're dealing mostly with
buildings where the landlord has walked
away," explains Cordero of the St. Nicholas
Neighborhood Preservation Corporation.
At 520 West 144th Street in Harlem, land-
lord Moishe Bodner failed to provide services
Q for years after he bought the six-story apart-
ment building and three others adjacent to it
owned buildings, the program was handling "In a large number
only a small percentage of the housing code
for $1.87 million in 1988 (see City Limits,
March 1992). He eventually defaulted on his
mortgages, and after two years in receiver-
ship with the federal Resolution Trust Corpo-
ration, the four 3D-unit buildings are now run
by a court-appointed administrator. They have
violations currently tallied in HPD records. of buildings, the
Yet in three years the ERP budget has been
cut from $12 million to $8 million, and last ..
repaIrS Just never
year the program made only 11,600 emer-
gency repairs citywide, tarring roofs, supply- ,
ing fuel. refitting boilers and removing lead get done.'
paint, among other things. The budget re-
thousands of violations, including more than
900 categorized as immediately hazardous,
including lead paint, rat infestation and
cently proposed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani includes no
increase in funding for ERP; code enforcement overall is
slated for significant cuts.
chronic heat and hot water problems. Inspectors have issued
dozens of emergency repair orders during the last two years.
Adela Fernandez, sharing an apartment at 520 West 144th
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/13
Street with her sister, Ramona Lopez, has a thick sheaf of pink
forms that HPD routinely mails to tenants, asking whether or
not repairs ordered by the agency have been completed. Until
recently, if tenants didn't respond to the forms within 21
days, the department assumed everything was fine, says
Assistant Commissioner SchaU.
Yet the query forms often arrive in tenants' hands after the
21-day deadline, according to organizers and tenant lawyers.
And they are written in English only. Fernan-
dez and Lopez speak Spanish and never knew
they were supposed to send the forms back to
HPD. As a result, a year and a half went by
before city workers finally showed up to fix
chronic plumbing leaks that had destroyed
much oftheir kitchen and bathroom ceilings,
despite four emergency repair orders issued
to the landlord and the receiver. Meanwhile,
windows in the building's hallways remain
broken more than five months after they were
ordered fixed. At least the tenants didn't freeze
last winter, Fernandez says-city workers be-
gan calling her sister in February to find out
whether the buildings had heat, and ERP
ended up spending more than $20,000 on fuel
to keep the boiler running.
projections for fiscal 1995 anticipate recouping only half of
the $8 million the agency expects to spend on ERP repairs.
Many tenant organizers have found there are better ways
to get repairs done than to wait for recalcitrant owners or the
city to take care of them. "The best way is to sue the landlord,"
says Evan Hess of the Northern Manhattan Improvement
Corporation (NMIC) in Washington Heights.
At 367 South 5th Street in Williamsburg, the city issued a
series of emergency repair orders demanding
that the landlord get rid of lead paint in three
apartments and fix a collapsed bathroom ceil-
ing in another. But work didn't begin until
after the tenants and landlord reached a court
agreement last July, according to Debra Medina
of the Los Sures housing group. The lead was
removed, but the landlord toldERP he couldn't
get into the apartment to fix the collapsed
ceiling. Tenants claim he never tried.
Among landlords who abide by emergency
repair orders only when legal pressure has
been applied, one of the most notorious is
Martin Fine, owner of 10 turn-of-the-century
tenements on Ninth Avenue between West
37th and 38th streets in Manhattan.
"We can't fix the
Bob Kalin, a tenant organizer with Housing
Conservation Coordinators in Clinton, calls
Fine "the last of the old-school slumlords" in
the neighborhood. The buildings were once
so drug-infested that police had to borrow a
city bus to haul off buyers nabbed in a
crackhouse raid. Fine owes 11 years of real
estate taxes on the properties, but he has
avoided seizure by filing for bankruptcy. He
owes ERP $80,000. The tenants have been in
court with him for 15 years.
whole city. There
Fine has been doing some repairs recently,
partly in response to Housing Court Judge
Arthur Birnbaum's threat to jail him and partly
because he is trying to stave off the tenants'
bid to take over the buildings. The halls have
been painted and replastered, and one resi-
ordered repairs citywide, Schatt explains. aren't enough
Inspectors' ranks have been decimated by
budget cuts since 1991, thanks primarily to resources."
the elimination of $8 million in state aid. The
500-plus squad of inspectors on the HPD
roster in 1989 has been cut to 207 and will fall to 187 next year
if Mayor Giuliani's budget plan is approved (see City Limits,
March 1994). Most of those who remain are aSSigned only to
check heat and hot water complaints or make inspections
ordered by judges in Housing Court.
There are a few other penalties for property owners who
don't comply, but they are mild. Landlords can self-certify
that repair work has been completed; the fine for false self-
certification is $250 per repair. The City Council took no
action on a 1993 HPD proposal to increase the fine to $1,000.
Seizure of the property is not much of a threat either.
Mayor Giuliani has temporarily postponed vesting private
properties for nonpayment of taxes or government liens,
saying that the city should avoid taking on the management
of any more decrepit buildings. As a result, HPD's budget
14/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
dent recently got cold water for the first time
in 15 months. Tenants had only 15 days without heat this
winter, the best record in years, says Kalin.
T ntil 1992, the ERP program was a favorite
or l ~ d l o r d groups who accused the city of being
to s all property owners. They complained about
o'verc1larges y the private contractors ERP hired to do repairs
da ut b 'ng charged for work that was never done. Even
te - cates agree that many of the landlords' com-
plaints were justified. Weissman of Legal Aid says ERP was
"one of the worst-run programs in the city," with little
accountability for the private contractors who did most of the
work. In one incident, a repair crew put an exposed steam
pipe barely a foot away from the front of a toilet, leaving the
tenants to risk getting scalded when they used the bathroom.
In 1991 and '92, landlord lobbyists pushed hard for changes
in ERP and they found a sympathetic ear: City Council
Member Archie Spigner of Queens, chair of the council's
housing committee, who held a public hearing on the pro-
gram. Soon after, then-HPD Commissioner Felice Michetti
restructured ERP, giving landlords more time to comply.
HPD also virtually eliminated the use of outside contractors,
employing agency maintenance and repair staff instead.
"Owner groups always said that, given a chance, owners
would make repairs," Schatt explains. "That fits in with my
philosophy: Give them the opportunity to do the right thing,
and hold them accountable."
Yet, as the 1993 audit found, holding landlords account-
able was not such a simple task. After the audit, ERP began
a pilot program on the Lower East Side to improve its tenant
outreach. That effort has recently been expanded to all five
boroughs, with 17 city workers making follow-up calls to
tenants to check on repairs, according to Vernon ofHPD. The
department is also hiring four more workers to call tenants on
evenings and weekends, sidestepping the Giuliani personnel
cuts by using temporary per-diem employees reassigned
from the agency's Central Complaint Bureau, she says.
Anne Pasmanick of the Community Resource and Train-
ing Center charges that calling tenants a few times is "flimsy"
followup, however. She points out that tenants aren't quali-
fied to assess major structural repairs like roofing or boiler
work, and the sheer number of repairs needed in decrepit
buildings may cause them to overlook less threatening
repairs that haven't been done.
any landlords are willing to keep their
shape, as Schatt contends. Unfortunately,
se buildings are most likely to need emer-
a thtt aren't getting the work done. "I assume
better landlords out there, but we get the worst
s, ay. NMIC.
"When HPD finally gets around to doing the job, they do
great work, but we have families sitting around for six, eight,
ten months in safe houses waiting for [lead abatement] to get
done," adds Michael Kink, a Legal Aid lawyer in Harlem.
But Schatt will not concede that the ERP policy is failing.
"We can't fix the whole city," he says. "[HPD] can't do all the
work that needs to be done in private housing. There aren't
enough resources." Furthermore, he argues, "No one has
suffered because of the changes. Tenants aren't suffering."
Tenants might take a different view. The residents of1470
Sterling Place had to buy a pump to get sewage out of their
basement, and they paid for several pipes to be replaced after
they had burst. Down the block at 1484 Sterling, the tenants
fixed broken hall windows in January, 10 months after the
city ordered the landlord to do the same. "People got tired of
freezing," says Eunice Davis. 0
Steven Wishnia is a frequent contributor to City Limits.
mBankersliust Company
Community Development Group
A resource for the non-profit
development community

Gary Hattem, Managing Director
Amy Brusiloff, Vice President
280 Park Avenue, 19West
New York, New York 10017
Tel: 212 .. 454 .. 3677 Fax: 212 .. 454 .. 2380
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994115
Lead paint poisons thousands of children each year, but community groups
fear that new regulations could undermine housing affordability.
'1' are two mil-
hon apartments
in New York City
that were built
before 1960, the year lead
paint was banned in housing
construction. Unless the old
paint has been removed,
young children living in
these buildings are potential
victims of the toxic scourge
of lead poisoning, which can
impair a child's intellectual
development and cause
severe learning disabilities,
according to the federal
Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention; at high
levels, it can even be fatal.
implication of these rising
costs is that the housing will
just not get built," says Fran
Justa, executive director of
Neighborhood Housing Ser-
vices, which packages loans
and grants for refurbishing
buildings in low income
neighborhoods. "People
will not be housed."
"No one wants to jeopar-
dize kids, " echoes Jim
Buckley of University
Neighborhood Housing in
the Bronx, an organization
that helps tenants rehabili-
tate and buy their buildings
from private landlords. "But
if people tell us you have to
spend X amount of dollars,
tell us where the money is
going to come from."
'1' he city gov.ern-
cr ment prOVIdes
financial assis-
tance to nonprofit
1>:
groups and private land-
Yet many neighborhood
housing groups worry that
strict new government guide-
lines for the removal of lead
paint will push the cost of
rehabilitation work so high
that the housing they pro-
duce will no longer be afford-
able to low income tenants.
And already, insurance com-
panies are threatening to
make life far more difficult-
and more expensive-for
non profits , contractors and
IIY II I '1' Illl
lords to rehabilitate more
than 10,000 apartments
each year. For now, there is
private landlords alike by refusing all liability coverage for
lead paint poisoning, leaving anyone involved in a rehabil-
itation job open to severe losses from civil lawsuits.
The lead paint dilemma couldn't come at a worse time.
New York City is in the grip of a housing crisis that promises
to deepen as each year goes by. Recent surveys show that
overcrowding in rental apartments is more extensive than it
has been in 30 years, and thousands of privately-owned
buildings are on the verge of abandonment or foreclosure
because of unpaid mortgages and taxes.
As a result, longtime housing advocates say they are
unsure on which side of the lead issue their allegiances lie.
"No one wants to see children getting lead-poisoned, but the
16/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/CITY UMITS
still a great deal of uncer-
tainty about exactly what impact government lead abatement
guidelines will have on this work. In fact , laws mandating the
elimination of lead paint hazards have been on the city's
books since 1982. So far, enforcement has been spotty, but a
longstanding lawsuit by local health and antipoverty advo-
cates and new federal regulations due for release later this
year are helping shape a radically different climate.
The most concrete evidence of the change is a set of rules
put into effect by the city' s Department of Health (DOH) last
March. They include detailed guidelines spelling out exactly
how contractors must go about the removal of the toxic paint,
and they affect all apartments in which a child has been
found to be lead-poisoned, as well as any apartments where
inspectors from the city's Department of Housing Preserva-
tion and Development (HPD) find peeling paint or other lead
violations.
The new rules require that city agencies be notified before
any abatement work is begun, and that, in some cases,
apartments be vacated while the work is underway. In addi-
tion, a final cleanup must be performed using a special
vacuum that captures the smallest particles of dust. After-
ward, DOH also requires a set of laboratory tests on dust
collected from any room where an abatement takes place.
"None of this was needed before," says Mendell Raksin, a
Brooklyn-based general contractor who has worked for many
going to have budgets to cover this," exclaims Justa, who says
it is not far-fetched to assume that every moderate rehabilita-
tion job will cost an additional $15,000 cost per apartment.
"We're in kind of a bind right now," Buckley agrees.
"Frankly, we just can' t add $15,000 to the cost of an apart-
ment and keep it affordable." In fact, his organization is
already feeling the impact. The group has been finalizing
financing for two buildings that tenants are purchasing, but
the negotiations have been delayed by uncertainty about the
rehabilitation costs now that the DOH rules are in place.
Apply Buckley'S experience to the city' s entire develop-
ment portfolio and you have a situation in which affordable
years renovating city-owned buildings. "It's
like the whole world has changed."
According to Harold Shultz, deputy com-
missioner for HPD's Office of Housing Policy
and Supervision, the cost of abatement work
has doubled as a result of the new guidelines.
Depending on the apartment and the extent of
the work that's required, abatement now costs
anywhere from $850 to well over $1,500, he
says, and sometimes as much as $10,000.
.. I .. IJS

housing does not get rehabilitated or, at best, the
pipeline is slowed considerably, developers
say. "If it's going to cost more money per reha-
bilitation job, common sense says that there' s
going to be less done, " says Allan Blitz, director
of the Program Loan Fund of the Community

Services Society.
And the abatement guidelines are only part
of the problem. In recent years, insurance com-
panies in New York State have been increas-
ingly reluctant to protect landlords from any
liability associated with lead poisoning. Last
year, according to the State Insurance Depart-
ment, 21 companies were granted the right to
But private landlords charge that Shultz's
estimates are too low. "A job that may have cost
you between $50 and $100 [before the new
regulations] will now cost about a couple of
thousand," says Dan Margulies of the Commu-
IS f.f)INf.
'I'f)
II. "
nity Housing Improvement Program, a landlord advocacy
group representing 2,500 property owners. "A violation that
cost $8,000 to fix will now cost about $15,000," he continues.
Cost estimates put together by the Community Preservation
Corporation, a coalition of banks that lends to nonprofit
developers and private landlords in low and moderate in-
come communities, corroborate Margulies' figures. The costs
are so substantial, says John McCarthy, the organization's
executive vice president, that "there is a danger of choking off
rehabilitation activity."
f
' ity officials counter that the new rules do not apply
directly to most rehabilitation work, but only to
repairs demanded by health and housing inspec-
"I tors. But the DOH rules are just the beginning: strict
new federal regulations are slated to be issued later this year,
and by the time they take full effect in 1996, they are likely to
spur changes that will carry substantial added costs for any
rehabilitation job in a building with lead paint.
The federal regulations are the result of the 1992 Housing
and Community Development Act, signed into law by then-
President George Bush. The law included a passage known as
"Title 10," which mandated the federal government to issue
regulations by the end of this year outlining a new certifica-
tion process for lead abatement workers, work rules, inspec-
tion and testing, essentially creating a whole new industry
similar to what grew up around asbestos removal.
"It's just going to drive nonprofits out of housing. No one's
issue policies that specifically exclude lead in
their coverage. Thirty-five others petitioned the insurance
department to do the same, but have been denied, says
spokesperson John Cologna. Margulies says that small land-
lords with just one or two buildings are already unable to get
insurance covering lead poisoning.
This could have serious repercussions for nonprofit com-
munity groups owning and managing buildings as well as for-
profit owners and contractors, according to McCarthy of the
CPC. He has not yet heard of projects that have actually been
stopped because of the lack of insurance. But long-term
prospects, as coverage gets harder and harder to obtain, look
bleak for all concerned.
Last October, a Bronx jury awarded $7.8 million to a child
who had been lead-poisoned in a city-owned building. A
lawsuit like that against an uninsured landlord-whether it
is a tenant-owned cooperative, a nonprofit or a private
landlord-would have devastating consequences. "All it
takes is one lawsuit to wipe you out," says Margulies. "It isn't
worth it."
II
ut activists who have fought long and hard for
tougher public health regulations point out that,
whatever the costs and hardships suffered by
developers and landlords, they don't come close
to the problems of children who are lead-poisoned. Lead
paint poisoning has devastating effects on young children,
damaging their learning capacity and sometimes causing
deafness and anemia. In 1991, the Centers for Disease Control
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JULY 1994/17
and Prevention tightened their definition of what was con-
sidered a harmful level oflead in blood, based on new data on
the effects of mild poisoning.
"We really don't have the option of saying that we can't
address this problem," says Heidi Most of the Maryland-
based National Center for Lead-Safe Housing, a group funded
by the Fannie Mae and Enterprise foundations. "It affects
poor and minority neighborhoods the most, so not addressing
it has wide-ranging policy implications."
Judging from the laws that have been on New York City's
books for more than a decade, observers might easily think
that New York has one of the boldest and most progressive
policies on lead paint in the nation. The stuff was banned
from use in housing here more than 30 years ago, 18 years
before the federal government implemented similar legisla-
tion. And laws mandating the removal of lead
board," adds Andy Goldberg, another NYCCELP attorney.
"But the thing is, kids are getting poisoned. Yes, these rules
add a cost...but the alternative is a greater cost."
I
loise Johnson couldn't agree more. Some 10 years
JI ago, blood tests revealed that her two children had
' .. to be hospitalized for severe lead poisoning after
... they had eaten large amounts of paint they peeled
off the walls of her Bronx apartment. The city promptly hired
contractors to scrape and repaint the a partmen t, but Johnson's
troubles were only beginning: when the children were re-
leased from the hospital, they came back to a home in
disarray, with their furniture and toys covered with lead dust
paint from old apartments went into effect in "1')4 .... f)I'I.)4 ....
1982; 10 years later, the federal government
and paint chips. Jones' best efforts at cleaning
up did not prevent her son from ingesting the
poisonous material once again. He was forced
to return to the hospital two more times during finally caught up.
,IIJS'I'

the next year and a half.
Today, Johnson's teenage son is partially
But so far, enforcement of the rules has been
lax, advocates charge. For years, city inspec-
tors have ignored the problem, often failing to
cite landlords for blatant lead violations, says
Philip Berns of the Bronx Legal Aid Society
Lead Prevention Project. "And when they cite
them, they don't follow up to make sure the
violations are cleared," he says (see "Blind
Trust," page 12).
'I'f)
"7"1'8
I' Ilf)f.llll'l. "
deaf and has trouble in school. He didn't learn
to read until he was 13 years old. "The doctor
says he is damaged," Johnson remarks with a
stoicism that has come from narrating her story
many times over the last decade. "But it's not
his fault. It's like he had an accident when he
In 1985, the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poison-
ing (NYCCELP) filed a lawsuit charging that, among other
things, the city could not comply with its own 1982 law
without setting up specific procedures for removing or cov-
ering all lead-based paint. The courts agreed in 1989, and the
city was eventually forced to draft the current DOH rules after
a more recent contempt ruling. In fact, the city has still not
fully complied, says Lucy Billings, one of the attorneys for
NYCCELP. The law goes further than simply demanding
certain lead abatement procedures, she says; it makes any
lead paint in an apartment where a child under age seven is
living a violation of the housing code.
"Just because the paint isn't peeling now does not mean it
won't peel later," she says.
In fact, for the 1993 fiscal year, the City Council appropri-
ated $17 million to enforce the lead abatement law, yet the
Dinkins administration did not spend the money. Billings
claims that the administration was simply unwilling to abide
by a law it did not like. At the time, officials argued that
enforcement was just too expensive.
As for the current uproar among housing developers and
property owners, activists say it is due to an overwhelming
resistance to change that they have encountered over and
over again. "These rules can be followed. People just have to
get with the program," says Megan Charlop, who runs a safe
house at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx where
families can stay while lead paint is being abated in their
apartments.
"There's resistance to dealing with the problem across the
18/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
was young .... He was not born this way."
For Johnson, the changes in the city's laws couldn't come
soon enough. Even though it's too late for her son, she now
volunteers at Montefiore's safe house, reaching out to edu-
cate mothers about the dangers to which their young children
may be exposed.
"It's about time things were changed," she says. "It's time
they had stricter rules so what happened to me doesn't
happen to other mothers."
"r
hile housing developers agonize with their
consciences and try to determine how best to
cope with the coming changes, not all of the
news they are hearing is bad. The 1992 federal
legislation included some money to be made available to
landlords in low income neighborhoods for lead paint abate-
ment. The type of work to be funded is still being finalized by
the National Center for Lead-Safe Housing, which has been
designated by the Department of Housing and Urban Devel-
opment to write the guidelines.
"We understand this is a problem in which government
has to step in and help," says David Jacobs, deputy director
of the center. "It can't be done [by property owners] alone."
It's a nugget of hopeful information for Jim Buckley and
others in the housing community, who are unsure whether
there will be any other funding made available to cover the
cost oflead abatement. "We need the support," Buckley says.
"And frankly, we're not going to be able to pay it back." 0
~ ...
... ,
CHASE
Community
Development
Corporation
The Chase Community Development
Corporation Finances Housing and
Economic Development Projects,
including:
New Construction
Rehabilitation
Special Needs Housing
Homeless Shelters
Home Mortgages
Small Business Loans
Loan Consortia
For information, call the
Community-Based Development Unit
(212) 552-9737
We Look Forward to Your Call!
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/19
The struggle to provide tenants with legal representation in Housing Court
BY HANNA LIEBMAN AND JILL KIRSCHENBAUM
After decades of television crime dramas, almost any 10-year-
old child in the United States could recite the Miranda rights
by heart. The right to an attorney, even for those who can't
Thl
.s IS the afford to pay, has been etched deeply into
our collective consciousness.
second of Most New Yorkers might assume they
a t'!Vo-part have the right to an attorney in the city's
series. Housing Court as well. They would be
wrong. It took many decades for legal activists to win the right
to counsel in the criminal
courts, and even today it
has not been extended
throughout the judicial
system. In Housing Court,
where each year tens of
thousands of people are
threatened with the
prospect oflosing the roof
over their heads, there is
no such guaranteed
protection. It is a state of
affairs that has serious
ramifications for any
unlucky person who ends
up there.
interpreter. The result was a "stipulation," written by the
landlord's attorney, signed by Wierzbowski and approved by
the judge. The document required him to pay his back rent,
then move out.
Wierzbowski was under the impression that the stipula-
tion outlined a sentence handed down by the judge. "This
was his first contact with jurisprudence in the States and he
felt that if the judge had all the evidence, then [the judge] was
capable and willing to make the right decision without bias,"
says Jacek Birkowski, a
tenant advocate with The
People's Firehouse, a
Greenpoint community
group that Wierzbowski
later contacted. He
couldn't have been further
from the truth: a stipula-
tion is little more than a
settlement between a land-
lord and a tenant, written
with the assent of a judge,
but without the court's
~ active involvement.
Cii
~ With the clock ticking
~ on the time Wierzbowski
ill had left before his sched- Take Waldemar Wierz-
bowski, a Polish dance
instructor who came to
the United States 15 years
Waldemar Wl8I'Zbowski was nearty evicted from his Greenpoint apartment because he
couldn't afford an attorney when he MIlt to Housing Court.
uled eviction, Birkowski
steered him to Brooklyn
ago. He stopped paying rent when his landlord ignored
repeated requests for repairs of problems in his Greenpoint
apartment, including holes in the ceiling, falling plaster and
a torn up floor. Soon Wierzbowski was summoned to Hous-
ing Court to face eviction proceedings. He appeared without
legal representation and was assigned a court-appointed
20/JUNE/]ULY 1994/CITY UMITS
Legal Services Corpora-
tion A, which is now seeking to have the agreement aban-
doned. "It was patently unfair, unjust and one-sided," says
Eric Feinberg, a lawyer in that office. "It's a clear case of a
tenant who, if he had been represented by an attorney, would
have had dramatically different results."
Wierzbowski was lucky to get any help at all. According
to studies, tenants are so cowed by the rapid-fire justice of
Housing Court that they often cave in to unreasonable terms.
Others are so threatened by the mere prospect of going to
court without legal advice that they fail to demand much-
needed building repairs, or they simply move out when they
receive a notice from the landlord.
Wierzbowski's experience is emblematic of one of the
most pressing problems in one of the messiest court systems
around. But his tale only scratches the surface: evidence is
rapidly mounting that the lack of
legal representation for tenants in
Housing Court is not only causing
thousands of people to lose their
homes each year, but may also be
costing the city millions and mil-
lions of taxpayer dollars that could
be far better spent.
come by. A 1986 study by the City-Wide Task Force on
Housing Court, a tenant advocacy group, found that 83
percent of all court-approved stipulations agreed to by both
tenants and landlords ordered rent to be paid, while fewer
than 40 percent ordered apartments to be repaired. What's
more, followup inspections by the Task Force found that only
half of the stipulated repairs were ever actually completed.
Douglas Palms of Bushwick is well aware of how difficult
it can be to get repairs, even after the landlord agrees in court
to make them. When he found rat
droppings in his infant daughter's
crib two years ago, Palms immedi-
ately called their landlord, who he
says had been negligent about roach
and rodent infestation problems ever
since they moved into the eight-unit
building on Linden Street in 1990.
No effective measures were forth-
coming, says Palms, and last year,
when the rats and roaches were the
worst he had ever seen, he had taken
all he could stand.
"I held my rent and [the land-
lord] took me to court. It was quite a
hassle," says Palms. "It didn't go to
trial, which was a mistake. I agreed
to a stipulation that really tied me
in, where I had to pay and he had to
fix the rat holes in the basement."
Palms paid the back rent. Getting
the landlord to comply with the
stipulation was another matter,
however.
A
s soon as you walk into
Brooklyn Housing Court,
it feels like you've stepped
onto a hamster treadmill. The
wheels are spinning, but it doesn't
seem possible to get from one place
to another; nor is there a clear
direction of where you are sup-
posed to go. Bewildered people
stand in long queues stretching
out from every room. It is hardly
what one would expect from a
court: there are none of the im-
prints of officialdom to suggest it
is a fair, upstanding place. It is
often as crowded as a rush-hour
subway train. A report last Febru-
ary by The Fund for Modern Courts
blasted the Brooklyn court for its
The CityWide Task Force on Housing Court operates
infonnation tables In each courthouse to advise tenants
who have no legal representation.
"I think that it was very much
unfair." Palms says. "You could be
as dedicated as possible, but you're
not a lawyer; you need somebody
versed in legal matters." Palms says
poor conditions: "Severe overcrowding, understaffing, de-
plorable physical facilities, inordinate waiting times and a
lack of public information hinder the fair administration of
justice."
Tenants appearing in any of the city's four Housing Courts-
one each in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan-
find themselves very much alone. It is the largest pro se (Latin
for "appearing for oneself') court in the state, with only 12
percent of tenants represented by legal counsel, compared
with 98 percent of the landlords . .
And though the court was established 20 years ago as the
place where landlords would be held accountable for prop-
erly maintaining rental property through strict code enforce-
ment, its original intent has long since been abandoned (see
City Limits, April 1994). Today, rent collection comprises 92
percent of the Housing Court's actions; in many cases, the
result is eviction.
Evidence of the one-sidedness of the system is easy to
he regrets not having gotten advice
sooner. He knows now, for example, that he could have
insisted on having an inspector visit the premises prior to
signing any agreement, an inspection that could have sup-
ported his right to a rent reduction until the repairs were
made.
So many cases are decided by these stipulations that
observers believe the notion of justice in Housing Court has
been utterly subverted.
"Significant rights are being waived unwillingly," attests
Arnold S. Cohen, executive director of Queens Legal Services.
"Judges aren't able to and don't question tenants about
stipulations. "
And it is the poorest residents from the most dilapidated
neighborhoods who most often wind up in Housing Court.
Nearly half of them have incomes below $10,000 a year,
according to a study released last summer by the City-Wide
Task Force and the Community Training and Resource
Center (CTRC). Eighty-seven percent are black and Hispanic.
CITY UMITS/JUNE/]UL Y 1994/21
I
n addition to the unchecked deterioration of the city's
rental stock-a principal cause of homelessness in New
York City-studies show that eviction is the other major
cause of homeless ness here. The impact on the city is severe.
According to a 1993 report by anthropologist Anna Lou
Dehavenon for the Action Research Project on Hunger,
Homelessness and Family Health, 50 percent of the families
entering homeless shelters say they have been forced to
abandon their apartments because of poor housing con-
ditions. Thirty-eight percent have been evicted, most for
nonpayment of rent due to inadequate welfare shelter allow-
ances, disputes over the landlord's delivery of essential
services or other problems. Dehavenon conducted her study
over a year's time, interviewing hundreds of families at the
city's Emergency Assistance Units, the front door to the
shelter system.
Currently, according to city statistics, there are more than
23,000 people living in municipal shelters, at a staggering
cost of over $200 million in direct shelter costs and services.
And this does not take into consideration the hundreds of
thousands of New Yorkers considered by city officials to be
at risk of becoming homeless because they are living doubled-
up with relatives or are in unsafe and dilapidated apartments.
Meanwhile, every year an estimated 24,000 households
are evicted by city marshals. Yet it is impossible to assess the
true eviction rate citywide, since more than 100,000 petitions
for nonpayment of rent filed annually by landlords are never
answered in court by the tenants involved. Many simply
move out of their apartments because they are intimidated by
the prospect of going to court or just don't speak English well
enough to know what their options are. Others settle with
their landlords out of court.
The correlation between Housing Court proceedings and
homelessness has not gone unnoticed by city policy makers.
A 1987 report by the Mayor's Advisory Task Force on the
Homeless prompted a pilot eviction prevention project funded
by the Human Resources Administration (HRA), the city's
welfare agency, to provide legal representation to families
eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
In 1990, after the program had been underway for 18 months,
HRA reported that the project had "saved 3,600 families from
eviction or restored them to apartments from which they had
been evicted, a 90 percent success rate." In some cases, the
lawyers forced landlords to reduce rent overcharges or to
address threatening repair issues; in others, they helped
clients apply for AFDC and additional rent subsidies. The
beneficial impact of legal representation. on the lives of the
poor had been made quite clear.
L
ast summer's analysis by the City-Wide Task Force on
Housing Court and CTRC affirmed the city's findings
and extrapolated the program's potential savings to
taxpayers. Simply by providing representation in Housing
Court, the city could save millions of dollars a year and keep
thousands of New Yorkers out of the shelter system, the
22/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
authors concluded. Using a conservative city estimate, they
calculated that 5,414 families enter shelters each year as a
result of eviction. If legal representation were available, the
study estimated 4,873 families would remain in their apart-
ments and not need a place in a homeless shelter. Another
3,963 single people would also avoid entry to the shelters by
virtue of the right to counsel, the report continued. Based on
the costs of sheltering these people, the total savings would
be $150 million, less the cost of representation-figured at
$1,200 per case. The result was a substantial savings to the
city of $67 million.
Of course, the numbers do not adequately reflect the toll
that homelessness has on its victims. But for those rescued by
legal representation, the benefits are obvious.
Maria Jimenez, a 33-year-old Bronx resident who emi-
grated from the Dominican Republic two years ago with her
three children, lost her job as a nanny last September and
quickly fell behind in paying her bills. "Everything accumu-
lated. Paying for food, my children's school," she recalls.
Then, Jimenez, who speaks no English, received eviction
papers. Somehow, she says, she was able to delay a final
judgment for several months, but ultimately she found her-
self signing a stipulation in Housing Court in which the
landlord's attorney specified "No more 72s," meaning she
could be evicted at any time without a 72-hour notice.
Only a last-minute referral to Nelida Malave, the staff
attorney at the Neighborhood Association of Intercultural
Affairs, a Bronx community group, kept the city marshals
from Jimenez's door. Malave convinced an impatient judge to
stay the eviction warrant one last time to give her time to
contact HRA and get Jimenez's children registered for public
assistance. Malave was also able to obtain a one-time pay-
ment from the federal Emergency Assistance to Families
(EAF) program to cover the back rent owed by Jimenez.
"I was in an emotional crisis," says Jimenez. "Nelida
Malave saved me. Without her, I don't know what I would
have done. I had no place to go."
E
ven under the best of circumstances-in a court with
a manageable caseload and a well-tooled system in
place to educate pro se tenants-the absence of coun-
sel in Housing Court constitutes a breach of constitutional
rights, some legal experts say. As defined by the due process
clause of the 14th Amendment, the right to counsel has been
absolutely established when a person's physical liberty is at
stake. As such, the right of the poor to have a lawyer ap-
pointed without charge has been guaranteed in criminal
cases and some other proceedings, such as child custody
cases.
When an eviction is ordered, "That constitutes an impor-
tant deprivation of property and liberty and cannot be done
without due process of law," argues constitutional scholar
Monroe Freedman, a professor at Hofstra University Law
School. Without an attorney, adds Andrew Scherer, an attor-
ney with Legal Services for New York City, "you can't have
a meaningful opportunity to be
heard in court," another provision
of due process.
These arguments are the basis of
a 1989 class action suit brought on
behalf of unrepresented low income
tenants by the City-Wide Task
Force, Donaldson et al. v. State of
New York. But progress in the case
has been slow. Initially filed in the
Appellate Division, First Depart-
ment, which ruled that it did not
have jurisdiction to hear the case,
Donaldson was sent down to the
state Supreme Court, which ruled
in 1991 that the issue of rep resent a-
tion in Housing Court must be de-
cided on a case-by-case basis.
The Donaldson case has been
idling ever since. But its very exist-
ence may have prompted the city's
decision in 1990 to expand HRA's
pilot eviction prevention project.
The program currently provides $12
million a year-$3 million each from state and city coffers
and the rest from the federal EAF program-for Legal Aid,
Legal Services and others to take on 10,000 eviction cases
each year. Of course, the city has also been under pressure to
alleviate its overburdened shelter system because of a court
ruling charging city officials with contempt and levying fines
of $3.5 million for the failure to provide adequate shelter to
homeless families.
But the EAF program only serves a small percentage of
those who need counsel in Housing Court. And even as the
13 participating legal services providers
like a mercenary."
Meanwhile, there are some
70,000 people in Housing Court ev-
ery year who need attorneys and are
financially eligible for legal services,
according to the Task Force study.
But 86 percent can't get it under
EAF's stringent guidelines: only low
income single-parent households
with children are eligible f9r HRA's
anti-eviction legal assistance pro-
gram. Two-parent low income fami-
lies don't qualify; neither do single
or disabled adults, senior citizens
and couples without children.
And city funding for legal pro-
grams targeting these constituencies
is due for elimination in the Giuliani
budget, including the $1.3 million
anti-eviction program of the
~ Department of Housing Preserva-
~ tion and Development.
t;; Balancing the gains of the EAF
program against the cuts made else-
where, it is unclear whether the total number of people
receiving legal assistance in Housing Court has increased
overall.
"The EAF money," says Kenneth Rosenfeld, project direc-
tor of the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, "is
supplementing what's been cut by other programs. But I don't
think there's been a net gain in representation for tenants."
Some advocates disagree. Scott Auwarter, director of case
management services at the Citizens Advice Bureau, says that
access to representation has improved. Yet he hastens to
point out that his organization's eviction
have expanded their staffs in order to
handle the 10,000 new cases, their abil-
ity to represent clients not eligible for
the program has diminished. In general,
legal services funding has been declin-
ing rapidly in recent years because of an
overall reduction in government sup-
port and massive losses in revenue from
The city could
save $67 million
a year.
prevention teams, scattered in four sites
in the Bronx, can grant appointments to
only one of every three people who re-
quest help.
What's more, the focus of the assis-
tance program is on crisis intervention
rather than early prevention, says Liz
Interest on Lawyers Accounts (lOLA). IOLAs channel the
interest earned on short-term escrow accounts held by pri-
vate attorneys into legal assistance for the poor, but as interest
rates drop, this funding stream dries up.
As a result, advocates say, free legal assistance has been
skewed disproportionately toward the EAF cases-that is,
families on welfare. For them, legal services agencies are paid
a flat fee of $1,200 per case, a dependable source of income
at a time when other resources have dwindled.
Such a situation, notes Martin Needelman, project direc-
tor of Brooklyn Legal Services Corp. A, has put his and other
organizations under a tremendous strain, and has caused
staff resistance as well. "People don't like to have a bounty on
their heads--every case is twelve hundred dollars, so you feel
Krueger, executive director of the Com-
munity Food Resource Center, who believes many steps
could be taken to forestall eviction proceedings before they
reach the court. And under the EAF rules, a family can't go for
legal services until they have already lost the first round in
Housing Court. In a more flexible system, Krueger adds, other
services could be provided. such as getting HRA to determine
whether a family may be entitled to more benefits than they
are receiving. But this takes time not easily afforded when
lawyers are forced to operate in a crisis mode to ward off
imminent evictions.
"I'm a strong proponent of the right to counsel," Krueger
says. "But if the system was set up better, there'd be a lot of
people who wouldn't need to be in Housing Court and
therefore wouldn't need an attorney."
CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/23
S t e v ~ n Banks, coordinating attorney of the Legal Aid
Society's Homeless Family Rights Project, believes most of
the problems with the EAF program stem from the fact that
only certain people now have a right to counsel in Housing
Court, and the rest do not.
"Imbalances have clearly been created as a result of the
[eligibility] limitations of EAF," he observes. "And it is
unconscionable that [the city] has failed to extend the right to
counsel to other poor tenants.
"But the bottom line is that for families with children,
eviction as a reason for entry into the shelter system has been
significantly reduced."
S
till, some housing advocates complain that too many
hopes have been pinned on the EAF program, hopes
that they say have left the legal effort to establish the
right to counsel stillborn. Andrew Scherer, one of the attor-
neys who filed the Donaldson class action suit, counters that
this is a premature assessment, but admits the suit is on hold
partly because the EAF program-which has served some
20,000 families since its inception three years ago-has not
yet reached its full potential of 10,000 cases per year. EAF
program coordinator Rekha Schoumaker of HRA reports the
agency expects to come close to its goals this year. In addi-
tion, HRA has expressed an interest in expanding the pro-
gram in 1995, according to Arthur Fried, acting general
counsel in the agency's Office of Legal Affairs. This could
dull the impetus for Donaldson, Scherer says, since it would
effectively establish a de facto right to counsel, perhaps
making it more difficult to prove that a court ruling is
necessary to guarantee due process rights.
In any event, support for the right to counsel has increased
in recent years. Civil Court Administrative Judge Jacqueline
Silbermann, who oversees Housing Court operations, strongly
favors representation for indigent tenants appearing there, as
does the court's Advisory Council and the Association of the
Bar of the City of New York.
And in a decision delivered in 1992 that offers hope to the
Waldemar Wierzbowskis of the world, Brooklyn Housing
Court Judge Marcy S. Friedman ordered a signed stipulation
thrown out on the grounds that, without counsel, the tenant
was not adequately apprised of his rights: "This case pro-
vides a textbook example of a one-sided stipulation
unadvisedly signed by a pro se litigant who lacked knowl-
edge of a defense .... In recent years, the plight of unrepresented
tenants like the respondent has become the subject of increas-
ing concern."
However it happens, legal advocates say they are confi-
dent that a right to counsel will eventually be established in
Housing Court. Says Scherer, "When we started talking about
the issue back in 1984 or so, people laughed. We've substan-
tially moved forward since then. It will simply take a certain
amount of patience and keeping our eyes on the prize over the
long haul." 0
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24/JUNE/JULY 1994/CITY UMITS
Race and Justice By P.ggy M. Sh .... rd
"Confronting Environmental Racism:
Voices from the Grassroots, " edited by
Robert D. Bullard, South End Press,
1993,260 pages, $16 paperback.
W
ho pays the price for envi-
ronmental degradation?
According to this formidable
collection of essays edited
by Robert Bullard of the University of
California at Riverside, it is most often
communities of color-not only the
poor, but often the middle class as
well. And white America derives the
benefit.
In recent years, a number of books
and studies have clearly documented
that communities of color-in urban
areas, in pockets of rural poverty and on
Native American reservations-live in
many of the most environmentally
damaged places in the country. But in
his introductory essay to Confronting
Environmental Racism: Voices from the
Grassroots, Bullard, the self-styled
chronicler of the national environmen-
tal justice movement, makes the socio-
logical link that the most polluted urban
communities are also those with crum-
bling infrastructures, deteriorating
housing, inadequate schools, high
unemployment and poverty, ongoing
disinvestment and an overloaded
health care system. He suggests that it is
not surprising that South Central Los
Angeles, scene of last year' s riots, is
located in the "dirtiest" zip code in
California.
His analysis goes beyond the ques-
tion of poverty and urban neglect, and
tackles head-on the issue of race versus
class. "People of color ... face elevated
toxic exposure levels even when social
class variables are held constant," he
argues, refuting the singular challenge
leveled by whites against the concept of
environmental racism: that it is not
racism but income that is the critical
factor in environmental injustice.
Whites often ask why middle class
persons of color don't simply move to
other neighborhoods to escape toxic
dumping grounds and polluted air and
water. But such questions ignore the
long history of segregation and its fun-
damental causes. "The difficulty for
people of color to buy their way out,"
Bullard explains, "rests on housing
discrimination, redlining and other
market forces."
Broad Diversity
The centrality of race is a theme
Bullard pursued in his book Dumping
in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmen-
tal Quality, published in 1990. And it
underlies each of the contributions to
this new anthology of essays document-
ing community environmental struggles
and examining the broad diversity of
the national environmental justice
movement.
The contributors represent several
disciplines, community struggles and
perspectives. Many of them participated
in the historic First National People of
Color Environmental Leadership
Summit convened in Washington, D.C.,
in October, 1991. More than 650 activists
and leaders from 50 states, the District
of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Mexico and
the Marshall Islands met in marathon,
often fractious sessions as delegates
drafted and adopted the Principles of
Environmental Justice. Activists
returned home committed to organiz-
ing regional networks to provide a
unified voice and to gather support and
resources for opposing local abuses as
well as the export of waste and pollut-
ing industries to the Third World.
The research in Bullard's opening
essay focuses on struggles against
government and private industry in six
American cities and towns. The author
examines the grassroots strategies that
organizers use for resolving disputes,
details the conditions and events that
led communities to mobilize and evalu-
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CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/25
ates the level and quality of external
support these local groups receive from
mainstream environmental and social
justice groups.
Filtered Voices
Throughout the book, the essays are
thorough but, as in any anthology, the
tone and style are uneven. The book's
greatest weakness is the lack of case
studies from the Northeast and the pre-
dominance of contributors from
academia. The voices from the grassroots
are often filtered, but they are never-
theless strong, informative voices rarely
heard before.
In the forward, the Reverend Ben-
jamin Chavis Jr., executive director of
the NAACP, offers a historical pers-
pective on the movement and defines
environmental racism, a term coined,
he says, during the 1982 protests in
North Carolina over the siting of a PCB
landfill in poor, rural and most! y African
American Warren County, selected not
for its location but because of the pow-
erlessness of its residents.
"Race and Waste in Two Virginia
Communities," by Robert W. Collin and
William Harris Sr., examines the role of
environmental planning. And there are
thorough, studious chapters on toxic
waste issues by Charles Lee and on lead
poisoning by Janet Phoenix, as well as a
harrowing piece on farm workers and
pesticides by Marion Moses. There is
also a well-documented look at the en-
vironmental politics of Sumter County,
Alabama, home of the nation's largest
hazardous waste landfill.
Environmental Mainstream
Another important theme is the racial
discrimination that excludes people of
color from many mainstream environ-
mental groups, decision-making boards,
commissions and regulatory bodies. The
consequences of this are illustrated in
Laura Pulido's powerful chapter on
"Sustainable Development at Granados
del Valle" in northern New Mexico:
"The racism and class bias evident in
the [local] conflict...stems from the
nature of existing environmental policy
and conflicting conceptions of the
natural world," she writes. "The pre-
vailing idea of nature among most pres-
ervationists has no place for people,
even when they are a historical compo-
nent of the rural landscape and habitat."
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In "Global Threats to People of Color, "
Dana Alston and Nicole Brown exam-
ine the role that race and poverty play
internationally while looking at the
impact of war, debt-for-nature swaps,
the international waste trade and issues
of biodiversity.
Perhaps the most political chapter,
"Coping with Industrial Exploitation,"
by Cynthia Hamilton, looks at growth
and development as sources of wealth
and destruction, and suggests that the
domination of nature provides a context
for viewing the domination of women
as well as that of local governments by
industry. She argues that, since the
problems of development and unlimited
growth have emerged from the
economic/corporate arena where
government is only a junior partner,
"changing government policy is simply
no longer enough."
Required Reading
Confronting Environmental Racism
should be required reading for anyone
concerned about social justice and the
environmental quality of life in this
country. Questions are posed and
answered: What community organizing
strategies are effective? What institu-
tional changes would enable this coun-
try to become a just and sustainable
society?
Responding to the latter would seem
a tall order, but Bullard rises to the
challenge. In the concluding chapter,
he posits a "model environmental justice
framework" that adopts a public health
model of prevention, shifts the burden
of proof to polluters and redresses the
disproportionate impact of pollution on
African American, Latino and other
communities. He calls for targeting
actions and resources, enforcing exist-
ing environmental laws and pushing
for a Fair Environmental Protection Act
that would challenge the public poli-
cies, land use decisions and industrial
practices that have unfairly damaged
communities of color. 0
Peggy M. Shepard is a cofounder of
West Harlem Environmental Action.
Advertise in
City Limits!
Call Faith Wiggins
at 925-9820.
In Touch
As I am leaving New York City after
a nine-month training in community
organizing at Hunter College, Forest
Hills Community House and Action for
Community Empowerment, I would like
to subscribe to your magazine to make
sure that back in Berlin I will stay in
touch with local deyelopments and
projects that I have learned to feel for
and identify with.
Let me use this opportunity to tell
you how much City Limits has been a
source of illumination, inspiration and
encouragement for me. If it wasn't for
you, my knowledge about politics and
community initiatives in this city would
be much narrower. Thank you for a
terrific job fighting against the tide.
Patrik Herrman
Berlin, Germany
Short Shrift
I enjoyed Richard Cloward and
Frances Fox Piven's review of Tyranny
of Kindness by Theresa Funiciello
(April, 1994). I found out all kinds of
interesting stuff, like the author's treach-
erous treatment of Ruth Messinger, her
ingratitude toward Cloward and Piven,
etc. What! didn't find was an analysis of
Funiciello's ideas and proposed solu-
tions, such as the negative income tax
model. I'm even sorrier because
Funiciello's book has received scant
notice and even less critical analysis.
Mina Lach
Manhattan
Enforced Silence
The "review" of Tyranny of Kind-
ness demonstrated one point of my book:
social welfare professionals who pur-
port to represent the interests of poor
people rarely give two hoots about what
they have to say. I attempted to insert
the hitherto enforced silence of welfare
mothers into the political process. If
what I wrote meets their test, then I have
done my job. As Cloward and Piven
well know, welfare rights activists all
over this country agree with my book
and applaud it.
Cloward and Piven did participate in
many events put together by the Down-
town Welfare Advocate Center (DWAC)
but when they couldn't call the shots,
they shot the organization. They forgot
they were there to help, not just to be
helped. They did go to jail, not for our
benefit per se, but for "the experience"
which had previously been denied them
to avoid the appearance that they had
too much control over the National
Welfare Rights Organization.
As for Ruth Messinger's trials with
me and DWAC: 1) I, like many others,
paid rent. I didn't even meet Ruth until
after I moved in. (And for you tenant
purists, if the roof needed fixing, the
rent went up till Ruth declared it paid
off.) 2) During the time I lived there,
Messinger had access to the best minds
on the welfare issue in the city and she
used it every bit to her advantage. 3)
Cloward and Piven's account of the
incident with the commissioner of the
Human Resources Administration
(HRA) failed to mention that at the time,
the dynamic duo were all ga-ga about
the action and the campaign to raise
welfare benefits of which it was a part.
Cloward's precise mantra at the time
was, "disrupt, disrupt .... "
In 1971, their book, Regulating the
Poor ended with, "The moral seems
clear: a placid poor get nothing, a tur-
bulent poor sometimes get something."
We took it to heart. Toward the end of
our now infamous campaign, the HRA
commissioner wrote that raising welfare
benefits had become the city's "highest
priority." We won a welfare grant
increase worth hundreds of millions of
dollars that went directly into welfare
recipients' pockets. Sorry about those
hard feelings.
The assertion by Cloward and Piven
that I denounce the entire social welfare
world and declare all politicians
corrupt is baloney. Literally hundreds
of individuals, organizations and even
politicians are lauded in my book. I also
wrote in the book, "If the shoe don't fit,
don't wear it."
Notwithstanding, there are some
macro-issues with which I do grapple.
Our welfare state rewards many social
service providers, elected officials,
government bureaucrats, corporations
and wealthy individuals in the guise of
helping poor people. The welfare state
grows like weeds in a garden, yet Aid to
Families with Dependent Children
assistance-has dropped
nationwide by an average of 45 percent
since 1970. Welfare families (mostly
mothers and their children) are poorer,
not because no one purports to repre-
sent their interests but because too many
of the self-serving and/or naive do.
Repeatedly, when these institutions
and individuals mediate the politics of
poverty, somehow they end up with
more money in their own coffers and
more power in the bag. They are
accountable to no one, unregulated and
for the most part unregulatable, even
though their moneys come directly or
indirectly from the United States
Treasury. They succeed with the aid of
a virtually comatose press that allows
them unrestricted self-reporting. Most
disheartening, lots of people knew it,
but because of the political distance of
poor people from those who exercise
power the story hadn't leaked. Until
Tyranny of Kindness, we were (some
still are) under a virtual political (left)
gag order. Trouble is, not telling didn't
help. Quite the opposite. That's how we
got a food banking system that dispenses
tax benefits to large corporations but
less money for mothers to buy food.
That's how we got shelters with forced
counseling up the wazoo instead of
housing for homeless families. That's
how we keep on pumping up a gusher of
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job training programs for jobs that don't
exist. Welfare mothers would rather
have the cash and the right to choose
whether, when, and under what condi-
tions they will work outside the home,
just the way widows with minor chil-
dren on Social Security benefits do.
Cloward and Piven believe that every
welfare state expenditure translates into
social progress. I don't. Unless the people
who need it are helped, it is just more
legal graft and we ' re all getting
snookered. They say it is politically
naive to assume that dismantling the
welfare state infrastructure would
automatically move more money into
the hands of poor people. No shit,
Sherlock. This is a good example of
Cloward and Piven's own mechanistic
view of politics, not mine.
Still, a precondition for changing the
redistributive policies in the United
States is to acknowledge the failure of
the au courant social services strategy
to eliminate poverty. As a practical
matter it strains credibility to keep sup-
porting failed programs while making
the case for a guaranteed income. If
political indicators tell us anything it is
that most people, correctly, feel ripped
off by government, paying too much
and getting too little. Having served in
various public and private positions
since the late 1970s, I frequently wit-
nessed the outright stealing that goes on
in the name of causes. Bottom line:
corruption is so pervasive, virtually the
only way to benefit poor people at this
juncture is to get dollars appropriated
on their behalf, directly to them.
Finally, Cloward and Piven appear
blind to the fundamental power
dynamics of the welfare state. They fail
to understand that it was the abuse of
power that resulted in the abandon-
ment of income security for ending
poverty. I say "appear" because in their
attempt to render my book trivial they
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reveal all too clearly how to use power
to discredit a point of view that conflicts
with their own. In printing this review,
City Limits participated in the real
hidden agenda here: silencing poor
women yet again. Shame on all of you
for the McCarthyism of the left and the
sorry state of social policy debate it
continues to foster.
Theresa Funiciello
Woodstock, NY
Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox
Piven respond: We certainly do advo-
cate "disruption." Labor strikes, rent
strikes, filling the jails as civil rights
protesters did, flooding the welfare rolls.
But we obviously didn't mean that
organizers should go around disrupting
the few allies they have.
There wouldn't have been a welfare
rights movement for Theresa Funiciello
to join in the 1970s if, in the 1960s,
scores of social agencies had not made
their meeting rooms and mimeograph
machines available and if thousands of
social workers had not joined up. The
welfare rights movement was the child
of the Civil Rights Movement. It was
also the child of progressives in the field
of social welfare who became committed
to the antipoverty struggle. It could not
have been mounted without resources
that poor people didn't have, and the
social welfare establishment provided
many of them. None of this means that
social welfare institutions are not
riddled by self-interest, timidity and
indifference, or are not sometimes
corrupt. Life is complicated.
Funiciello thinks services should be
abolished and cash given directly to the
poor, perhaps as a guaranteed income,
but that the social welfare establish-
ment is blocking the way. We have
always favored some kind of income
guarantee, as well as affordable housing,
jobs at decent wages, and so on. But
decent and well-run services would
still be necessary, especially for chil-
dren and the elderly. Moreover, it is
absurd to say that the social welfare
establishment stands in the way of
these reforms. Social welfare practi-
tioners provide much of what little
support exists for them.
The real enemies of reform go
unnamed by Funiciello. For two
decades, business elites and the Right
have been smashing labor unions ,
driving wages down and slashing social
welfare expenditures. It has not been a
climate where anyone could be talking
about a guaranteed income and be heard
in Washington. Funiciello's book comes
at a time when many liberal politicians
have turned on the poor, especially the
minority poor, and the welfare state is
the main battlefront.
Profile (continued from page 7)
they start to believe it," says Dervis,
who has spent most of his life in foster
homes. "A couple of teachers have put
me down. They say I'm no good. I know
it's not true what they say, but it does
affect me."
teenage gender issues-information on
StreetReach, an article on YES and
another on teen pregnancy.
Funiciello ignores this large warscape
and the forces that dominate it, such as
the Conference Board, the Federal
Reserve, the conservative think tanks,
the Democratic Leadershi p Council and
the Republican Party. Instead, she is
preoccupied with the villainies of the
social welfare establishment. There are
things to complain about, not least that
the establishment has been pusillani-
mous even in its own defense, to say
nothing of the defense of its poorer
constituencies. Still, those failings aren't
reason to provide more ammunition to
business and the Right for its increas-
ingly successful campaign against social
welfare and the poor.
"The job program shows them they
can do meaningful work which they can
be proud of," observes Berman. "But it
also shows them they have something
to offer to others in the community."
If that were the only challenge facing
kids like Dervis, there would be less
cause to worry about their survival. But
one of his poems, telling of friends who
have been "sliced, jumped and beat
up," reveals asadly intimate familiarity
with death and violence.
YES is also working with Women as
Resources on a Child Welfare Bill of
Rights, intended to protect parents and
children caught in the system by insur-
ing that they are better informed about
their legal rights when dealing with city
social service agencies.
However, the determination of YES
members is by far their greatest strength.
"I'm going to break the cycle because I
want to do something more," says Blair.
"I want to be me and not to follow the
crowd. I refuse to surrender." Sad Familiarity
"People tell kids in school and at
home that they're never going to be any
good and it messes them up because
Alexia Lewnes is a frequent contributor
to City Limits.
PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORY
LAWRENCE H. McGAUGHEY
Attorney at Law
Meeting the challenges of affordable housing for 20 years.
Providing legal services in the areas of General Real Estate,
Business, Trust & Estates, and Elder Law.
217 Broadway, Suite 610
New York, NY 10007
(212) 5130981
William .Jacobs
Cntitinl Puhlic AccoUl1t,\I1t
Over 25 years experience specializing in nonprofit housing
HDFCs, Neighborhood Preservation Corporations
Certified Annual Audits, Compilation and Review Services,
Management Advisory Services, Tax Consultation and Preparation
77 Quaker Ridge Road, Suite 215
New Rochelle, N.Y. 10804
914-633-5095 Fax 914-633-5097
LPC DEVELOPMENt SERVICES
a project of Lexington Planning Coalition Inc.
Proposal Writing - Grantsmanship
Grass-Roots Funaraising Campaigns
Public & Private Sectors
JO frAU OPrRlrNCr WITH MINORITY C80'S COMMIIN/TlrS
1939 3rd Avenue
New York, NY 10029
212-427-4927
Rolando Cintron
Director of Development
Change\IVorkers
171 Avenue B
New York, NY 10009
(212) 6741308 Fax (212) 674-0361
Changeworkers provides affordable project services
to not-for-profit organizations.
I
Fundraising Publishing Computing
Money Management Board Development
Concrete products, not abstract plans.
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RESG provides non.profits and managing agents
with low cost consulting regarding all DHCR matters.
RESG specializes in analyzing and filing rent
registrations forms' for current and missing past years.
Call (718) 8925996
For information and a FREE building
evaluation.
Planning, Design and
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Maps & Illustrations for Reports . Software naining
. Macintosh & IBM System Analysis and Networking
Desktop Publishing
Specializing in non-profits and small businesses
2940 Ocean Parkway #7R. Brooklyn, New York 11235
(718) 996-4162
CITY UMITS/JUNE/]ULY 1994/29
PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORY
I'lannin).! and \rchitl'l'tlln'lor till' '\ol1-l'rolit (omlllllllit.\
Specializing in
Feasibility Studies, Zoning Analysis & Design of
Housing, Health Care and Educational Projects
Magnus Magnusson, AlA
MAGNUSSON ARCHITECTS
10 East 40th Street, 39th Floor, New York, NY 10016
Facsimile 212 481 3768 Telepbone 212 683 5977
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
C ommunity Development legal A ssistance C enter
a project of the lawyers Alliance for New York, a nonprofit organization
Real Estate, Corporate and Tax Legal Representation to Organizations
Tax Syndications Mutual Housing Associations
Homeless Housing Economic Development
HDFCs Not-far-profit corporations
Community Development Credit Unions and Loan Funds
99 Hudson Street, 14th Fir., NYC, 10013 (212) 219-1800
David H. Grumer
Certified Public Accountant
271 Madison Avenue, Suite 908, New York, New York 10016
(212) 3541770
Financial Audits Compilation and Review Services
Management Advisory Consulting
T ax Return Preparation & Advice
Over a decade of service to community and nonprofit organizations.
COMPUTER SERVICES
Hardware Sales:
ruM Compatible Computers
Super VGA Monitors
Okidata Laser Printers
Okidata Dot Matrix Printers
Software Sales:
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Accounting
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Services: NetworklHardware/Software Installation,
Training, Custom Software, Hand Holding
Clients Include: ANHD, MHANY, NHS, UHAB
Morris Kornbluth 718-857-9157
SPECIALIZING IN REAL ESTATE
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Applications. 501 (c) (3) Federal Tax Exemptions . All forms
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Section 202, State Turnkey, and NYC Partnership Homes
KOURAKOS & KOURAKOS
Bronx, N.Y.
(718) 585-3187
Attorneys at Law
New York, N.Y.
(212) 682-8981
JOB ADS
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. Prep for Prep identifies academically able,
highly motivated Black, Latino and Asian-American youngsters, provides
14 months of intensive academic preparation, places them in leading
independent schools (day and boarding) and provides ongoing counseling,
peer support and leadership development opportunities until HS gradua-
tion. We seek an administrative assistant to provide clerical support,
maintain contact with college personnel , students and parents, maintain
and update student rosters, schedules and progress reports, and coordi-
nate mailings. To qualify, you should be highly organized and detail oriented
with excellent language and people skills. 50 wpm WordPerfect and
database skills are essential ; English/Spanish skills a plus. Contact: V.
Alippe, Prep for Prep, 163 West 91 st St. , NYC 10024.
PROGRAM OFFICER for national community development intermediary. Re-
sponsibilities: providing technical assistance to community organizations
on planning and monitoring housing and economic development projects;
financial packaging; organizational development; community collaboration.
Qualifications: experience in affordable housing or community-based eco-
nomic development, project feasibility analysis and organizational assess-
ment; ability to manage numerous projects; excellent interpersonal and
writing skills; computer literacy. Substantial travel. Salary in 40s. Affirmative
Action. Send resume, cover letter: Bab Freiberg, Seedco, 915 Broadway,
Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. No calls.
30/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/CITY UMITS
HOUSINGSPECIAlIST. New position under innovative HUD-funded program to
place public housing residents in privately-owned apartments. Responsibil-
ities include real estate research, tenant placement, negotiations with
landlords. Qualifications: well-organized self-starter with housing experi-
ence, Spanish-speaking a plus. Salary: mid-30s. Resume to: Barbara
Lowry, NMIC, 76 Wadsworth Ave., New York, NY 10033.
CASE MANAGER. Position available for a bilingual , English/Spanish speaker
in Comprehensive Medicaid Case Management. Must have degree and
experience in accessing educational and human services for persons with
developmental disabilities. Salary $25,000 with generous benefit package.
Fax resume to Shane McGrail , CSW Case Management Supervisor,
Sinergia, Inc. 120West 105th Street#L 1, New York, NY 10025. Telephone:
(212) 666-1300. Fax: (212) 749-5021 .
PROJECT MANAGER. Neighborhood-based organization seeks motivated
individual to coordinate and implement community development programs
and write related funding proposals. Must be detail oriented, with excellent
problem solving and writing skills. Ability to work with people of diverse
backgrounds essential. Experience in housing or economic development
required. Salary high 20s, low 30s. Resume and cover letter to Executive
Director, Pratt Area Community Council , 201 Dekalb Ave., Brooklyn, NY
11205 or fax to (718) 522-2604.
JOB ADS
SOCIAL WORKER for not-for-profit housing and community development
corporation. Job offers flexibility and creativity in working with families,
seniors, tenants (some who are formerly homeless) and on bringing needed
social services to the Southside of Williamsburg. Duties would include some
supervision and working cooperatively with other staff members, housing
managers, community organizers and planners. Position offers opportuni-
ties to work directly with people and to create new program ideas. BilinguaV
Spanish-speaking preferred. MSW preferred, but BSW with experience
may apply. Salary negotiable, hours flexible. Resume to Cathy Herman, Los
Sures, 213 South 4th St., Brooklyn, NY 11211 . Or fax: (718) 387-4683.
OIRECTOR, HOUSING MANAGEMENT. Starting salary $40,000 and excellent
fringe benefits. Supervise 83 employees/700 units in 12 hotels. Bachelor's
degree + 5 years' experience (or combination of relevant education/
experience totaling 9 years), computer fluent. Job description: SRO Hous-
ing, 311 South Spring #1110, Los Angeles, CA 90013. (213) 229-9640.
EOUCATIONAL SPECIALIST. Applicants must possess teaching experience,
excellent organizational skills, excellent interpersonal skills and fluency in
Spanish. COMPUTER INSTRUCTOR. Applicants must possess advanced knowl-
edge of Macintosh and IBM compatible computers and their operating
systems. Previous computer instruction experience and excellent interper-
sonal skills are a must. Fluency in Spanish a plus. Mail or fax cover letter with
resume and hourly salary requirement to: United Tenants Association,
Attention: Personnel Committee, 109 West 88th St.-Basement, New York,
NY 10024. Fax: (212) 721-5314.
EXECUTIVE OIRECTOR. Diamond and Jewelry Industries Development Corpo-
ration is a start-up, not-for-profit development corporation, established to
strengthen the diamond and jewelry industries in New York City. The
executive director will work closely with DJIDC's board to assess industry
needs, develop programs, obtain funding and deliver services to the
industries' business and trade associations. Requirements: experience
working with city or state agencies in economic development or training;
strong communication, networking and organization building skills; fund-
raising and financial management abilities; prefer familiarity with industries.
Send resume to Arthur Wein, Vice President, Diamond Dealers Club, 580
Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10036.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. Westside Crime Prevention Program seeking com-
munity organizer to help residents combat crime problems in community
that is primarily Latino. Spanish required along with excellent communica-
tion skills. Part-time. Salary: $15,000 to $19,000 depending on experience.
Resume and cover letter to Marjorie Cohen, WCPP, 893 Amsterdam Ave.,
New York, NY 10025 or fax (212) 662-8393.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. Coordinate organizing efforts of public school
parents to build active organization and commitment to school change.
Organizing and leadership training experience a must! Bilingual (Spanish/
English). Door-knocking neighborhood majority of time. Salary low to mid-
20s; great benefits. Send resume to M. Bonilla, Parent Organizing Project,
965 Longwood Ave., Bronx, NY 10459, Room 309.
CLASSIFIED ADS
SUMMER INTERNSHIP IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZING. The Trust for Public Land,
a national nonprofit land conservation organization dedicated to conserving
land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, recreation areas and
wilderness lands, has a summer internship available in its New York City
office. The selected candidate will work directly with the community organiz-
er for the housing and. Open Space Initiative, a local project aimed at
developing coherent, self-sustaining garden groups able to effectively
manage all aspects of a successful community garden. Interest in com-
munity organizing and working with different ethnic communities; willing-
ness to travel around the city and attend meetings at nights and on
weekend. Please mail or fax a resume or letter to: The Trust for Public Land;
Attn Mr. Jean Vernet, 666 Broadway, 9th floor, New York, NY 10012. Fax
(212) 353-2052.
PROFESSIONAL MANAGEMENT TRAINING. A new class at UHAB. Training will
help individual HDFC managers sharpen management skills, create a small
business, computerize. Class offered in 8-week series: 6/25 thru 8/20/94.
Assistance provided in business start-up. Cost for series $100. (For TIU
CMP/HDFC residents, $50). To register call Marina at (212) 226-4119.
LET US DO A FREE EVALUATION
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CITY UMITS/JUNE/JUL Y 1994/31
R e p l a c e y o u r o l d w a t e r
g u u l i n g t o i l e t w i t h a
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w a t e r t r e a t m e n t f a c i l i t i e s . P l u s , y o u
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NO W E V E RY F L U S H
S A V E S CA S H A ND W A TE R.
Di t P
N ew Y o r k C i t y
D e p o r t m e n t o f
E n v i r o n m e n t a l
P r o t e c t i o n
R u d o l p h W . G i u l i a n i . M a v o r
M o r i ~ n G e l b e r . C o m m i s s i o n e r