U R B A N A f f A I R S N I W S M A 6 A Z I N I

o
Brick by Brick
a
sk any architect, contractor or housing developer what they dream about at night.
Chances are that at some point they've had a variation on the same surreal night-
mare. In it, electricians cackle as they lay in thick ropes of wire. Copper pipes pile up
as high as the sky, but plastic ones are nowhere to be found. Building permit expediters are
more familiar faces than best friends. Application fees cost as much as a weekend getaway, with
Jacuzzi.
This summer, a report commissioned by the New York City Housing Partnership and the city
Department of Housing Preservation and Development documented how hellishly expensive it
is to build in New York City, and laid out a blueprint for fixing it. Some of its recommendations
are debatable. For example, a call to rezone many manufacturing areas throughout the city for
residential use, without project-by-project review, could jeopardize the city's dwindling stock of
available industrial space.
But the report has the right idea: affordable housing in New York is just too expensive to
build without massive subsidies to offset the costs of building it. And many of those costs are
unnecessary ones embedded in the city's ridiculous building code. Calling it "stringent, volu-
minous, detailed, complex, cumbersome and arcane," the report called for it to be streamlined
and expensive provisions dropped.
Those same laws apply to building rehabilitations, too. Because codes covering new con-
struction only kick in if a rehab job costs 50 percent or more of a building's value, some penny-
pinching builders do their projects piecemeal, stretching them out over long periods of time.
Just a few hundred yards away, though, builders have what seems like a winning alternative. In
October, New Jersey won the Kennedy School of Government's prestigious Innovations in
American Government award for a new housing subcode, the first of its kind, that makes it
cheaper and easier to rehabilitate old buildings for use as affordable housing. Under the new
code, for example, windows can continue to face property lines, instead of having to be ripped
out. Transoms across rooms can stay, too. In general, many old buildings that would have had
to be gut-renovated can now gel the basic upgrades they really need. Jersey architects report
that the old code promoted demolition rather than readaptation and made it uneconomical to
upgrade older urban buildings for new uses.
Governor Christie Todd Whitman correctly saw the new code as an important part of her
efforts to control suburban sprawl-one of the reasons developers build outward instead of
inward is that it's often cheaper to start from scratch. The state claims that last year, rehab
work in its 10 largest cities went up by 42 percent, up from 3.6 percent growth in 1997. And
fans of the code swear that it does not result in inferior or unsafe buildings-just in housing,
day care centers and schools where none would otherwise have existed.
If it ever does happen, streamlining New York City's elaborate building code to make sense
for affordable housing will be a bureaucratic ordeal even worse than the code itself But by
tackling rehabs first, the city can take care 'of a vital piece .of the puzzle.
Cover photo by Gregory P. Mango; Staten Island's North Shore
Alyssa Katz
Editor
City Limits relies on the generous support of its readers and advertisers, as well as the following funders: The Adco
Foundation, The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, The Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, The Edna
McConnell Clark Foundation, The Joyce Mertz-Gi lmore Foundation, The Scherman Foundation, The North Star Fund, J P.
Morgan & Co. Incorporated, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The New York Community Trust, The New York Foundation, The
Taconic Foundation, Deutsche Bank, M& T Bank, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan Bank.
lity Limits
Volume XXIV Number 10
City Limits is published ten times per year, monthly except
bi-monthly issues in July/ August and September/ October, by
the City Limits Community Information Service, Inc., a non-
profit organization devoted to disseminating information
concerning neighborhood revitalization.
Publisher: Kim Nauer
Editor: Alyssa Katz
Senior Editors: Kemba Johnson, Kathleen McGowan
Associ ate Editor: Jarrett Murphy
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DECEMBER 1999
FEATURES
Fantasy Island
Mariners Harbor was supposed to make Staten Island a manufacturing
mecca. But by hunting for headlines instead of plans that create
jobs, city officials are squandering the borough's big chance. By JolUllhan Bowles
Marcia's Law
For 30 years, attorney Marcia Lowry has waged war on bumbling child
welfare systems. Yet though she has shown the world what's wrong with
foster care, Lowry's the first to admit she has no idea how to fix it. By Wendy Davis
MEEDTOKMOW
Don't Bank on It
As banks reinvent themselves with mega-mergers, community
developers worry 'What the new financial order will bring. Could the
fall of bring neighborhoods down, too? By Jarrett Murphy
PROFILE
Hockett Protector
At 25, Dushaw Hockett is the fresh young face at the head of the
New York City Public Housing Resident Alliance, organizing
tenants in the projects he grew up in.
Also: The Devil in the Details
A plan for the future of public housing has frightened residents
with promises of demolition and private control.
PIPELIME
The New Math
Missing school used to mean a concerned phone call from
a school principal. Butlfor families on welfare, truancy
these days comes at a price: a hefty reduction in benefits.
COMMEMTARY
Cityview
By Keith Meatto
By Jill Grossman
128
Collective and Conscious By Glenn D. Magpanflly
Review
A Tale of Three Cities
Spare Change
At Home in the Past
Editorial
Letters
Briefs
DEPARTMEMTS
2 Ammo
4
Job Ads
5
Professional
Directory
130
By Carl Vogel
138
By Alyssa Katz
29
33
34
-
D
ABOVE THE LAW
We write to correct an error in Matt
Fleischer's article, "Judge Not," which
describes the efforts by the city Corporation
Counsel to avoid having the city enter into
consent decrees in reform litigation brought
LETTERS by advocates such as the Legal Aid Society.
.... _ ..... Fleischer cites the resolution of Shep-
tled the case for nothing more than an
agreement that the city would receive
reports from two consultants, whose rec-
ommendations are non-binding. In fact,
the Sheppard consent decree requires both
that the city comply with its terms and that
its compliance be monitored by two cor-
rectional experts who report to the court
and whose fees are paid by the city. The
consultants review in detail every use of
force incident which occurs in the subject
jail facility and the investigations of these
incidents by the Department of Correc-
tion's investigation unit, which was estab-
lished to meet the requirements of the
decree, as well as evaluate relevant
Department policies and procedures.
pard v. Phoenix, the class action which
addressed a long-standing practice of guard
brutality and administrative indifference to
it in the Rikers Island Central Punitive Seg-
regation Unit, as an example of how the
city was able to avoid entering into a court-
ordered settlement. But his facts are wrong.
In this case, the plaintiffs obtained signifi-
cantly more than "a slice of victory," as
Fleischer described it. In fact, to settle the
case, the city in July 1998 entered into a
48-page consent decree, the mandates of
which address all of the systemic failings
which gave rise to the culture of brutality
exposed by the litigation. Moreover, the
city acknowledged in the stipulation, which
the federal court then approved, that the
relief it had agreed to was necessary to cor-
rect violations of the federal constitutional
rights of the Rikers Island prisoners.
The article leaves the erroneous
impression that the prisoners' lawyers set-
There is no doubt that Corporation
Counsel Hess deserves credit for his
efforts to settle the Sheppard case. But the
settlement was, in this case, a consent
decree which even this administration
acknowledged was necessary to remedy
horrifying wrongs in the city's jails.
Jonathan S. Chasan,
Sarah Kerr
Class counsel in Sheppard,
John Boston
Project Director; Legal Aid Society
Specializing in
Community Development Groups,
HDFCs and
Low .. Cost Insurance and Quality Service.
NANCY HARDY
Insurance Broker
Over 20 Years of Experience.
270 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY 10801
914,654,8667
7
CEMEROUS PRAISE
I am writing to commend Kemba
Johnson and Chau Quach for their arti-
cle, "The Color of Money," which
appeared in the September/October 1999
issue of City Limits.
These days, there are many articles
written about new wealth, big donors,
and the $10 trillion transfer of wealth,
but some of what is written repeats old
information and sometimes, old stereo-
types. Your writers went looking for a
much more complicated and interesting
story, and in doing so introduced City
Limits' readers to some individuals and
organizations that ought to be more
widely known for their key roles as
organizers, technical assistance provi-
ders, advocates, and yes, financial sup-
porters of numerous grassroots organiza-
tions throughout this region. Their
expertise is firmly rooted in their com-
munities, and New York is a better place
to live for all of us because of their
work.
I would like to offer a small technical
correction for the record. It is actually
not the case that "traditional" founda-
tions are "always on the lookout for
ways to build their endowments." This
characterization may be correct for com-
munity foundations (later in that para-
graph, the writer does specifically men-
tion community foundations) , since by
law they must receive new support each
year to keep their public status. But I
suspect when most people read the
phrase "traditional foundations" they
think of private foundations like Ford,
Kellogg, Rockefeller, etcetera. These
private foundations are endowed already
and do not raise additional dollars from
the public.
Barbara Bryan
President,
New York Regional
Association of Grantmakers
Letters to the editor can be sent to City
Limits, 120 Wall Street, 20th Floor; New
York, NY 10005 or via e-mail to
cl@citylimits.org. City Limits reserves the
right to edit all letters for clarity and
space.
Selected articles from back issues of
City Limits and the full text of City Limits
Weekly are available on our web site:
www.citylimits.org.
To subscribe to the City Limits Week-
ly, available free via fax or e-mail, call
212-479-3349, or e-mail mcgowan@
citylimits.org.
CITY LIMITS
..
Retirement
O
utside Rochdale VIllage, children clam-
ber over a jungle gym and cars swirl
across 133rd Avenue, but most of the
traffic moves at a more leisurely pace-
with the help of a walker or cane. More
than 40 percent of the development's tenants are at
least 65 years old.
Rochdale's board wants to start offering more
comprehensive services for the approximately
10,000 older tenants who live in this southeastern
Queens apartment complex. Their plan will take
advantage of a new $4 million city program serv-
ing what planners call "naturally occurring retire-
ment communities," or NORCs. Funding services
where old people already live, goes the thinking, is
more efficient and humane than requiring older
residents to travel for everything from doctor's
appointments to chamber music performances.
Communities of older residents tend to devel-
op where housing is affordable and stable, partic-
ularly in subsidized residential complexes like
Rochdale. As a result, many tenants "age in
DECEMBER 1999
place." At Rochdale, most of the predominantly
African-American residents moved into this
5,860-unit Mitchell-Lama co-op decades ago,
when they were just starting their families. "Our
children grew up here," says Jacqueline Christo-
pher, 66, who has lived there since 1964. "1 like
the community, the area. It's almost as if 1 grew up
here."
In 1997, Rochdale's board looked to Chelsea's
Penn South Mutual Houses, the city's flagship
NORC, for pointers. Home to retired garment work-
ers and other lifelong union members, Penn South
houses about 2,000 senior citizens in its 3,000 apart-
ments. For the past 13 years, the United Jewish
Appeal Federation of New York (UJA), a social ser-
vice provider, in cooperation with the buildings'
management, has provided extensive on-site med-
ical and social services to older residents, in addition
to arts, volunteer, and recreational programs.
UJA estimates that in 1997 alone, its program
forestalled 460 hospital and 317 nursing home stays,
saving over $10 million for patients and taxpayers.
The project's success-and the fact that State
Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver lives in
and draws his votes from a venerable Lower East
Side NORC-led the state legislature to begin fund-
ing Penn South and similar programs in 1994.
Today, 12 city housing developments run these pro-
grams for their elderly residents.
One 37-year resident of Penn South, Nat
Yalowitz, helped found the nonprofit NORC Sup-
portive Services Center four years ago to encourage
other communities to start similar arrangements.
Yalowitz surveyed Rochdale's residents, finding that
common complaints were boredom and loneliness.
"People were feeling isolated and depressed," he
explains. "Another problem was people needing help
with daily life things, like shopping and cooking."
The graying residents of Rochdale Village are
excited at the prospect of being able to take advan-
tage of the new city program. They're hoping for
psychiatric services, to make the depression asso-
ciated with illness and bereavement more manage-
able. They'd like doctors on call, nurses on site,
and someone who can knock on the door and make
sure everything's all right. "Many of us have lived
here for so long, but now we need help to stay,"
says Rochdale's Christopher. "We came here
young, and now we're growing up. That's why we
should have this extra care here."
-ATTUlnda Bell
w
Briem .......... ------...... ---------------=
Public Art
A Picture of
Health
1\1
ore than 50 people gathered outside
the Southside Community Center in
Williamsburg on a recent afternoon
to introduce a new mural taking aim
at asthma, one of the biggest
scourges of this western Brooklyn neighborhood.
At the top of the painting is an angel, blowing
away the smoke and pollution. Home remedies
tumble from a shelf. The mural also shows
patients getting medications and information from
a doctor, and a group protesting the pollutants that
can trigger crippling attacks.
The mural was sponsored by the community
group EI Puente, which runs a young artists' group
known throughout Williamsburg for its public art.
Fifteen teenage muraIists, working with a commu-

nity artist, created the building-size painting over
the summer with the input of health promoters, res-
idents, environmental organizations and hospitals.
"People will see the pollution right there-which
is what people breathe-and the positive side, which
is what cures it," says Christine Sanchez, 16, one of
the muraIists. ''1 am proud of the artwork."
Health promoters at EI Puente point out that
asthma is not just a personal issue but a pervasive
community problem. Last summer they conducted a
survey revea1ing that 12 percent of the mostly Lati-
no population of Southside had the respiratory dis-
ease. Another survey showed that three of every 10
people with asthma used home remedies like aloe,
honey, lemon, onions, and oils like shark and cod.
It's a health care problem as well: The surveyors
found that three out of 10 residents had no health
insurance, and that 46 percent of asthma sufferers
had been to the emergency room at least once.
''The mural represents a different form of edu-
cation and will be a constant reminder of health,"
says Evelyn Erickson, a science teacher at EI
Puente Academy, the group's alternative high
school. -Elizabeth Corona
Child Welfare
Ex-Con Mom
W
hen the federal government gave
New York State $3.5 million this
year to implement the sweeping
new federal adoption law now being
phased in, Albany's law-and-order
legislature spent $2.2 million of the cash to finger-
print prospective parents.
But Child Welfare Watch has found that less
than I percent of the parents screened have a crim-
inal record. So far, the state has rooted out only
100 felons after fingerprinting 11 ,000 adult family
members in potential adoptive homes, according to
officials at the city Administration for Children's
Services (ACS). Overall, it is not clear how many
families the city will have to fingerprint.
The policy follows from New York State's ver-
sion of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, a
tough new law that pushes states to tighten up adop-
tion rules and speed up the process. Under New
York's law, passed last February, anyone convicted of
domestic violence, homicide or child abuse is auto-
matically barred from ever adopting a child. Appli-
cants with recent drug convictions are also barred.
The law makes no exemptions, even if the crime is
decades old, or if the ex-con has already proven to be
an exceptional foster parent.
The federal law has given states some flexibil-
ity; a few, including lliinois and Pennsylvania, per-
mit foster parents with decade-old criminal con-
victions to adopt. Yet despite pressure from judges
and family preservation advocates, New York put
the strictest possible measures into play.
Now, in what promises to be the first of many
challenges to the complicated and controversial
new law, the city is pushing to soften the one-strike-
and-you're-out provision. ACS Commissioner
Nicholas Scoppetta is currently drafting a bill that
would grant Family Court judges more leeway in
giving fully rehabilitated felons permission to adopt
kids, if they have a proven track record of respon-
sible parenting. The legislation would "give the
court discretion in deciding what is in the child's
best interest in these types of exceptional cases,"
says Jennifer FaIk, a spokesperson for the agency.
The news comes just a month after Brooklyn
Family Court judge Philip Segal ruled that a 53-
year-old Brooklyn woman should be able to adopt
her four young nieces, even though she has a 20-
year-old felony conviction. In 1979, the woman
pleaded guilty to killing her abusive boyfriend in
self-defense. After finishing three years of proba-
tion, she has led a law-abiding life as a dental assis-
tant and had been caring for her nieces for the past
eight years. Citing her "excellent" care of the chil-
dren, Judge Segal ruled that the law shouldn't pre-
vent her from trying to adopt the girls.
Adapted from a Child Welfare Watch news brief
To subscribe, call Shalini Ahuja at 212-479-3348 .
CITY LIMITS
!
........ --------.. ----------------Briem


rn
=
::s
IN A QUALITY OF UfE CRACKDOWN SET FOR NEXT YEAR, NEW YORKERS WILL
RELOCATE THE MAYOR TO THE Us. SENATE WHERE HE'LL BE LESS OF
Housing Policy
The Taxman
Cometh
T
he city has once again started sending out
last-call notices to the owners of about
300 dilapidated tax-delinquent buildings
citywide: pay up, or your property will
be taken away from you within the year.
It's happening very quietly, without pronounce-
ments or press conferences, but it's the first time
since 1995 that the city has moved to punish the
deadbeat landlords of distressed buildings. These
buildings are some of the most neglected and debt-
ridden in the city, and some carry truly stunning tax
debts-up to $4 million on one Riverside Drive
property.
Up until the mid 1990s, the city used to seize
properties from tax deadbeats, a policy that left
the housing department holding thousands of bro-
ken-down buildings. So since 1996, the city's offi-
cial policy has been instead to use a "third-party
transfer" system to give dilapidated, tax -delin-
quent buildings over to specially chosen owners
with management experience.
But the legally complex program has been
slow getting off the ground: Although 174 proper-
DECEMBER 1999
ties were originally included in the pilot last year,
only 27 buildings went through the full transfer
process, 13 of them vacant. Many owners, realiz-
ing the city was serious about the foreclosure
process, decided to work out payment arrange-
ments rather than lose their land.
Housing advocates cautiously welcomed the
move. "If it's done right, and if it's done on the scale
Players
that the city used to vest buildings, it will be a
tremendous opportunity to deal with affordable
housing issues," says Irene Baldwin of the Associa-
tion for Neighborhood and Housing Development.
The city has only made the list available in a
handbook at the collector's office. But City Limits
has obtained a copy; see our web site at
www.citylirnits.org. - Kathleen McGowan
In October, the city Department of Housing Preservation and
Development merged its two main property management divi-
sions, pushing two longtime allies, John Warren and Jerilyn Per-
ine, to the top of the agency. Many veteran housing developers
are rejoicing: The two are technical experts with nearly 20 years
WARREN
PEACE
of experience in the agency between them. But the reshuffling has spooked some commu-
nity group heads who have run afoul of the tough-talking Perine in the past.
Through the merger, Warren has been boosted into the job of Acting Deputy Commis-
sioner of a new department that will oversee both the city's stock of repossessed build-
ings and the buildings that have been slotted for alternative programs like the low-
income co-op Tenant Interim Lease program. Perine has jumped into the number-two
spot at the agency as First Deputy Commissioner, replacing Hector Batista, who left in
July. In her new job, say HPD staff, she will call the shots on the most important techni-
cal decisions.
According to agency spokesperson Carol Abrams, the department's code enforcement
division will be the next to be reorganized. -Kathleen McGowan
s
PIPELINE i
,
In the face of
public housing
policies that hurt
the poor, Dushaw
Hockett is turning
residents' anger
into action.
:M
Hockett
Protector
A dynamic young organizer puts
public housing tenants back on
the map.
By Keith Meatto
I
t's a decent crowd at Lehman College
in the Bronx, where an audience has
turned out to vent its fears over the lat-
est round of public housing regulations
being handed down from Washington and
City Hall. The crowd is mostly middle-
aged African-American women. A smat-
tering of Latinas huddles around an inter-
preter in the front aisles. After a brief
spiel by officials from the public housing
agency, the audience's questions and
recriminations focus on the everyday has-
sles of urban life hovering around the
poverty line: crime, rent, building
upkeep.
But on several occasions, a male voice
from the back of the room-younger, soft-
er and more articulate-rises to deliver
point-by-point queries:
"Is the housing authority committed to
preserving ceiling rents in spite of federal
regulations? How long will master leases
with private developers last? The resi-
dents want to be sure there won't be
demolition further down the line-will
there be any demolition after the fiscal
year 2000?"
That voice belongs to Dushaw Hockett,
25, who has emerged as a populist gadfly in
the debate over how the New York City
Housing Authority (NYCHA) will comply
with the federal QUality Housing and Work
Responsibility Act of 1998. Articulate,
confident and impeccably dressed, he has
become a fixture in community politics.
And this fall, as NYCHA begins changing
the way it does business, he has been at the
core of a newly awakened public housing
tenants' movement.
Raised in the projects, educated in
public schools and steeped in civil rights
activism, Hockett has the classic pedigree
of a New York City progressive-more
Fiorello laGuardia than Third Way liber-
al. And in true grassroots sty Ie, he focuses
on an issue he knows first-hand: the prob-
lems of the projects. By choosing that bat-
tle, Hockett is getting into the very busi-
ness that the federal government is trying
to get out of-tending to the future of the
600,000 tenants in New York City's public
housing.
, 'It's an ideological mistake to view
public housing as a plague that
needs to be cured," he says two
days later, in a postmortem interview at a
Fort Greene luncheonette. He favors these
sorts of vivid metaphors, but Hockett has
also mastered soulless bureaucratic lan-
guage such as "deconcentration"-a term
the federal initiative invented to describe its
mandate to mix in members of the working
class with the poorest of the poor in public
housing projects.
Local authorities believe that deconcen-
tration will help restore the economic
diversity in public housing that once made
New York City's tops in the nation. In
7
1983, 50 percent of New York's public
housing residents were employed; by 1996
the figure had dwindled to below 30 per-
cent. 'The difference between New York
and other cities, where public housing has
failed, is that we have always had a viable
mix of people in our developments," says
Steven Love, director for federal policy and
compliance at NYCHA, comparing
Gotham's projects to public housing disas-
ters in Chicago and Newark.
But this policy in particular has earned
Hockett's disdain. Not only does it squeeze
out those with the greatest need, he argues,
but it implies a moral hierarchy based on
income. "Are you telling me that a person
who earns $10,000 more than me is going
to be a better neighbor?" he scoffs. 'That
they have values and beliefs that are better
than mine?"
CITY LIMITS
Hockett knows what he's talking about:
he's been living in Bushwick Houses in
Brooklyn for 18 years. "This is an issue
that hits close to horne for him," says
Damaris Reyes, aide to City Councilrnem-
ber Margarita L6pez. L6pez's political
stronghold has been in the projects of the
Lower East Side, and Reyes herself grew
up in public housing. "A lot of people take
on causes for professional advancement,
but that's not what he's about."
Even in his days at Murry Bergtraum
High School for Business Careers, while
other kids were studying and battling
teenage problems, the political bug had
already bitten Hockett. When proposals to
cut education funding came down the pipe,
Hockett led his schoolmates to protest at
City Hall and even staged two walkouts.
"I was reading a lot of books about Mal-
colm X, Dr. Martin Luther King and civil
rights at the time," he recalls. "And my Eng-
lish teacher-who happened to be Coretta
Scott King's cousin-rea11y helped get me
started." The teacher, Philip Mott, took his
protege to Washington to see the Congres-
sional Black Caucus. Mott also brought
Hockett along to seminars in Atlanta on
nonviolent protests and invited him to dine
with Martin Luther King's daughters.
A lucky break landed Hockett into pol-
itics. The summer after he finished high
school, he met Nydia Velazquez's cam-
paign staffers distributing flyers on the
street. When they learned that he lived in
Bushwick-where the Rev. Jesse Jackson
happened to be scheduled to stump for
Velazquez the next day-they enlisted his
aid. To his surprise, both pols thanked him
publicly and asked him to deliver an
impromptu speech at their side. Hockett
obliged, talking about the need for political
unity among African-Americans and Lati-
nos.
Soon after, Hockett joined Congress-
woman Velazquez' staff, helping immi-
grants, veterans and public housing resi-
dents navigate government bureaucracies.
But the work left him hungry for more
direct action. "It was a trying process and
there were definitely more losses than vic-
tories," he says. ''Ultimately, I became frus-
trated with the fact that the best we could
tell people was 'Your paperwork is fine.
Now you just have to wait.'" Nonetheless,
because the lion's share of his work
involved public housing tenants, the job
paid off by giving him a political education.
Now, Hockett draws his paycheck from
DECEMBER 1999
the Center for Community Change, a
national advocacy group formed in 1997
when Capitol Hill was swept by housing
reform. He also chairs the NYC Public
Housing Resident Alliance, a coalition of
residents and legal advocates. And he's still
working on his undergraduate degree in
sociology from Hunter College-a combi-
nation of financial hardships and other
commitments has kept him too busy to fin-
ish. At one point he was juggling his stud-
ies with two jobs: one stocking inventory at
a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory on
Hudson Street, and another working the
graveyard shift unloading boxes at United
Parcel Service.
F
rustrated with what they perceive as a
system that doesn't care about their
well-being, many public housing ten-
ants, including some who have tried to make
changes before, see organizing as futile.
"Residents feel that they have no control
over what happens to them," says Ethel
Velez, a tenant activist at James Weldon
Johnson Houses in East Harlem. "Folks use
the buzzword 'empowerment,' but many
people have had their spirits broken."
But this fall, Hockett-with many col-
laborators-has spearheaded an organizing
campaign that brought thousands of public
housing tenants to NYCHA forums this fall,
mobilized a fractured population, and won
concessions from the Authority (see "The
Devil in the Details," next page) The tactics:
key alliances with the Manhattan Borough
President's office and citywide tenant
groups like New York State Tenants &
Neighbors, combined with a core list of 100
committed tenants whom Hockett bombards
with mail and faxes.
"He's been willing to sit with ali of us
old dogs and learn," Velez says. 'The
important thing is not to reinvent the wheel
but get all the spokes together."
Like many grassroots organizers, Hock-
ett believes that information is the deadliest
weapon. To boil down Byzantine govern-
ment documents for residents, the Center for
Community Change published its own rules
for radicals: a 6O-page, reader-friendly guide
to the new housing legislation. On the local
front, Hockett has spoken out at countless
community hearings and distributed fact
sheets. In every instance, the song remains
the same: learn the facts; focus on the tough-
est issues; and speak your mind.
He doesn't make everyone happy.
Dianne Jackson, a representative on the
nine-member citywide Interim Council of
Presidents tenant board, praised Hockett for
his ability to bring useful research and infor-
mation directly to tenants. But she says that
other ICOP members resent Hockett's group
as "outside agitators," because of its alliance
with Legal Aid and the Community Service
Society. Hockett is equally critical of the
Council, echoing tenants' complaints that it
is not a truly representative body.
"When are you running for office,
Dushaw?" teased NYCHA's Love as they
left the Lehman College forum, where they
had pubicly sparred. The question is a fair
one, given Hockett's oratorical style and
organizing prowess. But Hockett says that
while he cherishes his experience within
politics, it's not a game he wants to return
to soon.
Besides, he believes that public housing
tenants need his help now in the trenches.
Because federal money to build new public
housing has dried up, NYCHA intends to
explore partnerships with private real estate
developers. This has raised hackles among
many tenant activists, who fear that tenants
will become homeless if landlords decide
later to get out of their commitment to pub-
lic housing. 'These private solutions are
only temporary," agrees Victor Bach, hous-
ing analyst at the Community Service Soci-
ety. 'The virtue of truly public housing is
that it stays public for the long term."
The organizing campaign shows
promise. Where tenants are most
involved-Williamsburg, the Lower East
Side, downtown Brooklyn and Coney
Island-the Resident Alliance hopes to
develop a backbone for a permanent orga-
nizational structure, with the aim of having
a permanent tenant role in NYCHA plans.
Meanwhile, Bach estimates, deconcen-
tration could eliminate 10,000 to 16,000
apartments for the poor over 10 years. And
while NYCHA plans to demolish just part
of only one public housing complex this
year-Prospect Plaza in Brooklyn-
Hockett fears for the future. When the
hoopla over this year's plan dies away, he
aims to spread his message of activism and
pride in public housing. "People don't
make change because they believe that
public housing is something that can't be
corrected," he says. "But everyone can
help build up a community, even if it's just
one step at a time."
Keith Meatto is a Brooklyn-basedfreelance
writer.



The Devil in the Details
A
t a series of nine fractious public meetings in late October, New York City
Housing Authority brass explained to tenants exactly how the nebulous
language in their new federally mandated "one-year plan" would trans-
late into rents, bricks and waiting lists. Initially, the Authority had tried to get
away with just one public hearing in late September, but about twice as many
tenants-with a lot of angry questions-showed up as could fit in the audito-
rium. Since then, the Authority has backed down somewhat, and chair John
Martinez apologized for the planning process. "Why weren't people more
involvedT he mused. "Because the Housing Authority made a mistake."
One problem is that NYCHA's blueprints are temporary; its "five year
plan" is just a vague "mission statement;' as General Manager Paul
Graziano put it. The promises and guarantees that NYCHA made in Octo-
ber are only good through next year; after that, tenants' biggest fears-
demolition, privatization, income-mixing, changes in the rent structures-
will again be on the table.
Here is a summary of the major sticking points:
What the AuIIJIriQ is ~ In response to a federal decree that very
poor tenants be more evenly distributed throughout its projects (it's called
"deconcentration"), NYCHA letting working families cut in on the 120,000-
family waiting list and steering them toward the 41 poorest buildings. City-
wide, for half of the apartments that become vacant, working families now get
preference. But 40 percent of newly vacant apartments will still be reserved
for those who make less than $14,400 for a family of three.
What WUITies bIIanb: At the hearings, a lot of tenants said they were happy
to have more working neighbors. But nobody thought it was fair that the
poorest should have to wait longer for housing, when more than 80 percent
of the people on waiting lists are very poor, and as many as 100,000
NYCHA tenants live doubled up. And they're mad that poor tenants won't
move into richer buildings as richer tenants get moved into the poor ones.
[I.
Any IIIIJ't'IIIIII. The Authority already dropped a plan to offer working fam-
ilies an extra-bedroom bonus. As for the idea of moving poor families up into
better buildings, Martinez told tenants that he'd be "happy to talk to his staff'
about it But don't expect NYCHA to start opening up lots more apartments
to the poor: As reps kept reminding tenants, the Authority has $7 billion in
unmet capital needs. One of its highest priorities right now is finding new
ways to replace dwindling federal subsidies.
WIIat tile AIItIIority is proposing: "Mixed-Finance," 4O-year contracts to
put NYCHA money behind new developments that blend public housing
and market rate apartments, and "Master Lease," 20-year rental contracts
that would bring more private money into development and rehabilitation.
Wbat WOITies tenants: This opens the door to outright privatization and
sales. Another question, as State Senator Tom Duane asked at one hearing,
is what will protect the tenants after the contracts are up?
7
Any IIIIMII8It: No. NYCHA's Graziano replied to
Duane: 'These programs are evolving." But the
Authority did promise not to get involved in any direct
privatization-the plan at the Lower East Side's
Baruch Houses only has private investors building
new units on vacant land
What the Authority is proposing: Flat rents. Well,
sort of. The feds have interpreted the housing reform
law as requiring NYCHA to offer flat rents based on
market values, but city reps kicked up a fuss with the
feds on this. NYCHA has most-favored-Authority
status with the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, so it usually gets its way. In this case,
it did: Rents will continue to be calculated the same
way they are now: 30 percent of income, up to a
ceiling rent between $347 and $693. Temporarily,
rents can be reduced to $25 a month for families that
lose their job or welfare benefits.
WIIat worries tenants: Rent hikes, of course.
Any IIIOVIIIII8IIt: There won't be any changes this
year in rent structures, and Martinez promised that
they are "willing to talk about a minimum rent that
starts at $0." But again, that will be up for revision
next year.
WIIat the luthority is proposing: Minor demolition
projects in the Bronx that would remove a total of 42 apartments and one
major demolition project in Brooklyn.
Wllat worries tenants: That this is the beginning of the end, as NYCHA
starts tearing down many more of its buildings.
Any IIIIMIII8IIt: The Bronx projects are on hold, and NYCHA heads have
pledged not to start new demolitions-not this year, anyway.
Wllat the Authority is proposing: It has already turned the 12-member pub-
lic housing tenant board-the "Interim Council of Presidents"-into the
permanent official voice for tenants.
Wbat worries tenants: Under the housing reform law, tenants are sup-
posed to get a stronger and better-recognized voice. Many tenants say
ICOP is unaccountable to tenants and a patsy of the Authority. They'd like
a new board, with staff and resources to contact tenants.
Any IIIIMIII8IIt: Martinez, admitting that ICOP may have had "incom-
plete information" in the past, pledged to expand the board next year, but
hasn't specified by how much-"It should be at least 20," he said-or how
the elections will take place. -Kathleen McGowan
CITY LIMITS
..
The New Math
Tying welfare checks to school attendance, New York State holds students' benefits hostage.
By Jill Grossman
O
ne boy didn't have a winter coat or
wann shoes. Another was afraid
of his teacher. A third had to
accompany his parents to court because
they couldn't speak English. All of them
couldn' t show up for school at some point
last year.
These are the kind of situations that
often lead kids to cut class-trivial prob-
lems, for the most part, easily diagnosed
and solved by school social workers. But
with a new state program that ties parents'
welfare benefits to their kids' attendance,
small problems like these could have huge
consequences. This new anti-truancy ini-
tiative takes aim at some of the most vul-
nerable students, those whose families are
dependent on public assistance.
This fall , a program known as Learn-
fare is being launched in every elementary
school in New York State, putting some
250,000 students under the watchful eye
of attendance officials. With Learnfare, a
student who misses a total of three days of
school without a doctor's note during an
academic quarter has to go see a coun-
selor. Then, if the child is absent two more
times, his or her family's welfare check
will be docked by $60 a month for the
next three months. The money is reim-
bursed only if the student has perfect
attendance during the next academic quar-
ter, or has valid written excuses for any
further absences.
During the last two school years, the
families of 1,747 children statewide went
through a pilot version of Learnfare. The
results were a lot harsher than a stem
phone call from a principal: 68 families
had part or all of their welfare benefits
withheld because their children repeatedly
missed school. Forty-one other house-
holds had their benefits completely cut off
for neglecting to mail in the form that
would allow the Board of Education to
release attendance records to the city's
welfare agency.
New York is hardly the first state to
make school attendance a qualification
for welfare benefits. As part of its
groundbreaking welfare reform package,
Wisconsin pioneered Leamfare in 1988;
that year, 27 other states obtained the
federal waivers that allow them to make
school attendance a condition for welfare
benefits.
DECEMBER 1999
With a big push from Governor George
Pataki, New York is now launching its pro-
gram on little more than a mandate and a
prayer. Wisconsin spent $9 million a year
on its initiative. Albany has budgeted just .
$4 million statewide-less than 5 percent
of what the city's Human Resources
Administration says it alone needs to run
the program.
Nonetheless, state officials are plowing
ahead. Just as workfare professes to get
parents into the discipline of showing up
for work, Learnfare, they say, aims to do
the same thing for children. "At that age,
it's a time when you learn right from
wrong," says Jack Madden, spokesperson
for the state Office of Temporary and Dis-
ability Assistance, which oversees welfare
programs. "We need to coach them to a life
of self-sufficiency."
At the six city schools in the pilot run,
attendance rates did climb slightly during
the first year, by about 3 percent on aver-
age. Sixty-four students were referred to
truancy counseling. But in none of these
cases did counseling actually work as a
deterrent: Every one of these families
later lost part of its check, and only 10
households ultimately had their benefits
reimbursed.
While school administrators say they
welcome new approaches to dealing with
truancy, some who participated in the pilot
program have already given up on Leam-

PIPELINE i
,
Starting Jhis fall,
city welfare offices
will dock the
checks of families
whose kids miss
too much school.
-
s
-
fare. "Leamfare really gave us nothing but
more work," says Doris Wilson, the atten-
dance teacher at P.S. 178 in Brownsville,
Brooklyn. Her principal, Max Glover, con-
tends that counselors needed extra help
that he couldn't afford to provide.
D
uring her 30 years as an attendance
counselor at P.S. 178, Wilson has
organized class trips, hosted bread-
making workshops and awarded certifi-
cates of honor, all as incentives for getting
kids to come to school. Like one-fifth of
all city elementary and middle schools,
P.S. 178 is part of a 5-year-old, $25 million
city program, called Attendance Improve-
ment Dropout Prevention, that tries to cut
back on truancy with counselors, class
trips and parent programs.
But Wilson has never tried using
threats rather than rewards. She's also sus-
picious of a program that singles out one
group of kids in particular. "I don't really
like the idea," Wilson says of Leamfare.
She's concerned, she says, about penaliz-
ing poor families for problems like evic-
tions or asthma attacks. In addition, Wil-
son is all too aware that her school's atten-
dance-keeping system is far from perfect;
she reports it's not unusual for a child who
shows up late to mistakenly be hit with an
absent mark when the forms are scanned
into the school database.
Because the Board of Ed requires
home visits for chronic truants, P.S. 178
family caseworker Shenan Ford sees first-
hand the problems that keep kids out of
school. On his home visits, eight to 10 a
day, he often finds overwhelmed parents
trying to juggle work, child care and
health problems. "You have kids whose
parents keep them home to do errands or
baby sit so they can go out," he says.
"That's not right."
Under Leamfare, however, excuses
alone won't fly. llinesses usually require
a doctor's note; appearances in court call
for a statement from a court officer. It
remains to be seen how attendance coun-
selors will interpret an allowance for "cri-
sis situations."
The teachers and principals unions
aren't waiting to find out-they've come
out against Leamfare for what they call its
"punitive" tactics. "It's holding poor fami-
lies to a tougher standard than other fami-
lies," says Ron Davis of the United Feder-
ation of Teachers. "And it's an additional
burden for the teachers."
The teachers
and
principals
unions have
come out
against
Lea rnfare
for its
"punitive"
tactics.
It's true that children on public assis-
tance are more likely to miss school. One
Delaware report found that 29 percent of
kids on welfare nationwide miss 10 days
of school or more each year, compared
with 19 percent of middle-class students.
Because most absences are illness-related,
the Delaware researchers concluded that
public health care programs are the best
way to reduce truancy.
In New York, $4 million is supposed to
subsidize both counseling and parent noti-
fication letters for all 2,470 elementary
schools statewide. "There is adequate
money available to all districts for coun-
seling services," insists state agency
spokesperson Madden. The city may dis-
agree, however: The Board of Education
estimates that staffing one school with an
aide, a counselor and a caseworker will
cost about $150,000. Last spring, HRA
asked that $79.5 million of the state's wel-
fare surplus-now standing at $1.44 bil-
lion-go to fund Leamfare.
HRA refuses to disclose how much
Leamfare support it is receiving from the
state, and the Board of Ed refers all fund-
ing questions back to HRA. But when
asked if the welfare agency is helping the
Board of Ed pay for counseling under
Leamfare, HRA spokesperson Ruth
Reinacke responds, "I don't think so.
That's something [the Board of Ed] should
be doing already."
T
his summer, the welfare agency
sent letters to all 115,000 of its
clients with school-age children,
asking them to sign consent forms or risk
having their cases closed. But as of the
September 1 due date, almost half had not
yet been returned to HRA. The Communi-
ty Food Resource Center found that four
of every 10 of its clients who were sup-
posed to get the letter never even received
it, and some of those who did get it
weren't sure what it meant. The agency
has announced that, for now, it won' t cut
anyone off for failing to return the letter. It
is also working on additional mailing and
outreach efforts before moving forward
with Leamfare.
Meanwhile, legal advocates are poised
to sue the city as soon as the first family
loses benefits under Leamfare. "It will
probably be for people being cut off with-
out adequate notice," says Cathleen
Clements, a board member of the Associa-
tion of the Bar of the City of New York.
The law authorizing Leamfare is slated to
sunset in July, giving advocates another
chance to derail it; so far, the Assembly
has sat on a proposal that would extend it
by five years.
In other states, Leamfare hasn' t paid
off. In Wisconsin, state-commissioned
studies found that overall attendance actu-
ally decreased under Leamfare. Truancy
specialists say there are far more effective
approaches. ''Trying to engage the families
and become partners with them is the
healthy way to go," says Sharon Daly of
the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health,
which places counselors in New York City
elementary schools.
But instead, New York is heading in an
unhealthy direction, with Governor Pataki
calling for Leamfare to be expanded
through high school. Given teens' tenden-
cies, that could deal a crushing blow to
families already burdened with internal
strife. In Wisconsin, 47 percent of high
school students whose parents were sanc-
tioned had dropped out of school within a
year of starting Leamfare.
Steven Grossman, chair of the UFT's
attendance teachers and himself an atten-
dance teacher for 10 years, recalled one
16-year-old mother he recently counseled.
With both l-year-old twins and a 4-year-
old, she was refusing to go to school. "I
visited her every few weeks at the house,"
he says. And eventually, she started going
to classes again. "You want to cut an allot-
ment to a family like that?"
Jill Grossman is a Brooklyn-based free-
lance writer.
CITVLlMITS
..
As THE CITY POURS MONEY INTO GLITZY ATTRACTIONS, STATEN
ISLAND MISSES ITS BIG CHANCE TO BECOME A MANUFACTURERS
PARADISE. By JONATHAN BOWLES
D
riving along the lonely waterfront of Staten Island, Rev-
erend Calvin Rice remembers the manufacturing mecca
that was. Rice, who used to work at the massive Procter
& Gamble soap factory at Mariners Harbor, made this
drive every day for 15 years. The waterfront was a different place
then.
"At its heyday, in the early I 980s, you could just feel the activ-
g, ity riding through here," he says. ''The factory employed about
~ 2,000 people at its prime."
i Though it's hard to picture now, this desolate stretch of road was
'" a harbor of possibilities for Staten Islanders. "I started out stacking
DECEMBER 1999
boxes," recalls Rice, who eventually rose to become an accountant.
''That's the kind of opportunity that places like this offered. 1 went to
school, and they paid for it. The average person at Procter & Gam-
ble was just a high school graduate, but they were able to make
$30,000 to $35,000 a year."
Now, there are few signs of life left. Nearly nine years after
Procter & Gamble left New York, its 900,OOO-square-foot com-
plex is a ghost town. The road is lined with junkyards, rotting dry
docks and long-abandoned factory buildings.
The grim state of Mariners Harbor was enough to turn Rice,
who now leads the borough's largest African-American congrega-
--
tion, into an unlikely booster for industrial development. "Every-
where else in the country I've been that has this much waterfront
has been developed into something that generates money and
brings in jobs," he says bitterly. "Here, there's nothing. There's a
tremendous need for employment in these areas. And no one's
doing anything about it."
To most New Yorkers, Staten Island is a punchline, notable for
its Mafia dons, soccer morns and the Wu-Tang Clan. But for Rice,
and for the manufacturers and developers clamoring to rebuild
northern Staten Island, it's no joke. As industrial developers get
squeezed out of New York City by high rents, Staten Island has
become the promised land-the place with, if nothing else, space.
It's the city's untapped real estate frontier, with 70 percent of all
the open manufacturing turf left in the city.
Five years ago, Staten Island economic development officials
came up with a plan to capitalize on the borough's status. They
decided to develop a Mariners Harbor industrial park for roughly
50 manufacturers, bringing about 1,500 blue collar jobs to one of
the borougb's poorest areas. They got the support of elected offi-
cials, and rounded up $4 million in federal and state money.
Then earlier this year, the project hit an unexpected snag: the
city's Economic Development Corporation (EDC). This powerful
balf-billion dollar agency, in charge of creating jobs and cultivating
businesses in New York, stepped in with its own plans for Mariners
Harbor-{)nes that probably won't create as many jobs and may not
even bappen. It has put that land in limbo, a hiatus that could kill
the locally grown project or delay it until its funding evaporates.
EDC wasn't acting out of borougb snobbery. City economic
development officials have showered this Republican stronghold
with a total of $150 million for glitzy projects like a new minor
league baseball stadium, a new museum, and a major facelift for
the St. George ferry terminal. Instead, say economic development
policy experts, city planning watchers and local development offi-
cials citywide, Mariners Harbor is just one version of a story play-
ing out all over New York. Throughout the city, economic devel-
opment officials are .fumbling, deflecting or outright sabotaging
the projects that would bring the city's industrial base back to life.
Rather than give industrial projects like Mariners Harbor a
hand, the EDC-which has a stranglehold on public development
in the city-has consistently backed only deals that both generate
big headlines and please the powerful companies and developers
that lobby City Hall. This big-ticket economic development strat-
egy means that the city pours money into commercial, retail and
lUXUry housing developments, or into sexy projects like the movie
sound stage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Small, low-glamour busi-
nesses like manufacturing are not even a consideration.
"The people in City Hall only see two sectors: luxury housing
and office-based industry," says Columbia University urban plan-
ning professor Elliott Sc1ar. "They look at industrial land as
underused land. They choose to spend money on larger projects
that are visible to the Manhattan media."
The manufacturers left in New York-there are approximately
10,600 firms-are mostly small to medium-sized. Most are out-
side Manhattan. Most don't know how to lobby, or are simply too
smaIl. And most are losing out. Because by the city's reckoning, in
the millennial economy manufacturing just doesn't make muster.
M
anufacturing and industry are still crucial parts of the
city's economy, employing more than 260,000 pea-
pie-roughly 100,000 more than the number
employed by securities and commodities brokerages
combined. These jobs, in everything from sequin manufacture to
bean-canning, usually offer better wages and more opportunities
than retail or service jobs.
But in these boom times, hundreds of small and medium-sized
manufacturers that want to expand can't find the space. Industrial
vacancy rates in Brooklyn and Queens have plummeted by more
than 30 percent during the past four years. Real estate agents con-
firm that prime industrial neighborhoods like Long Island City,
Greenpoint, Sunset Park and Hunts Point are all at capacity.
So Staten Island, with nearly 2,000 acres of vacant industrial
land, has become a draw. Howard Berger, for one, says that he
tried to find a home in the borough. Since 1972, Berger has been
running his 75-employee hardware distribution finn in East New
York, distributing everything from hammers and shopping carts to
toilet seats and doorknobs. But he needs more room-about
300,000 square feet in a modern building with high ceilings.
Staten Island looked like the best place for him to find that
space, but otherwise ideal sites there required substantial environ-
mental cleanup. "What we wanted just didn't exist on Staten
Island," says Berger, who has since decided to build in Cranberry,
New Jersey.
At the same time, North Shore neigbborhoods like Mariners
Harbor, New Brighton and Park Hill suffer from high unemploy-
ment and little opportunity. Reverend Rice says that these pre-
dominantly minority neighborhoods haven't been the same since
the island's major manufacturers-Procter & Gamble, a building
materials manufacturer called U.S. Gypsum, and Nassau Smelt-
ing-left town.
"When they left, you'd see people that would normally be
working standing on the corner because there were no more
opportunities for them," Rice reports. And according to Rice and
others, Staten Island's North Shore has also seen an influx of
Mexican, Nigerian, Chinese and Albanian immigrants seeking
jobs. Every morning, they say, dozens of young Mexicans look-
CITVLlMITS
ing for work as day laborers congregate on the sidewalks of New
Brighton a few short blocks from the former U.S. Gypsum plant.
Today, the remnants of that plant are sad testimony to the bor-
ough's industrial decline. Less than two miles from the ferry ter-
minal, this 29-acre collection of factory buildings, sheds and silos
has been disintegrating steadily'since the plasterboard company
abandoned the waterfront property in 1976. The sheer cost of
demolishing the structures and cleaning up the contaminated soil
is simply too high. Nearly a dozen other former industrial proper-
ties nearby sit in similarly derelict condition.
This was all going to change with Mariners Harbor. Tired of
watching in vain as companies sped through the borough in moving
trucks on their way to New Jersey, officials at the local Staten Island
Economic Development Corporation (SIEOC) worked out a plan in
1995 to put some of the island's industrial land back on the market.
The idea was simple: If small and mid-sized firms couldn't afford
to fix up properties on their own, these Staten Island boosters would
make it easier, laying the groundwork for an industrial park that
would draw dozens of textile-assembling, chocolate-making, die-
cutting and other light manufacturing companies.
In 1996, SIEOC identified a 70-acre site in Mariners Harbor as
the only suitable location in Staten Island for the park. The group,
which is not affiliated with the city's EDC, then lined up support
from Borough President Guy Molinari and other
politicians; the city's economic development
agency tentatively agreed to turn over the plot it
owned. SIEOC also rounded up $2 million from
the federal Economic Development Agency and
got commitments for another $2.25 million in
funds from the state and the borough president.
Their timing was perfect. SIEDC officials
have said they' ve had to turn away hundreds of
manufacturers and distribution companies look-
ing for quality space in the past few years. Stat-
en Island real estate agent Del Smith reports that
in the last six months he's had to turn down
requests from nearly 30 companies looking for
roughly 1.6 million square feet of space. "We've
become New Jersey's biggest customers," he
says. Another potential industrial park project
that he is marketing has been flooded by
demands. Within weeks of announcing the pro-
ject, they got dozens of responses-from Brook-
lyn, Staten Island, and as far away as Maryland,
Ohio, and Seattle.
"These companies just need space to expand.
They want to stay in the city, but we just don't
have the space ready," says Smith. "If they build
an industrial park here, with modern facilities
and amenities like parking, there's no doubt in Project
tie hope for survival with this agency.
For city officials, there's a much clearer payoff in big, charis-
matic projects. For example, when the city helps find the New
York Stock Exchange a new home, everyone goes home happy:
the powerful Wall Street lobbyists, the developers with a lucrative
new project, and the mayor, who gets headlines.
It's not just Staten Island: EDC has let down manufacturers in
other boroughs, too. In the mid-1980s, the Koch Administration
spent millions of dollars to develop an empty building at the
Brooklyn Army Terminal. The building is now at 98 percent
capacity, an all-time high. There's still more than 900,000 square
feet of undeveloped space at the complex. But although the city
had dedicated $23 million to redevelop it, it summarily cancelled
the funds earlier this year.
In the Bronx, economic development officials complain that
EDC takes forever to turn over city-owned industrial land to com-
panies wanting to redevelop the sites; the Bronx Overall Econom-
ic Development Corporation reports a backlog of more than 40
industrial companies looking for space in the borough.
In fact, none of the half-dozen economic development experts
that City Limits contacted could think of any major new EOC-
backed industrial projects in recent years, besides the port. "The
actual work of growing manufacturing jobs in New York City
West
Brighton
Staten Island
Stapleton
my mind you would lease the space."
1 Howland Hook Marine Terminal
Funding Source/City Support
$40 million from ci ty
The Mariners Harbor project seemed like a no-
I IndusbiaI --"
brainer, keeping businesses in New York City and -"
plan in limbo
SI. George
Ferry
Terminal
creating new jobs without costing the city a cent. 3 Staten Island Yankees minor league ballpark $52 million to purchase site and build stadium
B
ut that's not the way EDC works.
According to planners and economic

.. development experts, a small project
without a big developer to back it has lit-
DECEMBER 1999
4 St. George Ferry Terminal ra1OValion
5 National Lighthouse Museum
$56 mlHlDn In ... ______ ----I
$5 million from city and state
will soon 88Iecl
of
-
could best be achieved by a lot of small and unglamorous kinds of
activities," says Linda Cox, former director of the Planning Center
at the Municipal Art Society. "But that's not what EDC is about."
In part, manufacturers get shut out because they're simply too
small, says Hugh O'Neill, the former assistant executive director of
the Port Authority who worked on planning projects with governors
Carey and Cuomo. "For a long time, there has been a tilt in the city's
economic development programs toward office-based and other
commercial activities instead of industrial activities," says O'Neill,
who now runs an economic development consulting company.
''That's to some extent accidental. My gut feeling is that's a byprod-
uct of a focus on large projects."
It happened at Mariners Harbor, too. Earlier this year, the EDC
decided the land parcel might not be available after all. Agency
bigwigs were thinking of expanding the Howland Hook Marine
Terminal, the borough's thriving container port nearby. Thinking
it might want to reserve the land at Mariners Harbor for the port,
the agency revoked its donation.
Since the Howland Hook container port reopened in 1996, it
has created slightly more than 900 jobs. With water cargo into the
Port of New York and New Jersey expected to quadruple during
the next 40 years, EDC officials estimate that the port must
expand by 430 acres to meet demand. And EDC points out that the
expansion project could generate as many as 12,000 jobs and $80
million in revenues for the city.
But, as with other port projects, locals suspect that the blacks
and Latinos on the North Shore won't get hired for jobs that usu-
ally get filled through the predominantly white longshoremen's
union. EDC officials acknowledge that the land wouldn't be need-
ed until 2020, if at all: If port growth doesn't follow their predic-
tions, expansion onto this site won't be necessary. And if the port
really must expand, advocates for the industrial park point out,
EDC already has dibs on the 124-acre Procter & Gamble soap fac-
tory site right next to Howland Hook.
Right now, SIEDC reports that the city agency has made a dif-
ferent offer, proposing a shared development project that would
cram both the expanded port and the industrial park project onto
the 70-acre Mariners Harbor site. Instead of using 43 acres of this
site for the industrial park, as originally planned, the project will
be confined to 15 acres. But EDC says its plans for the port
haven't changed; it's still preparing a port feasibility study, which
a spokesperson says is in the "very early stages." In the shuffle, the
incubator project may simply slide into limbo.
Staten Island Assembly Member Eileen Connelly was dis-
mayed when City Limits told her in August about EDC's change
of heart. "It's extremely frustrating all the way around," says Con-
nelly, who was responsible for securing half of the $1.5 million in
state funds for the project. "It worries me because it imperils the
funding. How long until the federal government decides that there
are other worthy projects that should get the money?" Connelly
says she will recommend the funds be withdrawn if the project is
substantially modified, but she may not even need to go to the
trouble: SIEDC reports that the $4.25 million is site-specific and
can't be transferred to another project.
Meanwhile, other Staten Island projects-flashy, expensive
developments-are blazing ahead. The city set aside $49 million
to build a minor league baseball stadium, and $55 million to give
the drab St. George ferry terminal a facelift. The city is also back-
CITY LIMITS
. '
.'
ing private initiatives on its own land, like the redevelopment of
the 36-acre naval homeport in Stapleton, a new retail complex on
125 acres in Charleston and a residential development on a 109-
acre plot in Rossville, 33 acres of which is city land.
All will consume prime industrial space, and none will create
the kinds of high-paid permanent jobs that manufacturers pro-
vide. For example, the 36-acre Stapleton homeport site would be
easy to convert to industrial work. It's well-situated (roughly
halfway between the ferry terminal and the Verrazano Narrows
bridge) and has buildings with 200,000 square feet of industrial
space in good condition, with the high ceilings that contemporary
manufacturers need.
Real estate agent Smith says he approached the city four years
ago with a proposal to bring in industrial and office businesses
that would have generated 350 to 400 jobs. "I had tenants for
every one of the buildings there," says Smith, "but the city would-
n't talk to me. Maybe it wasn't glamorous enough-I don't
know." Since that time, Smith says that one potential tenant, a
large freight forwarder, has moved across the river to New Jersey.
Instead, EDC has other plans for the homeport, with its spec-
tacular harbor views. In 1994, the agency began marketing the site
to potential developers and initially entertained proposals for a
Formula One race track and a floating casino. EDC officials
opened the bidding in September 1998, and although they have
refused to disclose the names of the bidders or the candidates for
the site, local officials say the projects now under consideration
include a hotel, a residential development and a film studio. In
other words, anything but manufacturing.
These big projects won't bring much to Staten Island, say
locals. "From my vantage point, I don't see any positive impact
from these projects," says Terry Player, president of the New
Brighton Local Development Corporation. '1f there is going to be
an impact on employment, it will be marginal."
The $52 million stadium will host just 38 home games a year. It
would support about 200 low-wage service jobs-like selling tick-
ets and hot dogs-for a small part of the year, and a full -time staff
of about 20. "[The stadium] is not going to do diddley squat in
terms of having a long-term impact for communities that are con-
sidered blighted on Staten Island," says Player. ''The city needs to
be more focused on manufacturing as a job creation engine than the
stadium-type projects."
Most Staten Islanders may not exactly be clamoring for facto-
ries. They see their borough as a bedroom community, not a man-
ufacturing zone. But as Reverend Rice points out, the story is a bit
different on the North Shore. "You try to put anything on this
island and the people don't want it," he says. "But you don't hear
that NIMBYism from the minority communities because they're
so hungry for employment and opportunity."
F
or her part, Susan Meeker has just about given up on the
city. As director of the West Brighton Local Development
Corporation, she saw a perfect opportunity in 1993 to help
the growing number of small woodworking businesses on
the North Shore. By her count, there are roughly 30 woodworkers,
cabinet makers, upholsterers and musical instrument manufactur-
ers doing business on the island. Many more are working out of
basements and garages because they can't find affordable space.
Her plan was to ' create a business incubator that would give
them an affordable home, train apprentices, and set up technical
DECEMBER 1999
assistance and equipment sharing programs. Using the hugely
successful Greenpoint Manufacturing Design Center as a model,
Meeker identified 15 businesses that would be interested in rent-
ing space in an incubator. Many are from Staten Island, but some
would relocate: More than 30 firms are on the waiting list at the
Greenpoint shop.
Meeker has spent six months looking at a number of available
small buildings along the North Shore, but she has yet to find any-
thing that meets her price and doesn't have serious environmental
problems. ''There are many buildings, but retrofitting them to the
technology today is going to cost a fortune," she says.
These are the same problems that small companies and local
development officials confront across the city. They can't solve
them on their own, and City Hall isn't helping, either. "Instead of
putting up roadblocks, EDC should be pushing infrastructure
improvements," says Meeker. "Otherwise, we're never going to see
anything happen here."
Jonathan Bowles is research director for economic development
at the Center for an Urban Future.
-

Francisca Salce, a.k.a. Joe,
taking care of making her
business rise at her store on
1121 St. Nicholas Avenue at
166th St. in Washington Heights.
CALL: CHASE COMMUNITY
DEVELOPMENT COMMERCIAL
LENDING 212-622-4248
Moving in the right direction
Joe's Pizza's got the dough.
Joe's Pizza was a first. Not only did Francisca Salce
make a neighborhood name for her store with great
tasting pizza, she was the first recipient of a loan under
The Chase Community Development Group's Small
Retailers Lending Program.
The Small Retailers Lending Program is a unique
Chase initiative whose purpose is to expand access to
bank loans for hard to finance small businesses, par-
ticularly those located in low- and moderate-income
communities.
This program made it possible for Ms. Salce to obtain
a loan to relocate her restaurant, renovate the new
space and still remain in the neighborhood in which
she has built a successful business.
Which is just fine by Joe's Pizza's customers, who
swear by the dough.
:. .. .... ............ .. ....... Community Development Group
CHASE. The right relationship is everything. SM
1997 The Chase Manhattan Bank. Member FDI C.
r,-------------------------------,
to
Banking
L _______________________________ ~
Don't Bank On It
By Jarrett Murphy
Politics nearly destroyed
the law that makes
banks invest in urban
neighborhoods. Now the
real showdown begins, as
new financial behemoths
snub inner cities-and
communlty groups con-
front a poorer future. In
banking's brave new
world, neighborhoods
are drawing up strategies
for survival.
DECEMBER 1999
POWBRMAP
Chuck
Amuck
ROLODBX
Who To
Tum To
--
I
NEED TO KNOW!
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-
Y
OU will surely remember the plot It's a Wonderful Life
pits the ''broken down 01' Bailey Building and Loan"
against the massive, callous bank run by Mr. Potter.
The Baileys cared about common people and helped
them build homes. The greedy Mr. Potter, lusting after
money, tried to destroy them. It was a compelling match-up of little
guy versus fat cat. But if the movie were made today, a very large
out-of-state bank would be squeezing both the Building and Loan
and Mr. Potter's bank to sell out. .
'There'll come a time when people will see It's a Wonderful
Life and actually begin to see Potter as a good banker, because he
actually had an interest in the community," predicts John Taylor,
head of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an
advocacy group that presses for increased lending in poor neigh-
borhoods. At least Potter had an office on Main Street, and he and
his tellers lived in town They knew their customers. They had a
stake in the place where they did business.
These days, many banks don't. An unprecedented wave of
mergers is reshaping banking, as former corporate rivals join
together in multi-billion dollar deals designed to give them more
market power and more cash to keep growing. Four of the 10
largest mergers in U.S. history happened between banks in 1998,
and the top eight banks now control 35 percent of the nation's
deposited assets. The Federal Reserve estimates that another
2,000 to 3,000 banks could vanish in the hext decade.
That consolidation craze is playing out just as traditional banking
is becoming increasingly obsolete, and banks look to merge not just
with other banks but also with insurance companies and investment
firms. This fall, Congress passed a "financial modernization" bill
that allows those marriages to happen. In the not so distant future,
one corporation could operate the ATM you get cash from, insure the
car you drive, handle the investments that you'll live off during
retirement, and payout your life insurance benefit when you die.
; Before Congress could approve the deregulation that banks
have lusted after for two decades, Senate Banking Chair Phil
Gramm made a hostage of the law that inner cities have come to
rely on to guarantee access to banking (see . "Gramm's Fairy
Tales," City Limits, November 1999). Until the Community Rein-
vestment Act of 1977, banks were free to ignore poor areas, lock-
ing them out of mortgage and business lending. CRA changed all
that by requiring every bank to meet the credit needs of the entire
community from which it took deposits or else find themselves
blocked from mergers and other major business deals.
Gramm's crusade to crush CRA grabbed all the headlines, only
to collapse at the last minute. Meanwhile, Congress was quietly
ensuring that CRA would have no part in the new landscape of
banking. With the new law, banks could expand into finance and
insurance-but Congress refused to expand CRA along with the
banks. Banks still have to maintain a decent rating with regulators
if they want to merge, but the law won' t apply to the assets in those
new subsidiary businesses. With banks free to lure big deposits to
any part of their operations, the amount of cash earmarked for
community lending is bound to plummet.
Until now, the mergers have meant boom times for CRA. Just
recently, Citigroup pledged $115 billion in community lending;
Fleet, $14.6 billion. Not coincidentally, these banks were both look-
ing to close on unprecedented mergers with financial giants-
Citibank with Travelers Insurance, Fleet with Bank Boston. Banks
jockeying to merge are making sure to shore up their community
lending to impress regulators. While CRA is credited with leverag-
ing one trillion dollars to date, pledges in just the last few years have
totalled in the hundreds of billions.
Community lending experts are dreading the bust they say will
inevitably follow. But while the prospect of a dip in community
lending is terrible news for neighborhoods, it isn't entirely new.
The banking business has already been leaving neighborhoods
behind. Since CRA was passed two decades ago, massive amounts
of cash have shifted from savings accounts to services like mutual
funds and pensions-and cash covered by the law has correspond-
ingly dwindled.
Now, as the shrinking number of banks exercise their new free-
dom to expand into these other services, the funding pipeline that
neighborhoods depend on for developing housing, retail and com-
munity services is in serious danger of drying up. "What has coin-
CAPITOL PAINS
T
he significance of Octo-
ber's ''financial model'D-
ization" battles in Con-
gress depends on whom you talk
to. Community developers, afraid
the bill would gut the Community
Reinvestment Act, looked forward
to it as eagerly as a triple root
canal. The Novocaine was that the
final legislation emerged without
destroying eRA.
But for bankers and investors,
the debate was Ike Christmas Eve-
and the billliIre Christmas IIIOI'IIing.
The banking industry had been
pushing for decades to overturn the
laws that baITed banks from merg-
ing with insurance companies and
investment finns, peaking last year,
when Citicorp announced its merger
with Travelers Insurance and the
Salomon Smith Ramey invesbnent
group. Regulators approved the
III8ITiage on the condition that the
new entiQ, Citigroup, divest itself rI
its insurance business.
Citigroup won't have to worry
about d'MISting now. And it's just
the rnt rI the new breed. The new
banking law is expected to trigger a
wave rI mergers involving baits,
insurers and investment houses.
What's pushing the merger
waveP Low interest rates, high
stock prices, and technology are
making mergers easier. Global
companies want global financial
institutions to handle their big
deals. One merger tends to trigger
another, as banks try to keep pace
with the competition.
Fonner Delaware State Banking
CommissIoner T..thy McTaggart
predicts that only some smaI banks
wi make it. "The ones that wi
SII'Vive and prosper," he SQI, "wiI
be the ones that rmd IIIIque marbt
niches." -JII
CITY LIMITS
r------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iBANKING
cided with branch closings and the mergers has been a strong econ-
omy and a strong CRA commitment by some banks, masking some
of the problems:' says Taylor. ''What will be left when the econo-
my cools off is frightful. There may be just a shell of a banking
system."
Groups dependent on CRA money share that dread.
'The kind of difference that CRA investment has made
in our community is tremendous," says Liz Blaney,
head of the Jamaica office of the community
development network Neighborhood Housing
Services. "What we fear as a result of any
changes is that there will be fewer dollars
and less accountability for banks in our
community."
So while merger mania is hailed
on Wall Street, it's being watched
warily in some city neighbor-
hoods. Bigger banks are doing
less home mortgage lending.
Consumer fees keep rising at
banks that have fewer competi-
tors; a bounced check will now
set you back $29 at Chase. And
when out-of-state or foreign
banks buy local institutions,
the bonds between banks and
communities are stretched
thin-banks without a local
base tend to know a territory
based on its assets, not its spe-
cific needs.
These monumental changes
in banking aren't just making a
certain movie obsolete. Communi-
ties and the organizations that work
POWER MAP
Senator Charles Schumer
Despite New York's dependence on the Community Rein-
vestment Act, not a vote to be counted on. Schumer was
reportedly instrumental in moving the Banking Committee
debates behind closed doors, and he 01Uected when repre-
sentatives of community groups were invited in. Schumer
was one of the House's top 10 recipients of securities
industry PAC money in 1998.
Senator PhD Gramm
The Texas tornado is CRA Enemy Number One. In banking
bill negotiations, Gramm refused to relent on his provi-
sions gutting CRA until the very last minute, going down
vowing to hold more hearings on the law.
Alan Greenspan
The Federal Reserve Board chair is poised to put the brakes
on the U.s. economy by raising interest rates at the fnt
lint fI a rise in prices, a move that would make COIIIDUnity
development more expensive.
John%). Hawke, Jr.
to keep them vital are being forced to
rethink how they get what they need
from banks-it's either that, or risk
going the way of the savings passbook.
Chuck Schumer
ThfLComptroIIer fI the CuITency is in the eRA drivers seat,
makiIg SII'8 national banks comply with the law. Hawke and
the T.....-y Department want banks that merge with other
P
oor neighborhoods have never had
an easy time with the finance indus-
try. In the 1930s the Federal Housing
Administration urged underwriters not to
give loans to blacks and Hispanics who want-
ed to move into white neighborhoods. At the same time,
FHA itself refused to lend in minority neighborhoods.
The National Association of Realtors gave similar advice in
the 1960s. "It was very difficult to get financing on small busi-
nesses or mortgages," remembers Fran Justa, president of Neigh-
borhood Housing Services. Redlining was often built into the
rules-in the 1970s, Justa recalls, banks' underwriting guidelines
rejected houses with claw-foot bathtubs or those within so many
feet of a commercial strip, stipulations designed to exclude old,
urban neighborhoods.
CRA rewrote the script, ordering banks to reach out to all the
neighborhoods where depositors lived in an effort to increase lend-
ing to neglected areas. The law was written vaguely and required
no dollar commitments for community lending. The rules devel-
oped by federal regulators to enforce CRA merely said that if reg-
DECEMBER 1999
kinds fI fnns to be able to choose to work like operating
subsidiaries, which IIIQ preserve more bank cash for eRA.
EUza.beth McCaul
The acting head of New York State's Banking Department
oversees state regulators, who are considered more
aggressive than their federal counterparts in urging banks j
to meet their eRA obligations. McCaul's stair has adopted a ~
proactive approach to eRA enforcement. ~
ula-
tors gave
a bank a bad rat-
ing during a regular
inspection, that bank would face delays
when it tried to expand, merge or sell out
Still, the impact was dramatic. "When you have capital, you
can have dreams. CRA made it possible for all of us to get financ-
ing, which meant that a neighborhood could grow and prosper
where it really hadn't before," observes Justa."
Perhaps most important, under CRA a community group
could file a challenge to any bank merger on the grounds that the
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bank had failed to meet its obligations. This became a powerful
tool-mergers mean money to banks, and delays are costly. Banks
learned that it was better to negotiate with community groups than
fight them, and neighborhoods were able to win multi-million
commitments for future CRA lending.
Partnerships between community groups, banks and govern-
ment now create package deals to develop multiple residential and
business properties that make a huge impact on neighborhoods.
The partners involved increase the muscle behind a project: One
recent NHS endeavor brought in the federal and New York City
housing agencies, the Bank of New York, Greenpoint Savings
Bank, EAB, and the Industrial Bank of Japan.
The law has made banks players in areas they wouldn' t have
touched before. "I think the banks are a lot more aware of the pos-
sibility of a growing, emerging, really potential market," says Justa.
And banks understand that community lending can be profitable-
a recent survey by the Bank Insurance Market Research Group
found that only 5 percent believe CRA hurts their profitability. A
1997 Federal Reserve study found that banks that specialize in
CRA-qualified lending are as profitable as other banks. In fact,
banks hungry for markets now look increasingly toward commu-
nity lending as a new business opportunity.
Yet despite the glowing reviews, CRA's future is murky, and not
just because Congress chose not to expand it or even because Sena-
tor Gramm vows to continue his war on the law. The rapidly chang-
ing financial industry is already on its way to making CRA obsolete.
EXTRA
CREDIT
A
s banks lose interest
in lending to small
businesses, nonprof-
it community development
organizations are eager to
step in. But without the assets
of big banks, they don't always have all the resources to do the job. So
in 17 states (though not in New York), some community lenders are
tuming to the Community Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit firm that
hooks them up with deep-pocketed investors. Based in Minneapolis, CRF
purchases small business loans from local financial organizations, then
bundles the loans in packages and sells them to pensioo plans, banks and
mutual funds, who earn a profit from the loan's interest payments.
Some CRF investors, like religious pension funds, say they do so
because of the community link. "There is often a socially conscious
etTort that they're looking for," says Michael Blumfleld, CRF's market-
ing director. However, "it's as much the performance of the bond as a
criteria. You have to acknowledge that market reality."
That reality dictates that CRF sell the loans at an attractive market
rate, as well as pay its own operating costs. So it usually takes a cut oot
of the cash it delivers to the community-based Ienders-on a SlOO,OOO
loan, CRF might pay a credit union S92,OOO. Some prospective sellers
bristle at receiving less than they could on a loan. The main attraction,
says Blumfl8ld, is that "instead of waiting to be repaid on it," over a
period of months or years, ''they sell it to us and get an iqiection of new
capital to go and make more Ioans." Lenders have more money to
lend-and neighborhoods more to spend. -JM
-
Banking used to be a simpler business. In 1975,55 percent of
all household assets were in bank accounts. Depositors earned a
modest interest rate on savings, while banks made money by
charging interest on loans. Regulators limited all bank interest
rates.
The field was wide open for investment firms. Armed with
money market accounts that paid 20 percent interest and new laws
that let them launch consumer operations, firms like Merrill
Lynch sparked a free flow of capital from banks to investments.
As banks merged or failed, the money in traditional banking
deposits dwindled as well, down to 25 percent of household assets
by 1998.
The prospect of cashing in on consumer investing has made
mergers more attractive for banks. The same can't always be said of
commitments to inner cities. At community development corpora-
tions, the mantra these days is "one plus one does not equal two."
Although the new megabanks are making some unprecedented
promises as they vie for additional mergers, community developers
report, these don' t always add up to what the banks were spending
separately.
As Association for Neighborhood and Housing Develop-
ment president Irene Baldwin puts it, "The level of services
they provide to groups is not equal to the combined activities of
the pre-merger banks. People relied on those." John Riley at
Fordham-Bedford Housing Services says that Citibank now
supports specific projects but no longer gives a general housing
grant to hi s group. Overall, he says, he's getting less. ANHD
itself has seen its grant from Chase drop from $25,000 to
$20,000 over the last two years.
Chase is a good example of how community investment can lose
out in a merger. When Chase bought Chemical Bank, it pledged
$18.1 billion in community lending over five years and promised
non profits that they would suffer no immediate decreases as a result
of the merger. From 1996 to 1998, Chase's lending to community
groups went up 32 percent. But thanks to its merger with Chemical,
Chase itself doubled in size at the same time, according to federal
regulators, and its deposits more than doubled. Mark Willis, who
directs the bank's community projects, admits there have been shifts
in Chase's priorities-funding increasingly favors faith-based orga-
nizations, for example.
With increasing uncertainty over whether banks will remain the
ally they have become, community advocates who depend on
banks' money are being forced to revise their approaches and con-
sider reinventing themselves. Says Mark Wmston Griffith, director
of Central Brooklyn Partnership, "It's a whole new ballgame."
I
n the Bronx, the 50,000 residents of Highbridge continue to
live without a single bank. Mott Haven is a virtual bank-
free zone. Harlem makes do with a handful of full-service
branches. These and other poor neighborhoods have always
been underserved by banks. Now the power shifts in the
banking industry also jeopardize hard-won relationships between
bankers and community leaders in those areas.
Those connections are easily frayed, especially when a bank is
bought by an out-of-town institution. ''It's like reinventing the wheel
all over again," says Martin Liebman, an ex-banker who now works
as a consultant for Neighborhood Housing Services. "You lose some
of the chemistry and that clear channel of communication."
Phyllis Rosenblum, a community development executive at
CITY LIMITS
r------- ---------------------------------- --- ---- -- - - - - ------------- -----------------------------
!BANKING
Republic Bank, agrees. Her bank is in the process of being taken
over by the London-based HSBC. In general, she says, 'The more
distance there is between the community development person and
the bank, the harder it will be to maintain."
harder to "find" the money. Without a bank on the corner, and
with many banks using specialized offices to handle small busi-
ness lending, it's difficult for some business owners even to find
the right people to talk to.
Since 1992, activists in central Brooklyn had that kind of
relationship with Bankers Trust. Now, people like Central
Brooklyn's Griffith will be dealing with Deutsche Bank, facing
what Griffith calls the "big, open question as to whether or not
the bank has the same CRA commitment Bankers Trust had."
While only the most major policy decisions will be made at the
bank's world headquarters in Frankfurt, Griffith fears that those
decisions will ultimately have an impact on his neighborhood.
Responding to such concerns, Deutsche Bank's chief
executive, Dr. Rolf-e Breuer, recently set up a tour of
Large banks often abandon the personal approach in favor of
computer-based techniques. With, for example, credit scoring, a
method for approving loans based on an applicant's credit history,
and past problems overshadow current credit-worthiness. 'There's
not as much competition for the low end as the high end of the small
business market, so a lot of people who need assistance don't get it,"
says Sheehan.
Competition for desirable borrowers and investors is just as
fierce in consumer finance as it is in commercial lending. To
prevail, financial companies have become shamelessly
bank-poor neighborhoods in New York. . slavish to the desires of their better-heeled customers.
'There's a demand side for
these products, too," notes
Timothy McTaggart, who
Griffith's worries about big
banks' lack of accountability to
minority neighborhoods are
backed up by data on the lend-
ing patterns of New York's
three largest retail banks.
Reports filed by Citibank,
Chase Manhattan and Fleet
Bank with the Federal Financial
Institutions Examination Coun-
cil for 1997 and 1998 show that
all three institutions, each of
which has been involved in a
recent merger, deny applica-
tions from African-Americans
and Latinos in New York far
more often than they reject
them from whites.
T
here's some evi-
dence that the trans-
formation of the
banking industry
hasn't been all bad
news for neighborhoods. Sever-
al major banks-including EAB
and North Fork-have recently
opened branches in the South
Bronx. And small business
lending is up-in the five bor-
0ughs' it increased by 25 per-
cent from 1996 to 1998.
But businesses in under-
served neighborhoods face a
dilemma, says Richard Shee-
han, head of the small business
lending unit of SOBRO, a
South Bronx community devel-
opment nonprofit. "There's
more [small business lending]
going on than there used to be,
but there are fewer institutions
doing it." That has several con-
sequences. First, it makes it
DECEMBER 1999
ROLODEX
NATIONAL COMMUNITY
REINVESTMENT COALITION
John Taylor's advocacy group is unofficial HQ for
eRA activists, offering research and networking for
areas shunned by megaiJanks. 202-628-8866
CONSUMER FEDERATION OF
AMERICA
This think tank looks at the big-picture impact of
mergers on all consumers, while generating
research on how the poor get hurt. 202-387-6121
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
CREDIT UNIONS
A granddaddy among community investment advo-
cates, this membership organization represents
200 credit unions in 40 states from a base in New
York's financial district. 212-809-1850
NEIGHBORHOOD ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT ADVOCACY
PROJECT
Sarah Ludwig, director of this advocacy think tank,
uses smarts and data to bridge the gap between
neighborhoods and financial services in
New York City. 212-633-8585
NATIONAL COALITION OF
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS
A membership organization cum think tank and
lobbyist for the new breed of community lenders,
who serve neighborhoods where bankers won't
tread. 215-923-5363
oversaw hundreds of financial
companies catering to con-
sumers seeking easy credit
when he served as Delaware's
Banking Commissioner from
1994 to 1998. "It's not just that
the institution dreams up the
newest and greatest product
that they wish to present."
Moneyed baby boomers are
the market that banks lust after,
vying to sell them retirement
investments.
But those new vehicles
aren't accessible to poor people
who don't have pension plans
or disposable income. And that
lack of access winds up exacer-
bating the huge wealth gap
between rich and poor. The
research group United for a
Fair Economy estimated that
while the average financial
wealth in 1995 for whites was
$18,100, blacks averaged $200
and Hispanics averaged zero.
The bottom fifth of households
in 1995 was saddled with an
average negative net worth of
$7,100.
That gap in wealth-the
assets people can live off if
they lose their job, retire or get
sick-makes the banking situ-
ation urgent for poor commu-
nities. Neighborhood advo-
cates describe the wealth gap
as both a cause and an effect of
banks' changing priorities.
Because of discriminatory
lending practices, poor people
--
I
NEED TO KNOW!
I
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don't have access to low-interest loans, and therefore don't have
enough money to play the market; since they don't invest, finance
companies don't reach out to them as customers. The financial
industry, and the tools that most middle-class Americans now use
to sustain a decent living, are increasingly out of reach for
low-income communities.
So banks are driving harder bargains. "They are getting
more sophisticated in what they're looking for in an invest-
ment," says Caroline Glackin, director of Delaware's First State
Community Loan Fund, a community development lender.
"Banks will look at the realm of investments and what makes
the best fit with what their goals are." To convince recalci-
"These changes have affected everybody, but the
negative impacts of it all fall particularly bard on
trant bankers, Glackin's group shows them
detailed data on exactly how their investment is
inner city neighborhoods and
neighborhoods of color," con-
tends Sarah Ludwig, director of
the Neighborhood Economic
Development Advocacy Project.
"All these forces together col-
lude to deny low income people
even more of conventional
access to banking services." As
the new mega-banks turn their
attention to individual savings,
they are once again turning their
backs on neighborhoods that
lack them. It's redlining redux,
1990s-style.
T
o survive the bank-
ing revolution, com-
munity development
corporations have to
learn to navigate new
terrain. They also have to think
strategically about new relation-
ships with banks. To bankers, a
"good idea" has two elements:
strong structure and a profit. The
architecture of a deal-tbe soft
and hard costs, equity, timetables
and parties involved-is key for
the banker because he or she
needs to show regulators that the
loans the bank makes are well-
researched and safe. A banker
must also show shareholders and
directors that they are making a
profit. In the new, intensely
profit-driven financial environ-
ment, banks' CRA executives
are on a shorter leash. They are
also constrained by cuts in pub-
lic funding that formerly pro-
vided essential subsidies to
community development pro-
jects. "You have a city such as
New York with a huge amount
of poor people. You wind up
with the stretched dollar not
doing enough," says Rosen-
blum. 'Those problems to me
are bigger than the merger
problems."
IN PRINT
THE CRA HANDBOOK
Ken Thomas' guide has become a bible for bankers,
community groups and regulators alike-former
U.S. Comptroller of the Cumncy Eugene Ludwig, the
nation's number one bank regulator, kept a copy on
his desk. You can read excerpts at www.crahand-
book. com. (McGraw Hill, February 1998)
FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF
NEW YORK WEB SITE
The most prestigious of the 12 Federal Reserve
regional banks, FRB-NY offers cutting-edge
research on changes in banking and finance. Some
of the material is slanted to favor the Fed's cumnt
policies, but the research is often ambitious and big
on detail. www.ny.frb.org
THE BANK BEAT AND
CRA REPORTER
These superb weekly web newsletters produced by
Bronx-based Inner City Press are chock full of the
latest news and gossip from political and banking
circles. A great way to stay on top of pending
mergers, legislative developments and CRA enforce-
ment action. www.innercitypress.com
FINANCIAL MARKETS CENTER
FMC is an independent research engine that makes
everything the Federal Reserve does its business.
FMC's website is a treasure chest of new research.
If you don't already have a subscription to its
newsletter, FOMC Alert, get one. www.fmcenter.org
THE BANKERS:
THE NEXT GENERATION
Martin Mayer's follow-up to his 1979 expose The
Bankers is a fascinating look inside the world of
banking. As readable as it is richly detailed, the
book gives laypeople an idea of who bankers are,
what motivates them and how their world works-
key information for community groups that have to
deal with them. (Penguin, May 1998)
paying off, both for the bank
and for the community.
Paradoxically, banks'
embrace of community lending
as a profit-making venture also
puts new pressures on commu-
nity organizations. "We realize
that banks are acknowledging
that money is to be made and
are much more willing to lend
in inner city neighborhoods,"
says Karen Phillips, president
and CEO of Abyssinian Devel-
opment Corp. However, she
says, that really means that
banks are placing "more
demands on organizations to
get bankable deals." Banks that
want to invest in inner city
neighborhoods are asking
community development cor-
porations to craft deals that
will guarantee a high retum.
It's not just about banks-
community groups that deal
with them also need to look
inward. Some already have by
branching out into health care,
job training and other services.
Others have formed coalitions
with groups far away to deal
with multi-state banks.
The merger wave appears to
be slowing, thanks to approach-
ing changes in accounting rules
that could make it tougher to
finance buyouts. But any down-
turns in the economy will rever-
berate for a long time.
"Our view of the last few
years has been tainted by
extremely favorable economic
circumstances," warns Rosen-
thal. "Banks generally have
enjoyed a string of very prof-
itable years. I think that has
buffered the nonprofit commu-
nity from the potential effects.
There will be a downturn at
some point. That's when the
real test will come."
CITY LIMITS
Y
ears before children's rights attorney Marcia Robinson Lowry
became a professional hell-raiser taking on child welfare systems
across the country, she drew a check from the one in New York City.
In 1972, she was attempting to be part of the solution in the
Bureau of Child Welfare, known today as the Administration for
Children's Services (ACS). As an assistant to the commissioner, she helped
the agency strategize how to handle high-profile cases and developed new
programs for older kids who were faring poorly in foster care.
Problem was, her ideas all too often ended up shelved when they proved
to be impolitic. Her favorite plan-and one she admits she "totally bombed
out on"-was to build a group home for teen truants a block from a high
school on King Street in Greenwich Village. When students went AWOL,
teachers could just stop by the home and retrieve their charges. "It was just
a great idea," she says, still wistful that the plan was lcilled after Village res-
idents protested. ''They didn' t want those lcids in their neighborhood, and
that was the end of it."
Had the school been built, it would have met Lowry's ideal of child wel-
DECEMBER 1999
,
For 30 years,
Marcia Lowry has
waged a war to save
foster care. Just
don't ask her how
to make the
system work.
By Wendy Davis
fare: a powerful government entity that serves as neither jail guard nor
absentee parent, but as a benign caretaker, with a staff of social workers to
keep an eye on things.
Lowry left that job, deciding she could do better for lcids on her own.
Since then she has invented an entirely new kind of law with one single pur-
pose: to tum child welfare from a bureaucratic disaster into a system truly
focused on children. First as director of the Children's Rights Project of the
New York Civil Liberties Union, then the ACLU, and later, starting in 1995,
as head of a seven-attorney firm called Children's Rights, Inc., she has pur-
sued that quixotic dream for the last 30 years, bending child welfare systems
nationwide to her will in the process.
To this day, Lowry thinks child welfare as we know it is an abysmal fail-
ure. She charges, correctly, that children are routinely left at home when
they're in danger, sent to foster care when they're safe at home, and mis-
treated once they're in foster care. Yet just as she remains certain that King
Street should have had its group home, Lowry steadfastly believes that
child welfare can make children's lives better-it just hasn't yet, ever. For
--
In a videotaped
1990 press
conference,
Marcia Lowry
accuses the
Kansas foster
care agency of
"participating in
the abuse of
children." She
sued the state
that same day.

Lowry, foster care cannot be reformed piecemeal, with lawsuits
that chip away at problems. It must be completely rebuilt-and
through relentless litigation, Lowry has anointed herself to do it.
In all, she has forced a dozen cities and states into court, charg-
ing that their child welfare systems fail to serve children. Her bat-
tlefields have ranged from states with few kids in foster care, such
as Wisconsin and Kentucky, to Philadelphia and New York, where
even years of other people's best efforts had failed to tum around
entrenched cultures of failure. In 1995, she convinced a judge in
Washington, D.C., to appoint an independent overseer to take over
that city's entire child welfare agency. This summer, she filed a
suit in New Jersey and she says, cryptically, that she has at least
one other major suit in development.
But Lowry has become famous for what she did in New York.
Last year she settled her blockbuster federal case Marisol A. v.
Giuliani, filed in 1996 when New York City was still shaken by
the death of Elisa Izquierdo, a 6-year-old killed by her mother.
Lowry originally asked a federal court to put the city's entire child
welfare system into receivership. The incendiary suit was a Molo-
tov cocktail toast to New York's child welfare bureaucracy.
In a child advocacy world long tom between proponents for
removing children from problem homes and those promoting fos-
ter care as a last resort for only the most extreme cases, Lowry's
ferocious efforts have generated respect on all sides. "I don't
know anyone who's worked for poor children quite as doggedly
as Marcia has over the years," offers Margaret Ayers, executive
director of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, which granted
$100,000 to Children's Rights in 1998 alone.
"She's brought an enormous amount of attention to these
issues," says Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition
for Child Protection Reform, a group dedicated to keeping chil-
dren out of foster care. "Whatever else, these lawsuits shed a light
on a very dark comer."
But for all her legal opinions about what's wrong, it's unclear
whether these lawsuits have made her targets substantially more
responsive to children's needs. Three decades after her first law-
suit against New York, Lowry concedes that she does not know
what will actually work to improve the sad circumstances of the
children she represents. She's not even sure if the deal she worked
out with city lawyers on Marisol, the culmination of years of work
and millions of dollars in bills to be paid by the city, will result in
improvements for kids.
Yet even after years of raising hell, watching foster care bureau-
crats scramble to comply to her orders, and waiting, and waiting, for
results, Lowry's faith that child welfare will eventually work seems
bottomless. A 1996 New York Times article about Lowry reported that
when the ACLU threw her a 20th anniversary party, she told a room-
ful of guests that she was a failure for not having fixed New York's
system. Lowry now says that the reporter got it wrong-she wants it
known that she told the guests it was premature to congratulate her.
So what did she say? For the record: "I haven't fixed it yet."
, ,
T
he individual stories can be devastating," says the
58-year-old Lowry, with the same cool intensity
that she brings to her exhaustive depositions and
court arguments. "When I read Marisol's case
record, I start to cry." Lowry's emotional outpour-
ings on behalf of abused and neglected children at first seem out
of sync with her prickly personality, but the overall effect is a
convincing fierceness. Neither eager to please nor especially
interested whether other advocates agree with her methods,
Lowry pursues her cause singiernindedly, not caring who she
alienates along the way.
She's got other priorities. Seven-year-old Marisol A. was
burned, beaten, starved and locked in a closet after being returned
to her mother from a foster mother who wanted to adopt her.
Where even the steeliest children's advocates end up slipping into
hopelessness after seeing case after case like that one, Lowry sees
opportunity. "If I know that I'm going to do something that's
going to keep this from happening again, then obviously that ener-
gizes me," she explains.
Lowry was energized enough to file a class-action lawsuit that
was gargantuan even by advocacy lawyer standards. Besides
Marisol herself, Marisol v. Giuliani was filed on behalf of all
40,000 children in New York's foster care system and every child
whose parents were merely suspected of abuse or neglect-
100,000 children in all.
Lowry's lawsuits spell out in horrific detail the abuse and
neglect suffered by children, both at the hands of their own par-
ents and under the watch of incompetent child welfare systems.
Throughout the country, the children's stories are chillingly simi-
lar. In the New Jersey case, Charlie and Nadine H. v. Whitman,
Charlie and Nadine were taken from a mother who tried to drown
the girl, then put in the hands of a mentally ill family friend and
her alcoholic boyfriend, a convicted pedophile, both of whom
seriously abused them.
"The issues they're raising are compelling and representative of
continuing problems," says Cecelia Za1kind, director of the New
Jersey advocacy group Association for Children. She notes that
New Jersey is already working on its own child welfare reform
plan, and worries that time-consuming litigation will divert the
state agency's energies right when it needs them internally.
"We're trying" is a phrase heard often from child welfare agen-
cies under assault. New York, too, is being revamped under a
reform plan by ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, a former
foster child who grew up to be a federal prosecutor and friend of
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. ACS's own reform efforts, launched in
CITY LIMITS
1996, focus on overhauling an ineffective bureaucracy and moving
child welfare services from downtown offices into the neighbor-
hoods where children live. It also promotes a zero-tolerance
approach to reports of child abuse and neglect, which led to an
alarming 50 percent increase in the number of children removed
from their homes in just two years.
Up against agencies in perpetual chaos, Lowry believes that
only legal advocates can make foster care accountable to kids. "I
haven't had any system that has had sustained reform without liti-
gation," she insists. "Litigation is unfortunately necessary in most
of these systems, to shove them into compliance with the law."
Within four months of arriving at the ACLU in 1973, Lowry
had already started pushing New York City, and in the process she
learned a powerful lesson in getting mileage out of lawsuits. With
Wilder v. Sugarman, she charged that the private agencies that
took in foster children discriminated against them based on race
and religion. The agreement she reached with city lawyers in
Wilder was supposed to end racial bias in child welfare.
Almost accidentally, the settlement accomplished more: For the
first time, court-imposed mandates detailed everything the child
welfare system had to do when children entered its care. For
instance, the city agreed that every child would receive a compre-
hensive evaluation. This measure had the hidden advantage of
allowing children to be screened for services like counseling.
But the numerous mandates put on the city, mostly geared to
finding the most appropriate placement for each child, never
worked in the ways they were supposed to. Too many casework-
ers had to implement regulations that they never quite understood,
making Wilder another layer of bureaucracy instead of a mean-
ingful blueprint.
Still, Lowry saw that child welfare systems could be made to
budge-and if they could move a little, she reasoned, they could
move a lot. In the process she created lots of precedents that other
child welfare advocates use to bolster their cases today. Remarks
Ira Burnim, who successfully sued to overhaul Alabama's child
welfare system with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law,
"Marcia created all the tools for litigation. She did all the early
work. She pioneered it."
M
arcia Lowry didn't always think so big. When she
enrolled at NYU Law School in 1966, she had a com-
mitment to social justice but no idea that child welfare
was her future. She started out at Community Action
for Legal Services, where she pushed to legalize abor-
tion. Then, after her stint with the city, Lowry went to the ACLU
to head up its brand-new Children's Rights Project.
In those early days, Lowry did what most other public interest
lawyers do: file suits to remedy specific problems in public insti-
tutions. For example, in 1970 she sued New York for its practice
of warehousing children with emotional problems in mental hos-
pitals, and she won. But in what she has since called "an unfore-
seen and undesirable outcome," the city began shipping hundreds
of children to out-of-state institutions instead.
Similarly, in New Mexico, Lowry sued to force the state to
make sure kids languishing in foster care got adopted, and in 1983
a court ordered the state to beef up its adoption efforts in specific
ways. State officials politely complied. But Lowry later discov-
ered that they had managed to do that by taking staff away from
other parts of the system. ''These systems can't walk and chew
gum at the same time," she complains.
DECEMBER 1999
Lowry eventually concluded that with decaying bureaucracies
like these, only a complete housecleaning will do the job. "You
can't reform a piece of the system," she says. "If you focus on one
part, another part goes down the tubes."
In a 1986 law journal article that doubles as a manifesto for her
children's crusade, Lowry considered each of the ways attorneys
try to get child welfare to change. Narrow constitutional chal-
lenges and suits for damages, she argued, have only fleeting
effects and leave fundamental problems unaddressed. She insisted
that only sweeping class action litigation-"big bites," she called
them-could have lasting consequences.
Lowry cited examples from her own case files. In Kentucky in
1978, for instance, the ACLU sued Louisville's child welfare sys-
tem for neglect of children languishing in foster care. Lowry hit the
jackpot there, getting a court decree outlining procedures, moni-
toring, and other steps to be taken to make sure kids get adopted.
Big bites, though, sometimes meant swallowing unintended
Lowry claims
responsibility for getting
seven state legislatures to
spend a total of 8300
million more on child
welfare. "Litigation
creates political will,"
she shrugs, as confidently
as saying July
follows June.
results. In 1993, Marcia Lowry tried to hold New York City in con-
tempt for refusing to follow the Wilder settlement in certain cases.
Among other things, caseworkers were not pre-screening kids enter-
ing "kinship care," in which children are placed in foster care with
relatives instead of strangers. Responding to her complaint, a judge
ordered that the city evaluate children going into kinship care, too.
Other children's advocates, including Lawyers for Children and
Legal Aid's Juvenile Rights Division, filed objections, fearing that
extra burdens on city caseworkers would make kinship care an unat-
tractive option. Their concerns were proven right, as kinship place-
ments declined by one-third in the years following the judge's deci-
sion.
Lowry attributes the kinship slump not to her actions but to
bureaucratic bungling. ''The city has often applied very reasonable
(continued on page 3 J )
-
GlennD.
Magpantay is a
staff attorney at
the Asian
American Legal
Defense and
Education Fund.
Collective
and
Conscious
By Glenn D. Magpantay
A
fter years of silence, New York City's Filipino
community has found its political voice again.
Drawing on one injustice to right another, it's
supporting a hate crimes bill that should have
become law a decade ago.
Unsurprisingly, this political resurgence was
born out of violence. In Los Angeles this August,
Buford Furrow shot and killed Filipino-
American postal worker Joseph Ileto, affec-
tionately known to his family as "Jojo."
Earlier that same day, Furrow, a self-declared
white supremacist, also wounded five others,
including four children, at a Jewish commu-
nity center.
In response, Filipinos in seven major cites across the coun-
try launched days of mourning and protest. In New York City,
hundreds of Filipinos, joined by a mix of allies from Koreans
and Jews to lesbians and gays-and even postal workers-held
a candlelight vigil turned rally. Looking out at the gathering,
Jojo's uncle remarked, "Jojo's death is an awakening for all of
us."
In fact, not since the protests against Ferdinand Marcos in
the mid-1980s have various Filipino groups in the city united
for a political purpose. This time around, the city's 115,000
Filipinos have a local, more accessible target for protest-and
a ready-made coalition to back them up.
Every year since 1990, the New York State Bias-Related
Violence and Intimidation Act-which increases the penalties for
crimes based on race, religion or national origin, and adds age,
disability, gender and sexual orientation to the list--has passed
the State Assembly. The push for tougher laws has also won over
Governor George Pataki. Yet each legislative session, without
fail, the bill stalls in the Republican-controlled State Senate,
which has repeatedly refused to vote on the measure.
More than 1,100 bias complaints were reported in New
.-.... --...... ~ ...... ...
York City during fiscal year 1999, CITY V lE W
according to the City Commission on
Human Rights. Even though a tougher
statute won' t prevent all bias crimes, it would send a resound-
ing message that these acts will not be tolerated. To make that
statement, the Assembly's bill creates an additional law
through which offenders can be given two consecutive sen-
tences, one for the violent act and another for the bias itself,
while a Pataki version stiffens existing laws. These bills take
different approaches, but the underlying thought is the same:
Our laws won't do. New York is the only state in the Northeast
not to have broadened its bias crime laws to include sexual ori-
entation-and some of these states have already stiffened the
penalties for hate crimes.
New York's antiquated laws will become even more out-
of-date while a powerful few hold up progress. There are
enough votes in the Senate to pass the bill if Majority Leader
Joseph Bruno would ever allow it to come up for a vote.
Early on, Senate Republicans said they'd support the bill if
it removed lesbians and gays as a protected group. But the
legislature's Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, with other
advocates, refused to support a biased bias bill. It has been
stalled ever since.
Not since the protests against
Ferdinand Marcos have Filipinos in the
city untted for a polttical purpose-
this time, to back a hate crimes law.
Now, because of Jojo, New York's Filipino community
wants to change that. Filipinos are the newest members of a
coalition of lesbians and gays, legislators of color, civic asso-
ciations, churches, labor groups, and district attorneys to push
for the bill's passage.
So begins the difficult task of rousing a sleeping giant. In
addition to lobbying senators, we are trying to mobilize indi-
vidual Filipinos. At the vigil for Jojo, we passed out voter reg-
istration forms and collected nearly 200 signed postcards
addressed to state senators, including Bruno, asking them to
pass the bias crimes bill. An array of groups have signed on to
the fight, including the Filipino Civil Rights Advocates,
Filipino American Human Services and Philippine Nurses
Association. Even prayer groups and church committees have
promised to get their members involved.
The night of the vigil, a young, openly gay Filipino activist
raised his fist with the cry, "Furrow shot Joseph neto because
he had brown skin like me." Though in its infancy, this new
political spark burns bright. Most Filipinos may not be ready
yet to shout down a politician or shut down Broadway, but
they are ready to push for protections that are long overdue .
CITY LIMITS
---_ .... ---...... -
Private Tutors
I
n a recent book from the Economic Policy Institute,
researchers explore a question that has sent educators, parents
and politicians on either side of the school voucher debate
searching for a soapbox: Can public schools learn from private
ones? EPI's answer: not really.
After interviewing parents, administrators and teachers at 16
elementary and middle schools in Califomia-half of them pub-
lic, half private-in poor, middle class and affluent communities,
EPI discovered that public versus private simply matters less
than rich versus poor.
This divide became clearest when looking at schools'
accountability to parents. Not surprisingly, while affluent par-
ents of students at both public and private schools infuriated
educators with their constant meddling, their poorer counter-
parts infuriated teachers with their apparent apathy. But the
report found that poor parents were in fact interacting with the
schools. It's just that in academic matters, poor parents usually
deferred to the teachers.
Interestingly, of all the schools in poor communities, the one
that most successfully engaged parents also tried to bridge socio-
economic gaps. This public school, with one-third of its students
Latino and one-third Chinese, offers financial, legal, immigration
and other services. Teachers even try to assign homework that
involves the entire family.
But for all the similarities the report found between Catholic
and public schools in low-income neighborhoods, parents really
didn' t pay attention to the most obvious defining difference-
religion. In fact, many parents chose the parochial schools
because they seemed like safer versions of public ones-not as
places for religious instruction or even a superior education.
The book strikes down a litany of widely held assumptions
about the superiority of all private schools: that they outline
expectations more clearly, encourage more positive behaviors
and are better at hiring and keeping good teachers.
"Can Public Schools Leamfrom Private Schools ?" $12.95
plus $3.50 shipping and handling, Economic Policy Institute,
202-775-8810, www.epinet.org.
The Principal Principle
T
here's been a long line of suspects in the mystery of why
some urban schools are such failures: unmotivated kids,
underqualified teachers, uninvolved parents. A look at
successful schools in poor city neighborhoods finds, instead, that
the obstacle most schools face is a principal problem.
Despite having varying teaching and management styles, the
14 schools surveyed shared a common theme: ''walk-around''
principals who managed instruction and got teachers and parents
to believe in the educational mission.
But most city public schools aren't getting these well-trained,
highly involved leaders, the report says. While much thought is
focused on teacher training, the same cannot be said of principal
training. Plus, principals are no panacea. Besides good bosses,
these successful schools usually have lots of books, hardworking
staff and caring parents.
"Beating the Odds: High Achieving Elementary Schools in
High-Poverty Neighborhoods," $15, Educational Priorities
Pane/, 212-964-7347.
After School Specials
W
ith federal funding for school-to-work programs set to
sunset in 200 I, a new study paints a doomsday picture
for these initiatives. They were popular in 1994, when
bipartisan support poured $1.6 billion into the school-business
partnerships. Since then, partisan battles and the ascension of
standardized testing have pushed school-to-work projects out of
favor.
Anecdotally, these programs have resulted in higher college
attendance, increased student motivation, and fewer dropouts. In
New York career magnet schools, though, results have been
mixed. While students had higher self esteem than peers at other
schools, dropout rates and test scores were about the same.
"What's Next for School to Career," free on web site, $12.50
in print, Jobs for the Future, 617-728-4446, www.jJf.org.
College
High School Graduates Enrolled in College
the October After Graduation
Bound
70%
60%
1972 1985 1997
For black and Latino students tfIese
days, once tIJey'w made it t h ~
50%
high school they are more likely
40%
headed off to college than not.
Gettq the degree is more elusive for
30%
all students, ~ . In 1997, only 28
20%
percent of high school graduates
aged 25 to 29 had managed to corn- 10%
plate a bacheIor's degree or hi;ler.
0%
Total White Black Hispanic
DECEMBER 1999
AMMO
...
.......... --.: . ..... -
REVIEW
-
A Tale Of
Three Cities
By Carl Vogel
"New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's
Global Cities," by Janet L Abu-Lughod,
University of Minnesota Press,
580 pages, $39.95
I
have lived in "Postapocalypse Chicago." Who knew? I
thought I was just underpaid at a struggling nonprofit. It
turns out that I made my home in an economic and social
wasteland.
Mad Max Chicago makes an appearance late in New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities, the latest book
from Janet Abu-Lughod. As she sees it, Chicago has hit the
hardest times of these Big Three due to a busted economy, a
poisonous legacy of racial segregation and a primogenitive
political system.
Unfortunately, a doomsday nickname for a troubled city is
one of the few provocative touches put forward by the author, a
sociologist who's been writing about cities for more than 50
years. The book fails to fulfill its promise to provide insight into
how the three urban centers operate as "global cities"-hubs for
international commerce. But in the process of amassing heaps of
data in her attempts to make a case that these cities were always
global, Abu-Lughod almost accidentally creates a surprisingly
lucid history of how America's biggest cities came to be.
When fellow sociologist Saskia Sassen published The
Global City: New York, London, Tokyo in 1991, she created a
small but significant buzz. The information revolution was
allowing a few cities to become worldwide command centers,
she argued, a role more important than ever because of the cre-
ation of a truly global capitalist order from the collapse of the
Eastern Bloc. As these cities become more international, in
Sassen's view, they become more alike.
Abu-Lughod loves the idea, but she disapproves of some of
the details. She maintains that some form of globalism has been
present from the beginning for New York, Chicago and L.A., and
that each city is singular enough to foil any late-20th century
trend toward standardization. To prove her point, she sets out on
an ambitious recounting of the cities' histories-economic,
demographic, architectural, political, labor, geographical and
social- going through the highs and lows for each city through
four eras, all the way from 1624
to the present day.
For all the trouble she goes
through, though, the payoff is
underwhelming. Who would
dispute her idea that the
bedrock features of the
global city-import and
export between countries,
an influx of immigrant
labor, a wide gap
between rich and
poor-have been sig-
nificant for each city
from the start? Her
account is an inter-
esting exercise, but
it doesn't shed much new
light onto how these cities work.
The book's lack of real analysis is still more frus-
trating when it comes to the premise that each city is unique.
Abu-Lughod expends so much energy just telling their narra-
tives that she never explores what these individual histories
augur for each city's future (or even gives much of an explana-
tion of why these cities are being compared at all, besides the
fact that they're the country's biggest). It doesn't help that Abu-
Lughod occasionally wanders down cul-de-sacs of statistical
minutiae, like six pages of proof that most of New York's poor
people of color live in the outer boroughs.
The long history lesson does have an upside: Abu-Lughod
skillfully weaves all those various disciplines together into
three engaging urban stories. New York quickly establishes
itself as the country's premier mercantile city. Chicago prospers
and falters as a manufacturing town and the trading hinge in the
middle of the country. Los Angeles' boosters use water rights,
marketing to cold Midwesterners and the unlikely twin eco-
nomic engines of entertainment and military spending to
. become the capital of the West Coast.
Some of the best parts of this big picture are in the small
details, especially when they provide insight into today's
metropoli. For example, both New York and Chicago were big
industrial centers, but New York's economy has always been
dominated by smaller companies. Chicago's enormous steel
mills, slaughterhouses and factories have been hit much harder
at the end of America's industrial age.
Other facts fare best as good trivia: For instance, Chicago
avoided much of the effects of the 1873 depression because of
the economic boost from the massive rebuilding efforts after the
Chicago fire. Most new development in Los Angeles at the turn
of the century was within four or five blocks of the city's cru-
cial trolley lines.
With so much to tell, this book careens a bit wildly through
eras and disciplines. But that's the necessary sacrifice with one
volume telling three stories from so many perspectives.
Underneath the thin veneer of global theory, New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles can serve as a kind of Intro to Big City
History textbook for anyone who wants to know how three
mostly empty tracts of land became home to more than 30 mil-
lion people. Just don't expect much more .
Carl Vogel is a former editor of City Limits.
CITY LIMITS

Marcia's Law
(continued from page 27)
rules in very perplexing ways," she says. "They
are capable of misapplying almost anything."
As unpredictable as it is impossible to escape,
Lowry's law has led to some concrete results.
Children's Rights materials boast of "faster investi-
gation of abuse and neglect in Kansas and
Washington" and "regular and timely case planning
conferences in Kansas." Adoptions, it reports, have
accelerated in Philadelphia, Washington and
Kansas City. Lowry even claims responsibility for
getting seven state legislatures to spend a total of
$300 million more on child welfare. "Litigation cre-
ates political will," she shrugs, as confidently as
. saying July follows June.
Yet even as it moves mountains, Lowry's deter-
mination to raise a ruckus also shakes up institu-
tions without providing a blueprint for piecing them
back together. Doug Nelson-the head of the panel
advising ACS under the Marisol settlement and a
longtime Lowry supporter-is concerned about
consequences. "She, like lots of other advocates,
sees her role as calling attention to problems, cre-
ating a heightened sense of urgency," he observes.
He's not sure if he agrees with her. "I've never
been fully convinced that crying fire in a theater,
even if there's smoke, leads to everybody's safety."
A
s she proceeds on her cross-country tour,
Lowry's showdowns with child welfare
authorities have only gotten rockier. In
Kansas, she won a consent decree in 1993 in
which the state promised many improve-
ments, such as pledges to investigate reports of sus-
pected abuse and to speed up case planning. But a
1997 audit found the state in compliance with only
10 percent of the decree's requirements (a figure
that has since much improved).
In 1991, she won an astounding court order
declaring the entire child welfare system of
Washington, D.C., unlawful, after a trial lasting just
two weeks. The decision marked the first time in
U.S. history that an entire bureaucracy was found
unconstitutional. The city signed an agreement
promising far-reaching improvements, including a
24-hour abuse hotline, twice-monthly caseworker
visits to foster homes, and planning meetings to
make sure children don't languish in foster care.
But by 1995, there had been no noticeable
improvements for the city's roughly 2,500 foster
children. Lowry went back to court and convinced
the judge to order the entire child welfare system
into receivership. Lowry says that progress has
been made, with staff tripled and a budget increase
of $32 million in the last three years.
Fifteen times larger than Washington's, New
York City's child welfare situation is that much
messier. Pretend for a moment that the laws gov-
eming ACS reflected reality. Caseworkers would
make all reasonable efforts to keep children home
with their parents, removing them only when
they're in real danger. Children in foster care would
be in nurturing homes where their physical and
psychological needs are met. ACS would help par-
ents do whatever is necessary to resume care of
their children. And should that prove impossible,
ACS would ensure that the children are adopted.
That too rarely happens. Three years of vitriolic
litigation in Marisol revealed just how badly the city
had failed children. In 1997, Children's Rights
released three reports prepared by a panel of experts,
one of which was so embarrassing that the city
unsuccessfully tried to block its release. The panel
discovered staggering deficiencies. Caseworkers
failed their legal obligation to meet bimonthly with
children and parents 97 percent of the time. There
was new abuse or neglect in 43 percent of the homes
thatACS was supposed to be monitoring. One-quar-
ter of children in foster care were not receiving ade-
quate medical, dental or psychological treatment,
including almost half of those in group homes.
Yet despite the damning evidence Lowry
amassed for trial, she and the city hashed out a res-
olution in September 1998 rather than go to the mat
in court. Under the settlement agreement, the city
would allow a panel of experts to review ACS
records and make recommendations for two years.
(continued on page 32)
THERE IS NO SUCH THING
AS A FREE LUNCH
But there is free legal assistance
Not-for-profits, community groups and organizations working to improve their communities in New York
City are eligible for free legal assistance through New York Lawyers for the Public Interest's
(NYLPI) pro bono clearinghouse. The clearinghouse draws on the expertise of lawyers at our 78
member law firms and corporate legal departments.
Our network of attorneys can work with you on a wide variety of legal issues:
Establishing your group as a not-far-profit
Lease negotiations and other real estate matters
Establishing a long-term relationship with one of our member law firms
Representing your organization in litigation matters
If you believe your organization can benefit from legal assistance, call Wendy Brennan
at (212) 244-4664, or email at wbrennan@nylpi.org to see if you qualify.
All legal services are free of charge.
NYLPI, 151 West 30th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10001-4007
DECEMBER 1999
-

Marcia's Law
(continued from page 31)
Lowry also agreed that during that time no class-
action suits could be filed against ACS-by anyone.
''The panel is recommending changes that are
more far-reaching than a judge could order," she
says in defense of the settlement. "If they're imple-
mented, that would have a more far-reaching effect
than anything I could get." Yet Lowry acknowledges
that there's no certainty that "if they're implement-
ed" will ever turn into "when they're implemented."
Under the agreement, city Corporation Counsel
Michael Hess was careful to hold ACS to no direct
obligations. The panel is "purely advisory," reads
the agreement, "intended to assist ACS in achiev-
ing the reform goals it has set." ACS is obligated to
make only a "good faith" effort to address the
panel's recommendations; if it does not, the panel
can recommend that Lowry bring the case back to
court. But even if that happens, it may be difficult to
prove bad faith on ACS's part: as long as ACS
shows some indication that it considered the panel's
proposals, it's legally off the hook. At the time, Hess
described the deal as "very comforting" to the city.
Well aware of the arrangement, panel chair
Doug Nelson shares Lowry's uncertainty that his
team's work will result in serious improvements.
So far, they have issued three reports, in which a
call for better preventive services is the most ambi-
tious recommendation. ''The mid-course judgment
is that a great deal has been done, and a great deal
appears ready to be done. But it is not clear to me
that enough can be done to satisfy everybody's rea-
sonable expectations for improvement," says
Nelson. "Marcia Lowry might walk away in eight
months and say it was a mistake."
Other family advocates are already saying it
was a mistake. Douglas Lasdon, director of the
Urban Justice Center, is livid about the looseness
of the agreement. "In this settlement, the devil is in
the details," says Lasdon. He insists that the deal
leaves ACS with so many outs that there is little
chance the panel will have an impact. And he's
even angrier that it shields the city from other law-
suits. ''For the first time in our country, an entire
bureaucracy is free from class-action lawsuits for
two years," he says. "It's unprecedented."
In agreeing to the two-year moratorium, Lowry
might as well have dumped all of her Marisol briefs
on Lasdon's toes. This January, Lasdon unsuccess-
fully tried to bring suit on behalf of lesbian and gay
teens in foster care-the moratorium, a judge ruled,
preempted it. Lasdon, who had spent a year prepar-
ing his suit, blames Lowry for derailing his case.
"Frankly, we don't see what they're getting," he
says, referring to Children's Rights.
He's also upset that city has agreed fo reimburse
Children's Rights for fees that will add up to the mil-
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lions. Fees are a standard part of the winning side's
package in lawsuits like this, but Lasdon doesn't
believe Children's Rights has earned them. ''The
kids have gotten nothing," he contends. Lowry
insists that the settlement is a victory for children,
and that the prospect of getting fees back has never
influenced her decisions to make agreements. "In my
view there's only one thing that you can do and that's
get the best deal for your client," says Lowry. ''If you
have to eat your fees, then you have to eat the fees."
Lasdon is the loudest in a chorus of resentment
over Lowry's preemptive strike. Legal Aid, which
represents most children in foster care, filed court
papers that backed the idea of the panel but protest-
ed that two years is too long not to be able to sue.
At the time of the settlement, Lowry assured
other attorneys that cases clearly out of Mariso/'s
range wouldn't be affected. But advocates' fear of a
blockade is already being realized. One group of par-
ents, represented by Brooklyn Legal Services, sued
the city in March to force caseworkers to include
them in planning their cases, as state law requires.
But in September, a state court judge dismissed the
suit, saying that only the Marisol panel had the
authority to deal with casework problems.
Legal Services lawyer Lauren Shapiro thinks the
judge misread Marisol, and she plans to appeal. City
lawyers, she notes, had asked the judge to delay the
case until after the Mariso/ panel had completed its
work. No one told him to kill it entirely.
L
owry admits that even after all this time she
doesn't know what will work best for children.
''Liability is easy," she remarks-it's coming
up with a settlement that benefits children
that's the real trick. She says she is still search-
ing for the lawsuit that will, once and for all, trans-
form child welfare from a bureaucratic backwater
into a safe haven for troubled kids, She recently
scored a grant from the Edna McConnell Clark
Foundation, which she's using to explore whether
she can bring a case even more comprehensive than
Mariso!. Her plans are still embryonic, but she says
she is trying to figure out how to bring the juvenile
justice and mental health systems into her suits.
Her plan might sound wildly ambitious, even
by Marcia Lowry standards. But she's right that all
those problems are inextricably intertwined.
Abused and neglected children are much more
likely than others to develop mental health prob-
lems, stop attending school, become teenage par-
ents or get arrested.
To this day, the civil libertarians she used to
work with are still upset that Lowry won't focus on
preventing kids from entering foster care in the first
place. But Lowry says that's not her department-
she just wants to make sure that when children need
a refuge, they'll have places to go. Lowry pro-
claims-yes, proclaims-"It's got to be fixable."
Wendy Davis is a reporter for the New Jersey Law
Journal.
CITVLlMITS
NATIONAL DlRECTOR-PROJECT VOTI. National nonprofit doing non-partisan
voter participation organizing in minority communities seeks National Director
in our Downtown Brooklyn office. Major fundraising and programmatic respon-
sibilities. Several years campaign or nonprofit experience required. Salary
commensurate with experience. Fax letter, resume to Project Vote, 718-246-
7939 or call 718-246-7929.
DPUTY DIRECTOR. New York ACORN Housing Company, a citywide notfor
profit housing and community development organization, seeks a highly
experienced, energetic and self-motivated person to oversee city-wide hous-
ing development and management operations. Responsibilities include:
housing program development and administration, financial management
and close supervision of management company. Resume to: Ismene
Speliotis, NYAHC, 88 Third Avenue, 3rd Aoor, Brooklyn, NY 11217 or fax to
718-246-7939.
HOUSING ACTlVIST. Highly-motivated selfstarter interested in working with an
aggressive community organization of low- and moderate-income people on
housing, banking and community issues-committed to organizing, bilingual
a plus. Send resumes to: Ismene Speliotis, NYAHC, 88 Third Avenue, 3rd
Aoor, NY 11217 or fax to 718-246-7939.
Casa Betsaida, a residence for persons with AIDS located in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, seeks a DIRECTOR OF ADMINISlWATION AND RNANCE. This poSition
will be responsible for the development and supervision of day-to-day opera-
tions. Activities will include: . financial management and reporting, human
resources management, organizational development and planning. The ideal
candidate will have experience in the fiscal management of a human service
organization, excellent financial analysis skills, and strong communication
skills. Experience in working with special needs populations in a residential
environment preferred. Master's degree or commensurate experience.
Salary: $35,000-$40,000. Send cover letter and resume to: Kenneth Haag,
Builders for Family and Youth of the Diocese of Brooklyn, 19 Joralemon Street,
9th Aoor, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Nonprofit housing developer working in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens,
seeks DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANT. This position will be responsible for assisting
in the development of low-income and special needs housing. Activities will
include the development of feasibility analyses and pro-formas, construction
management, community relations, grant writing and managing the rent-up
process. Strong writing, computer literacy and quantitative skills are essential
to this position. Bachelor's degree in Business, Planning and Real Estate pre-
ferred. Salary: mid $30,ooos, commensurate with experience. Excellent ben-
efits. Send cover letter and resume to: Progress of Peoples Development
Corporation, an affiliate of Brooklyn Catholic Charities, 19 Joralemon St., 2nd
Aoor, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Prep for Prep, an educationally based not-for-profit organization, is seeking
candidates to fill the following positions: DIRECTOR OF PUBUC AFFAIRS
PROJECTS. Applicants must have a background in government, public poli-
cy, or politics and 3 years related experience. The Director will assume pri-
mary day-to-day responsibility for existing projects that introduce our stu-
dents to public policy issues and the political process. Responsibilities will
include planning and implementing the Leadership Development Summer
Institute, the Local Government Summer Internships Project, and develop-
ing a Speakers Series. Strong academic background, degree from compet-
itive college required. Salary based on experience, excellent benefits. SUM-
MER JOBS BANK COORDINATOR. The coordinator has the primary day-to-day
responsibility for maintaining and significantly expanding the Summer Jobs
Bank, which serves high school juniors/seniors as well as some college
undergrads. Tasks include aggressive outreach to potential employers;
interviewing job candidates and matching appropriate candidates with spe-
cific job opportunities; setting up seminars as appropriate on various
aspects of job-seeking .. i.e., interviewing, resume-writing, etc.; monitoring
the performance of students in their summer jobs. BA from competitive col-
lege, min. 3 years experience in business, project management & planning,
and flexible schedule required. Please mail or fax resume and cover letter
to: Prep for Prep, attn. Director of Personnel, 328 West 71st St. , NYC
10023. Fax: 212-579-1443.
Office of elected official seeks detaik)riented, RESEARCH ASSISTANT for
groundbreaking, highly publicized project. Mail or fax resume to Emily West at:
1 Centre Street, 15th Aoor, NY, NY 10007. Fax: 212-669-4701.
DECEMBER 1999
CUCS' West Harlem Transitional Services, a highly successful program that
helps mentally ill, homeless people prepare for and access housing through
its outreach services, drop-in center and transitional residence, seeks an
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR. Responsibilities: assisting the director with program
oversight, development & management; supervision of clinical staff; con-
tract and regulatory compliance; community relations; and participation in
efforts to develop effective public policies for the program's target popula-
tion. Requirements: A master's degree in the Human Services field,
MSW/CSW preferred; 4 years applicable post-master's experience with pop-
ulations served by the program; 2 years of applicable pre-master' s degree
experience may be substituted for no more than 1 year of post-master's
degree experience; good writing and verbal communication skills; computer
literacy. Bilingual Spanish/English preferred. Salary: $48K + competitive
benefits including $65/month in transit checks. Resume and cover letter to
Lolita Jefferson, CUCS-WHTS, 312-314 West 127th St. , New York, NY
10027. The Center for Urban Community Services is committed to workforce
diversity. EEO.
DEPtITY DIRECTOR for Working Families Party. Knowledge of NY community,
labor, minority, immigrant and/or nonprofit organizations a must. Ability to
communicate well essential. Spanish a plus. Women and people of color
encouraged to apply. Salary DOE. Fax resume/cover letter: 718-246-3718.
Erasmus Neighborhood Federation seeks applicants for three pOSitions. A
COMMERCIAL REVITALIZATION MANAGER to support and assist the merchants
of the Church-Nostrand-Rogers area in Brooklyn in developing and main-
taining an attractive and economically viable shopping commercial strip that
services the general needs of the surrounding community. Responsibilities:
establish relationships with area merchants, provide marketing assistance,
serve as liaison to government and community; assist Merchants
Association; organize development activities for specific business groups;
identify new leadership. Qualifications: computer literacy; occasional week-
end or night work. Salary: Low $20s. CHILD CARE COORDINATOR.
Responsibilities: record-keeping; budgeting; planning and community orga-
nizing. Qualifications: B.A. or B.S., one year experience in child care; or
degree in early childhood education from an accredited college or universi-
ty with 2 years teaching experience; or 2-3 years experience working full-
time in child care. Salary: Low $20s. HOUSING SPECIALIST to counsel ten-
ants, and property owners; assist with rehabilitation, loans application and
funding negotiations; conduct seminars; prepare educational materials.
Requirements: B.A. in social service or 3 years housing related experience;
computer literacy; excellent communication and interpersonal skills; ability
to attend night meetings on a regular basis. Salary: low $20s. Send resume
to Yves Vilus, Executive Director, Erasmus Neighborhood Federation, Inc.,
814 R o g e r ~ Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11226. Fax: 718-462-7709.
OFFICE ASSISTANT. Nonprofit Facilities Fund is seeking an Office Assistant
who will be responsible for general office functions and finance and
accounting work. Some of the duties include but are not limited to: answer-
ing and screening telephone calls, providing general administrative and
financial support. Expertise with Microsoft Word, Excel and Access is
essential. Qualities preferred are: excellent communications and comput-
er/spreadsheet skills; ability to work independently, be self-motivated and
detail-oriented; ability to be flexible, and have a sense of humor. Nonprofit
arts and/or community-based organization experience a plus. College
degree or equivalent work experience required. Salary is mid-twenties plus
excellent benefits. Candidates should e-mail, send or fax a cover letter and
resume to: Office Assistant Search, Nonprofit Facilities Fund, 70 West 36th
Street, New York, NY 10018. E-mail: olivia.maristela@nffny.org OR
rosanne.miskow@nffny.org. Fax: 212-268-8653. NFF is an equal opportu-
nity employer. No telephone calls please.
Brooklyn CDC seeks a SENIOR VP OF ECONOMIC DEVD..OPMENT to build a
team and structure to carry out the objectives of creating locally owned
businesses and developing/investing in business ventures to support the
Corporation' s activities, mobilizing and managing all resources necessary
to implement economic development strategies. Significant work experi-
ence in economic development or in banking/finance, specifically related to
small to medium sized businesses, highly developed leadership and entre-
preneurial skills based upon success in prior endeavors, and ability to
recruit, train and motivate highly talented staff. Fax resumes to J. Anglin at
718-857-5984.
(continued on page 34)
-
(continued from page 33)
Brooklyn CDC seeks to hire a PUBLIC RElATIONS MANAGER to assist with
the development and monitor the implementation of the organization's
public relations policies and procedures. Will have responsibility for coor-
dinating the presentation of Restoration merchandising products, dis-
plays and exhibits, assist with corporate tours, assist development office
to build sponsorship campaign, prepare digital presentations, designs;
will liaison/develop with marketing and advertising agencies the adver-
tising and sales promotion materials with public relations objectives.
Requires BA/BS in Marketing/Communications with three to five years
experience in public relations/media industry. Fax resumes to J. Anglin at
718-857-5984.
The Fourth Universalist Society, a progressive, historic West Side congre-
gation, is seeking a CHURCH ADMINISTRATOR. This position supervises a
small staff while reporting to the Minister. Primary responsibilities include:
budgeting and financial management, strategic planning, and myriad spe-
cial projects from marketing to contractor oversight. The ideal candidate is
outgoing, flexible, knows spreadsheet programs, and a problemsolver.
Events coordination experience helpful. The salary range is $40,000 to
$50,000 plus pension and benefits. Please send your resume and cover
letter explaining your interest to Rev. Nugent, 392 CPW, Apt. 8R, NY, NY
10025. Fourth Universalist is a member of the Unitarian Universalist
Association of Congregations--one of the leading voices of liberal religion
in contemporary America.
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CHCA, a worker-owned home-care agency, seeks OUTREACH AND RECRUnMEHT
COORDINATOR to manage recruitment activities and facilitate information ses-
sions on-site and at community-based organization serving the targeted pop-
ulation. Report to Director of Workforce Development. Bachelor's degree and
minimum 2 years experience in training and employment required. Must be
bilingual (Spanish/English). Competitive salary; excellent benefits. EOE. Send
resume and cover letter with requirement history to: The Search Co., @CHCA,
39 Broadway, 10th Roor, New York, NY 10006.
SPECIAL EVENTS COORDINATOR. Habitat-NYC seeks an events coordinator
with exceptional organization skills and a proven track record, to create and
execute all special events, primarily the Jimmy Carter Work Project, a week-
long house-building event with President Carter to take place in September
2000. Coordinator must liaison with staff, volunteers, and an international
organization, BA required, community development experience preferred.
Starting date: November 1, 1999. Send cover letter, resume, and address-
es and telephone numbers of three references to Robert Lewis, Executive
Director, Habitat for Humanity-New York City, 334 Furman Street, Brooklyn,
New York 11201.
SOCIAL RESEARCHERS. The Urban Issues Group, a policy center conducting
studies from the perspective of New Yorkers of African descent, seeks m o t ~
vated persons committed to forging links among research, policy and advo-
cacy for social change. We wish to fill the following positions: PROJECT DIREC-
TOR (pm. To plan, direct and conduct a foster care study with major policy sig-
nificance. Responsibilities include developing interviewing and survey instru-
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
313 Hicks Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201,
(718) 780-7994 (718) 624-6850
GET A BREAK ON POSTAGE
WHILE GIVING SOMEONE A BREAK
Let us Zip+4 and Bar Code Your Mailings for Maximum Postal
Discounts and Faster Delivery
We also offer hand inserting, live stamp affixing, bulk mail,
folding, collating, labeling, wafer sealing and more.
Henry Street Settlement Mailing Services is a work readiness program
offering participants on-the-job and life-skills training
For information, contact Bob Modic
(212) 505-7307 Fax: (212) 475-8711
NesoH Associates
management solutions for non-profits
Providing a full range of management support services for
non-profit organizations
management development & strategic planning
board and staff development & training
program design, implementation & evaluation
proposal and report writing
Box 130 75A Lake Road Congers, NY 1092()O tel/fax (914) 268-6315
CITY LIMITS
SPECIALIZING IN REAL ESTATE
J-51 Tax Abatement /Exemption. 421A and 421B
Applications 501 (c) (3) Federal Tax Exemptions All forms
of government-assisted housing, including LISC/ Enterprise,
Section 202, State Turnkey and NYC Partnership Homes
KOURAKOS & KOURAKOS
Bronx, N.Y.
(718) 585-3187
Attorneys at Law
New York, N.Y.
(212) 551-7809
... THE ANALYSIS AND SOLUTIONS COMPANY
Daniel Convissor, President
Website 6- Database Design. Public Policy Research.
. Management 6- Transportation Consulting.
... :: . 4015 7 Av #4WA, Brooklyn NY 11232
. : v: 718-854-0335 f: 718-854-0409
danielc@AnalysisAndSolutions.com
www.AnalysisAndSolutions.com
... Excellent rate for nonprofit organizations.
CoNSUlTANT SERVICES
Proposals/Grant Wri.ting
HUO Grants/Goyt. RFPs
MI(HA(L 6. BU((I
CONSULTANT
Howing/Program Development
Real Estate SaJes/Rentals
Technical Assistance
Employment Programs
Capacity Building
Community Relations
HOUSING, DEVELOPMENT & FUNDRAISING
E: 212-765-7123
212-397-6238
L: mgbuccl@aol.com
451 WEST 48th STREET, SUITE 2E
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10036-1298
Does your nonprofit need corporate, real estate,
tax or other business legal services?
Lawyers Alliance for New York has a staff of skilled lawyers
and a roster of 400 volunteer attorneys from leading NY firms.
We special ize in providing free or low-cost legal services to
nonprofit corporations. We also offer helpful publications and
workshops on many nonprofit legal issues.
To find out if we can help your nonprofit, call 212 219-1800
Lawyers Alliance
99 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013 for New York
Committed to the development of affordable housing
GEORGE C. DELLAPA, ATTORNEY AT LAW
15 Maiden Lane, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10038
212-732-2700 FAX: 212-732-2m
Low-income housing tax credit syndication. Public and private
financing. HDFCs and not jor-profit corporations. Condos and co-ops.
1-51 Tax abatement/exemptions. Lending for historic properties.
DECEMBER 1999
ments; conducting interviews and focus group; data analysis; fieldwork with
child welfare agencies and CBOs; report preparation; supervision of small
research staff. Requires strong research and related program experience; writ
ing, communication, managerial skills. DSW/PhD plus three years experience
or master' s plus five. Compensation commensurate with rank and experience.
PROJECT COORDINATOR (Fro. To coordinate and participate in the project, inte-
grating it with the center's overall program. Responsibilities include day-to-day
project management; data collection, and analysis; interviews, focus groups
and surveys; of program reports and policy analyses. Master's
plus one year related research and program experience. Requires energetic,
self-motivated, organized individual , able to work independently, with excellent
writing and computer skills. Competitive salary and benefits. RESEARCH ASSlS-
TANTS (1CH5 hours/ week) are also needed. Resume to: 3 Park Avenue, 37th
Roor, New York, NY 10016 or fax: 212-316-0716.
Working Today, a nonprofit organization promoting the interests of indepen-
dent workers, seeks a POLICY AND OUTREACH COORDINATOR with excellent orga-
nizational/communication skills. A college degree and four years work experi-
ence are required. Salary is negotiable; generous benefits. If interested,
please fax resume ASAP to 212-366-6971.
ANANCIALIOFFICE MANAGER. Experience with nonprofit accounting, manage-
ment, and administration including funding reports and computer accounting
programs. Candidates should possess an advanced degree and have excel-
lent writing, verbal and speaking skills. Salary mid- to high-$30s with benefits .
Mail resume and cover letter to: Global Kids, Inc., 561 Broadway, 6th Roor,
New York, NY 10012. Fax: 212-226-0137. Attn: Alisha Billings .
LEGAL ASSISTANT/RECEPTIONIST (PjT). National women's organization
seeks legal assistant for administrative and receptionisi: work. Word process-
ing. Legal 'or secretarial experience. 15 hours/week. $12-$15/ hour depend-
ing on experience. Resume and cover letter ASAP to. Legal Assistant, NOW
LDEF, 395 Hudson Street, NYC 10014. EOE.
City agency seeks focused, detailmiented, RESEARCH ASSISTANT with strong
interest in problem solving and social issues. Familiarity with Microsoft Access
a plus. Mail or fax cover letter, resume and writing sample to Emily West at: 1
Centre Street, 15th Roor, New York, NY 10007. Fax: 212-6694701.
Catholic Charities seeks an ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF PERSONNR to review,
maintain and respond to resumes and employment inquiries; manage open
enrollment procedures; handle benefit problems directly; act as liaison to pen-
sion, health insurance carrier, disability, LTD, TDA, workers' compensation and
unemployment; conduct first-<lay orientations; and prepare reports related to
Human Resources. Requirements: BA in business with a specialty in Human
Resources preferred or related degree; master' s preferred; Min. 3 years expe-
rience in HR capacity with an emphasis on recruiting, HRIS maintenance and
benefits administration; excellent communication and listening skills;
lent computer skills including Word, Excel and database management; and
knowledge of health, disability, worker's compensation and other benefits.
Excellent benefits. 19 holidays. Send resume, salary requirements & include
job title in your response to: Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of New York, 1011
Rrst Avenue, Room 1113, New York, NY 10022 or fax: 212-816-8795.
R.A.I.N. Boston Secor seeks a PROGRAM SPECIAUST for its youth development
program at MS 142. Responsibilities: Assist coordinator in overall adminis-
tration of program; organize educational , conflict resolution, and cultural activ-
ities, implement special events. Must have 2 yrs. experience. Salary: $20s
plus benefits. Resume to: Mercedes Rivera, R.A.I.N. Boston Secor, 3540
Bivona Street, Bronx, NY 10475 or fax: 718-671-1028.
PROJECT COORDINATOR. Individual with strong communication and writing skills
needed to provide technical support to unions, employers, and CBOs for the
recruitment and retention of women in the blue collar trades. PIT (3
days/ week). $27,300/ year plus health/ vacation benefits. Call or fax for com-
plete job description, Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), phone:
212-627-6252; fax: 212-255-8021.
SOIIOR PROGRAM MANAGER. Leading School-to-Work nonprofit training and pro-
fessional organization needs strong communicator who can work wi the edu-
cation & business community to design & implement high quality programs &
services & assist w/ strategic planning, marketing & grant writing. Low/ mid
$40s. Resume and writing sample to: T. Pendleton, STW Alliance, 84 William
Street, 14 Roor, NY, NY 10038.
(continued on page 36)
--
(continued from page 35)
NEIGHBORHOOD ENVIRONMENTS PROGRAM COORDINATOR for Brooklyn Center
for the Urban Environment. Administer environmental justice programs in
impacted Brooklyn neighborhoods. Manage 1 fit, 12 pit staff. Community
gardening, youth empowerment expo a plus. Fax resume and cover letter to:
71849S-3750 ASAP.
OFFICE MANAGER for a progressive political organization. Must have office
work experience, be detail'<>riented, friendly, confident and well-<lrganized. Full
time; starting salary low $20s; health benefits. Fax cover letter and resume
to lIana: 718-246-3718.
COMMUNnY UAISON. Brooklyn Neighborhood Improvement Association, INC.
(BNlA) seeks an experienced community outreach individual. Responsibilities:
Develop and maintain relationship with community residents, CBOs, home-
owners, tenant/block associations, and area merchants; promote BNIA pro-
grams and services, prepare and distribute informational materials.
Qualifications: High School Diploma or GED; good written and oral
cations skills; proven work experience. Send resume and cover letter to:
Executive Director, BNIA, 1482 St. Johns Place, lF, Brooklyn, NY 11213 or
fax 718-2211711.
Episcopal Community Development seeks a highly qualified SENIOR PR0-
GRAM OFFICER to take responsibility for technical assistance in organiza-
tional issues, community collaboration, project development and financial
packaging of community development projects throughout the Diocese of
Newark (7 northern counties of NJ). Reports to Executive Director.
Requires: knowledge of current community development programs; experi-
ence working with CD groups from entry level to experienced, particularly
urban; good judgment of feasibility of proposed projects; strong writing and
interpersonal skills. Competitive compensation package based on experi-
ence and salary history. Send resume, cover letter expanding on resume
and names and addresses of three supervisory work references to ECD, 31
Mulberry Street, Newark, NJ 07102, Attn: Carla L. Lerman, Executive
Director. ECD is an equal opportunity employer encouraging women and per-
sons of color to apply.
COMMUNnY ORGANIZERS. The Training Institute for Careers in Organizing
seeks people eager to fight for social justice on issues such as affordable
housing, living wage jobs, environmental justice and public education. Paid,
12-week apprenticeship providing field and classroom experience, followed by
permanent positions at end of program. Starts in January and in June. Call
TICO immediately at 718-584-0515.
New Community Federal Credit Union seeks CREDIT UNION MANAGERIECO-
NOMIC DEVELOPMENT LOAN OFFICER. Responsibilities: all operations, including
loan origination, underwriting, compliance; reporting to board and Director.
Requirements: supervisory banking experience, preferably with credit union.
Resume to HR Department, New Community Corporation, 233 West Market
Street, Newark, NJ 07103. Fax: 973-63S-7866; E-mail: jselzer@newcommu-
nity.org.
LITERACY AND ARIS COORDINATOR. The Forest Hills Community House Beacon
Program at JHS 190, an innovative youth development and community center,
seeks a creative educator to develop and run literacy and arts activities,
supervise 4 staff and organize arts and education events. 30 hours/week,
afternoons and evenings (Saturdays possible). Salary: $24,000, full benefits,
great work environment. Resume to: Eldad Shepen, FHCH, 108-25 62nd
Drive, Forest Hills, NY 11375.
STAFF ATTORNEY POSITlONS. The Civil Division of the Legal Aid Society has
attorney vacancies in its neighborhood offices. They will be filled contingent
upon funding. These staff attorneys will provide legal representation in hous-
ing matters. Send a cover letter, resume and writing sample to: Helaine
Barnett, Attorney-in-Charge, Civil Division, The Legal Aid SOCiety, 90 Church
Street, 15th Roor, New York, NY 10007. Women, people of color, gays and
lesbians, and people with disabilities are especially encouraged to apply.
Il PROGRAM DIRECTOR. Prior experience in independent living centers a must.
Should have supervisory and administrative experience. Call for job descrip-
tion. Queens Independent Living Center. 718-658-2526, 718-6584720
(TTY), e-mail shaikun@Qilc.org.
PROGRAM ASSOCIATE for the New York Immigration Coalition' s Newcomer
-
Community Action Program. Responsibil ities include: coordinating various
aspects of the NYIC volunteer-<lriven voter registration project, including
database management; aSSisting with the development and implementa-
tion of an individual members recruitment campaign; writing program-relat-
ed materials and coordinating their dissemination; working closely with rep-
resentatives from voter registration, voting rights and civil rights organiza-
tions to foster the political engagement of newcomer communities; provid-
ing staff support to community organizing campaigns; cultivating relation-
ships and developing key contacts with immigrant community leaders in
New York City; monitoring and identifying electoral , democracy-related, and
other issues relevant to newcomer communities, and advocating for
improvements and change; assisting in other areas of the NCA Program and
providing support to program coordinator as needed. Qualifications: excel-
lent writing, editing and analytical skills; bachelor' s degree required. Social
Sciences preferred; at least two years experi ence working with a progres-
sive community-based or public i nterest organization (MA in
Government/ Political Science, MSW or MPA may substitute for experience);
demonstrated commitment to immigrant and refugee rights; practical knowl-
edge of the U.S. political system and government; background working with
newcomer communities and community organizing activities; strong organi-
zational, communications and computer skills, including Internet research
(Microsoft Office preferred); bijmultilingual ability preferred, demonstrated
abil ity to prioritize and handle multiple, complex tasks; and an ability to
work cooperatively with diverse staff. Salary: mid to high $20s, commen-
surate with experience. To apply: no phone calls please. Fax resume with
cover letter to 212-627-9314 or mail to NYIC, Attn. Dulce Reyes,
Community Action Coordinator, 275 Seventh Avenue, 12th Roor, New York,
NY 10001.
Global Kids, Inc. is seeking a SENIOR TRAINER for its youth leadership and
global education programs. Responsibilities: develop and co-lead interactive
workshops, conduct staff development, implement special events, help
op programs. Extensive training experience in leadership, global/social
issues, conflict resolution, diversity. College degree and excellent communi-
cation skills. Salary: $30s plus benefits. Fax resume and three references
to 212-226-0137.
PROJECT MANAGER. Nonprofit seeks individuals to manage construction pro-
jects. B. Arch or Civil Degree. 2 to 11 years of experience. Send resume and
salary requirements to: NHSNYC, 121 W. 27th Street, 4th R. , New York, NY
10001, attn. G. Robergeau, or fax 212-242-1161.
The Center for Court Innovation, a public/ private partnership of the New York
State Unified Court System and the Fund for the City of New York, seeks a
DOMES11C VIOlENCE PROJECT PlANNER. Responsibilities: looking for bright,
committed individual to join the Center' s Domestic Violence Team. The
Project Planner will be involved in aSSisting with several programs, including
the planning and implementation of specialized domestic violence courts in
New York State; grant writing and grants management, including budgeting;
providing assistance to other jurisdictions nationwide that are interested in
planning a domestic violence court; and designing violence training pro-
grams for judges working in the criminal justice system. Qualifications: excel -
lent written and oral communication skills; proficiency with word processing
and spreadsheet software; experience with grant writing and grants man-
agement, including budgeting, highly desirable; strong organizational skills;
ability to manage many projects simultaneously; ability to interact with mem-
bers of the judiciary, court and criminal justice personnel; interested in
domestic violence and criminal justice issues; master' s level preferred, but
BA with relevant experi ence will be considered. Salary: competitive salary
commensurate with experience. Excellent benefits. Send resume to: Emily J.
Sack, Esq., Director of Domestic Violence Programs, Center for Court
Innovation, 351 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019. Fax: 212-397-
0985. No phone calls please. The Fund for the City of New York is an Equal
Opportunity Employer.
LEAD COMMUNnY BUILDER. Head community building project for 7 Bronx set-
tlement houses. Responsibilities include working with staff and residents on
project activities. Knowledge of and experience in Bronx preferred. Exp. with
youth development work a plus. MSW or related experience and excellent writ-
ing skills required. Resumes to Community Building Project, East Side House,
337 Alexander Ave., Bronx, NY 10454. Fax: 718-585-1433.
NMIC seeks DAYCARE COOROINATORIORGANIZER. Organize training, sup-
port for family day care providers, and outreach to families needing day
care. Assist residents to organize for increased day care in the com-
CITY LIMITS
munity. Salary commensurate with experience. Resume to Barbara
Lowry, Executive Director, NMIC, 76 Wadsworth Ave. , NYC 10033. Fax:
212-928-4180.
The Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union seeks a highly self-moti-
vated LENDING MANAGER to take this 13-year-old community development
financial institution into the next century. The successful 'candidate should
have commercial or real estate (co-op and mortgage) lending experience,
with a background in either banking or nonprofit lending. The position will
include product development; program implementation; and oversight of
real estate, commercial, participation, personal and auto lending.
Bachelor' s degree and at least 5 years' relevant experience required. Cover
letter, salary requirements and resume to: Manager, LESPFCU, 37 Avenue
B, NY, NY 10009.
The Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) seeks DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANT. It
requires a BA and two years of fundraising experience. Responsibilities
include maintaining a database; updating the annual report, other publi-
cations, and the web site; coordinating mass mailings; and preparing pro-
posals. Salary: $30,000. Send cover letter, resume and brief writing sam-
ple to Ken Small , CBA, 2054 Morris Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453 or fax to
718-365-0697. EOE.
OPERATIONS DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR. Provides technical assistance to
HIV/AIDS housing programs in the area of operations/property manage-
ment. Provides training on issues relevant to operation/maintenance
functions of AIDS housing. Reports to Assistant Director of Training and
Technical Assistance. Background and education: high school diploma or
equivalency; bachelor' s degree or certification in Property Management
preferred; knowledge of AIDS housing needs; three years of previous
experience managing community-based organizations/property manage-
ment services; familiarity with community-based organizations; strong
oral and written communication skills; ability to coordinate multiple tasks
simultaneously; ability to coordinate workshops and conferences; ability
to travel to appointments and site visits; skills in using appli-
cations programs, including word processing, database and spreadsheet
software. Salary range: high $30s to mid $40s. Mail cover letter and
resume to Bailey House, Inc., 275 7th Avenue, 12th Floor, New York, NY
10001 or fax: 212-633-2932.
FT VOlUNTEER sought for immediate placement at Manhattan-based RSVP
program to work on Jiggetts Relief Project. Monthly stipend and health
insurance provided through VISTA program. Must possess excellent com-
munication skills, be computer literate and have working knowledge of
public assistance programs. Bilingual (Spanish) a plus. To apply, send
resume to: W-l , CSS, 105 East 22nd St., New York, NY 10010 or fax:
212-614-5336.
COMMUNnY ORGANIZER -$ 40-50K. For a comprehensive resident-led initia-
t ive, addressing problems properties. 5 years experience. ASSISTANT
DEVELOPER. $28-38K to serve as part of a 3-person team to build 25-30
houses per year. HANDS, Inc., Orange, NJ. For more information visit
WWW.NHI.ORG
Common Ground, an innovative housing and economic development organi-
zation serving low-income adults, seeks a TRAINING DIRECTOR for its newly
expanded job training program. Responsibilities include supervision of train-
ing staff and oversight, design and implementation of an expanded classroom
training curriculum. Job training, curriculum design and/or adult education
experience required. Send resume to: Justine Zinkin, Common Ground, 255
West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036. Fax: 212-768-8492.
VOCIED PROGRAM DEVELOPER. Provides technical assistance to developers of
new HIV/ AIDS vocational education programs as well as providers of existing
programs who wish to expand their service capacity. Assists in the develop.
ment of on-site service plans, staffing patterns and protocols and proce-
dures; preparation of proposals, concept documents and funding applications
for the financing of voc/ed programs. Minimum of master's level degree and
at least three to four years experience in the area of vocation, education and
job training. Salary range: low to mid $40s. Mail cover letter and resume to
Bailey House, Inc., 275 7th Avenue, 12th Roor, New York, NY 10001 or fax:
212-633-2932.
FUNDRAISING. Queens-based nonprofit human services agency is looking for
an energetic, talented professional to plan and implement fund raising
DECEMBER 1999
t ies and special events. If you have excellent computer, writing, verbal , com-
munication and leadership skills and 5 to 7 years related work experience in
marketing, fundraising and events planning, please send resume and salary
requirements to: Samaritan Village, Inc., 138-02 Queens Blvd., Dept. CJ,
Briarwood, NY 11438. Fax: 718-206-2399. Excellent benefit package. (EOE
M/ F/ SO/ D/V)
Experienced JOB DEVELOPER to place Nurse Aide Training graduates in hos-
pitals and nursing homes. Able to hold job readiness workshops. Microsoft
Access a plus. Fax resume to Sr. Ellenrita Purcaro at 718-6814137 or mail
to HCLC, 979 Ogden Avenue, Bronx, NY 10452.
The Garment Industry Development Corporation, a nonprofit consortium of
industry, labor and government working to keep good jobs in the apparel
industry seeks DIRECTOR OF MADEIN-NEW YORK initiative to identify and
access new markets for New York apparel manufacturers. Requires: grad-
uate degree; experience w/government agencies, manufacturing indus-
tries; and/or business assistance programs. $50,000-55,000. TRAINING
MANAGER for skill standards and curriculum development. Will also coor-
dinate training courses for garment workers. Requires: experience w/ adult
education and curriculum equipment; bilingual English/ Spanish; BA; ana-
lytical and communication skills; $25,000-30,000. ADMINISTRATIVE
ASSTIBOOKKEEPER. Requires: word processing and database skills; accu-
racy, highly organized. $25,000-32,000. Send resumes and cover letters
to: GIDC, attn. LD, 275 Seventh Avenue, 9th R., New York, NY 10001 or
fax: 212-366-6162.
BOOKKEEPER. Property management co. for low-income housing seeks a pro-
ficient bookkeeper to handle all aspects of general ledger entries, (a/r, al p,
payroll) for monthly financial reports. Candidate must be computer literate
and capable of working independently. Experience in Yardi software a plus.
Send resume and salary requirements to e-mail : dms890@aol.com or write
to NYRW Francis, 11 East 125th St. New York, NY 10035.
National Hispanic organization seeks DIRECTOR to plan & manage
lion dollar welfare-to-work program based in NYC. Must have extensive expe-
rience in employment services, knowledge of W2W legislation and imple-
mentation plans. Substantial supervisory experience, effective teambuilding
& computer knowledge a must. MSW/MPA preferred. Bilingual Spanish.
Minimum 5 years in social services organization. Salary based on qualifica-
tions & experience. No calls please. Cover letter, resume w/ references to:
NPRF Personnel Dept. , 31 E. 32nd St., 4th Roor, NYC 10016.
Bronx Legal Services is seeking an experienced SOCIAL WORKER for its new
Family Law/ Domestic Violence Project, to work directly with attorneys
preparing cases for court, and with victims of domestic violence, assess-
ing individual needs and providing counseling, advocacy and referral.
Additional responsibilities include recruiting and supervising social work
students to work in the unit; collaborating with a neighborhood-based
domestic violence services provider, and an organization making pro-bono
attorney referrals. Ruency in Spanish is desirable. The pOSition, funded for
one year, is available immediately. Salary is based upon year of graduation
pursuant to a collective bargaining agreement; excellent fringe benefits.
Please mail resume, references and a writing sample to: Walker T.
Thompson, Project Director, Bronx Legal Services, 579 Cortlandt Avenue,
Bronx, NY 10451.
The New York City Partnership is seeking an EDUCATION PROGRAMS MAN
AGER for program management of one or more programs in the Education
& Workforce Development department. Maintain and improve established
programs as well as developing new initiatives. Responsible for project
planning, implementation, communication materials, research, event plan-
ning, relationship building, budget management and database develop.
ment. Excellent communication, organizational, computer and Internet
skills. College degree plus some experience in program management,
preferably in the nonprofit sector. Also seeking a team-minded PRO-
GRAMS ASSISTANT to provide fUll-time administrative support to the
Senior Director and other staff in the Department of Education &
Workforce Development. Handle office management, telephones, meeting
planning, correspondence, files, mail, surveys and some research.
Knowledge of Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel , Access, PowerPoint and the
Internet. Excellent organizational , interpersonal and communications
skills. Fax resume and cover letter to Michelle Robinson, VP Human
Resources at 212-334-3344.
(continued on page 39)
-
At Home
in the Past
A dime-store novel is an artifact
of a dead genre: housing lit.
By Alyssa Katz
B
ushwick is on the brink. Shady realtors are luring in black ten-
ants desperate for housing, hitting them with exorbitant rents.
Frightened white residents are loading up their Chevys and
heading for the suburbs. The air is thick with tension as street punks
armed with sharpened car antennas face off with black Muslims
looking to even the score. It's time for a hero to infiltrate the real
estate operation and prevent a race war. Enter Ken Schneider, real
estate broker.
"I guess I could understand it if it were somewhere down
south," he reflects with gee-whiz indignity long since vanished
from the planet. "But it isn't. This is Brooklyn, U.S.A. The land
of the liberal and the Fair Employment Law."
Sad to say, the only place you can find a guy like Schneider
these days is where I found him: in the pages of a frail, yellowed
novel published in 1964, The Block Busters, by one Lou Cameron. The
cover promises that "what happened to a neighborhood in Brooklyn yester-
day ... could happen in your town tomorrow!" I came upon it this summer in
a used bookstore near Woodstock, home to more than a few suspiciously
high-strung yoga instructors and herbal doctors. Someone, it was clear, had
. moved up there and taken the book with them as a memento of city life.
With all the right genre touches-street rumbles, virginal dames,
inept henchmen and soliloquies about the American Way-this is a
pulp rendition of what went on in a lot of outer-borough neighborhoods
in the early 1960s. In the book, a nasty realtor named Duke Raven rents
apartments in Bushwick to large black families, who are so desperate
for housing that they're willing not only to pay outrageous rents but
also to follow Raven's instructions to be as obnoxious as possible to
their new neighbors. Panicked white homeowners on the block pack
their cars for the suburbs and sell their homes to the realtors for
peanuts. Then Raven and company rent the buildings out to more black
tenants at ridiculous prices. All in all, nobody makes out too well except
for the busters themselves.
Blockbusting certainly was about more than real estate-fundamen-
tally, it was a calculated exercise in racism. But The Block Busters rec-
ognizes, with a heaving heart, how fundamental the places people
live-their blocks and homes-are to their lives. It's as true for the
young Puerto Rican couple looking at uninhabitable apartments with
Schneider as it is for the Jewish candy store owner whose racism makes
him sell the moment Raven makes an offer.
It certainly wasn' t like any book I had ever read. Who writes novels
about housing anymore? Surely there are people out there who wouldn't
mind a good read about real estate-God only knows it's an obsession in
-
, ,
'-
1
, I I
I
-
-
-
....
-
-
-
-
-
-
this city. That pre-
occupation once spawned Henry
Roth's Call It Sleep, Ann Petry's The Street, and ho-hum
paperbacks with titles like The Tenants. But no longer. Fine, Richard
Price (Clockers) has a digital camera's eye for the worlds contained with-
in housing projects, but his books are police thrillers more than shelter
chronicles. Whatever happened to housing lit?
I've come to think it's for the same reason most New Yorkers have never
heard of Hunts Point: If middle-class people don't live there, it's off the
map. In the 1960s, blockbusting was a big issue not because it exploited
minority tenants but because white realtors were "destroying" white neigh-
borhoods. While the Ravens of New York were unquestionably vile, read-
ers are also implicated in the racism of that momeni-the book focuses not
on the black tenants but on a colorful parade of white ethnic characters. The
Block Busters is unashamedly a lament about their displacement.
Now our eyes are fixed on evolving neighborhoods once again, this
time ones that miraculously "revive" with the arrival of residents skilled
in the arts of web design and barrette placement. Are there compelling
stories to be told of the change in these places? Of course. But tales of
deals and displacement in the neighborhood wouldn' t be particularly fun
for the new residents to read; that history simply disappears. The
Gentrifiers isn' t going to show up at Barnes and Noble anytime soon.
The Block Busters isn' t long for my bookshelf, either. A quick read
and a few trips on the subway have just about done the poor paperback
in-its covers are chipping off, along with some stray pages. Like the
$125 Manhattan rents in a classified ad printed on the back cover, it's a
disintegrating piece of the past.
CITY LIMITS
(continued from page 37)
Urban Horizons Food Company, a wholesale bakery and catering company in
South Bronx seeks a SALES MANAGER. Responsibilities include developing
and maintaining accounts for wholesale bakery and catering company, plan-
ning parties, supervising waitstaff at events, working with Director and
Executive Chef in developing and implementing marketing plans, and willing
to work with culinary arts students. Successful candidates must have e x c e ~
lent sales and interpersonal skills. Excellent benefits. Resume to: Felice
Ramella, 718-839-1171.
PROGRAM ASSISTANT. This individual will provide administrative, clerical and
fiscal support for a social service agency. Responsibilities include: expense
reports, client billing, monthly reports, word processing, petty cash, check
requests, ordering office supplies, and general office support. Requirements:
HS Diploma, BA preferred; 2 years office experience; attention to detail; com-
puter literacy (Word & Excel); excellent organizational skills and ability to
effectively prioritize and meet deadlines. Salary: mid-high $20s + competitive
benefits. Resume and cover letter to Lucy Kim, CUCS, 120 Wall St., 25th R.,
New York, NY 10005. Fax: 212-635-2191. CUCS is committed to workforce
diversity. EEO.
The Center for Urban Community Services, Inc., a growing not-for-profit
organization whose mission is to improve the quality of life for homeless
and low-income individuals seeks three SENIOR SOCIAL WORK CLINICIANS.
These positions are available at two permanent supportive housing resi-
dence for 418 low-income tenants, many of whom have a history of men-
tal illness, homelessness, substance abuse and/or HIV /AIDS located in
midtown Manhattan. The primary responsibility of this pOSition will be to
direct client care, group work and program development on a core ser-
vices team. Additionally, this position will provide clinical support to para-
profeSSionals, partiCipate in the design and provision of in-service train-
ings, and assist the clinical coordinator in reviewing core plans to meet
agency standards. Requirements: CSW, 2 years of applicable post-mas-
ter's direct service experience with populations served by the program; 2
years of applicable pre-master's direct service experience may be sub-
stituted for no more than 1 year of post-master's experience; good writ-
ing and verbal communication skills; computer literacy. Bilingual
Spanish/English is preferred. Salary: $39K + compo bnfts. including $65
in transit checks_ Send cover letter and resume ASAP to Personnel Office,
CUCS, The Times Square, 255 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036.
Also seeking another SENIOR SOCIAL WORK CLINICIAN for our supportive
residential programs in Upper Manhattan, which provide services to low-
income tenants, many of whom have a history of mental illness, home-
lessness, substance abuse and/or HIV /AIDS. The primary responsibility
of this position will be to direct client care, group work and program devel-
opment on a core services team. Additionally, this position will provide
clinical support to para-professionals, participate in the design and pro-
vision of in-service trainings, and assist the clinical coordinator in review-
ing core plans to meet agency standards. Requirements: CSW, 2 years of
applicable post-master's direct service experience with populations
served by the program; 2 years of applicable pre-master' s experience;
good writing and verbal communication skills; computer literacy. Bilingual
Spanish/English is preferred. Salary: $39K + compo bnfts. including $65
in transit checks_ Send cover letter and resume ASAP to Dawn Bradford,
Personnel Office, CUCS, The Times Square, 255 West 43rd Street. New
York, NY 10036.
CUCS' West Harlem Transitional Services, a highly successful program
that helps mentally ill, homeless individuals prepare for and access hous-
ing through its outreach services and transitional services, seeks a
HOUSING SPECIALIST. Responsibilities: providing housing placement case
management services, assisting staff with the development and imple-
mentation of client housing plans, coordinating the housing application
and referral process, developing and maintaining housing resources,
facilitating housing readiness groups, and serving as liaison to housing
providers. Requirements: BA and 2 years of related experience providing
direct services to the population served by the program; or 60 college
credits and 5 years of related experience providing direct services to the
population served by the program; or HS diploma and 7 years related
experience providing direct services to the population served by the pro-
gram. Bilingual Spanish/English preferred, strong writing and verbal com-
munication skills; computer literacy. Salary: $30K + competitive benefits
including $65/month in transit checks. Resume and cover letter to Lol ita
Jefferson, CUCS-WHTS, 312-314 West 127th St., New York, NY 10027_
The Center for Urban Community Services is committed to workforce
diversity. EEO.
The Organizing/Housing and Homelessness Prevention Department now has
a full-time HOUSING SPECIALIST position available at our Eviction Prevention
Program in Jamaica (located near E train line). Responsibilities: Provide evic-
tion prevention assistance to tenants in job center 54. Must have knowledge
of housing law and public assistance; good advocacy skills. Bilingual
Spanish/English preferred. Salary: mid $20s plus full benefits package.
Submit resume to: FHCH 108-25 62nd Drive, Forest Hills, NY 11375. Attn:
Housing. EEO.
OFFICE SPACE. 1600 square feet. Will build to suit. Great light, large windows,
perfect for artists, architects and others, convenient location two blocks from
Atlantic/Pacific Street subway station. Below market rent. Call Kathy at 718-
246-7900.
LET US DO A FREE EVALUATION
OF YOUR INSURANCE NEEDS
DECEMBER 1999
We have been providing low-cost insurance programs and
quality service for HDFCs, TENANTS, COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT
and other NONPROFIT organizations for over 15 years.
We Offer:
SPECIAL BUILDING PACKAGES
FIRE LIABILITY BONDS
DIRECTOR'S & OFFICERS' L1ABILTY
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"Tailored Payment Plans "
ASHKAR CORPORATION
146 West 29th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10001
(212) 279-8300 FAX 714-2161 Ask for : Bolo Ramanathan
000
financi ng for Rehabilitation
110 Rental Housing Units
Fort Greene/ Clinton Hill
Brookl yn Community
An investment
n, 399,000
Financing (or Hew
Construction
Zl Z-Famlly and
19 l-Family Homes
Hunts Point
Bronx Community
lAB.
lAB.
with invaluable
850, 000
retu rns.
\
\
At EAB Community Development Corporation, we' re constantly
working with private and public entities to turn limited resources into
powerful tools for improving communities in New York City. And so far it's
working. Through partnerships with organizations such as the New York City
Housing Partnership, Neighborhood Housing Services of New York City and
various government agencies, EAB Community Development Corporation
has provided low- and moderate-income Yorkers with affordable
housing opportunities, as well as economic development for communities as a
whole. To find out what else is possible with EAB's Community Development
Corporation, call Diane Borradaile at 212-370-8547.
Member ABN AMRO Group w w w _eab _co m
Financing (or Rehabilitation
174 Rental Housing Units
University/ Morris Heights
Bronx Community
lAB.
635, 000
Construction loan
t l,700,OOO Term loan
Flnancino for Hew Construction
84 low-Income, Senior
Citizen, Rental Housing Units
Rosebank Staten Isl and
Community
lAB.
2, 200, 000
Construction loan
10 Subsidized Mjxed-use,
Commercial, and
Residential Properties
BTOoklyn and Queens
Communities
lAB.
There's a reason people bank
1999 EABs EAB Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender.