Pratt Center

In this Issue:

• A Message from Pratt Center Director Brad Lander
• New Report on Immigrant Housing
• Community Group Converts Bronx Convent
• Displacement Goes Off-Broadway
• Renewing Seward Park
• One City/One Future: A Blueprint for Growth That Works for All New Yorkers
• Pratt Center's Bus Rapid Transit Leadership Honored
• Affordable Housing Wins One in Queens
• Deutsche Bank Gift is Largest in Pratt Center's History
• Contribute

A Message from Pratt Center Director Brad Lander

On a few early evenings over the past few weeks, the sky has been a remarkable combination of large dark gray clouds, and spaces of bright clear sunshine. This has felt to me like the right meteorological metaphor for the times – in both personal and broader ways. 

While it is hard for me to believe, this will be my last e-newsletter after five years as director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. On March 1, 2008, I will step down as director to become a senior fellow here at the Pratt Center, as I prepare to run for the New York City Council next year.

You'll be hearing from the chair of our Advisory Board, Gary Hattem, in the near future about the Pratt Center's search for a great new director. It is an extraordinary position at any time, and especially important as low-income communities in New York City brace for a potentially long economic downturn. I hope you will help in the effort find a fantastic person to lead the Center.

The past five years have been a time of tremendous learning and collaboration for me. I have been consistently inspired by the vision and determination of community leaders in helping us imagine and commit to a more just, equitable, vibrant, and sustainable city… and consistently impressed by their savvy in organizing and negotiating to bring these visions a bit closer to reality (even when the choices have been hard). And I am humbled by dedication of our staff and Advisory Board and partners, who never shy away from the hard work of one more community meeting, planning study, feasibility analysis, policy report, or advocacy strategy session.

I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work with all of you. My decision to run for City Council comes directly from our work together, and from the belief that affordable housing, good jobs, livable neighborhoods, and a greener city aren't just pipe dreams, but can be, more and more, our lived and shared reality. I'm excited by this new endeavor, but also sad to be moving on from this great position.

On a broader level, the alternately dark-and-bright sky feels apt as well.

The economic news is worse every day. While it has hit Wall Street and a few New York City neighborhoods very hard, we know that it is going to get much worse in many communities around the city. We are only just starting to feel the ramifications of lost jobs, less money to spend at neighborhood shops, store closings, more people without health care, squeezed public services. The dark gray clouds are hard to miss.

But the spaces of bright sunshine are there, too. First, in the incoming Obama Administration, I believe we have real hope for the possibility of using the levers of government to make change, a deep commitment to the idea of a "shared fate," that we are all in this together, and – hopefully more concretely – a commitment to cities and urban neighborhoods, and an economic stimulus package that will include resources for unemployment insurance and food stamps and green jobs and metropolitan infrastructure. 

Second, we know that community development is a strategy that makes a real difference in times like these. From our experience helping CDCs and community-based groups save their neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s, we have not forgotten what dedicated groups of people can do when they come together, roll up their sleeves, invest some sweat equity, agree to shared sacrifices, and fight for their neighborhoods. They may not be able to boost the Dow, but they can save homes and stores, create jobs, keep neighborhoods strong, and provide support and comfort and hope to neighbors facing hard times. 

We have already refocused much of the Pratt Center's staff time and energy on helping groups working on these types of projects…and the Center will be doing much more of this in the months to come. The community groups we support are on the front lines of the economic crisis, working to foster a strong economic base through a combination of local action and citywide organizing. So I approach the holiday season feeling, admittedly, some anxiety – and I know this is shared from the neighborhood to the global scale. But I remain grateful to all of you for your vision and hard work, and for what you've taught me in the work we've done together. And I remain hopeful that we will find strategies that create opportunity and keep neighborhoods strong. Sometimes the darkest times are when we find the brightest solutions.

Equitable Development
New Report on Immigrant Housing

The Pratt Center recently released "Confronting the Housing Squeeze," a report with The New York City Immigrant Housing Collaborative that documents the housing conditions faced by immigrants in New York City. The Immigrant Housing Collaborative was launched in 2007 by New York Immigration Coalition, Asian Americans for Equality, Chhaya Community Development Corporation, Make the Road by Walking, Latin American Integration Center, Mirabal Sisters, and Neighbors Helping Neighbors. Working with the Pratt Center, members of those organizations surveyed immigrant residents of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island with large immigrant communities, including Jackson Heights, Bushwick, Sunset Park, Upper Manhattan, and Flushing. Large majorities of residents surveyed reported that they or their immigrant neighbors faced such problems as excessively high rents compared with income; poor housing conditions; and discrimination in seeking or retaining housing. Immigrants are much less likely than native-born New Yorkers to live in government-subsidized housing and much more likely to live in overcrowded conditions.

"Confronting the Housing Squeeze" recommends actions to preserve existing affordable housing in immigrant neighborhoods, increase access to government-sponsored housing programs, and improve housing conditions. Those recommendations will be carried forward by upcoming organizing campaigns coordinated by the New York City Immigrant Housing Collaborative and its member organizations.

Helping Communities Build
Community Group Converts Bronx Convent

The Helping Communities Build Initiative is helping Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, a Bronx environmental justice and community empowerment organization, to acquire an unused former convent and convert it into 10,000 feet of space for the organization's administrative offices and programs. YMPJ and its staff of 23 currently work out of a cramped space that was built as a private home. When the conversion is completed, the organization will occupy both buildings, which will allow it to enlarge its service area as well as its square footage.

The project will help create a model for low-cost sustainable design. The project is an educational opportunity for participants in YMPJ's youth programs, who will help research materials and learn about sustainable design and construction as the project moves forward. The Pratt Center will methodically document the project's innovations and make details of design and construction available to other practitioners, including architecture students at Pratt Institute. "With our sustainability monographs, we'll show step by step what was done and how we did it together," says Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh, the Pratt Center's lead architect. In addition to producing plans for rehabilitation of the convent and incorporating innovations in energy efficiency and sustainable materials, Michael is collaborating with YMPJ staff and members on designing interior space suited for the organization's programs in community leadership and environmental justice. Rebecca Reich, Director of Community Real Estate, is advising YMPJ on its negotiations with the Archdiocese of New York on the purchase of the property.

Equitable Development
Displacement Goes Off-Broadway

During October, the Pratt Center co-sponsored a series of free performances of Taking Over, performer Danny Hoch's one-man show, now running at the Public Theater, chronicling the characters and conflicts in a Williamsburg transformed by gentrification.

With the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, the Pratt Center helped organize "talkback" sessions following performances in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, as well as at the Public Theater, at which audience members shared stories of their own experiences of how their communities have changed in recent years, in many cases gaining new amenities – one of Hoch's characters delights in almond croissants – but losing residents who can no longer afford to live there. Panelists helped educate theatergoers about how New York's housing and development policies have contributed to neighborhood transformation in New York City. At a performance at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, panelists from Queens for Affordable Housing discussed their advocacy at Willets Points and Hunters Point South, two major development projects instigated by the Bloomberg administration. (See "Affordable Housing Wins One in Queens," below, for a news update about those campaigns.)

"This is an opportunity to say: Here's this piece of art talking about gentrification, and here's a development project that is going to accelerate gentrification, in this exact neighborhood," explains Elena Conte, organizer of public policy campaigns at the Pratt Center. Conte is working with Queens for Affordable Housing to identify opportunities to create more affordable housing in the borough. "What can we do? How can we use these performances as a chance to come together as a community and say that everyone should have a place here?"

The Taking Over All-City Tour is part the Pratt Center's new work on arts and community change, which brings the Pratt Center together with a diverse group of artists, cultural leaders, and neighborhood partners to advance social change through arts and culture and to pursue development strategies that sustain the arts in a community context.

Community Planning
Renewing Seward Park

Four decades ago, an urban renewal project near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge on Manhattan's Lower East Side displaced thousands of low-income tenants. While the city built affordable housing on some of the cleared parcels in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), several large blocks went undeveloped. Today, parking lots occupy the undeveloped zone of SPURA along Delancey Street, even while the Lower East Side, where the typical household earns $37,000 a year, urgently needs more affordable housing.

This fall the community organizing group Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and the neighborhood history project City Lore convened Lower East Side residents and other stakeholders in a series of four visioning sessions designed to generate discussion about the site's future, the neighborhood's needs, and the place of affordable housing in an area that has seen an influx of higher-income new residents along side largely poor families. Pratt Center Planner Paula Crespo developed and facilitated the workshops. GOLES will present participants' input to the city agencies that control the land, making the case for development that brings benefits to a wide range of residents in the neighborhood.

Equitable Development
One City/One Future: A Blueprint for Growth That Works for All New Yorkers

In early December, the Pratt Center, the National Employment Law Project, and New York Jobs with Justice released the One City/One Future Blueprint for Economic Development, the product of four years of collaboration between the three organizations and dozens of other groups in New York City seeking to make economic development programs and policies work to strengthen New York City's neighborhoods and provide better opportunities for New Yorkers.

The Blueprint lays out 54 policy measures that New York City should take in this moment of economic retrenchment to ensure that the city's future growth and development results in affordable housing, good jobs, livable neighborhoods, and environmental sustainability. It looks at models from around the country, and examines how New York's economic development policies, even during recent times of prosperity, have led to declining wages, unaffordable housing, and less livable neighborhoods.

In the coming year, One City/One Future will hold public forums and work with candidates for public office seeking to have New York join L.A., London and other cities whose economic development policies generate broad benefits. Visit the One City/One Future website to download the report.

Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Pratt Center's Bus Rapid Transit Leadership Honored

The Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at the NYU Wagner School of Public Policy has announced that it will grant its annual award for Civic Leadership to Pratt Center Sustainability and Environmental Justice initiative director Joan Byron, in recognition of the Pratt Center's advocacy work in pursuit of "transportation equity." The Pratt Center has been in the forefront of a burgeoning movement in New York City for bus rapid transit, which offers an opportunity to dramatically improve access to speedy transportation for parts of New York City poorly served by public transit. More than 400,000 New Yorkers earning less than $35,000 a year must travel for an hour or more to get to work.

Joan, along with public policy campaign organizer Elena Conte and COMMUTE! (Communities United for Transportation Equity), worked with then-interns Michael Amabile and Adam Brock to propose 11 bus rapid transit routes that maximize connections between underserved low-income riders and major centers of employment and education, including medical complexes, colleges, and airports. Detailed maps showing four of those routes and the number of riders they would serve are available on the Pratt Center website. The routes connect Sunset Park with JFK (see download); East Elmhurst/LaGuardia with Midtown; Rosedale and Jamaica with Midtown via Flushing; and Washington Heights with JFK via a crosstown Bronx route.

The Rudin Center award also recognizes the Pratt Center's efforts to ensure that low-income communities benefit from New York City's greenway and livable streets initiatives, as well as our work to advance the Cross Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel, and the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance's campaign to replace the Sheridan Expressway with housing and parkland.

Take a look at the Pratt Center Transportation Equity Atlas.

Equitable Development
Affordable Housing Wins One in Queens

Even though Queens is home to nearly one-quarter of all New York City households earning less than $50,000 a year, until now it has been the site of only 4 percent of the affordable housing units developed under the Bloomberg administration's New Housing Marketplace program. Spurred by this jarring inequity, community groups in Queens formed the Queens for Affordable Housing coalition. In November, several years of organizing work paid off, as the City Council approved rezoning plans that will allow two major, City Hall-led redevelopment projects to proceed in Queens, both including more affordable housing than initially proposed.

At Willets Point, where the Economic Development Corporation plans a hotel, convention center and other commercial development in addition to 5,500 units of housing, 1,155 apartments will be reserved for low-income families (earning less than about $46,000 a year for a family of four) and another 770 will be designated for households earning up to roughly $100,000 annually. Significantly, many of the low-income units are designated for households with incomes as low as $30,000 (and less for seniors residents with special needs). Willets Point represents a precedent-setting commitment to deeply affordable housing in a redevelopment project. The City also agreed to expand relocation assistance for local businesses and workers, to include a larger public school to ease nearby overcrowding, and to guarantee that nearly all of the jobs in the project will pay family-sustaining wages.

Unfortunately, the agreement at Hunters Point South was not as good. Despite substantial community efforts, the Bloomberg Administration to this point has refused to include a meaningful number of low-income units in the 5,000-unit market/middle-income development. While the City then agreed to make 1,000 of the units affordable to families earning about $61,000 (for a family of four), this is still higher than the Queens median income. More than half of Queens households would not be eligible for these units. In the final negotiations, the City agreed to make 200 units affordable to low-income seniors, just 4 percent of the total project. Queens for Affordable Housing groups have vowed to continue to fight for more low-income units on-site as part of the Hunters Point South project. 

Deutsche Bank Gift is Largest in Pratt Center's History

The Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation recently honored the Pratt Center with a gift of securities worth $862,000 at maturity, the largest single gift in our history. Deutsche Bank has a focused commitment to supporting community development and affordable housing in New York City and is a long-time supporter of the Pratt Center. Gary Hattem, President of Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, is a member of the Pratt Center Advisory Board and a member of Pratt Institute's Board of Trustees. "The Pratt Center has positioned Pratt Institute center stage in the struggle for positive social change in New York City," Hattem told Pratt's community newspaper, Gateway. "By deploying architects and planners as advocates for low-income communities, the Center has helped to reshape entire neighborhoods and has effectively launched several generations of values-driven professionals." As the securities will mature in eight and a half years, this gift is not only extremely generous, but is also a vote of confidence in the Pratt Center's long-term success. We are proud and grateful for their support: this contribution will help ensure that the Pratt Center will continue to play a role in strengthening New York City's communities.

CONTRIBUTE

This year's economic crisis has touched us all, and New York City's neighborhoods are now facing severe challenges that require swift action and innovative thinking. For the last 45 years, the Pratt Center has proven to be an effective and articulate voice for change, and now, more than ever, our community partners are looking to the Pratt Center's thought-leadership and experience. With your support, we will continue to help neighborhoods make smart investments in housing, economic development, public transit, community facilities, and environmental sustainability.

Make your tax-deductible contribution today at our secure online donation page.