The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  I’m a junior. Trying to not graduate ever, that’s my goal—ever.

  She laughs.

  I could just stay at Cooper and live in this little wonderful, creative fantasy world. Why not? The community that’s there is so unlike anything I’ve ever had. Everyone is there for a reason and knows that they’re there for a reason, and it’s all about collaborating and being open and trying to formulate new ideas. You can’t beat it. I’ve never been anywhere where the faculty really treats you as a part of this democratic experience instead of an authoritative situation. It’s all based on merit and hard work so you get all of these different people. Like my friend Marina is from Berkeley, pretty well-to-do, middle-class family; there’s a kid who lived in the school without anyone’s permission last year; and there are these two twins that go to my school that lived through a bunch of different adoption homes and are still sort of very wayward. The professors are always willing to help out where they can. In different ways, too. But that’s starting to happen less and less. There used to be this thing, a Cooper loan, and any time you needed it you could just go and borrow $500 on the spot—whenever. They don’t do that anymore. Financially they can’t do it.

  They voted against charging tuition for this year but after that we don’t know. A lot of the seniors are heavily involved trying to keep the conversation going for those of us who will still be around but we all just feel like it’s inevitable. It seems like they’ve made up their mind to start charging tuition. So we’ve slacked off. And now maybe we’re fucked.

  Barbara: It’s all money, money, money, money. We flee to New York because we know it’s the place where there’s freedom. But it’s not going to be free for too much longer.

  A few months later, Cooper Union’s board of trustees votes to begin charging tuition in the fall due to the institution’s financial shortfall—against the mandate of the institution’s founder and the will of faculty, students, and alumni. The announcement is made in the school’s famous Great Hall, just across the street from a brand new academic building, 41 Cooper Square, one of Barbara’s “huge monstrosities.” While the necessity and financial feasibility of the building were being publicly debated—it had a price tag of $165 million—the trustees approved a range of expenditures that included $350,000 for an inauguration party and $50,000 for a guest speaker.

  In his review of 41 Cooper Square, the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff said, “We’ll have to wait to find out exactly what the end of the Age of Excess means for architecture in New York … The new academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is yet more proof that some great art was produced in those self-indulgent times.” The aluminum and glass building looks a bit like a boxy spaceship, and those who were protesting the tuition fees have all been cleared out of the lobby.

  20.

  The blocks immediately surrounding Cooper Union fall under the domain of the Cooper Square Committee—a group of residents who work to prevent private capital from dominating their neighborhood. The committee has had some success doing so, and it’s been at it a long time—in the 1960s, members hung banners from fire escapes: “Cooper Square Is Here To Stay—Speculators Keep Away.”

  The Cooper Square neighborhood is composed, roughly, of the four northernmost blocks of the Bowery before it splits into two separate streets at the entrance to Cooper Union’s Great Hall where, 152 years before the school announced it would charge tuition, Abraham Lincoln was propelled to his party’s presidental nomination after giving a speech asserting the government’s authority to limit slavery.

  In addition to the school, the Cooper Square neighborhood includes a building that houses The Village Voice, several theaters—the Public, La MaMa, New York Theatre Workshop—and Barbara’s old haunt, McSorley’s. After the judge informed Barbara that the politics had changed in 1985, it was the Cooper Square Committee that helped her get a new space for her shop.

  Still fighting off outside capital in 2012, the committee won a decades-long battle that gave them approval for an expansive co-operative housing plan that allowed tenants to buy shares in their apartment buildings for as little as $250. The Cooper Square Committee is studied and revered—in large part because its sustained success is a rarity. It is challenging enough to get two neighbors to agree on the optimal volume at which music should be played; how much greater is the task of getting a building or a block—or several blocks—to agree on unified interests when they all sit in the direct path of a hurricane tossing money in various directions?

  Crown Heights has one such organizing effort under way. In this part of Brooklyn, a handful of large building management companies dominate the area; they oversee maintenance and billing for investment groups and other landlords who, as Toussaint pointed out, rarely seek direct contact with the people who live in the buildings they buy.

  Celia Weaver has only lived in Crown Heights for two years but she’s been organizing in the neighborhood twice as long. She goes by Cea and works for the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board. She can easily get revved up talking about how her neighborhood is changing, and when she does she reminds me of a twenty-eight-year-old version of Barbara Shaum—the same red hair, the same fair skin, the same socialist song in her heart. At university, Cea explored different kinds of ideology that government imposes on the home; she wrote a paper comparing two vastly different mid-twentieth century models: private development in Levittown, New York, and a public housing project in the Marzahn section of East Berlin.

  We sit in a coffee shop across the street from a shuttered, stone-faced private school built in 1910 and currently covered in scaffolding. Plumes of smoke occasionally shoot out past the building’s temporary cover; the sound of spinning electric blades echoes up and down the street.

  The residents here really feel squeezed. There have been intense buyouts. They’ll go to tenants who are paying lower rents and they’ll say look, let me give you $10,000 to move out. It’s kind of insulting so then the landlord goes away and comes back and says, “Okay, we’ll give you one hundred thousand dollars.” Value is so subjective. But that extreme financial value, it just arrived. It feels raw.

  And we’ve started to see some really weird things you wouldn’t expect in a city with a housing crunch. Landlords in this neighborhood buy up buildings that are in foreclosure and empty the tenants but don’t bring in new people. My only guess could be that they want to sell the building empty but that ends up being extremely painful because it keeps the housing supply artificially low and that just further drives up rents.

  If you talk to the Caribbean residents—tenants and homeowners—it’s so visible on the street, and it feels raw. It’s like you woke up one morning and Franklin Avenue was a different place.

  So we’re doing an interesting project in this neighborhood: we see the foreclosure as a weak point where there’s actually more of a balance of power between the owner and the residents and we try to help residents take over the building.

  A lot of the times with someone going into foreclosure in multi-family housing, it’s not the same kind of sympathetic homeowner story that we’re used to. They’re often private equity companies or hedge funds that were buying up multi-family housing stock in New York City from 2005–2008. They’re not sympathetic guys. A lot of the buildings have been sold in bulk to different hedge funds, private equity, what-have-you.

  So we’ve been organizing against landlords of multi-family buildings that are in foreclosure. If they took out a $4 million mortgage on a six-unit building, such a risky deal can only work out by completely turning over the tenancy. In New York, generally rent is regulated so if the tenant stays in the apartment the rent can go up usually between 4–7 percent but if a tenant vacates an apartment the rent can go up 20 percent each year. So there’s a huge incentive for landlords to vacate apartments. But if the tenants refuse to leave, if they don’t accept the buyouts and the landlords can’t bring in new people that’s a problem for them. They too
k out their mortgage on the hedge that they are going to be able to move people out and raise rents rapidly. If tenants decide to fight back, that mortgage is not sustainable. And if they leave and they go out to East New York, wherever the landlords want them to go, they’ll be able to pay back the mortgage. That’s the situation in Crown Heights. In places like the South Bronx they’re making the same bets but a lot of these private equity groups are buying so indiscriminately, they don’t know anything about the neighborhoods.

  The private equity companies don’t care about the rent laws, you know—tenants care about the rent laws, small landlords care about the rent laws. People investing in commercially backed securities don’t know about the rent laws. Who knows who these investors even are? So the larger the gap between people who know about New York City housing and the people who own the buildings, the worse it’s going to be for the communities.

  New York City does have really strong tenant protection laws for when a foreclosure happens because, of course, the tenant never took out a mortgage, it’s the landlord that’s being foreclosed upon. So we often go into buildings that are in foreclosure with the goal of organizing tenants to use the foreclosure as an opportunity to bring in the kind of ownership they would want.

  We decided to join all these tenant associations together, working with a group called the Crown Heights Assembly, which came out of the Occupy movements. Now we have the Crown Heights Tenant Union, which is a collective of tenant associations.

  It’s a challenge to build larger coalitions. In the past our organization has been very building-centric. And we do want to maintain a percentage of that and maintain resident autonomy over what’s happening in their building.

  We had a rally two Fridays ago. We have a list of demands around notifications, around illegal rents in the buildings; there’s a lot of evidence that the rent guidelines board, which sets the rents in New York City, has been letting rents go up faster than wages and faster than oil costs in response to the landlord lobby. So we’re calling for a rent freeze in the neighborhood.

  Some of our demands may sound crazy, but there’s a lot of evidence that points to the fact that they’re actually fair. We’re really excited—there’s a lot of energy in the neighborhood because the displacement and gentrification pressures are really palpable here and they’re really racial. It’s easy to recognize. The neighborhood has been under attack and there’s a lot of energy and anger and desire to fight back.

  I think the problem around all gentrification dialogue is this false dichotomy between a changing neighborhood and what was happening before. So a lot of real estate people will say, “Ten years ago there was a race riot in Crown Heights, it was so dangerous you couldn’t walk down the street. You wouldn’t really want that. What neighborhood are you fighting for? Are you crazy? This is so much better.”

  But the tenants, especially the tenants who have been here a long time, they say, “We lived through it being shitty, we want to stay and enjoy what’s coming.”

  There are ways to have a neighborhood have less crime and more economic justice that don’t include displacement. And I think that’s kind of the crux of what we’re organizing for. We want the good things. We want the coffee shops. We want the safety. We want the better schools. But we don’t want that to be at the expense of the community who’s been here a long time. And that’s the problem with gentrification. Even with the anti-gentrification folks it becomes Us vs. Them, and that’s really what we’re trying to combat and talk about.

  Gentrification has obvious symptoms—new residents, new shops, displacement, sometimes less crime—but I think that often these symptoms become conflated with the definition of gentrification.

  When a lot of people think about gentrification they think about artists moving in. But cultural critiques about gentrification are less interesting to me than capital and real estate. The other thing about the artist thing: are the West Indian people who have been living here for years not artists? They probably are and so when people say artists and gentrification they kind of mean white artists and that’s not helpful.

  She laughs.

  In the ’70s a lot of the gentrifiers coming into Brooklyn—Park Slope or Clinton Hill—were people who were maybe two-earner households and commuting from the suburbs wasn’t an option since there was this desire for the women to work outside of the home. You needed to be in the city. So in those days it started as a socially progressive movement with people looking for diverse communities and equality of gender, which I think is really interesting because now I think it’s taken on a more sinister capital driven lens.

  I tend to think about gentrification as a sort of structural process where real estate capital sees growth opportunity in neighborhoods and comes in and tries to do neighborhood turnover. Real estate developers see a difference between what the neighborhood is currently making in rent capital and what its potential is and that gap is something landowners can sort of exploit and that’s where gentrification happens.

  This idea of the “rent gap” that Cea is describing was first conceived and narrated by Neil Smith, the urbanist: “Building owners and developers garner a double reward for milking properties and destroying buildings. First, they pocket the money that should have gone to repairs and upkeep; second, having effectively destroyed the building and established a rent gap, they have produced for themselves the conditions and opportunity for a whole new round of capital investment. Having produced a scarcity of capital in the name of profit they now flood the neighborhood for the same purpose, portraying themselves all along as civic-minded heroes, pioneers taking a risk where no one else would venture, builders of a new city for the worthy populace.”

  The people moving into this neighborhood—I wouldn’t say across the board but just generally—maybe don’t have that different of an income than the long-time residents but the income potential is different. So there will be students who are content to be living on a lower income now but don’t intend to be doing so later on.

  There are race differences, there are age differences, there are social capital, if not actual capital differences. So even if you still live in your apartment after many years, if the neighborhood is unrecognizable to you and you’re not welcome in a coffee shop, it’s totally different. And if you walk down Franklin Avenue right now there is a total difference in who shops where, and what businesses are welcoming to which sort of race and class of people. That’s an unquantifiable human cost. And the costs of groceries go up. Neighborhood amenities go up. Even if I could afford to live in an apartment on the Upper East Side could I afford to shop in the grocery stores on the Upper East Side? Probably not.

  I think one of the painful things about gentrification is that people say, “I don’t know my neighbors anymore,” and that they don’t feel connected to the neighborhood anymore and the only way to mediate that is to talk to people around you. And the racial divide ends up worsening when people are afraid to confront their privilege or confront what’s happening. There are good ways and bad ways, you know, to do these things.

  I think a lot about my race and class while I’m doing this work in Crown Heights and I want to be sensitive about it. I don’t want to take on a leadership role in what I’m doing and part of that is because I want to be sensitive to the racial and class issues that are happening in this neighborhood.

  In avoiding a leadership role, Cea strikes me as a welcome evolution on the theme of “three white girls in their twenties, teaching old black women in their sixties how to cook,” as Shatia Strother put it when lamenting the lack of diversity in our prevailing paradigm of leadership. Cea is happy to organize and assist and wear out the soles of her shoes under the leadership of someone with an older, deeper relationship to the neighborhood.

  The way the previous administration went about economic development in the city left something to be desired in terms of community input. It was sort of like Bloomberg considered himself a benevolent dictator. If you wanted t
o effect development in New York City under Michael Bloomberg you had to stand in front of a bulldozer. If not, there wouldn’t be anyone who’s willing to sit at the table with you.

  Community boards are sort of rendered impotent. Their votes are only advisory. It’s not like if the community board voted no that would mean that the project goes back to the drawing board. It goes all the way to the City Planning Commission, which are all mayoral appointees, before voting actually affects the process at all.

  And that puts us in a really bad position with this false dichotomy: developers are saying I’m making your neighborhood better and the community is saying get the hell out of my neighborhood. What we really need is a more participatory urban planning world where residents have a say in what’s going to happen. It’s wrong to say that New York City is static, New York City has always changed, but the question is who’s going to be driving the train?

  21.

  Once a month, the Crown Heights Tenant Union gathers in the atrium room of the Center for Nursing Rehabilitation on Classon Avenue. At first glance the meeting looks like group therapy of some kind—and, in a way, maybe it is. Clusters of three or four people sit in chairs, talking, loosely forming one big circle around the perimeter of the room.

  A white man in his thirties and a dark-complected woman in her fifties stand in the middle of the room, trying to corral the smaller discussions and bring the entire room together. As the man occasionally takes a stab at speaking over the din, more people come in and each person gets a chair from Cea. She is happy in the shadows—more effective in the shadows, pulling chairs from a stack to make sure everyone is comfortable at the meeting. The man standing in the middle of the room gets everyone settled enough to hand the floor over to the older woman standing at his side. When she speaks her voice booms: