Gentrification in the 1990s
The most recent wave of gentrification, marked by new renovations, construction, and increasing rents, picked up during the economic recovery in the early 1990s. This time, along with artists priced out of SoHo and Greenwich Village, an increasing student population moved into the district. The real estate industry used students as another wedge to gentrify the East Village and drive up rents. Students differed from prior waves of tenants in many ways. Whereas most tenants move into a neighborhood and plan to stay for an extended period, students are significantly more transient, often moving frequently and leaving altogether when their studies have concluded. They usually have a lease guarantor—their parents, minimizing the possibility of rent default. Aggressive landlords can easily intimidate students who are often not native to the city and will move out rather than put up a fight if threatened with extra-legal evictions. Some landlords even tell students they cannot renew their lease, a violation of the rent code. Students are also not as active in local politics or social movements and generally remain withdrawn from longer term residents. These characteristics make them the perfect tenants for landlords looking to increase rents with minimum hassle.
Rent stabilization and long term tenants kept many rents in the district below market rate. Current rent regulations grant landlords a significant rent-increase when tenants move out and a new tenant signs a lease. In a few short years, a rapid succession of student tenants could more than double the rent of an apartment until it is no longer affordable to many students. As the district became more desirable in the mid to late 1990s, landlords constrained by rent regulations began to require extensive financial credentials to secure a lease. Many owners will not rent to tenants who cannot show incomes of 30 to 60 times a month's rent. Additionally, many newcomers claim that management companies have requested two to five years of tax returns before renting apartments. These requirements raised the bar for tenancy making leases attainable only for high-salaried professionals or students with wealthy parent-guarantors. Just as many artists before them were priced out of the district as a result of the gentrifying effects of their own tenancy in past years, many students are now.
Discussions with other residents of the neighborhood and building superintendents suggest that the most recent arrivals have been young professionals. Observation of the neighborhood reveals increased traffic of professionally dressed young people during traditional commute times. Additionally, new bars and restaurants opening in the neighborhood cater to a wealthier crowd. I Coppi, a Tuscan tratoria on 9Th Street just west of Avenue A, carries wines priced from $35 to $1000 a bottle. These observations are evidence that white-collar professionals characterize the present wave of gentrifying tenants, which effectively fulfills the vision laid out by planners in the 1920s.
The city continued to support and assist the process of gentrification through the auctioning of community gardens, community centers, and squats in July and November of 1998, often for market rate development. These efforts do not merely “inhibit the formation of community-based self-help organizations,� as Christopher Mele suggests; they destroy successful self-help models that have been created, often times, over many years. After a community has created a community garden on an abandoned lot, the process of auctioning this lot and destroying the garden does not simply involve the razing of some plants and walkways. It means the destruction of a complex and vital community along with the object around which it was created. Just as Ida Susser argues with respect to the symbolic importance of a home, gardens represent more than just open space—they are an integral part of forming the psychological ties that create a sense of community (Susser, p. 213).
The implications of destroying these gardens goes beyond the immediate physical and social loss. The consequences also include the disenchantment of an entire community that has seen such an organization destroyed. According to Morales, the community’s will and ability to organize is degraded after experiencing such loss and defeat. Both Jacobs and Mele concur that the destruction of community organizations results in a loss of social and political power. With each defeat witnessed, the community becomes weaker, until there is none left at all. Many local activists including Morales, Perin, Wright, Ferguson and others believe that weakening the community is one goal of community garden demolition. As Jacobs noted, “Either way, seduction or subversion of the elected is easiest when the electorate is fragmented into ineffectual units of power� (Jacobs, p. 13). To the politicians, including Mayor Giuliani, who so often cater to the real estate interests that contribute heavily to electoral campaigns, the fragmentation of the local electorate is to their advantage. Strong communities such as those on the LES often resist real estate development; thus the destruction of these self-help movements is advantageous to real estate developers and can be considered a motivation for some political decisions that achieve these ends.
Poor people, no matter how active in the community, do not make significant financial contributions to political campaigns. For the most part, the only political power they possess is the power developed in community organizations. The land disposition decisions made by politicians with strong political, financial, or personal ties to real estate developers often results in the destruction of these organizations. This process of disempowerment has existed for decades in the LES and continues today.
The city government’s actions have followed a tacit policy of social control through the destruction of self-mobilization and community controlled self-help movements. While politicians at many levels of government -- from George Bush and Bill Clinton to Rudy Giuliani -- have advocated and encouraged self-help as an alternative to reliance on government support, at a local level, this “advocacy� often has been merely rhetorical. It is one of the great ironies of gardening and other self help movements. When wealthier communities provide funds for neighborhood improvements it is championed. However, when poorer communities take it upon themselves to improve their surroundings, they are thwarted.
It is not likely a mere coincidence that the city’s current policies towards land disposition coincide with those of Anthony Downs. Downs is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which is a think-tank that is highly influential on the Giuliani administration. Author Robert Fitch recognizes that such “foundations and their free standing off-spring like LISC [Local Initiatives Support Corporation] and the [New York] Housing Partnership, could set neighborhood economic agendas by their funding priorities. They would decide what constituted economic development� (Fitch, 1993, p. 155-6). Similar foundation-funded private institutes and think-tanks have had an influential role in shaping public policy in recent decades. Deborah and Rodrick Wallace identify the roll of the Riverside Research Institute, the Rand Institute, and the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council in the development and implementation of planned shrinkage (Wallace and Wallace, p. xi-xiii, 24-5). These “institutes� and the academics who lead them operate beyond the reaches of electoral politics and public scrutiny (Fitch, p. 141-2, 155-6). The spatial deconcentration policies that Downs set forth in1968 have been present in the actions of both Democratic and Republican administrations through the present day.
As Mayor, Rudy Giuliani has aggressively disposed of city-owned property for the purpose of building middle-income housing usually in marginal and gentrifying districts such as the LES. The private non profit New York Housing Partnership has been involved in numerous low-density middle-income subsidized housing co-ops around the city and on the LES. In most cases, these homes have not been affordable to the residents of the neighborhood, often requiring incomes that are double or triple the median incomes in the surrounding areas, and their construction has advanced gentrification, particularly on the LES.
In some instances, Partnership projects displace thriving community gardens or squats, both of which represent the residents’ hard work to solve their own problems. Examples are the 5th and 13th Street Squats that the city “owned� and handed over to the private developers Asian Americans For Equality (AAFE) and the Lower East Side Coalition for Housing Development (LESCHD), respectively. Both of these developers are politically well connected to the Giuliani administration—AAFE through campaign contributions and LESCHD through donations and former City Council member and LESCHD principal, Antonio Pagan, now a commissioner of labor in the Giuliani administration. Well-connected Donald Capocia of BFC Development is responsible for the Del Este Village developments that displaced four community gardens including the Chico Mendez Memorial Mural Garden and the 10BC or Little Puerto Rico Garden. Pagan, LESCHD, and AAFE also have been instrumental in the demolition of other gardens and the eviction of squats on the LES. AAFE is the developer for a middle income New Homes Partnership project on the former site of the Rodriguez Garden on Suffolk Street. Before its demolition, the city transferred the 5th Street Squat building to AAFE control for development as subsidized rentals. In the two years since a small fire and subsequent extra-legal demolition, the site has become a trash-strewn lot.
Low-rent units removed from the housing stock in the 1970s through arson, abandonment and demolition were often replaced by moderate and now luxury rental or co-op and condo units. One can look to contemporary examples such as the scattered site Del Este Village co-ops, Tompkins Square Court, and CD280 luxury rentals as just a few of the market rate projects recently built east of Avenue A. These are only the larger, new construction projects; there have been smaller renovations and conversions such as those of some long vacant buildings on East Houston Street near Orchard Street into studios commanding rents in the $3,000 range. Almost three decades ago Cloward and Piven observed, “The new developments included chiefly high-rental housing; slum clearance was no boon to slum dwellers for whom it meant mainly dislocation.� Their observation is equally poignant today; there is no intrinsic benefit to the existing community from the housing that replaces gardens or squats. The current residents are facing the threat of deprivation of community space and affordable housing. The developments that replace these community-used properties will likely result in the further gentrification of the neighborhood, causing additional displacement of low-income and minority residents.