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We are analyzing the relationship between the state and rezoning this week. It can be argued that the relationship between the state and rezoning is a supportive relationship to each other. The literature on state formation is vast; we will not be mapping out different theoretical arguments on state formation here. We will use a very narrow definition of the state: the state is an instrument to protect, reproduce, and represent the interest of the capitalist class. We will also use a restricted definition of rezoning and will discuss rezoning only in the context of New York City. As provided by Angotti, we will define rezoning as the Zoning Resolution that controls: "how land may be used (either for residential, commercial, or industrial purposes, or a combination of these); how much can be built on the land (mainly through a formula that sets a maximum Floor Area Ratio (FAR) the built floor area divided by the total land area); ad how much land must remain unbuilt." The relationship between the state and rezoning is: the state through its institutions carry out rezoning in order to protect, reproduce and represent the interest of the capitalist class; likewise, by being protected, reproduced and represented, the capitalist class acquires a political character. The relationship is supportive in such a way. We will use this definition for the following discussion.

Hackworth and Smith: the authors outlined three waves of gentrification. Each wave of gentrification has a distinctive character. However, the trend of the development of gentrification is that the state has been becoming involved in directly organizing gentrification in several areas of New York City - particularly during the last two waves. This pattern can be seen in areas of Clinton, Long Island City and DUMBO. The argument for state intervention is: the federal government (since Reagan) had been reducing federal redistribution of resources to local government; as a response, local state had to come up with ways to increase tax dollars; one way to do so was to intensify gentrification and make alliances with capital, but subsequently, capital demanded city governments to "maintain a businesslike ledger sheet." "With the decline in federal outlays to cities, the need to borrow funds for redevelopment has increased during the third-wave. In order to retain the fiscal viability necessary to keep receiving such loans, many cities have, more unabashedly than in the past, turned to the attraction and retention of the middle lass to increase tax revenue" (p.470; in Hackworth and Smith). New York City became supportive of gentrification as a result.

DePaolo and Morse: residents and businesses felt the developmental pressures in Williamsburg/Greenpoint. They fought and created community-based plans in 2001 to protect the neighborhood. The city indeed official adopted the plans, which recommended "increasing the availability of low-rise affordable housing, improving access to open space and the waterfront, promoting non-polluting industry, and reducing the concentration of noxious waste facilities." The community did not want luxury high-rise towers on the waterfront. Few years later, the city launched its own rezoning plan that promoted high density residential development. In the 2005 Williamsburg rezoning intensified gentrification. Three elements to this rezoning: "residential uses were permitted in formerly industrial areas, buildings with significantly larger height and bulk were allowed, particularly on the waterfront, and new "mix-use" zones were introduced, which permitted either industrial or residential uses in the formerly industrial zones" (p.78; DePaolo and Morse). As a result of the rezoning, new upscale residential development came and there had been a loss of affordable housing. The Latino population in Williamsburg (18% decrease) was displaced and was replaced by a 44% increase of white population. Industrial employments also dropped.

Stein: Chinatown, Lower East Side and East Village are all within the boundaries of Community Board 3. However, in 2008, NYC rezoned East Village which is predominantly white and wealthy neighborhood by excluding Chinatown and the Lower East Side, which are predominantly low-income and with a mix of Latino, Asian, Black and poor White communities. The 2008 rezoning protected the white and rich areas of EV by restricting the height limits of the areas. Big and tall buildings could not be built in the area. However, this racist exclusion pushed developments into Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Since 2008, the communities across the area have been facing displacement. Chinatown/LES saw a boom of hotels and mega-towers being proposed along the waterfront - with one that is about to be completed. The working class communities from Chinatown and the LES came together and created the Chinatown Working Group (CWG) rezoning plan; the plan calls for height restriction that EV had. The communities want equality and the same protections that the wealthy white communities had since 2008. However, the City called CWG too ambiguous and refused to implement the plan. The City perpetuated the racist treatment started in 2008; racist impacts to the communities was created by Mayor Bloomberg and has been transferred and perpetuated by Mayor de Blasio who claims to be progressive.

Sites: Sites' argument is different from the previous three arguments. In the same context of federal budget cuts, local government was forced to create tax revenues. NYC held a number of properties in the LES area and wanted to auction them off. This triggered a resistance against privatization. There were three tendencies among the organizations that fought against gentrification: advocacy and planning, tenants organizing and direct housing provision. These three tendencies could interact with each other in the period of 1980-1995. This period is divided into three phases: 1980-1985, 1985-1990 and 1990-1995. The first phase is called "saving the neighborhood." This is when organizations came together with tactical differences and tried to stop displacement in the area. The second phase is characterized by "defending the neighborhood." It was no longer the city that is the target of various strategies but the neighborhood is the target - not to be eliminated (of course) but to be "defended." This created the problem of competition of available city-owned properties (to be developed by non-profit organizations). The third phase could be an intensification of the competition. The organizations that tried to stop displacement were then competing with each other to control the lands of LES; they wanted to develop the city-owned properties and competed for city contracts. The aim was to build affordable housing. However, as Sites highlighted, the "affordable housing" builders ended up supporting the City to evict squatters. Therefore, the argument is not on the State's direct involvement in organizing gentrification; the state selectively promoted and supported local community organizations that could support compromises in low-income housing development and evictions. In other words, the state manipulated the organizations to focus gentrification at a neighborhood level (to acquire land and city-owned properties) and pushed the same organizations to not to create strategies that target the state.

This week's discussion will be based on the above arguments and the required films. Your responses should be referencing the assigned videos.

Why are there mega-towers at the LES waterfront? Why the Chinatown tenants were being pushed out? What is the role of the state in the gentrification of Spanish Harlem and Williamsburg? (In other words, what did the City do in Spanish Harlem and Williamsburg in order to create gentrification?)


Video links:

Gut Renovation: Gentrification in Williamsburg

http://binghamton.kanopystreaming.com/video/gut-renovation

East Village Rezoning (David Tieu Narrated)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw4dJs7sa58

83-85 Bowery, Manhattan Chinatown

https://vimeo.com/229398210

Towers on the Waterfront

https://vimeo.com/231275193

Whose Barrio: Gentrification of Spanish Harlem

http://binghamton.kanopystreaming.com/video/whose-...

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THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION JASON HACKWORTH* & NEIL SMITH** *358 Bellamy Building, Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2190, USA. E-mail: jhackwor@mailer.fsu.edu **Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 6107, New York, NY 10016-4309, USA. E-mail: nsmith@gc.cuny.edu Received: May 2000; revised November 2000 ABSTRACT Gentrification has changed in ways that are related to larger economic and political restructuring. Among these changes is the return of heavy state intervention in the process. This paper explores heightened state involvement in gentrification by examining the process in three New York City neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). We argue that state intervention has returned for three key reasons. First, continued devolution of federal states has placed even more pressure on local states to actively pursue redevelopment and gentrification as ways of generating tax revenue. Second, the diffusion of gentrification into more remote portions of the urban landscape poses profit risks that are beyond the capacity of individual capitalists to manage. Third, the larger shift towards post-Keynesian governance has unhinged the state from the project of social reproduction and as such, measures to protect the working class are more easily contested. Key words: Gentrification, New York City, governance, neighbourhood change, state restructuring, economic restructuring INTRODUCTION Late in 1998, real estate developer David Walentas was given permission by the city of New York to redevelop a portion of the northern Brooklyn waterfront next to the neighbourhood of DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). Walentas has been trying to gentrify DUMBO since the early 1980s, and has been seeking permission to do so for almost as long. Turning the waterfront into a commercial arcade, not unlike South Street Seaport, directly across the East River, is an important component of his bid to bring the gentry to DUMBO. Yet for most of the 1980s and early 1990s Walentas encountered nothing but resistance from City Hall and Albany (the state capital). He lacked the experience and funding, they said, to be given permission to redevelop the site (Ennen 1999). If the private market did not have enough faith to back Walentas with lending capital, why, asked public officials, should tax dollars be used to support it? Recently, the city changed its stance towards Walentas’ plan. Not only was he given the planning permission that he coveted for the waterfront, but he was also given important zoning concessions as well. This occurred despite the fact that neighbourhood residents were unified against the plan (Ennen 1999). While this case could be simply discarded as another example of the Giuliani Administration repaying campaign contributors, other (very different) examples of recently increased state involvement in gentrification imply that something larger is afoot. Several years earlier, for example, the Federal Housing Administration awarded MO Associates – a firm trying to gentrify Long Island City (LIC) – unprecedented mortgage insurance for a luxury condominium project in Queens. Not long before this, the city’s department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2001, Vol. 92, No. 4, pp. 464–477. # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA 465 THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION all but eliminated its anti-gentrification enforcement in the neighbourhood of Clinton. After years of laissez-faire politics regarding gentrification – i.e. to encourage it only if the private market has proven it viable and in some cases, even help in its resistance – local governments, state level agencies, and federal administrations are assisting gentrification more assertively than during the 1980s. In the USA, some of this shift has been formalised into urban policy, but much of this change has been played out less formally, in the form of increased local government assistance to gentrifiers, relaxed zoning, and reduced protection of affordable housing. Why is this the case? This essay explores the reasons for the return of state intervention by examining the nature of recent gentrification in three New York neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Figure 1). Each avoided a major bout of gentrification during the 1980s but all are presently the focus of reinvestment, largely though not exclusively because of recent state intervention. As such they represent useful case studies for exploring why – in an epoch of continual deregulation – the state is suddenly more involved in the process. In order to address this question, a short history of gentrification is chronicled. Following this, explicit attention is focused on why the state’s role in gentrification has increased, by drawing on the available literature and exploring the process in the aforementioned neighbourhoods. WAVES OF GENTRIFICATION While most gentrification researchers would agree with Loretta Lees (2000, p. 16) when Ma nh at ta n Bronx Clinton ? Clinton Long Island Island CityCity Long Kilometres Kilometers 0 Queens 6 DUMBO DUMBO Brooklyn Staten Island Figure 1. Case study neighbourhoods in New York City. # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 466 she explains that, ‘gentrification today is quite different to gentrification in the early 1970s, late 1980s, even the early 1990s’, little explicit attempt has been made thus far to chronicling, much less theorising, these changes. In order to understand the changing role of the state in gentrification, it is first necessary to understand (at a minimum) the context for changes to the process as a whole. Systematic gentrification dates back only to the 1950s but has evolved enough to assemble a periodised history of the process. Figure 2 is a schematic summary of this history. Each phase of gentrification in the diagram is demarcated by a particular constellation of political and economic conditions nested at larger geographical scales. Though the timeline draws heavily from the experience of gentrification in New York City it has wider applicability insofar as studies from other cities were used to assemble it. Specific dates for these phases will undoubtedly vary from place to place, but not so significantly as to diminish the influence of broader scale political economic events on the local experience of gentrification. First-wave gentrification: sporadic and stateled – Prior to the economic recession that settled through the global economy in late 1973, gentrification was sporadic if widespread. Disinvested inner-city housing within the older north eastern cities of the USA, Western Europe and Australia became a target for reinvestment. While highly localised, these instances of gentrification were often significantly funded by the public sector (Hamnett 1973; Williams 1976; Smith 1979), as local and national governments sought to counteract the private-market economic decline of central city neighbourhoods. Governments were aggressive in helping gentrification because the prospect of inner-city investment (without state insurance of some form) was still very risky. While state involvement was often justified through the discourse of ameliorating urban decline, the effect was of course highly class specific. Conditions generally worsened for the urban working class as a result of such intervention (Smith 1996). If the global economic recession that affected various national economies between 1973 and 1977 also depressed national hous# 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG JASON HACKWORTH & NEIL SMITH ing markets, its effects on gentrification were more ambiguous. The recession was triggered by the international oil embargo but provoked at a deeper level by various developments: falling profit rates in the productive sectors of the economy; increasing global competition and integration as Germany and Japan emerged as industrial powers; competition from the cheap labour of newly industrialising countries; and crises in the financial sector (Harvey 1989a). Despite the severity of that recession, there is little evidence that gentrification was radically circumscribed in the mid 1970s, though disinvestment intensified in certain US cities (Sternlieb & Hughes 1983). This was certainly the case in New York City where landlord abandonment and arson rose to an all-time high in the 1970s. At a more general level, the economic downturn also encouraged the shift of capital from unproductive to productive sectors, setting the stage for a reinvestment in central city office, recreation, retail and residential activities (Harvey 1985). Second-wave gentrification: expansion and resistance – When depressed markets began to revive in the late 1970s, gentrification surged as never before. New neighbourhoods were converted into real estate ‘frontiers’, and cities that had not previously experienced gentrification implemented far-reaching strategies to attract this form of investment. Most local state efforts, however, focused on prodding the private market rather than directly orchestrating gentrification. Federal programmes like block grants and enterprise zones encouraged this relatively laissez-faire role. Despite slow economic growth between 1979 and 1983, gentrification activity remained largely unaffected (see Ley 1992 for the case of Canadian cities). In New York, sales prices in gentrifying neighbourhoods like Harlem did drop somewhat in 1982–83, apparently in response to the recession, but rebounded sharply thereafter (Schaeffer & Smith 1986). Less systematic evidence from other neighbourhoods in the city suggests that the recession was similarly mild throughout the inner city. The second-wave, lasting almost to the end of the 1980s, was characterised by the inte- 467 Transition Gentrification slows: The recession constricts the flow of capital into gentrifying and gentrified neighbourhoods, prompting some to proclaim that a ‘degentrification’ or reversal of the process was afoot. The anchoring of gentrification: The process becomes implanted in hitherto disinvested central city neighbourhoods. In contrast to the pre-1973 experience of gentrification, the process becomes common in smaller, non-global cities during the 1980s. In New York City, the presence of the arts community was often a key correlate of residential gentrification, serving to smooth the flow of capital into neighbourhoods like SoHo, Tribeca, and the Lower East Side. Intense political struggles occur during this period over the displacement of the poorest residents. Transition Second-wave Gentrification returns: Prophesies of degentrification appear to have been overstated as many neighbourhoods continue to gentrify while others, further from the city centre begin to experience the process for the first time. Post-recession gentrification seems to be more linked to large-scale capital than ever, as large developers rework entire neighbourhoods, often with state support. Gentrifiers buy property: In New York and other cities, developers and investors used the downturn in property values to consume large portions of devalorised neighbourhoods, thus setting the stage for 1980s gentrification. First-wave 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1976 1977 1975 1974 1973 1972 1971 1969 1968 Third-wave THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION Sporadic gentrification: Prior to 1973, the process is mainly isolated in small neighbourhoods in the north eastern USA and Western Europe. Figure 2. Schematic history of gentrification (recessions in grey). # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 468 gration of gentrification into a wider range of economic and cultural processes at the global and national scales. Nowhere was this more true than in New York, where the city’s emergence as a world city, the inflation of the real estate market, and the burgeoning of an internationally recognised ‘alternative’ art scene in SoHo and the Lower East Side went hand-in-hand with powerful and at times ruthless gentrification (Zukin 1982, 1987; Deutsche & Ryan 1984). Although celebrated by some (Caufield 1994), gentrification was also challenged in and around places like New York’s Tompkins Square Park, where homelessness, eviction and the increasing vulnerability of poor residents was directly connected to gentrification (Smith 1989, 1996). To the north, in Clinton, activists used the apparatus of local government to fight gentrification, but like the resistance in the Lower East Side, their efforts struggled to offset the overwhelming advance of the process in these neighbourhoods by the decade’s end. Third-wave gentrification: recessional pause and subsequent expansion – The stock market crash of 1987 provided the first warning signs of another imminent recession, but it was not until 1989 that inner-city residential land markets crashed along with the rest of the US economy. Unlike previous recessions in which gentrification slowed very little, during the recession of the early 1990s, gentrification came to a halt in some neighbourhoods and was severely curtailed in others. The effects of the recession certainly varied, but it was sufficiently severe to lead some critics to speculate that the 1990s were witnessing ‘degentrification’ (Bagli 1991). Bourne (1993), for example, predicted the ‘demise of gentrification’ due to an ageing of the baby boom, declining real incomes, and a relative reduction in the supply of inner-city housing. Since 1993, however, the expectation of degentrification has evaporated as reinvestment has again taken hold and a third-wave begun. In New York, all of the key inner-city housing market indicators – housing unit sale prices, rent levels, tax arrears, mortgage levels – have reversed themselves (from the recessional downturn) with the onset of the third-wave # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG JASON HACKWORTH & NEIL SMITH of gentrification, while growth in the suburbs has been slower to recover. The recession appears in retrospect to have been a transition period to the third-wave more than the advent of degentrification or any curtailment of inner-city reinvestment. Post-recession gentrification – the thirdwave of the process – is a purer expression of the economic conditions and processes that make reinvestment in disinvested inner-urban areas so alluring for investors (Smith & Defilippis 1999). Overall, economic forces driving gentrification seem to have eclipsed cultural factors as the scale of investment is greater and the level of corporate, as opposed to smaller-scale capital, has grown. In particular, third-wave gentrification is distinct from earlier phases in at least four ways. First, gentrification is expanding both within the inner-city neighbourhoods that it affected during earlier waves and to more remote neighbourhoods beyond the immediate core. Second, restructuring and globalisation in the real estate industry has set a context for larger developers becoming involved in gentrifying neighbourhoods (Logan 1993; Coakley 1994; Ball 1994). While such developers used to be common in the process only after the neighbourhood had been ‘tamed’ (Zukin 1982; Ley 1996), they are now increasingly the first to orchestrate reinvestment. Third, effective resistance to gentrification has declined as the working class is continually displaced from the inner city, and as the most militant antigentrification groups of the 1980s morph into housing service providers. Fourth, and of most relevance to this paper, the state is now more involved in the process than the second-wave. The remainder of this paper focuses on the possible reasons for the latter change to gentrification. THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION After a curious departure from direct involvement in gentrification during the second-wave, the state has become more interventionist in the third-wave. There are several salient aspects to this history. First, the private market expansion of gentrification in most cities has generally exhausted itself. In classic first-wave THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION neighbourhoods, like Society Hill in Philadelphia and SoHo in New York City, the state (mostly at city and federal level) had a very direct role in organising and encouraging gentrification (Smith 1979; Zukin 1982). Innercity reinvestment was still very risky (during the 1960s), so land assembly, tax incentives, and property condemnation were all orchestrated by the state, as were more informal attempts to convince conservative lenders and patrician families to move to such neighbourhoods (Smith 1979). After initial footholds in neighbourhoods like Society Hill and SoHo, gentrification radiated outward without such a direct need for the state because inner-city real estate investment was becoming less risky. During the 1980s, a private-market gentrification congealed into a reinvested core close to the central business district (CBD) of many cities (Hackworth 2001). But after almost two decades of this type of expansion, most of the easily gentrified (i.e. high amenity, close to the CBD) neighbourhoods have already been fully reinvested. By necessity, gentrifiers and outside investors have begun to roam into economically risky neighbourhoods – e.g. mixed-use neighbourhoods, remote locations, protected parcels like public housing – which are difficult for individual gentrifiers to make profitable without state assistance. The privatemarket expansion of gentrification has generally exhausted itself; state assistance (or some other form of assistance) is increasingly necessary for the process to swallow ‘underdeveloped’ parcels further from the CBD. But the return of state intervention is more than the product of gentrification’s spatial expansion. It is also encouraged by the secular tendency away from the maintenance of mass consumption – Keynesian governance. While Keynesian governance was certainly on the ebb by the mid 1970s, it would be a mistake to conclude that it had summarily expired with the election of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. State attempts to encourage gentrification during the second-wave were still partially impeded by internal vestiges of the Keynesian state – in the USA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is the best example. By the late 1960s, social movements had forced the creation of the cabinet level housing agency (HUD), which, 469 in part, restricted the private market pursuits of local government by redirecting public funding to affordable housing. As Feldman and Florida (1990) note, the effect of this change in the USA was swift and prohibitory for pro-business local states. Removing public housing – long seen as anathema to gentrification – was, for example, made practically impossible by HUD, and affordable housing construction dramatically increased between 1968 and 1973. Though the Reagan and Thatcher administrations actively assaulted such regulatory obstacles during the 1980s, their work was only partially completed by the time both left office. The assault took the form of funding reductions for welfare and affordable housing, but more subtly it also encouraged nonKeynesian modes of local governance (Gaffikin & Warf 1993). The latter typically involved the encouragement of the ‘entrepreneurial local state’ (Harvey 1989b) through programmes that prodded the private market (‘enterprise zones’, for example) rather than direct subsidy. Direct intervention by the local state was, however, still constrained by agencies like HUD, which forced cities to address affordable housing issues if a gentrification plan was unveiled (Hackworth 2000). In the USA, many of these constraints were dissolved in 1994, with the swift devolution of much of the regulatory capacity (over the affordable housing sector) that was still nested in the federal state (Staeheli et al. 1997). HUD was disemboweled – ‘reinvented’ to use the euphemistic parlance used to justify it – and significantly restricted from offsetting gentrification at the local level. Their HOPE VI programme, for example, now allows municipal governments to remove public housing units for the purpose of redevelopment without one-for-one replacement (Wyly & Hammel 1999). The few remaining obstacles (within the federal state) to gentrification (which partially restricted state involvement in the second-wave) have largely been removed since the onset of the third-wave. Paralleling heightened deregulation in the third-wave is a reduction in federal redistribution to localities. With a decline in federal redistribution during the 1990s, some of the pressures that originally encouraged the for# 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 470 mation of the entrepreneurial local state (Molotch 1976; Harvey 1989b; Leitner 1990) have been ratcheted up even further. The imperative to generate tax dollars has, for example, become even more pressing for localities because federal funds are now more scarce. As such, many cities have embarked on a partnership with capital that exceeds even the pro-business 1980s (Smith 1999). Compounding the necessity to generate tax dollars is the need for cities to appear business friendly in order to maintain their credit rating (Gaffikin & Warf 1993, p. 78; Sassen 1996, pp. 15–16; Sinclair 1994). Ever since the well-publicised bankruptcies of several large cities in the 1970s (Tabb 1982; Lichten 1986), the lending community has become more demanding of municipalities to maintain a businesslike ledger sheet. Losing a good credit rating can be devastating for an urban regime that has leveraged the future of a given city on the redevelopment of its downtown or the gentrification of a given neighbourhood. With the decline in federal outlays to cities, the need to borrow funds for redevelopment has increased during the third-wave. In order to retain the fiscal viability necessary to keep receiving such loans, many cities have, more unabashedly than in the past, turned to the attraction and retention of the middle class to increase tax revenue (Varady & Raffel 1995). Altogether, the state shift towards a more openly supportive role in gentrification has helped facilitate a rapid expansion of the process during the third-wave. Yet while the larger reasons for this shift are common, its local articulation is more varied. Clinton – In Clinton, for example, the most notable shift in state involvement during the third-wave is the departure from Keynesian regulation, manifest through the Special Clinton District (SCD). The SCD was the result of community organising during the 1960s. It restricted the power of property owners to gentrify their holdings in the neighbourhood, and was enforced (somewhat effectively) by the city until the 1990s. The genesis of the Special Clinton District is embedded in the history of the Clinton Planning Council (CPC). The CPC was established in the mid 1960s to organise against # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG JASON HACKWORTH & NEIL SMITH urban renewal plans that were directed at the neighbourhood. In 1968, the CPC became prominent with its opposition of the newly written New York City Master Plan, which identified Clinton as the ideal location for several large renewal projects. The Plan called for the construction of 3,000 hotel rooms, 7.5 million square metres of office space, and 25,000 new apartments in the neighbourhood (Sclar 1993). Clinton residents felt that the plan would eventually lead to their displacement and began to organise through the CPC. By 1972, this opposition to development coalesced into the ‘Save Clinton Committee’, which wrote an alternative ‘People’s Plan’, and dedicated itself to the specific task of resisting the siting of a proposed convention centre in the neighbourhood (HKNA 1999; Sclar 1993). The opposition movement attracted the attention of Congresswoman Bella Abzug who pressured city leaders to explore other neighbourhoods for the proposed centre. In response to pressure from Abzug and others, City Planning Commissioner John Zuccotti proposed special district status for Clinton, so that residents could more effectively oppose the project. In November 1973, the proposal was formalised into a one-year interim special district for Clinton (Sclar 1993). The interim district emboldened popular support for the neighbourhood’s efforts so local elected officials began to warm to a more permanent designation. Shortly thereafter, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton took the bold step of conditioning his support of the convention centre on the establishment of a permanent district for the neighbourhood (Sclar 1993). In October 1974, the New York City Planning Commission, under increasing pressure, acquiesced, and voted to create a permanent special district for Clinton. The goals of the permanent Special Clinton District were fairly straightforward. The District was established to protect against widespread development that might displace existing residents. The goal was to maximise the number of affordable, family-sized units within the neighbourhood to counterbalance mounting development pressure. The most restrictive clause of the district designation prohibited demolition of any structurally THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION sound building and prohibited any alteration permit where a history of tenant harassment could be found. Harassment violations were determined by the HPD working in conjunction with the Clinton Neighborhood Preservation Office. If the proposed development took place at a site free of past tenant harassment, a certificate of non-harassment was issued by the HPD, and construction was permitted. Predominant focus was placed on a portion of the neighbourhood deemed ‘the preservation area’, where building heights were kept at no more than 19.8 metres (or seven stories, whichever was lower). Special variance permits could be sought for new construction, alteration, or demolition within the SCD, but only after a hearing with the city’s HPD. Yet while provisions were made for those wishing to build in the neighbourhood, most developers abhorred the District’s power. It created an obstacle that many felt was excessively punitive. In 1986, BACO Fifty-Fourth Street Corporation formalised this sentiment by suing the city and the neighbourhood preservation office for establishing an unconstitutional barrier to development (HKNA 1999). BACO argued that the SCD was unconstitutional because it shackled current builders to the harassment of past owners. Tenant harassment was tied geographically to a particular plot of land rather than to a given developer so there was no way for current owners to remediate the wrongs of the past. The clause was originally created because New York developers and landlords have a long-established record of shifting properties between one another to conceal ownership, thus making it difficult, if not impossible, to trace tenant abuse (Deutsche 1996). BACO argued that, regardless of its intent, the clause was unconstitutional because landlords were unable to ‘cure’ the harassment of previous owners. In 1987, a federal court judge partially agreed with the company by stating that while it is entirely constitutional for the neighbourhood to define the future of development, a ‘cure clause’ must be added to the existing SCD that would enable developers to ‘exonerate’ properties from harassment committed in the past (Dunlap 1989). More trouble for the SCD and its advocates came in 1990 when the New York State Senior 471 Citizen Foundation (NYSF) tried to build a retirement home in Clinton. The proposal violated the 19.8-metre height limit and the anti-demolition clause of the SCD and as such, deeply divided the community between those who wanted to protect the sanctity of the SCD and those who thought that senior citizen housing was too important to limit because of District regulations (Dunlap 1988; HKNA 2000). HPD eventually made an exception for this case but because developers would now have a legal precedent to resist the SCD, city officials were forced to modify the District’s regulations more generally. Later in 1990, the terms of the SCD were renegotiated by the City Planning Commission to accommodate the court order and the NYSF controversy (Sclar 1993). First, developers were given permission to ‘exonerate’ their properties in order to obtain a demolition or alteration permit if they agreed to devote 28% of their new structure to affordable housing units. Additionally, demolition of sound structures would be allowed if: a) the project was not eligible for subsidised rehabilitation funds; b) affordable housing was included in the overall project; and/or c) substantial preservation was required (over 20% of the residential floor area) to improve the structure (Sclar 1993). The ostensibly benign technical modifications to the SCD and the palpably less enthusiastic enforcement by the HPD (Gwertzmann 1997; Lobbia 1998) have been effective at lowering developer aversion to the neighbourhood. The local real estate press lauded the neighbourhood as one of the trendiest gentrifying districts in the city during the 1990s (Lobbia 1998; Cawley 1995; Deutsch 1996; Finotti 1995). As each of these reports have also pointed out, however, the previous ability of the SCD to retain affordable housing has slipped away. Much of this is because the new regulations are so hard to enforce, particularly determining whether 28% of the units are affordable. Community activists have also noted that HPD under the Giuliani Administration is much quicker to deliver a requested permit than earlier administrations (Gwertzmann 1997). Paraphrasing one longtime housing activist, reporter J. Lobbia (1998) explains, ‘the Department of Buildings readily gives permits to owners who, for a # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 472 number of reasons, should not have them, or allows those with permits to do construction and demolition work well beyond what the permit allows’ (p. 49). As housing becomes less affordable in Clinton, progressive neighbourhood activists are leaving, along with the working class residents whose housing is no longer protected (Gwertzmann 1997). As Bob Kalin, another long-time activist in the neighbourhood, explains, ‘There will always be an element of poor people in this community but it will be smaller and smaller and we [activists] will end up organizing in more and more buildings where the tenants have enough money to access attorneys’ (Gwertzmann 1997). Overall, the recent experience of Clinton provides a useful example of how the (few) internal (to the state) obstacles to gentrification during the second-wave have eroded to such a point as to be ineffectual during the third. The goal of state power to resist gentrification was partially achieved with the creation of the SCD. But within the context of political deregulation, devolution of the federal state, and growth of the reinvested core, pressures to gentrify Clinton intensified and percolated through the local state to dissolve the SCD. Removing the power of the SCD was crucial for gentrification to expand in Clinton, but the impetus and backing to do so have only recently coalesced. Long Island City – Recent state involvement with gentrification has also intensified in Long Island City, albeit in a form different than Clinton. Though local government has been trying to assist luxury residential development in LIC since the early 1980s, it is only since the onset of the third-wave that the political environment changed sufficiently for this activity to intensify without effective resistance. Banks have been squeamish about lending in Long Island City for many years, largely because it is a mixed-use neighbourhood, with many active warehouses, factories, and workingclass apartment buildings. Because so much of the neighbourhood is zoned commercial, property is expensive enough to all but rule out the involvement of small-scale gentrifiers, who tend to be more dependent on traditional forms of lending capital. The state # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG JASON HACKWORTH & NEIL SMITH holds a crucial role in offsetting the high risk that even corporate gentrifiers face when the ‘frontier’ diffuses into such (relatively) remote locales.1 The key piece of LIC’s state-facilitated gentrification is the Queens West Project – a massive plan to bring luxury residential, office and commercial space to the neighbourhood. After years of planning, the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA) unveiled a $2.3-billion plan in the mid 1980s, which called for the construction of 6,385 residential units, 600,000 square metres of office space, a 350-room hotel, 67,500 square metres of retail space, 12,000 square metres of community facility space, and offstreet parking for 5,331 cars (HPCC 1996; Port Authority 1999). The project was to be completed in three phases. Tipped off by public officials that the waterfront area of Hunter’s Point in Queens was being considered for redevelopment, William Zeckendorf Jr. and several other major developers, investment bankers and real estate brokers, began acquiring property in the neighbourhood (Moss 1990). The entry of major real estate capital into the neighbourhood, inspired a reinvestment in the housing market and emboldened City Hall to offer tax breaks to Queens West. The Koch Administration offered a 16-year tax abatement and $30 million in city money to assist the project (Moss 1990; Fainstein & Fainstein 1987). Despite such support, Queens West was still risky, but City Hall was unable or unwilling to ameliorate this risk by offering more. Other obstacles existed: community opposition to the project was beginning to coalesce by the early 1990s, and the residential portion of the project would need some form of mortgage insurance to become reality. Local opposition became an obstacle with the formation of the Hunter’s Point Community Coalition (HPCC) in 1990. The HPCC did not want the bulky project built in its neighbourhood without some guarantee that jobs and working-class residents (particularly the elderly) would be protected (HPCC 1996). Not long after the local opposition materialised, the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) entered the Queens West THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION development team (Moss 1990). The resultant behemoth (which already included the EDC and PA) was deemed ‘the Queens West Development Corporation’ (QWDC). The entry of the UDC substantially undermined the ability of the HPCC to resist the project and its impact. Originally established to site low-income housing complexes, the UDC has the power to override local opposition to development proposals (Gutfreund 1995). The UDC’s participation satisfied a crucial requirement for the completion of Queens West – a way to overcome neighbourhood opposition. By 1995, the QWDC had begun making formal plans for the first phase of the project which involved a small community park and the Citylights Building – a 42-storey, 522-unit apartment building. Though the building was slated as the project ‘loss leader’ (apartments were to be sold at under market value), the building was still viewed as a risky prospect (Passell 1996). Convincing banks to invest luxury housing dollars into Long Island City’s mixed-use landscape would require further state intervention – namely mortgage insurance. The needed support arrived in 1996 when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) awarded the Citylights builder, Manhattan Overlook (MO) Associates, mortgage insurance for the first residential structure (Passell 1996). Though the FHA was originally established to provide home loans for working-class buyers, it backed the mortgage here even though there was an openly stated goal to make the project semi-luxurious. FHA involvement was reportedly motivated by the ‘pioneer’ hyperbole that the local real estate press used to frame the project (Passell 1996). Said one FHA official, ‘One of the FHA’s primary roles is to help the pioneers’ (Passell 1996, p. 6). But given its long history of aversion to such projects, there are likely less capricious reasons for the Administration’s involvement. It is perhaps more usefully framed within the gradual reorientation of such agencies away from Keynesianism. Whatever the reason, the effect was unambiguous. After the insurance was in place, the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust provided the $85.6 million in mortgage capital to MO Associates and construction began (Passell 1996). Citylights was completed in 1997, and 473 though some relatively inexpensive units were set aside, the majority of its apartments now command luxury rents (Oser 1998). Though construction of the first Queens West building has not translated into an immediate gentrification of the surrounding neighbourhood, the intense effort of government (manifest through the QWDC) to actuate this goal provides a useful window into the nature of the stategentrification nexus in the third-wave. The involvement of the state as profit protector in this instance is not only part of a larger return of the state to gentrification in the third-wave but also evidence that this return is not limited to the local state. As gentrification moves further from the CBD, and becomes more risky for individual investors, the state becomes more necessary to rationalise the conditions for profit. During the second-wave (when the development process for Queens West began), the federal state was not as likely to guarantee mortgages for luxury housing, primarily because of Keynesian relics in the federal state which directed attention to affordable rental housing rather than risky attempts to bring affluent living to mixed-use neighbourhoods like LIC. The Queens West case also reveals how agencies of redistribution (like FHA and UDC) are being morphed into powerful progenitors of gentrification as their regulatory capacities get removed through state restructuring. DUMBO – Like Long Island City, DUMBO is a difficult neighbourhood to gentrify. The small loft district in northern Brooklyn is relatively isolated, zoned non-residential, and still home to competing industrial land users. As described earlier, the gentrification of DUMBO is being largely orchestrated by one real estate developer, David Walentas. But despite his power as a developer, he was until recently unable to begin implementing his plan for the neighbourhood. Walentas first purchased property in the neighbourhood – nine turn-of-the-century industrial loft buildings at a cost of $16.5 million – in 1982 (Dunlap 1998). His plan was to transform the neighbourhood into an upscale office and residential enclave. Shortly after purchasing the buildings, Walentas was tenta# 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 474 tively selected by the city – eager to bring some (any) productive activity to the derelict landscape – to redevelop the waterfront of DUMBO. Redeveloping it would be crucial if gentrification in DUMBO were to work, so Walentas was pleased with the nod from the city. But before he could even assemble a formal plan for the site, the city summarily removed Walentas after anti-abatement (and anti-Walentas) council member Ruth Messinger and deputy mayor Kenneth Lipper publicly objected to the support (Ennen 1999). The deputy mayor justified the removal by arguing that Walentas’ Two Trees Company had neither the experience nor the financing to pull off such an extravagant plan. To compound his difficulty, he also failed to procure the zoning concessions necessary to turn DUMBO into a residential enclave (Tierney 1997). Walentas had apparently failed the private-market litmus test that the local state often employed during the secondwave. Yet while Walentas encountered difficulty in garnering support for his original plan, he did receive important support of another form. In 1986, the state of New York agreed to move its Department of Labor into one of Walentas’ buildings for ten years (Ennen 1999). This provided him with the stability of a long-term renter and time to attract the necessary support from both City Hall and the lending community for his original plan. During the period 1987–97 (while the Department of Labor was present), Walentas focused on ‘taming’ the neighbourhood for the type of investors he was seeking. Primarily, he offered rent concessions to artists to relocate in DUMBO. By 1997, Walentas had successfully attracted three ground-floor art galleries and numerous working artists to his portion of the neighbourhood alone. DUMBO had not only been ‘tamed’ but it had actually become one of the city’s trendiest art enclaves by the mid 1990s (Trebay 1999). A yearly arts festival and several boosterish articles by the local press (for example, Dunlap 1998; Garbarine 1998) fuelled this perception and lowered investor reluctance. When the state’s labour department left the Clocktower Building in 1997, Walentas acted quickly to convert the structure into # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG JASON HACKWORTH & NEIL SMITH an up-scale residential apartment complex. In March of 1998, Two Trees was able to procure a construction loan – $30 million from the Emmes Asset Management Company – after being rejected by several (more traditional) commercial institutions (Garbarine 1998). He used the loan along with $3 million of his own money to convert the structure in just under one year. Demand for Clocktower units was astonishing. By May of 1999, all but one of the building’s 124 units had been sold or were under contract. Two Trees was even able to raise asking prices several times during the sales process (Ennen 1999). With demand proven, Two Trees is currently renovating several nearby loft buildings to create 1,000 more housing units. While Walentas has done much independently to gentrify DUMBO, his effort, power, and influence would have been insufficient without the support of the local state. In addition to finally receiving the zoning concessions necessary to convert the Clocktower Building, Walentas was re-appointed as developer of the nearby waterfront just as Clocktower units were coming on the market despite community opposition. The decision by the city played no small part in fuelling and stabilising demand for the luxury units, and for the larger project of gentrifying the neighbourhood. This case highlights yet another aspect of an interventionist state in gentrification. As large corporate developers become more involved in gentrification, the contours of the process begin to change. Such development actors are more able to hold their property until support from the lending community and state materialise. Walentas had difficulty in getting the state to support his project during the 1980s, but has found support at several levels during the third-wave. The state has made important zoning decisions and given him uncontested approval to redevelop the waterfront despite public opposition (Sengupta 1999; Finder 1999) and ambivalence from the lending community. By removing these obstacles, City Hall has removed much of the risk associated with gentrifying DUMBO, and to this extent has mirrored a larger shift towards increased state involvement in gentrification during the thirdwave. THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION CONCLUSION While heightened state involvement has very real consequences for localities, it is important to frame it within the broader shift that is fueling the third-wave of gentrification. This shift has translated into an expansion of reinvestment from pockets created during the first and second-waves. It has translated into larger, more corporate developers involved in the early stages of gentrification, and a palpable decline of community opposition. These changes are mutually reinforcing in complex ways and worthy of another paper in their own right. This paper is an attempt to understand only one aspect of this larger shift – namely how, in an environment of privatisation, the state has become more direct in its encouragement of gentrification. In each of the cases described above, the state was deeply implicated during both the second and third-wave of gentrification, but it was only in the latter context that such support overwhelmed community opposition, land-use obstacles, and Keynesian relics designed to offset the process. Though work remains to be done on how the restructuring state is affecting other aspects of capitalist urbanisation, it is evident at this point that a systemic change in the way that the state relates to capital is afoot. Note 1. Although only a kilometre (across the East River) from the most expensive neighbourhood in NYC (the Upper East Side of Manhattan), LIC is still considered ‘remote’ by the real estate community because it is in Queens. Acknowledgement The support of NSF Grant #: SBR-9724988 is gratefully acknowledged. REFERENCE BAGLI, C. (1991), ‘De-gentrification’ Can Hit When Boom Goes Bust. The New York Observer 5 August, p. 12. BALL, M. (1994), The 1980s Property Boom. Environment and Planning A: Urban and Regional Research 26, pp. 671–695. 475 BOURNE, L. (1993), The Demise of Gentrification? A Commentary and Prospective View. Urban Geography 14, pp. 95–107. CAUFIELD, J. (1994), City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. CAWLEY, J. (1995), New York Community Boiling Over Name Change. The Chicago Tribune 15 January, p. 17. COAKLEY, J. (1994), The Integration of Property and Financial Markets. 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VAN WEESEP, eds., Government and Housing: Developments in Seven Countries, pp. 31–46. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. FINDER, A. (1999), Long View From the Waterfront: Developer Has Pursued a Brooklyn Dream for 20 Years. New York Today 24 June. FINOTTI, J. (1995), Clinton: Hell’s Kitchen Recipe: A Tangy Diversity. The New York Times 9 April, Real Estate Section. GAFFIKIN, F. & B. WARF (1993), Urban Policy and the Post-Keynesian State in the United Kingdom and United State. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17(1), pp. 67–84. GARBARINE, R. (1998), A Neighborhood Called Dumbo Has High Hopes. The New York Times 7 August, p. 8. GUTFREUND, O. (1995), Urban Development Corporation. In: K. JACKSON, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York, pp. 1218–1219. New Haven: Yale University Press. # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 476 GWERTZMANN, M. (1997), Keeping the ’Kitchen’ In Clinton: Community Efforts to Resist Gentrification (unpublished report, www.hellskitchen.net). HACKWORTH, J. (2000), State Devolution, Urban Regimes, and the Production of Geographic Scale: The Case of New Brunswick, NJ. Urban Geography 21(5), pp. 450–458. HACKWORTH, J. (2001), Inner City Real Estate Investment, Gentrification, and Economic Recession in New York City. Environment and Planning A: Urban and Regional Research 33(5), pp. 863–880. HAMNETT, C. (1973), Improvement Grants as an Indicator of Gentrification in Inner London. Area 5, pp. 252–261. HARVEY, D. (1985), The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. HARVEY, D. (1989a), The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. HARVEY, D. (1989b), From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism. Geografiska Annaler 71, pp. 3–17. HKNA (1999), website: www.hellskitchen.net HPCC (1996), The View: Newsletter of the Hunter’s Point Community Coalition 3, p. 5. LEES, L. (2000), A Re-appraisal of Gentrification: Towards a ‘Geography of Gentrification’. Progress in Human Geography 24(3). LEITNER, H. (1990), Cities in Pursuit of Economic Growth: The Local State as Entrepreneur. Political Geography Quarterly 9, pp. 146–170. LEY, D. (1992), Gentrification in Recession: Social Change in Six Canadian Inner Cities: 1981–1986. Urban Geography 13(3), pp. 220–256. LEY, D. (1996), The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LICHTEN, E. (1986), Class, Power & Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. LOBBIA, J. (1998), Hell’s Kitchen is Burning. The Village Voice 8 September, pp. 47–51. LOGAN, J. (1993), Cycles and Trends in the Globalization of Real Estate. In: P. Knox, ed., The Restless Urban Landscape, pp. 33–55. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. MOLOTCH, H. (1976), The City as Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy Place. 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DEFILIPPIS (1999), The Reassertion of Economics: 1990s Gentrification in the Lower East Side. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23(4), pp. 638–653. STAEHELI, L., J. KODRAS & C. FLINT, eds. (1997), State Devolution in America: Implications for a Diverse Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. STERNLIEB, G. & J. HUGHES (1983), The Uncertain Future of the Central City. Urban Affairs Quarterly 18(4), pp. 455–472. TABB, W. (1982), The Long Default: New York City and The Urban Fiscal Crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press. THE CHANGING STATE OF GENTRIFICATION TIERNEY, J. (1997), Brooklyn Could Have Been a Contender. The New York Times Magazine 28 December, pp. 18–23, 37–38, 47–48. TREBAY, G. (1998), Out of the Garret: A New Study Examines the Economic Life of Artists. The Village Voice 21–27 October. VARADY, D. & J. RAFFEL (1995), Selling Cities: Attracting Homebuyers Through Schools and Housing Programs. Albany: State University of New York Press. WILLIAMS, P. (1976), The Role of Institutions in the Inner-London Housing Market: The Case of 477 Islington. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 3, pp. 23–34. WYLY, E. & D. HAMMEL (1999), Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Urban Policy and Resurgence of Gentrification. CUPR Working Paper. ZUKIN, S. (1982), Loft Living: Culture And Capital In Urban Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ZUKIN, S. (1987), Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core. American Review of Sociology 13, pp. 129–147. # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG CHAPTER FIVE CHINATOWN: UNPROTECTED AND UNDONE SAMUEL STEIN 122 05 Chapter F.indd 122 1 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out! 8/22/16 9:00 AM For years, the immigrant and working-class neighborhood of Chinatown was able to resist gentrification, even as all nearby downtown neighborhoods turned into segregated citadels for the rich and the white. Today, in large part due to zoning actions taken by the city in 2008 and 2011, Chinatown is in the midst of a swift and severe transformation into yet another exclusive enclave. First, a contextual “downzoning” that limited development in the neighboring affluent East Village, absent zoning protections for Chinatown, pushed development pressures further into Chinatown. The subsequent rezoning of a large parcel of public land for large-scale, high-end development was a missed opportunity to create low-income housing to help mitigate displacement, and instead created opportunities for new luxury units that bolster speculation in surrounding areas. Luxury development, rent deregulation, condo conversion, and tenement demolition have all increased significantly since these rezonings, resulting in declining Asian and Latino populations. Attempts to create a community plan that would push back against these trends have so far been rebuffed by the de Blasio administration, which is moving forward with similar rezoning actions, despite evidence of their racially discriminatory impact. The city’s refusal to take corrective action amounts to intentional discrimination against current residents and those who would be expected to reside in Chinatown if corrective fair housing measures were undertaken by the city. HISTORY AND CONTEXT Chinatown and the Lower East Side have long been home to new immigrants and working-class communities. Chinatown is an economic and cultural hub for Chinese and other Asian communities that, over the past century and a half, has developed a complex and evolving network of migration, finance, employment, and land ownership, which, though far from ideal, has provided housing and jobs for generations of immigrants (Kwong 1996). A recent report found that the neighborhood has 116,722 residents living in 2,118 buildings (AALDEF, 2013). According to According to 2013 American Community Survey data—figures that likely undercount immigrants—the racial composition of Community District 3 is 45 percent Asian, 19 percent white, 26 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent black. While the median income for the metro area is $64,786, the median income in Chinatown and the Lower East Side is just $37,996, and on several Chinatown blocks average income is closer to $16,000. Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 123 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 123 8/22/16 9:00 AM The average structure is a five-story tenement with stores on the ground floor. Most of these buildings were built in the 19th and early 20th centuries during one of the Lower East Side’s immigration-driven population booms. Its far eastern edge is home to some of the city’s first public housing projects, including Smith, LaGuardia, and Baruch Houses, as well as Confucius Plaza, a 762-unit Mitchell-Lama cooperative complex. For nearly a century, New York City government and real estate interests have viewed Chinatown and the Lower East Side as opportunities for growth and development. Located in the heart of lower Manhattan, south of Midtown, and near the towers of Wall Street and the iconic East River bridges, these neighborhoods have been subject to one scheme after another aimed at spurring high-end construction and dispersing its population of working-class people of color (Lin 1998). One of the first such schemes was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a 1929 plan for an elevated highway that would have carried 120,000 cars per day from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. Cutting through Canal, Broome, and Delancey streets, it also would have displaced at least 2,000 families and 800 businesses employing 10,000 people. Over the years, the plan was supported by powerful city interests, including Robert Moses, the influential Regional Plan Association, Governor Rockefeller, and a group of finance and real estate interests known as the Lower Manhattan Association. Opposition, however, was furious and 05.A Neighborhood Map: Chinatown—Manhattan Community District 3 Eas t 14 th S tre et Sara Bow er y D. R oos eve lt P ark Tompkins Square Park East Village Lower East Side Seward Park Chinatown B Br roo id kl ge yn 124 05 Chapter F.indd 124 UR / Urban Research FDR Drive 0 .15 .3 .6 Miles Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM sustained, bringing together Chinatown community leaders with famed activist Jane Jacobs and her Greenwich Village allies (Flint 2009). The plan was eventually shelved, but the impulse to “redevelop” Chinatown lived on. Many of the same public officials and business groups later came up with a Title 1 Urban Renewal proposal called “China Village.” Declaring the neighborhood “one of the worst slums in New York,” the State Housing Division proposed demolishing fifteen acres of Chinatown and replacing it with eight high-rise housing projects and an Orientalist tourist market (as quoted in Umbach and Wishnoff 2008, 220). In the face of opposition from Chinatown residents and dwindling finances, the plan was vastly scaled down, and resulted in a much smaller urban renewal action. In 1981, the Department of City Planning (DCP) proposed a Special Manhattan Bridge District for Chinatown’s east side. The plan would have encouraged the construction of private high-rise condominiums at prices very few Chinatown residents could afford. Several community organizations resisted the plan and sued the city; the most significant lawsuit, Chinese Staff and Workers Association v. City of New York, argued that environmental impact reviews must evaluate the secondary economic impacts of private development, including indirect displacement.2 The judge sided with the community, and the rezoning plan was halted. 2008 AND 2011 REZONINGS AND DISPARATE RACIAL IMPACTS By the early 2000s, years of rising land values and rents had brought significant new, often out-of-scale residential and commercial development to the East Village, Lower East Side, and parts of Chinatown. After years of advocacy for preservation measures by residents and Community Board 3, in 2008 DCP proposed to rezone 111 blocks of the East Village and Lower East Side. The plan called for contextual rezoning and height limits to “preserve the established neighborhood scale and character” as well as increased residential density. In the final iteration of the plan, DCP stated that the city would also provide incentives for affordable housing.3 DCP presented a plan for balanced growth throughout the Lower East Side and Chinatown; however, the downzoning covered the more affluent East Village and the whitest blocks of the Lower East Side. At the same time, the proposed upzoning included a number of blocks with a high proportion of Asians, Latinos, and blacks, including Avenue D and Chrystie Street. DCP followed its longstanding policy of mixing preservation with new development, with the assent of the community board. The city’s rezoning Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 125 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 125 8/22/16 9:00 AM 05.B East Village-Lower East Side Rezoning, 2008 Community District 3 East Village Village View Co-op Str ee t Ave nu eD Ch Sar r ystie a D Str . Ro ee ose t velt Par k E. Ho ust on Tompkins Square Park Rezoning Area Chinatown 0 .04 .08 .16 .24 .32 Miles Downzoned Residential (Contexual) Upzoned Residential Upzoned Commercial New York City Department of City Planning, NYC GIS Zoning Features, December 2015. 126 05 Chapter F.indd 126 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM was sold to the community as a way to preserve the East Village’s low-tomid-rise residential character, and drive development towards its widest corridors. The upzoned area included a voluntary inclusionary zoning program, through which participating developers could receive a floor area bonus and/or tax benefit in exchange for allotting 20 percent of units as income-targeted. There were a number of problems with this plan. The proposed inclusionary housing, for example, would create only a small number of income-targeted rental and condo apartments, and even those would be far too expensive for most neighborhood residents. Qualifying income ranges for the proposed housing were typically $43,000 to $61,500; the median income within the rezoning’s boundaries was just over $25,600 (Angotti and Ervin 2008). This was bound to have a disparate racial outcome, as white incomes in the district greatly exceeded those of Asians, Latinos, and blacks. The biggest problem with the plan, however, was what it excluded. Despite shared concerns over unmitigated development and displacement, most of Chinatown and the Lower East Side’s least gentrified blocks were excluded in the contextual rezoning. Median household incomes for census tracts inside the rezoning’s boundaries ranged as high as $51,413. Meanwhile, all of the community board’s poorest census tracts, with median incomes as low as $11,963, were left out of the proposal. The plan left out the Lower East Side and East Village’s racially diverse waterfront, and did nothing to protect public housing residents.4 Though whites made up just 29 percent of Community District 3, 73 percent of the white population was covered by the Bloomberg administration’s proposal. And while Asians, Latinos, and blacks made up a broad majority of the population, just 37 percent of the area’s Hispanics and 23 percent of its Asian populations were covered by this protective zoning.5 Most of Chinatown and the Lower East Side’s least gentrified blocks were excluded in the contextual rezoning. Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 127 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 127 8/22/16 9:00 AM At public events and in communication with the press, community members argued that the city’s proposal was part of a plan to divert development into low-income communities of color. Josephine Lee, an organizer with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA), told a reporter: It’s really blatantly racist, the way they drew their boundaries. The rezoning plan is not so much to protect the East Village as it is to displace the communities of people of color within and around it (Tucker 2008). Wing Lam, founder of the CSWA, asked rhetorically: How can you put a plan like that on the Chinese? Only white [people] like low buildings and sunlight and Chinese don’t like low buildings and sunlight? (Anderson et al. 2008). CSWA and other groups ultimately sued the city, arguing that its Environmental Impact Statement significantly underrepresented the plan’s potential displacement of Chinatown’s working-class people of color. In the course of the debates over the rezoning plan, many also questioned why public housing, home to many Asian, Latino and black residents, was excluded from the rezoning. The zoning on these sites had been established decades ago, when gentrification and public housing seemed incompatible. In public forums, some falsely claimed that NYCHA, which was established under state legislation, was exempt from zoning rules. In the end, public housing residents were not included in conversations and plans for the future of their neighborhood. Public housing residents were not included in conversations and plans for the future of their neighborhood. The community board responded to these concerns with enormous hostility. They refused to provide key information to opponents of the plan. The board denied entry to Chinese and Latino members of the public, even when meetings were not full to capacity; at one point, a community board member even shouted at the crowd to “be quiet and stop your Chinese rebellion” (Li 2010). After a series of blistering hearings, Community Board 3 voted to 128 05 Chapter F.indd 128 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM 05.C Division Street. Photo: Sarah Friedland, 2016. approve the rezoning. In response to the community outcry, the board also recommended that the city introduce programs to address harassment and eviction of rent regulated tenants, monitor and attempt to halt demolition of existing buildings in the district, and identify publicly owned sites for affordable housing. When the plan moved on through the land use review process to the City Planning Commission, however, all of these recommendations were dropped, and the commission voted to approve the plan as written (Xu 2013). By the time the plan made it to the city council, it was virtually assured a victory. Alan Gerson, the city council member who represented the bulk of Chinatown, called Wing Lam, director of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, and asked for his blessing to vote for the rezoning. A no vote, Gerson argued, would be a useless protest. Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 129 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 129 8/22/16 9:00 AM When Lam refused to accept this compromise, Gerson offered funding for anti-eviction support work. This suggests that public officials understood that the East Village/Lower East Side rezoning would result in displacement in Chinatown, yet proceeded to support it. On November 19, 2008, the city council voted unanimously to approve the rezoning. During the public review process, proponents of the rezoning claimed that the plan was too far along to modify. City officials were also firm and sought to placate the opposition with promises that they would support a future rezoning of Chinatown. The city bulldozed ahead. THE 2011 SEWARD PARK MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT AND REZONING The 2008 rezoning affected most of the Lower East Side but excluded one significant area: 20 acres of largely vacant land known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, or SPURA. In 1967, as part of the federal urban renewal program, the city demolished 14 blocks of “blighted” housing and displaced 966 Puerto Rican families, 762 white families, 193 black families, and 178 Chinese families. Eighty percent of them were low-income households (Turner 1984). The city promised to create new housing in place of the “slums” it bulldozed, but instead SPURA languished for decades. The site includes a few isolated public or subsidized housing projects, but the original promise of large-scale low-income housing was never realized. Most of the lots have been used as parking or were fenced off and left vacant. Over the years there have been both city-led and community-driven proposals to redevelop the site, but they were repeatedly quashed in racially charged political battles. For decades, residents of nearby Cooperative Village, a complex built by and for garment workers — 97.6 percent of whom were white — fought with Chinese, Puerto Rican, and black activists over the site’s future (Turner 1984). White leaders, including the long-term New York State Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver, lobbied and maneuvered to ensure that no low-income housing was built on the cleared SPURA land, largely as a way to preserve their enclave and protect their positions of power. Meanwhile, organizations led by and representing working-class people of color fought for public and subsidized housing on the site. They were often promised parcels that were never delivered. The struggle simmered and raged on and off for over 40 years (Buettner 2014). 130 05 Chapter F.indd 130 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM For decades, residents of nearby Cooperative Village, a complex built by and for garment workers—97.6 percent of whom were white—fought with Chinese, Puerto Rican, and black activists over the site’s future. After the 2008 East Village/Lower East Side rezoning, the city was finally ready to take action on SPURA. Mayor Bloomberg, in concert with Speaker Silver, insisted that any new residential construction on the site be largely “market-rate,” with some percentage carved out for lower income tenants. Groups like CSWA and NMASS (National Mobilization Against Sweatshops) rejected this framework. In order to fight the tide of gentrification, and to right the wrongs of the 1967 demolition and displacement, they demanded that this rare tract of publicly owned land be used entirely for low-income housing. The city moved forward with planning and negotiations, often excluding these organizations. In 2011, the city’s plan for SPURA was adopted: about 1,000 apartments would be built, of which 20 percent would be low-income, 20 percent middle-income, and 10 percent senior housing. In their guidelines for development, the city insisted that “the mixed-income character of the neighborhood must be reflected in the development plan for the sites.” However, the final plan represents less a picture of Chinatown’s current diversity than a model of its gentrified future. At market rates, 500 of the new apartments would be affordable to less than 1 percent of current Community District 3 residents. Monthly rents in the “affordable” units would be no more than 30 percent of net household income, as per federal and city standards, for those who meet income qualifications. A unit can be considered “affordable” even if it serves persons earning far above the city median income, which is far higher than the neighborhood median income. Thus, among the 500 income-targeted units, at projected rents, 100 units at $3,000 per month would be affordable to only 14 percent of the population in the area; 100 apartments at $2,500 a month would be affordable to 17 percent of the population; and Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 131 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 131 8/22/16 9:00 AM 300 apartments at $1,000 per month would be affordable to a slim majority (53 percent) of neighborhood residents. In this vision of a mixed-income neighborhood, less than 1 percent of the population gets half of the housing, half of the apartments go to middle- and upper-middle-income residents, and low wage earners—47 percent of the existing population—cannot afford to live there at all (Chou and Miranda 2011).6 In 2015, Sheldon Silver, whose shadow hovered over the site for 40 years, was convicted of massive fraud (unrelated to the project) and forced to resign from the New York State Assembly. In this vision of a mixed-income neighborhood, half of the apartments go to middle- and upper-middle-income residents, and low wage earners—47 percent of the existing population—cannot afford to live there at all. THE IMPACT OF THE REZONINGS: DISPLACEMENT AND LOSS OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING In 2008 and 2011, when the city’s zoning actions took place, Chinatown was already experiencing gentrification pressures, felt most intensely by the neighborhood’s Chinese and Latino communities. Since then, the displacement has only persisted and grown. Between 2008 and 2011, nearly 6,000 existing and newly developed neighborhood apartments became unaffordable to households making middle-class wages.7 In 2010, median rents for newcomers to the neighborhood were $1,762, a third higher than the citywide figure.8 By 2014, 132 05 Chapter F.indd 132 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM 05.D The Coalition to Protect Chinatown and The Lower East Side and its supporters march to City Hall demanding passage of the Chinatown Working Group community plan. Photo: Samuel Stein, 2016. median asking rents had reached $3,000 a month (Furman Center 2014). Much of this change is due to the deregulation of rent-stabilized apartments, which are disappearing through both legal inaction and illegal transformations at a rapid rate. The prospect of rising rents, according to then-Democratic District Leader Paul Newell, “gives [landords] the incentive to have short-term residents—to flip people in-and-out” who pay more and are less likely to challenge deteriorating conditions (Barbino 2011). This, in turn, encourages landlords to harass long-term or low rent paying residents. As one community organizer told reporters in 2011: “Pretty much every day we have someone coming to us with a new story of a landlord harassing them” (Barbino 2011). As rents rose, income disparities expanded. Average incomes for whites in the neighborhood took off from $35,504 in 2000 to $58,265 in 2010. Meanwhile, wages did not keep up for people of color. Average incomes for Asian Chinatown residents actually decreased between 2000 and 2010, from $31,368 to $29,524. One-third of Asians in Chinatown live below the poverty line. Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 133 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 133 8/22/16 9:00 AM 05E Loss of Latino, Asian, and Black Populations, Growth of White Population in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, 2000-2010 Absolute Change in Number of Residents 6,000 19% 4,000 2,000 0 -2% -2,000 -4,000 -11% -6,000 -11% -6% -8,000 Total Population White Black Asian Hispanic/Latino Demographic *Percentages represent the percent change in number of residents within a demographic between 2000 and 2010. Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Chinatown Then and Now: Gentrification in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 2013, p.29 www.aaldef.org/ Between 2000 and 2010, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the number of residents of color drastically declined, with a loss of 6,707 Asian residents, 3,823 Latinos, and 131 black residents, while the white population increased by 3,785 residents. This widespread gentrification and displacement of people of color is directly linked to the city’s zoning actions: when landowners find that rezoning has increased the potential value of their land, they typically sell the property for upscale redevelopment, or employ legal and illegal tactics to remove low-income tenants and charge higher rents. If Chinatown had been included in the rezoning with zoning designations that protected existing buildings, the pressures of gentrification and displacement could have been minimized. 134 05 Chapter F.indd 134 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM 05.F A new hotel in Chinatown built after the 2008 rezoning. Photo: Sarah Friedland, 2016. NEW LUXURY DEVELOPMENT In the absence of zoning protections, Chinatown has experienced a rash of new upscale construction. A 2008 survey found 26 new luxury buildings in Chinatown; since then dozens more have been built (CAAAV 2008). These new buildings are easily identifiable: on the whole, they are taller and wider than most Chinatown buildings, they lack affordable retail spaces, and they tend to feature sheets of reflective glass or protruding balconies. Chinatown realtors are not shy about the people they are looking to attract. One agent marketing 123 Baxter, a new luxury building that claims to be in “SoHo South,” told a real estate newspaper she was looking for tenants who are “young and come from a lot of money” (Weiman 2007). The same realtor told The New York Times that their target was people “who want luxury but want to stay under the radar and who think SoHo is too trendy already—I think trust-fund babies with ripped jeans is the profile we’re looking at” (Toy 2006). Hotels are also rising throughout Chinatown. They are typically discouraged in residential neighborhoods, but permitted under Chinatown’s zoning. On blocks zoned for manufacturing, hotels can be built as of right. Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 135 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 135 8/22/16 9:00 AM Now that Chinatown is no longer a garment-manufacturing hub, many of the spaces that once housed sweatshops are being converted into luxury hotels or demolished for new hotel construction (Kwong and Stein 2015). These properties include: •  At 54 Canal Street, DLJ RE Capital Partners, an investment firm with developments in the US and China, is working on a 140-room conversion. •  On 154 Madison, a new Comfort Inn squeezed into a slender lot. •  On 185 Bowery, Brack Capital, a Dutch real estate conglomerate with properties around the world, is opening “CitizenM Downtown,” a new 300-room hotel that is larger than its Times Square counterpart. •  At 50 Bowery, Alex Chu of Eastbank is demolishing the old Silver Palace restaurant, site of one of the longest and most militant labor strikes in Chinatown’s history, and building a 22-story hotel. These developments will do nothing for Chinatown’s existing population, and will only advance the neighborhood’s transformation into a tourist attraction along the lines of the 1950s “China Village” plan. 05.G Development in Chinatown. Photo: Sarah Friedland, 2016. 136 05 Chapter F.indd 136 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM ADDING INSULT TO INJURY: THE EXTELL BUILDING One of the most alarming new developments is a proposed 80-story, 800unit super luxury apartment building along the waterfront in Chinatown. Until recently, it was the site of a 24-hour Pathmark, the only accessible supermarket for the neighborhood’s low-income population. On March 15, 2013, Extell Development Company purchased the land for over $103 million. Since Pathmark had 30 years left on its lease, Extell also bought out their lease for an additional $46 million, bringing the total acquisition price to just under $150 million. The new building will feature such absurdist amenities as a golf simulator room, a dog spa, and a cigar room, and is designed as a virtual gated community. The developer, however, is financing their project with public money (including Low Income Housing Tax Credits and 421-a tax abatements), and is building a separate, smaller, lower quality building with below-market rents. The plan is to build a 13-story, 205-apartment structure next to the high-rise, for families making up to 60 percent of New York’s Area Median Income. A qualifying family of four could earn up to $51,540 (Litvak 2014) while the median income for that particular census block is just $20,450 (Pratt Center for Community Development et al. 2013). This segregated development will exclude people of color and low-income families currently living in the area, while also creating secondary displacement pressures by fueling rising rents and land prices. DISPLACEMENT OF PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS Luxury development has also been proposed on the neighborhood’s public housing campuses, which were also excluded from 2008’s contextual rezoning. Smith, LaGuardia, and Baruch houses were chosen as potential development sites in a 2013 proposal for infill development at eight Manhattan public housing projects. The new buildings would be placed either on parking lots or on land now used for parks and playgrounds. At Smith Houses, plans were released for one 50-story luxury building (with 20 percent “affordable” housing), which would tower 33 stories over the current buildings, and two 35-story buildings, including one on top of the project’s baseball field (Smith 2013). Smith resident leader Aixa Torres told reporters: “They’re going to literally squeeze my residents like they’re roaches and they’re going to build this huge beautiful complex” (Smith 2013). Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 137 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 137 8/22/16 9:00 AM While Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s infill proposal was defeated by resident organizing, NYCHA (the New York City Housing Authority) has sold and leased property for private development on a piecemeal basis throughout the city, and is planning a new iteration of the large-scale infill plan. Since 2013, NYCHA has sold 54 plots (441 square feet) to private developers (Smith 2015). In 2015, Mayor de Blasio proposed the “NextGeneration” plan for NYCHA; activists were quick to dub it “NextGentrification” (Pinto 2015). The plan’s centerpiece was a proposal to lease large amounts of NYCHA land to private developers, who would build 7,500 new units of housing at 50 percent market rate and 50 percent “affordable,” though even these income levels would be significantly higher than public housing averages (Nahmias 2015). The plan also included steps towards privatizing select developments and increasing rent collection levels, with the implied threat of evictions for non-payment (Navarro 2015). Many fear that these actions, undeterred by zoning changes, are creating a pathway to privatization and laying claim to one of the last guarantees of affordable housing for low-income people of color in Chinatown and beyond. EXACERBATING INEQUALITIES By restricting development in the more affluent East Village and pushing development demand further into Chinatown, and by rezoning SPURA to stimulate high-end construction, the city’s land use policies have increased displacement pressures on the Asian, Latino, and black populations of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The real-life impacts of displacement go far beyond losing one’s home. Many tenants face constant landlord harassment, rising rents, and deteriorating conditions. Residents of aging tenement buildings frequently confront landlord negligence, often a form of harassment, that results in leaks and mold, chipping paint and plaster, vermin infestations, and more serious structural deterioration. Many of these low-income tenants are paying upwards of 50 percent of their incomes to live in such hazardous and inhumane conditions, often while facing housing court battles and off-therecord conflicts. Most recently, in May 2015, Chinatown tenants brought these issues to light in a protest of a local slumlord. Tenants and activists described living conditions: rats [are] all over the place coming out from the holes. [Tenants] have to knock on the door to make the rats leave before they can even enter their own bathroom (Airoldi 2015). 138 05 Chapter F.indd 138 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM One resident has to hold an umbrella when she uses the restroom to protect herself from leaks. As David Tieu of the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops stated: A lot of luxury development has been pushed into our community […] and it encourages landlords […] to use these slumlord tactics to push out long-time residents (Airoldi 2015). A 2010 tenant lawsuit claimed that landlord harassment tactics included: disrupting three tenant meetings by calling the police; rejecting rent payments; frivolously pursuing legal eviction proceedings; suspending essential services for a prolonged period of time; and ordering tenants to remove Chinese cultural symbols and decorations from their doors (Lee 2009). Residential and commercial displacement is particularly impactful in immigrant communities, where locally run businesses and organizations serve particular linguistic and cultural needs. These losses of community and culture are both emotional and practical. As Chinatown and the Lower East Side’s Asian and Latino residents, stores, and cultural centers are displaced by new development and rising rents, those who are able to stay lose local resources and are increasingly isolated. As their communities shrink, they are increasingly underrepresented and underserved. Residential and commercial displacement is particularly impactful in immigrant communities, where locally run businesses and organizations serve particular linguistic and cultural needs. Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 139 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 139 8/22/16 9:00 AM THE COMMUNITY PLAN FOR CHINATOWN: HOW THE CITY DESTROYED THE EQUITABLE ALTERNATIVE One way to curb displacement and segregation is to engage in and implement genuine community planning, which can manage development and protect existing residents and businesses. After Chinatown was excluded from the 2008 rezoning, the three community boards that contain pieces of Chinatown—Manhattan’s community boards 1, 2, and 3—came together with over 40 neighborhood organizations to form the Chinatown Working Group, a body tasked with creating a planning and zoning document that would help shape Chinatown’s future. Rather than creating a formal 197-a plan, a slow and cumbersome process that ends in a legally non-binding plan, the Chinatown Working Group aimed to build internal consensus, then hire an outside consultant to turn their ideas into a formal rezoning proposal. In consultation with DCP and other agencies, planners from the Pratt Institute developed a formal plan, which included a special zoning district, strict anti-eviction and anti-harassment provisions, a very targeted 05.H The Plan for Chinatown and Surrounding Areas: Preserving Affordability and Authenticity 140 05 Chapter F.indd 140 UR / Urban Research Zoned Out 8/22/16 9:00 AM and comparatively affordable inclusionary zoning program, restrictions on big box stores and hotels, and more allowances for light manufacturing in character with the neighborhood’s existing economic activity. As the plan was being approved by Community Board 3, however, DCP Director Carl Weisbrod sent a letter to the board, informing them that they had no intention to approve the Chinatown Working Group’s plan. Calling it too ambitious, they offered to consider the portions of the plan that emphasized development over preservation (Litvak 2015). This suggests that the problems of racially unequal zoning practices were not limited to the Bloomberg administration, but constitute a pattern and practice of discriminatory planning policies, deeply imbedded in city government. In response, Chinatown and Lower East Side residents and workers have been protesting the mayor and his planning priorities at the Extell development site, at city hall, at Gracie Mansion, and at real estate banquets. With their own community plan in hand, Chinatown activists are demanding an end to racist rezonings, and the beginning of a new era of community planning. Endnotes 1. The author would like to thank Wendy Chang, Kai Wen Yang, Gui Yang, Wing Lam (Chinese Staff and Workers Association), and David Tieu (National Mobilization Against Sweatshops) for all their input and guidance, and recognize Peter Kwong for his many years of mentorship and insightful analysis. 2.  Chinese Staff and Workers Association et al., Appellants, v. City of New York et al., Respondents. Court of Appeals of the State of New York. Decided November 18, 1986. 68 N.Y.2d 359 (1986). 3. “East Village/Lower East Side - Approved! Overview,” Department of City Planning, accessed January 23, 2016, http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/evles/index.shtml. 4. For more on the exclusion of most public housing from the 2008 rezoning, see Martinez 2010, 143–145. 5. Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side (2008), Bloomberg’s Racist Rezoning, accessed May 4, 2014. http://protectchinatownandles.org/english/DCP_plan.html#affordable. 6. These calculations assume the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s standard guidelines for affordability. 7. During this period, Manhattan’s Community District 3 (which includes most of Chinatown and the Lower East Side) saw 5,890 apartments become unaffordable to households making under 80 percent of Area Median Income (ANHD 2013). 8. In 2010, New York City’s median monthly rent was $1,184 (Furman Center 2011). Stein 05 Chapter F.indd 141 Chinatown: Unprotected and Undone 141 8/22/16 9:00 AM
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Running Head: GENTRIFICATION AND HOUSING

Gentrification and Housing
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GENTRIFICATION AND HOUSING

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Gentrification and Housing
Gentrification involves revamping an area in order to attract a wealthier class of people.
Rezoning involves changing permissions related to how land is used in a particular area of
jurisdiction. The mega towers in lower east side are as a resu...


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