Barnard-Columbia Urban Review Spring 2021 Issue 1

BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW

Spring 2021 Issue | Volume 1

Spring Issue | Volume 1

Contents Letter From the Associate Director of Urban Studies Letter From the Founder Letter From the Editor-in Chief

Articles 15

The Argentine Gaucho: Outlaw to Emblem

Ava Goldwyn

23 Vend Game: the Evolution of Street Food

in New York City and Its Contribution to Urban Identity Meredith Harris 33

RADicalizing Public Housing Amid Federal Retrenchment: Assessing the Effectiveness of the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) on Public Housing in Chicago and New York City

Kavya Tewari

71 The Ascension of Universities as Anchor

Institutions and the Threat of Gentrification: Evaluating Columbia University’s

Manhattanville Project Brianna Sturkey

Letter from the Associate Director of Urban Studies I am privileged, honored, and thrilled to be able to welcome you to the inaugural issue of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Review. The review is an entirely student-driven project that reflects the energy, interest, and dedication of our majors to the study of a wide range of urban issues and their commitment to sharing that interest – and the research it inspires – with the broader intellectual community.

The empty offices of the Urban Studies Program’s suite on Barnard’s campus remain full of the research of decades of Urban Studies majors – literally full, gigantic filing cabinets of years upon years of senior theses.

These serve as sources of inspiration (and sometimes intimidation) to our potential and current majors, but until recently have only been accessible to those who could visit our space in person. The efforts of our department administrator, Valerie Coates, supported by student workers, have put the abstracts of all of those theses online, meaning that decades of student research have a new life in their availability to anyone who can find their way to our website.

The Barnard Columbia Urban Review is the necessary next step and a tremendous leap forward. Urban Studies majors create new knowledge about the urban world that belongs in analysis and policy discussions and as the basis for further research. The opportunity to publish that work here is the opportunity to realize that potential impact. Moreover, the process of reviewing and selecting work to publish will open new channels of communication within and beyond the program, the college, and the university.

Many thanks to the students involved for their leadership in creating the journal and congratulations to them on this accomplishment and to you for finding your way to this remarkable outlet.

Sincerely, Aaron Passell Associate Director | Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program

Letter from the Founder Dear Reader, Thank you for picking up this copy of the BCUR, whether online or physically. It is with great joy that we present to you the result of a year’s long work, a year no one expected. In this volume, you will find a study

by Ava Goldwyn delving into what makes a national cultural icon, and the ramifications of what it means to be a Gaucho in Argentina. After this strong start, we have another piece on identity, but this time Meredith Harris takes a delicious twist to her analyses in breaking down the carbohydrates that fuel the city that never sleeps, New York. Kavya Tewari has submitted her senior thesis, an eye-opening analysis of rent assistance in both Chicago and New York, cities where the gap between market price and rent-assisted price is steadily growing. Lastly, but most certainly not least, Brianna Sturkey’s thesis represents what I founded the BCUR to do. She takes a candid and detailed look into the Manhattanville Project by Columbia University and asks whether Columbia has been a responsible anchor institution to the residents of the community surrounding us.

I remember walking past students on Barnard’s campus sometime early in February 2020. After working at the Columbia Economic Review for two years, my goal became to start a journal that urban studies majors could call their own. Things were going well, meetings had a decent number of interested attendees, Prof. Passell fully supported the club, and we had designs to hold our first event: a screening of the film “The Small Social Life of Public Spaces.” Then, everything changed.

We were sent home, meetings stalled, and our events would need to be held over Zoom henceforth. Growing up as part of Gen Z, I suppose we are in the mindset of “these things happen,” and we move onward with our lives as best we can. So, we did, accomplishing much in the year of the lockdown. We had a conversation with professional nurses about their experiences leading up to this moment, and how their lives changed because of it. In collaboration with urban student groups from around the country, the Exploring Urbanism event series connected prospective urbanists to the options available postgraduation. Recordings of these events are hosted on our Columbia website, the link of which is on the back of this volume. Now, dear reader, you hold a volume that represents the the first step in the time of many, many capable young leaders who will be at the forefront of urban development, research, and life.

BCUR was founded for three reasons. First,because urban students needed a support network of peers, as our field of study is relatively new, and many do not fully understand what they should do once they graduate.

Second, with graduation in mind, so that urban students may have a space to try their best at leading projects, with both Barnard’s and Columbia’s support, and to learn from their mistakes without the same consequences of post-college life. Third, to give new life to the original research that many urban students conduct, extending their reach beyond their professor’s bin.

In addition to these three principles, there is a fourth that I hope remains present in everyone’s mind at the BCUR: to hold Columbia University in the City of New York accountable for their actions that affect the people living in the city of New York. As Sturkey put so excellently, we all have a right to the city.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible, including Prof. Passell and Prof. Chazkel. Thank you to everyone who will keep making this possible; to the future BCUR leadership teams as well as its staff and contributors. Thank you, reader, for making this volume worth it.

Enjoy, Gabriel Multedo Founder | Columbia College, ‘21

Letter from the Editor I am honored to present the first issue of the Barnard/Columbia Urban Review. In my time within the Urban Studies department, I have been constantly impressed by the original research conducted by my peers.

It has been my pleasure to read the submissions we have received over the past year and to work with some of their authors. All of the BCUR staff have worked hard to do justice to this level of scholarship and to give it the platform it deserves.

The issue begins with Ava Goldwyn’s fascinating historical analysis of the gaucho, an outlaw figure of 19th century Argentina. Goldwyn describes the dramatic shift in the gaucho’s role from an early enemy of the colonial order to a hero of the newly independent state. She explores the paradoxical nature of the gaucho’s later role in both supporting nativism and uniting the urban immigrant poor. Next, Meredith Harris gives a passionate and joyful history of New York City street food. Harris’s case studies of three beloved foods remind us importantly of immigrants’ roles in their form and popularity. Harris also makes a compelling argument about the precarious nature of this street food’s accessibility.

Moving into questions of housing justice, Kavya Tewari assesses a new and unique element of public housing agencies in New York and Chicago. Both cities have attempted to use public-private cooperation, allowing their housing authorities to access private funding. Tewari both critiques this solution and provides constructive and thoughtful suggestions for the future of these partnerships. Finally, Brianna Sturkey brings us home to Columbia as she uncovers the vast landholdings that our university has amassed in Manhattanville. By viewing Columbia as a gentrifier that raises rents and displaces lower-income residents, Sturkey adds to the critical literature on “anchor institutions.” Sturkey’s integration of Columbia Daily Spectator articles may remind us once again of the value of student research and investigation, which this journal seeks to uplift.

We owe the first issue of BCUR to the culmination of many people’s efforts: the authors, the staff and board of the journal, and the faculty of the Urban Studies program, including our advisor, Professor Passell. The first year of BCUR’s existence has overlapped almost entirely with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the release of this issue in the midst of such a tragic and stressful period is a testament to the incredible determination of everyone involved. Additionally, as I write this letter, the Graduate Workers of Columbia and their allies are negotiating with the University for basic rights like a living wage and neutral, third-party arbitration in harassment cases. Much of the research in this journal has been supported by the feedback and assistance of graduate TAs in Urban Studies classes. Additionally, as an undergraduate research journal, the BCUR supports the work of undergraduate research

and teaching assistants who will benefit from a fair contract with the University. In this and future issues, we strive to support fair and equitable treatment of all researchers at Barnard and Columbia as we showcase the products of their labor.

Finally, thank you for reading this issue. We welcome your feedback and participation, and we thank you for joining us on the beginning of BCUR’s journey.

Sincerely, Madeline Liberman Editor-in-Chief | Barnard College, ‘23

The Argentine Gaucho: Outlaw to Emblem Ava Goldwyn Columbia College, Columbia University The gaucho is a national symbol of Argentina. A skilled horseman who roamed the pampas, the vast, fertile lands of provincial Argentina, the gaucho is a historical, near mythic, figure, who came to fame in popular culture during the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century sources document gauchos as little more than outlaws who resisted colonial order.

However, by the 1870s, the connotation of the gaucho was beginning to undergo significant changes. This paper seeks to understand how the gaucho shed his outlaw identity to be mobilized by the government to fabricate a national identity. By contextualizing this pastoral figure within the history of urban crime and policing in Buenos Aires, we will see how the gaucho appealed not only to the nativist movement, but also, paradoxically, to the urban immigrant poor. This duality propelled the gaucho to the status of national emblem. As a tool of the state, the gaucho served as a protagonist in the new history of Argentina, which was used to indoctrinate and subjugate a largely immigrant population.

Before their ascent to the rank of legend, the gauchos were “rough riding cattlemen” who subverted colonial order and attracted the contempt of elites living in Buenos Aires (Rodriguez 18). Gauchos are often described as a South American version of the cowboy — a type of ranch worker associated with the western United States. Such comparisons minimize the distinctly nefarious heritage of the gaucho, who emerged in Argentina in the seventeenth century. Before the advent of formal industry in Argentina, European businessmen developed trade routes throughout the countryside, exporting the local resources to Europe. The gauchos, along with caudillos, or local strongmen, operated their own illicit trade that often disrupted European trade routes. Later, in the early nineteenth century, the gauchos trafficked livestock and leather, relying on their deeper knowledge of the land and ability to travel more widely (Fradkin 113). Refusing to adopt the colonial currency, the gauchos dealt in the older system of rayas, a complex system of weights and measures brought to Argentina by early Spanish traders. The rayas system enabled the gauchos to falsify the value of their goods (Slatta 356). The pervasiveness of this practice preoccupied colonial authorities. In 1865, the colonial government instructed provincial officials to inspect scales at local pulperías, saloons frequented by the gauchos that doubled as pawnshops, and fine offenders harshly: “Short weights or

Ava Goldwyn

measures could bring a fine of two thousand pesos” (Ibid). In addition to their economic crimes, gauchos were also known for their indulgence in vices at the pulperías such as heavy drinking and fraternization with prostitutes (355). In the eyes of the colonial government, the rough, illiterate gauchos were “barbarians” who threatened colonial progress (Fradkin 113). Their nomadic and lawless ways directly obstructed the regulation of provincial lands. For example, in the province outside Buenos Aires and around the Río de la Plata, the gauchos interfered with efforts by wealthy European traders to privatize the land (Fradkin 112). By the late nineteenth century, criminologist Antonio Dellepiane formally declared that the gauchos were criminals. In 1892, Dellepiane published the book La causas del delito, or The Causes of Crime, in which he condemned the gauchos as the principal actors in rural violence due to their “banditry, gambling, and drunkenness” (Rodriguez 55). This characterization was not unfounded. Gauchos were frequently involved in violent crimes against European immigrants, who had settled in La Pampa. Richard Slatta describes several particularly gruesome escapades of gaucho bands in 1872: ...the nativistic mob [of gauchos] killed the clerks, William Gibson Smith, and his wife, Elena Brown Smith, both in their mid-twenties, and William Sterling, another employee. Further on, the xenophobes struck the unfortunate Basque family of pulpero Juan Chapar and murdered him, his wife, two daughters aged four and five, and a five-month old son. All had their throats slit (Slatta 356).

Such narratives demonstrate that some gauchos were criminals in the crudest sense. However, while this anti-immigrant violence legitimized Europeans’ fears at the time, it foreshadows the appeal of gaucho in the twentieth century.

The 1870s were critical years in the transformation of the gaucho from outlaw to national emblem. In an effort to stimulate the ‘civilization’ of rural areas, the young Argentine state encouraged the immigration of Europeans — a continuation of Spanish colonial policy. The plan did not anticipate that most newcomers would settle in Buenos Aires rather than exploring the pampas. Immigration outpaced expectations and the city’s resources. Welder and Johnson document that “from 1883 to 1890 the tenement population increased from 35 percent per structure to 42” (Welder 362). Crowding persisted until World War I, when almost a fourth of the urban population lived in unsanitary conventillos, or tenements (Ibid).

As Buenos Aires swelled throughout the end of the nineteenth century, the state continued to centralize and set in motion efforts to modernize its police force. Over the course of two decades, the government suspended civilian policing, established formal police schools, and granted the police new institutional powers: “In 1880, the capital police had an annual budget 16

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of 113,990 pesos; by 1902, the budget was over 5.5 million pesos” (Rodriguez 142). This rapid professionalization of the police in Buenos Aires is a metric for the state’s consolidation.

In light of overcrowded living and working conditions, local media began to report increasing rates of crime in Buenos Aires. The police, in line with the state’s capitalist preoccupations, adopted new classifications of criminality. Immigrants and their ‘socialist’ ways were identified as the most imposing threat to law and order in the quickly industrializing state. Around the turn of the century, immigrants, as poor urban laborers, became increasingly involved in union movements; from only ten or so strikes a year from 1885 to 1901, Buenos Aires saw roughly 300 strikes in the year 1910 (Welder 366). Although this outburst of strikes affirmed the importance of the police to many, select newspapers began to report the excessive violence used against strikers; after all, by 1914, nearly 49% of the city’s population had immigrant status (362). La Vanguardia (The Vanguard) reported that “thieves are treated with more consideration by the police” than striking workers, who were classified as “dangerous enemies of social order” (Rodriguez 143). Tension, thus, arose between the young state and its laboring class. The law and the police began to criminalize anti-capitalist activities. The fear of the urban poor on the part of the state is best captured by the words of the Argentine official and author, Belisario J. Montero: The law should intervene energetically against the parasite [i.e., vagrants and beggars] that systematically refuse to obey the natural law of work, especially since their conduct, generally depraved, constitutes a true focal point of moral infection for the people with whom they are in contact (Rodriguez 131).

In the growing xenophobia and class tension, it seems that hostility towards the remaining rural gauchos and the police’s interest in monitoring their activities were all but forgotten. The sheer number of gauchos in the pampas had been steadily declining since the end of the nineteenth century. Slatta writes that “the old days of unclaimed, unfenced rangelands and vast herds of wild cattle and horses when nature’s bounty belonged to all equally for the taking has disappeared. A new ethic of private property, contracts, and accounting ledgers ruled the pampa” (Slatta 357). Although the fencing off of private lands had fatally crippled nomadic life, epic novels about gauchos were just beginning to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century. The reality of the gaucho was dissolving into a mythic history.

In 1879, Eduardo Gutierrez published Juan Moreira, the story of a gaucho threatened by civil and military authorities who goes to great lengths to protect his friends and values; the novel was such a success that it might be considered the Don Quixote of Argentine literature, from Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 17

Ava Goldwyn

which the author drew some inspiration (Cara-Walker 41). Gutierrez’s text does not shy away from Moreira’s violent and criminal lifestyle: “Crime is the great driving force of the narrative, be it crime against Moreira or crimes he commits. Crime was one of the text’s features that kept readers coming back to see how Moreira’s fate would play out, how well he could exact justice, albeit through killing, or how criminal actions of authorities would end Moreira’s plight” (Gutierrez xxxii). Caimari notes that many late nineteenth-century authors read police documents to write gaucho literature after Gutierrez (Caimari 42). In this way, Literatura Gauchesca was a predecessor of the crime fiction genre that became world-famous in the early twentieth century.

As the gaucho permeated popular literature, the state adopted him as a hero in the new history of Argentina. The state saw history as a way to construct a coherent national identity in the face of so many immigrants.

Starting in 1888, school children spent “six hours every week studying Argentine history, three times the previous amount” (Rodriguez 221).

By the twentieth century, the nationalistic curriculum had expanded to include lessons taught exclusively in Spanish and, in addition to a national history class, a new class about the ‘national culture’, which pivoted around the romanticized figure of the gaucho (Ibid). The twentieth-century, state-wielded gaucho was a masculine ideal, a man of the land and of the nation’s purest roots. Leopolodo Lugones, a prominent Argentine author, once described the gaucho as the “hero and the civilizer of the pampas” (Rodriguez 222). This flattering transformation of the gaucho overtly ignored his criminal history and bestowed on the gaucho an indigenous identity. In fact, most gauchos were mixed-race and quite a few had Jewish immigrant heritage (18). The government, helped by emerging novels, rewrote the gaucho’s identity to align with its nationalist aims.

We must pause to wonder why the Argentine government plucked the gaucho out of history. As mentioned earlier, gauchos often worked in cooperation with local caudillos, another influential rural figure. Why were caudillos not similarly awarded a heroic legacy? In his 1904 research on the origins of crime in Argentina, the government official and physician Lucas Ayarragaray wrote that “Argentine anarchy” was derived from a history of rural violence perpetrated by caudillos, natives, and gauchos. Ayarragaray’s research concluded that caudillo was the worst sort; he was a combination of “...the passivity and duplicity [of ] the native [and] the sullen nature and violent humor of the degenerate gaucho” (19). Unlike the native, the gaucho was also more white-presenting. While we should classify Ayarragaray’s work as pseudo-science, he does outline the hierarchy that existed between these rural figures, from which the gaucho emerged the superior.

The gauchos also gained favor in the eyes of the nativist state through their participation in the War of Independence in the 1810s and the Argentine 18

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Civil Wars (Fradkin 109). Despite countless novels celebrating the rugged individualism of the gaucho, he was routinely exploited as a skilled, but poor and uneducated, nomadic worker. Richard Slatta writes: Landowners required seasonal ranch workers to round up, brand, castrate, and herd their livestock. Civil authorities needed the subjugated gaucho as an obedient voter to support official candidates in rigged elections.

Military officers wanted the skilled cavalrymen to fight in foreign and civil wars and particularly to defend the property of the landed elite against Indian incursions on the long, vulnerable frontier. Pulperos needed the gaucho to gather illicit goods (and suffer the gravest risks) that provided the profitable goods for contraband trade (Slatta 361).

History had already demonstrated that the gaucho was a malleable figure.

The gaucho’s involvement in formative military campaigns certainly appealed to twentieth-century officials intent upon constructing a national spirit. Further, the gaucho’s exploration of the pampas could easily be romanticized to encourage urban dwellers to leave the overcrowded and unsanitary city. In these respects, the gaucho was the perfect tool to inspire loyalty to the Argentine state.

What is more difficult to understand is how the government reconciled its concern for industry and labor with the gaucho’s well documented anti-capitalist activities. By the twentieth century, the principal preoccupation of police had become immigrants who sought to disrupt industrialization. The gaucho was intended to motivate citizens, in particular children, to respect and support their nation. Paradoxically, the gaucho’s resistance to capitalism and industry, both of which were in their nascence in Argentina by the end of the gaucho’s history, was a critical feature in the government’s successful mobilization of this figure. To become a national symbol, the gaucho had to appeal to the government as much as to the urban, laboring public. The gaucho’s distance from contemporary society, represented as he was in the world of the pampas and employed in rural labors, reduced his threat to twentieth-century policing efforts that targeted urban labor. At the same time, the urban immigrant poor were able to identify with this landless, working-class figure, who survived by the skin of his teeth. For instance, urban dwellers who suffered from price gouging by property owners in Buenos Aires could relate to famous gauchos from the Literatura Gauchesca, who frequently had to outsmart corrupt landowners in the pampas (Welder 362).

The government’s success in indoctrinating immigrants into Argentine culture depended on their identification with the gaucho’s problems and distrust of the law. The effective integration of the Argentine gaucho into immigrant culture is best demonstrated by the adoption of gaucho traditions by Argentine Italians. In Buenos Aires alone, Italian Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 19

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immigrants opened more than 50 small clubs, where people performed gaucho music, read gaucho stories, and drank mate, the gaucho’s preferred beverage (Cara-Walker 50). Although the narratives appealed to immigrants, the larger messages in gaucho literature were reflective of the state’s strong anti-immigrant sentiment. Cara-Walker describes the impact of secondary characters like Cocoliche, who “as the [gaucho,] mocked the immigrants’ language and behavior, and as the [Italian,] celebrated Argentine culture and tradition, leaving foreigners no alternative but to want to become ‘native’” (Cara-Walker 43). Gaucho stories offered an escape from hard urban life and, therefore, provided a digestible way for the government to disseminate nativist messages.

As a mythic figure, the rural gaucho was used to cultivate nationalist values that, in turn, strengthened the authority of the centralizing Argentine government. The masses were receptive to this government-wielded figure, because, on the surface, he did not have any ties to the modern state or its much-distrusted police force. The gaucho’s public persona was relatable and emulatable. We also noted that the crime formula for Literatura Gauchesca was influential in captivating and subjugating the public. To expand this idea further, we may draw parallels between Literatura Gauchesca and the true crime narratives that appeared weekly in newspapers like Tribuna, Caras y Caretas, and La Patria Argentina throughout the early twentieth century. Both genres used contemporary police reports to make their stories more appealing to readers. Caimari writes, with reference to crime stories in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, that newspaper coverage of urban crimes exposed the inefficiency of the police, becoming an outlet for the public to express their frustrations. Ultimately, however, crime-based narratives led to the public demanding more policing, as the stories made crime appear pervasive and relentless (Caimari 71). Literatura Gauchesca, even though it was more epic and historic in framing than true crime, might also be seen as galvanizing public support for state policing. Gaucho narratives suggest that crime was rampant in the days before organized police, thus legitimizing the expansion of the police and central government in the twentieth century. In this way, even the popular gaucho mythology written by citizens unwittingly affirmed the nationalist agenda. The nineteenthcentury gaucho and his outlaw history are exemplary of how the past can be mobilized to create conviction in the future of the modern nation-state.

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Works Cited

Caimari, Lila, Lisa Ubelaker Andrade, and Richard Shindell. “Languages of Crime.” In While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires before Perón, 41-72. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017.

Cara-Walker, Ana. “Cocoliche: The Art of Assimilation and Dissimulation among Italians and Argentines.” Latin American Research Review 22, no. 3, 1987, p. 37-67.

Fradkin, Raúl O., and Jacques Poloni-Simard. “Centaures De La Pampa Le Gaucho, Entre L’histoire Et Le Mythe.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 58, no. 1, 2003, p. 109-33.

Gutierrez, Eduardo, John Charles. Chasteen, and William Garrett Jr. Acree.

The Gaucho Juan Moreira: True Crime in Nineteenth-Century Argentina.

Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2014.

Kirk Black Welder, Julia and Lyman L. Johnson. “Changing Criminal Patterns in Buenos Aires, 1890 to 1914.” Journal of Latin American Studies 14, no. 2, 1982, p. 359-79. Accessed May 10, 2020.

Rodríguez, Julia. Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Slatta, Richard W. “Pulperías and Contraband Capitalism in NineteenthCentury Buenos Aires Province.” The Americas 38, no. 3, 1982, p. 347-62.

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Vend Game: the Evolution of Street Food in New York City and Its Contribution to Urban Identity Meredith Harris Barnard College, Columbia University While there are many foods named after cities, there are not many cities nicknamed after food. The “Big Apple” toponym may refer to the fruit of a tree, but New York City’s culinary identity is famed for the food that bears its streets. Throughout time, the quintessential New York slice, bagel, and hot dog have become as synonymous with New York City as Broadway or a yellow taxi cab. The iconography of New York City’s delicacies emerged through their accessibility, convenience, affordability, and taste. Today, street food serves as a symbol of an experience that unifies the city, whether its consumption takes place on the street or not.

Street food as a category encapsulates almost every cuisine. The category localizes and publicizes the taste of so many cultures; its inclusive nature is also visualized in its diverse customer base. Street food transforms concrete landscapes into interactive spaces, and its ability to congregate both people and cuisines contributes to the concentration and value of the urban environment. In New York City, where restaurant rents are high and permanency is rare, street food creates and maintains an authentic cultural experience for the everyday New Yorker and tourist. Street food has played an inextricable role in New York City’s culinary history, and its ability to break cultural boundaries has led it to flourish as an industry.

Street food functions as a private good in a public space, which subjects its sale to comply with the bureaucratic complexities of urban governance. Unlike restaurants, the space that street food claims is not entirely its own. How street food addresses government regulations may shape its survival. And its response to trends, such as food halls and food festivals, may shape its reputation. Additionally, vendors are often immigrants; starting, maintaining, and expanding operations can prove more difficult in comparison to establishments owned by native-born citizens. Further, as street food is being taken off the street, its ability to foster inclusivity is shifting. Understanding the history of street food in New York City can help one analyze the role that it plays in the urban experience.

And analyzing street food’s trajectory in terms of accessibility can guide one to consider how it should function in the future.

Street food’s disruption of form and content makes it a unique facet of New York City life. Transforming the categorization of a meal, handheld street food can deliver the same satiation as a dish that requires a fork and knife. Street food appears simple and unassuming, yet the flavors street food delivers can match up to a meal double or triple its price. Three of

Meredith Harris

the most classic New York City street foods are pizza, bagels, and hot dogs.

Each of these dishes have become ubiquitous on the streets due to their portability, accessibility, and authenticity. Their perfection within New York City has set an unattainable standard for their production or procurement elsewhere. These are the foods that draw crowds; in an era where food delivery and reservation apps are the norm, many New Yorkers will forever be willing to wait 30 minutes for a bagel on a Sunday morning.

Arguably now more American than Italian, pizza has become one of New York’s most iconic foods to the extent that it has characterized its own genre: the New York slice. Popular among New Yorkers and subway rodents alike, the city has pizza tours, pizza making classes, and controversial ranking lists. While other cities, such as Chicago and Detroit, have their own versions, it is universally known that no other city can come close to beating the New York slice. Many popular pizzerias, such as Joe’s, do not provide seating, almost encouraging consumption on the street. Despite the lack of pizza carts or trucks, the universality of pizza’s outdoor consumption allows it to fall under the street food category. The New York slice of today was made largely in part by Italian immigrant Frank Mastro’s invention of a gasfueled deck oven in the 1930s, which can maintain its temperature despite a constant opening and closing of the oven door (Wilson). Built and sold on the Bowery, Mastro’s pizza ovens enabled pizza pies to be sold by the slice. This pie-to-slice transformation quickened a serving’s cook time, and enabled it to be reheated and sold after glistening on a tray in a display case.

Korsha Wilson of The New York Times writes, “There is no culinary experience that New Yorkers share more widely and more unanimously than the slice joint.” However, the recent popularity of the neapolitan pie in a “personal” size has increased the stakes of the pie in terms of quality and price. When looking at the dollar slice model next to the $14 neapolitan from a “pizza truck,” one may question where the identity of pizza will turn next.

Another carbohydrate worshipped by New Yorkers is the bagel.

New York bagels are often thought to be better because of the water, but this is a popular misconception; while the softer Catskills water does contribute to their excellence, New York bagels are considered to be the best because they are proofed, or cooled, and then boiled (Godoy). While 24

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bagels originated from Jewish bakeries in Poland, the famous holed-rolls arrived in New York during the mass immigration of Eastern European Jews in the late 1800s (Constant). Bagels became popularized throughout the city in the 1960s by institutions such as Zabar’s and Russ & Daughters. Up until then, the bagel was largely unheard of outside of Jewish communities.

As bagels spread throughout the city, they quickly became popular across the country, like many other New York trademarks (Rothstein). While people may wait upwards of 30 minutes to get Ess-a-Bagel on a Sunday morning, they aren’t waiting for seats, which are quite limited at the institution.

Like pizza, most bagel places have very limited, if any, seating areas, again emphasizing their consumption outside. It is indisputable that New York City has the best bagels, and this accomplishment has been part of what makes the city great.

Finally, the story of the hot dog is a key part of New York City history.

From Sabrett carts, to Nathan’s, to Katz’s, to Gray’s Papaya, the history of the hot dog originates on the street. Hot dogs first entered New York in the 1860s on a push cart on the Bowery by a German immigrant selling them with milk rolls and sauerkraut (NHDSC). Their popularization came in 1871, when German butcher Charles Feltman started selling them at a stand on Coney Island (Solares). However, when employee Nathan Handwerker opened his own Coney Island stand in 1916, selling the delicacy for five cents apiece, he started a revolution (Martha G). Hot dogs, like bagels, soon became popular across the country. Nathan’s characterized hot dogs as a symbol for Yankee democracy, and they have grown to represent not only the city, but the United States at large (Gannon). The Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating contest on July 4th is an annual New York City tradition, and hot dogs can be eaten every day and anywhere as carts line the city’s streets. Simply put, New York hot dogs cannot be topped, unless with mustard, ketchup, and sauerkraut.

The histories of these delicacies demonstrate how many of the foods that have become icons of New York were introduced by immigrants.

Immigrants have played an inextricable role in the success of New York City’s street food scene. In most other countries, street food consists of the local cuisine. However, in New York City, street food is comprised of dishes that are iconically New York, as well as ones that are authentic to different places, serving as an important reminder of the city’s diverse population.

New York City street food can transport individuals to another place at an affordable cost, while simultaneously making them feel at home within the city.

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The vehicle in which street food is sold is just as important as the food itself, as it enables its portability and convenience. Beginning in the 1800s with the migration of Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants, push carts enabled the city’s first sales of food outside of a restaurant. A 1927 Department of Public Markets report notes that the first NYC push carts appeared on Hester Street in 1866 (Gannon). At the end of the 19th century, vendors called “Owls” thrived, catering to late-night eaters between 7:30pm to 4:30am after restaurants closed for the night. By 1900, about 2,500 openair vendors (predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants) were selling delicacies from knishes to Kosher dill pickles. While the success of street food grew in the 20th century, like many other things, its growth was largely unregulated and led to corruption and a decline in quality.

Today, street food regulation is more organized but quite complicated. Attaining a vending license is increasingly difficult and “politically problematic;” the complexity of starting the street-food-selling process is driving the entity exclusionary (Imbruce 31). In consideration of space, the city caps its permits at around four thousand, plus an additional one thousand over the summer months. Similar to taxi medallions, obtaining a permit is an expensive and corrupt process, as permits can be bought, sold, or rented from existing permit owners that often inflate the price. This has led to many street vendors working illegally, often incurring fines. In 2003, Mayor Bloomberg signed an executive order preventing agencies from asking the immigration status of permit applicants. While this has helped the city’s undocumented immigrants, the waiting list for a permit is over twenty-five years long, and getting on the list in the first place is a difficult task in itself.

The appropriation of the street as a place for cultural expression enables street food to function as a staple in the “sidewalk ballet” of New York City (Jacobs). Yet, as the democratization of street food is seeming to slowly vanish, the street food landscape is drastically changing. In “Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love,” Julian Agyeman writes about the operation of gourmet food trucks run predominantly by white people. He illustrates how food trucks can figuratively and literally serve as a vehicle for social justice, yet how the opportunities that the food service industry provides to showcase multicultural cuisines are dwindling at the hands of permits and regulation (Agyeman 8). Agyeman writes, “the trends associated with food trucks— hybrid and fusion cuisine, interest in food sourcing, the gourmetifying of street food—all reflect postmodernism’s messiness, its mixing of high and low culture and its challenge to traditional and corporate hegemony” (9). Food trucks have become an opportunity to build a brand that can attract investors, yet the trucks themselves have a minimum upfront cost of $35,000 and require the installation of ovens and other cookware 26

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features (61). Thus, as street food has moved from the stall to the truck, it has become a high-class endeavor. As the wheels have gotten bigger from the push cart to the food truck, so have the stakes of the operation. If food truck operators want to maintain their businesses, their prices may have to increase, and the audience that they cater to may also have to change. The glorification of this urban practice mirrors gentrification. As street food has become popularized, the audience that is able to afford it is also changing.

If the street workers that vendors originally intended to serve can no longer afford the food options surrounding them, how will public urban life remain diverse and inclusive?

The growing popularization of street food has some benefits.

The Vendy Awards, which recognize street vendors and food trucks, has become a platform to highlight smaller vendors and has created street food celebrities within the larger food scene. A Zagat category for street vendors has emerged, and the US Chamber of Commerce reported that food carts became a $2.7 billion industry as of 2017. Marketing via food trucks has also become a popular business tactic, and the attention that street food is receiving has increased the legitimacy of the industry. But what started this shift? Take a look at the original food-bearing vehicle--the ice cream truck. While the ice cream truck might not have had its origins in New York, its evolution and form within the city have shifted because of its vendors. Mister Softee and Good Humor trucks still roam the streets, but two New York street food stories come from two brands that started out as ice cream trucks: Big Gay Ice Cream and Van Leeuwen’s. The specialty ice cream trucks both had humble beginnings, yet by appealing to millennials with artisanal flavors and unique branding, they soon turned their trucks into storefronts with product lines available at Whole Foods. Most locations of the two companies’ storefronts today contain minimal seating space, requiring people to mainly eat standing up; this detail denotes one of the only elements left from the original outdoor concept. Paying $6 for a small cone has become the norm thanks to eateries like these. As street foods like ice cream go gourmet, their resemblance to traditional, accessible New York street food diminishes.

While some street food sensations have become their own restaurants, the latest cultural phenomenon for street food has been the commercialization of its concept sans the street. Urbanspace, a company that boasts both indoor and outdoor urban food spaces, has capitalized on the fascination surrounding street food. Their markets provide opportunities for vendors large and small to showcase their elevated, experimental street food creations. Yet, the implications of Urbanspace moving street food off the street, and their privatization of public areas such as Madison Square Park to become “public” food spaces, has changed the dynamic of actual urban spaces and who can access them. Although Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 27

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their outdoor markets lack enclosures, their vendors’ prices create invisible boundaries. Many Urbanspace vendors have established their brands and consumer bases; while their concept is a celebration of street food, their business models have changed the fundamental basis of what street food once was. As established restaurants, such as Ippudo and Roberta’s, open their own outposts within Urbanspaces, the premise of who is cultivating the street food model may endanger the category for good. However, the food hall concept is not new. David Gannon reports how, “using federal funds, [former Mayor] LaGuardia opened the Essex Street Market in 1940 as a place for street vendors to do business in a more orderly fashion” (Gannon).

Thus, LaGuardia’s decision to develop three indoor markets, each holding about 500 vendors, changed the vending landscape for good. Essex Street Market vendors were the first to receive supervision, and the amount of street peddlers as a result of the Market decreased from 15,000 to 1,200 between 1934 and 1945 (Agyeman 27). Essex Street Market soon became a fixture in the street food landscape of New York City. Although the food was moved indoors, the community that the market’s vendors created amongst its customers and each other drove its success. Essex Street Market closed its doors after 78 years on May 5, 2019 for the development of Hudson Yards-esque Essex Crossing. The Market reopened across the street as a fixture within a new mega-development, and its identity will surely shift as a result. As the luxury development will draw a much different crowd than the current Lower East Side community, the Market will never be the same. The redefinition of street food is inevitable, however, ensuring its affordability and inclusivity for all types of cuisines and patrons will be key to its long-term success.

Recent gourmet creations have transformed street food’s definition from a category to a cuisine and have increased its privatization. As I walked into Urbanspace @ 570, one of their food hall locations on 51st and Lexington, the myriad of options piqued my curiosity. Offerings were served on paper plates or in checkered boats, and the seventeen carefully curated vendors captured the complexity of the city’s identity through options ranging from Japanese tacos to personal wood-fired pizzas. Unlike typical street food, however, the dishes are extravagant and the prices aren’t cheap.

The only Halal food in sight was at a cart across the street. The Midtown crowd that the food hall draws likely isn’t interested in eating their food outdoors; these customers might have once instead populated a casual, sit-down restaurant. The multi-level space that functions alongside office buildings ultimately excludes more than includes, as the private nature of the space eliminates the opportunity for widespread consumption. As street food has become its own cuisine, its rise and evolution in New York City has transformed its original intention. Since the popularization of street food has led to its commercialization, its role in the New York experience 28

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has begun to shift.

The immigrant-introduced pizza, bagel, and hot dog are not going anywhere, but the redefinition of street food in New York City is affecting not only the category’s culture, but its role in urban space and identity. If immigrants no longer have access to the street food scene due to permits or regulations, how will the vending industry evolve? Street food celebrates immigrants and marginalized people, yet these are the communities that are not benefiting from its commercial success. Street food and food trucks have the potential to help underserved populations in need of alternative food networks. Shortening food supply chains through food trucks can provide economic opportunity and support local public health by combating dependencies on fast-food restaurants. The implications for full-service restaurants must also be noted; as food halls and gourmet street-food vendors serve as a fast-casual middle-ground between food carts and full-service restaurants, the sales of sit-down restaurants are negatively impacted. Momofuku Chef David Chang commented at the New York Times’ 2017 Cities of Tomorrow Conference, “You’re gonna see the mom and pop restaurant in New York City not vanish completely, but it’s gonna be way more difficult” (Tuder). Democratizing street food and supporting local restaurants will be imperative to securing an equitable future of dining and eating authentically in New York City.

New York City serves as a stage for a vast array of cuisines, and this performative element must not be ignored. In a city filled with landmark establishments, can vendors survive? Or must a physical building exist in order to ensure a legacy? What happens when “activity of passers-by” is eliminated from the street food equation, and can it be reconciled despite the popularization of enclosed street food spaces (de Certeau)? Is the consolidation of culture within these street food spaces a good or bad thing, and is the price elevation of these cuisines negatively affecting both its customer base and authenticity? Answering all of these questions is not an easy task, but their implications must be considered. In order for street food to continue to be a facet of urban identity, long-term inclusivity of the category must be ensured. Street food has the potential to do good for society; it’s all about whether it’s prepared and presented correctly.

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Works Cited

“Dachshunds, Dog Wagons and Other Important Elements of Hot Dog History” National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. https://www.hotdog.org/culture/hot-dog-history Agyeman, Julian. et al. Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice : From Loncheras to Lobsta Love. MIT Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/ detailaction?docID=5043427.

Constant, Evyania. “NYC Fun Facts: The History of the NYC Bagel.” Untapped Cities. September 6, 2017. https://untappedcities.com/2017/09/06/ nyc-fun-facts-the-history-of-the-nyc-bagel/ Certeau, Michel de, and Steven Rendall. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1988.

Gannon, Devin. “From oysters to falafel: The complete history of street vending in NYC”. 6sqft. August 10, 2017. https://www.6sqft.com/from-oysters-to-falafel-the-completehistory-of-street-vending-in-nyc/ Godoy, Maria. “Chew On This: The Science Of Great NYC Bagels (It’s Not The Water).” NPR. May 21, 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/21/405190434/ chew-on-this-the-science-of-great-nyc-bagels-its-not-the-water Imbruce, Valerie. From Farm to Canal Street : Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace. Cornell University Press, 2015.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nle bk&AN=1049459&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961.

Martha G. “History of the New York City Hot Dog Cart.” New York Tour 1. https://www.newyorktour1.com/blog/untold-nyc-history-hot-dogcart/ McShane, Larry. “A CENTURY OF NATHAN’S: The history of the famous hot dog from early days to becoming a Coney Island icon.” NY Daily News. May 21, 2016. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/nathancentury-hot-dog-history-n-y-icon-article-1.2644796 Rothstein, Mervyn. “The Circle of Life With Bagels.” The New York Times.

November 25, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/dining/26bagel.html Solares, Nick. “How New York City Hot Dogs Conquered the Galaxy.” Eater New York. August 1, 2014. https://ny.eater.com/maps/how-new-york- city-hot- dogsconquered-the-galaxy Tuder, Stefanie. “David Chang Warns of Affordable Restaurant Apocalypse.”

Eater New York. July 14, 2017. https://ny.eater.com/2017/7/14/15971364/david-chang-warns-ofaffordable-restaurant-apocalypse Wilson, Korsha. “How the Slice Joint Made Pizza the Perfect New York City Food” The New York Times. January 16, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/dining/slice-joint-pizza-new-york-city.html 30

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RADicalizing Public Housing Amid Federal Retrenchment: Assessing the Effectiveness of the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) on Public Housing in Chicago and New York City Kavya Tewari Columbia College, Columbia University Introduction

Throughout the past century, there have been several instances where the public and private sectors have worked together. City officials have sought collaborations with the private sector in mutually beneficial ways, when faced with significant cuts to federal aid in particular. While there exist several drawbacks to increasing private sector involvement in the provision of public goods and services — such as fear of displacement and increased costs to the public — a public-private partnership (P.P.P.) can lend certain benefits and is one potential solution that can be created to address community needs. Furthermore, despite mixed empirical evidence regarding positive outcomes resulting from a P.P.P., collaborations of this nature have bipartisan support as well as the support of both public and private entities. Hence, it is imperative that we better understand them and gauge how to improve them.

At its core, what motivate this research are the tremendous financial deficits that prevent the adequate provision and maintenance of public housing units through associations like Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). In a market like New York City in particular, there is a large gap between the market rate and rate for public housing, posing questions around potential solutions to make up such a cost differential. One solution is through the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD). RAD is a program administered through the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) intended to convert public housing units to either project-based voucher (PBV) units or project-based rental assistance contracts, underneath the Section 8 subsidy program. Such a conversion ultimately gives housing authorities the flexibility to use both private and public funding to support their needs.

This article addresses the following question: To what extent does private oversight — through a program like RAD — support CHA and NYCHA in sufficiently meeting public housing needs in Chicago and New York City? This research does not look at whether RAD should or should not exist; rather, given that the program is already being executed in cities across the nation, how can we critique, refine, and improve it to best serve the low- and moderate-income tenants of urban social housing?

Kavya Tewari

This article uses a mixed method, comparative case study approach to understand the combination of structural attributes that either support or challenge the successful implementation of a PPP, like RAD, in providing a viable option for public housing financing. By pulling from various examples of effective PPPs (not just examples of those in housing), this article operationalizes the effectiveness of PPPs and then applies those metrics to the cases examined in Chicago and New York City, providing a basis on which the thesis compares the two cities and the execution of the program within them. The developed rubric consists of the following criteria, each scored on a scale of 1 to 5: funding stability, capital flexibility, transparency, equity, and scalability. The methodological rubric is provided in Appendix A. The article first gives a review of the literature on public-private partnerships and history of federal retrenchment with regards to social housing, reflecting a need for additional discussion that sufficiently takes into account both the potential benefits and drawbacks of these publicprivate collaborations. It also provides a brief background on the history of public housing. Next, it examines the Fannie Emanuel and Ocean Bay case studies of the RAD program in Chicago and New York City, respectively, and uses the developed rubric to evaluate the extent to which RAD effectively met public housing needs for these sites. I then discuss and compare these findings. Lastly, I conclude with policy implications of the pending continuation and expansion of the RAD program in the context of current social and economic circumstances. I also outline potential directions for future research to continue and build upon this work.

Literature Review

This paper is centered around the concept of the public-private partnership (PPP), which has been defined in several different ways by scholars as well as actors in the public and private sectors. PPPs have typically been viewed by governments as one solution to address funding deficiencies in the provision of infrastructure.1 Some authors even suggest that PPPs are becoming a new form of governance, revealing its rise in popularity over the past two decades.2 Nevertheless, despite their prominence and continued deployment in a variety of infrastructure and other public service projects, empirical data supporting the benefits of PPPs remains mixed, and3 scholars continue to discuss appropriate and accurate ways to assess the extent to which such arrangements are effective in meeting their goals.

The PPP is defined by some as “a long-term contract between a private party and a government agency, for providing a public asset or service, in which the private party bears significant risk and management responsibility.”4 Other definitions mention the collaboration with regards to 34

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its “compatible objectives” as well as “some degree of shared authority and responsibility, joint investment of resources, shared risk-taking and mutual benefit.”5 Some scholars share a definition similar to Garvin and Bosso, who define PPPs with additional specificity, as “a long-term contractual arrangement between the public and private sectors where mutual benefits are sought and where ultimately (a) the private sector provides management and operating services and/or (b) puts private finance at risk.”6 Others articulate a perspective where the risk is not burdened on one actor entirely but rather is shared, not necessarily equally, between the public and private entities.7 More broadly, some authors even go as far as to argue that all public projects are public-private partnerships, given that nearly every project involves some degree of private and public sector involvement.8 It is important to acknowledge that there exist differing definitions in literature of these collaborations, and therefore, of who bears the risk; given that these arrangements are inherently complex and nuanced, these depictions can vary based on the context and needs of a particular partnership, as well as the perspective of whomever is sharing the story of the partnership in question.

Collectively, these perspectives reveal a strong need for conversation surrounding the extent to which private involvement is (or is not) effective — and also, to determine how it can be improved. This is particularly necessary given that private influence in the delivery of a public good can be consistently traced throughout the 20th century, and is not likely to diminish anytime soon; such collaborations continue to receive federal support in the present day. Furthermore, researchers believe that existing literature depicts an incomplete picture of PPP results, failing to comprehensively capture its potential benefits and full scope of drawbacks as well, which reflects a strong need for additional discussion.9 This research is structured in light of this necessity, taking into account and contextualizing both kinds of outcomes to engage in a nuanced, meaningful dialogue around the extent of the merits of a particular PPP: the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program.

Neoliberal Influence in History of PPPs Collaboration between public and private sectors is not a new concept to American urban, economic, and political development. Early separation between public and private spheres developed primarily in response to the rise of “big business” in the 19th century which “preceded the rise of big government.”10 Legislation enacted alongside the increasing prominence of businesses at the time — such as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission and Clayton Acts in 1914 — aimed to reduce the centralization and power of the private sector, thereby positioning the business and Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 35

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government at odds with one another. This tension would continue throughout the 20th century and up to the present day. Nevertheless, after events like the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals in the 1960s and 1970s, people began to lose faith in the government’s ability to accomplish its articulated goals instead of merely “throwing money at problems.”11 Significant reductions in federal aid and other revenue-related deficiencies, however, compelled city officials to depend on “local resources, including the unrealized value of publicly owned land” and seek support from businesses.12 Sentiment in favor of public-private partnerships grew stronger throughout the 1970s, with authorities from the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials even designating such collaborations as “‘essential’ for urban vitality.”13 Government policy in the 1970s began to shift focus, promoting private solutions to large public problems. This decade, therefore, was instrumental in setting the stage for future exploration of the potential of new public-private arrangements that could share financial risks, in order to feasibly move forward with their plans for urban redevelopment.

In 1977, President Carter initiated the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program, which would serve as a pivotal point in history with regards to the relationship between public officials and private developers.

UDAG was intended to “stimulate economic recovery in America’s most distressed urban areas.”14 The verbiage of the law was vague, allowing for leeway in how the grants were to relieve the economic distress. Notably, however, Congress mandated that the programs applying for action grants make the most of “unique opportunities” that attract investment from the private sector and “stimulate investment in restoration of deteriorated or abandoned housing stock.”15 This provision thereby defines the program as one that supports public goals and projects in coming to fruition, while remaining contingent upon a commitment of private resources and involvement16 — something that radically distinguishes it from other urban revitalization efforts. After the introduction of this program, cities began to act as “revenue-seeking investors rather than governments making grants.”

Both Democrats and Republicans liked what public-private partnerships had to offer as well, reflecting a supportive political environment where PPPs were encouraged to continue, especially in the face of urban renewal efforts. The program’s market-focused, profit-raising incentives not only guided relationships between private developers and public sector officials at that time, but also established a neoliberal approach that proved influential for structuring collaborations for years to come, like those implemented today.

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Criticism of PPPs Although PPPs have been implemented in urban areas throughout the country, empirical research and evidence on the success of their outcomes is mixed. Over-reliance on PPPs can be traced to periods of government retrenchment in particular, where private financing or investment is viewed as the answer to solve public sector problems, reflected in the prominence of joint developments for urban renewal projects, “socially responsible investing,” or even social impact bonds throughout the past 50 years. While a public-private collaboration has the potential to produce certain benefits, there are real risks and downsides as well. Commonly cited benefits of PPPs include increased efficiency in project delivery realized by the private sector, while allowing for an increased focus on the goals of the public sector.18 Prominent drawbacks include high transaction costs and limited scope for improvement over time, which some attribute to inadequate contractor capacity in comparison to the scale of the project.19 Furthermore, the involvement of the private sector ensures that return on investment is also of high priority, as there is a cost associated with the debt, and private actors require tangible incentives to finance these social projects. Even if a deal appears mutually beneficial to both public and private entities, other factors — like volatile or rising interest rates, or even high construction costs — could prevent a deal from closing, reflective of some risk and unpredictability inherent in a potential partnership.

Secondly, while the government is held accountable for continually delivering a quality service to the public — in both the short and long term — the private sector is responsible for only what is outlined in their contract, thereby illustrating that the burden of a given project’s risk is not equally shared among the two entities. Nevertheless, this divergence of accountability also illustrates a question around the city government’s ability to navigate multiple roles, of the adequate provision of public goods alongside earning a profit and reaping financial reward to sustain the partnership for a long period of time.20 In other words, the involvement of the private sector — the introduction of business principles and prioritization of profit — could detract from the “fairness and accountability” to the public that is otherwise intended to be upheld by government officials.

Variation in PPPs At the crux of the differences seen among PPP definitions is the variation in practice, which ultimately stems from how risk is distributed between the involved actors based on the separation of ownership. 21 Additionally, several authors highlight the expectation of a long-term relationship, qualifying the arrangement to be more than just a collaboration or typical contracted service.22 Others maintain that PPPs should always be considered when the implementation of infrastructure or service delivery Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 37

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projects is in question, but only pursued “if they deliver value for money, which is loosely defined as the optimum combination of life cycle costs and quality to meet user requirements.”23 It is also important to recognize that privatization and PPPs are not synonymous. Privatization is known as a total “divestiture of public property or agency to a private firm.” 24 In this case, unlike the PPP, the public sector has given up all accountability for providing the good or service to the public, shifting all risk, responsibility, and reward to the private actor instead. While definitions of PPPs may vary, many are in agreement that privatization, at its core, is a dynamic phenomenon, reflecting any reduction in the role of government provision of public goods or any increase in the role of private providers.25 How is Low-Income Housing financed?

Studies have shown that a significant percentage of low-income individuals “spend more than half of their income for housing, which can inhibit their ability to meet other basic needs and/or put them at a greater risk of homelessness,”26 thereby compelling the federal government to take action through a variety of programs. These public housing programs provide federally subsidized and publicly owned housing to low-income families. The HOME Investment Partnerships program is the largest federal block grant to state and local governments, designed exclusively to create affordable housing for low-income households by funding both the development and the maintenance of low-cost housing.

A significant portion of development funding also comes from the LowIncome Housing Tax Credit program (LIHTC), a federal tax credit given to states, which then allocate credit to developers who build housing units for low-income families. The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, also known as the Section 8 voucher program, provides subsidies to lowincome families in the private market to decrease their rental costs to 30% of their income.27 While the program is administered at the federal level by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), it is managed more locally by public housing authorities (PHAs). In recent years, rents have been rising quickly and incomes have not been able to keep up, which thereby increased the cost of a voucher and the cost of the program overall. Through the program, eligible families receive either a tenant-based voucher or a project-based voucher. Families who receive the former carry the responsibility of finding housing units owned by landlords who will accept vouchers, paying between 30% and 40% of their incomes.

Meanwhile, families who receive the latter move into housing units that “PHAs already have under contract with private landlords,” paying 30% of their incomes.28 A family’s eligibility is contingent on whether or not their adjusted gross income is less than 50% of the local area median income. Yet 38

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not all eligible families ultimately receive vouchers; there is no guarantee from the government, as Section 8 is not an entitlement program.

Conclusion As the prominence of the private sector in the provision of public goods and services continues to shape contemporary urban development, it becomes increasingly important that we evaluate past efforts to inform and improve those made in the future. Researchers believe that existing literature depicts an incomplete picture of PPP results regarding its potential benefits and drawbacks.29 Some scholars also claim that there is insufficient empirical understanding of the dynamics between performance-based contracts — with research on incentives focusing on conceptual approaches.30 The majority of PPP literature focuses on fixedinfrastructure PPPs and best practices in that domain. The existing literature on the implementation of PPPs in a housing context reveals a certain international focus, as it has been practiced in India, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Australia, Tanzania, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom, among others. This thesis assesses the effectiveness of private involvement in public housing through the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) in particular, given that this program and its produced outcomes have not yet been evaluated in depth. To do so, I establish a set of effective criteria and best practices on which current implementations of RAD in Chicago and New York City are evaluated.

Background

Public housing emerged from slum clearance in New York City during the Great Depression. It was seen as a tool to reintroduce social stability and mitigate crime and poverty during a time of disarray.31 During the New Deal, some of the best designed housing projects came to life, as there was generous federal funding support in addition to government subsidies. Over time, a clear conflict arose between maintaining high standards of living with low rental costs and the “national political ideology of ‘free enterprise;’”32 in other words, better quality housing could not be offered at rates that were below the market.

The many urban development efforts that took place between 1949 and 1973 contextualized the following drastic reduction of federal leaders who favored increased state and local involvement (and even involvement of the private sector) in such development projects. Scholars later attributed the failure of many public housing projects during this time to poor management and inadequate attention, but also to HUD’s lack of influence at a local level.33 While government-subsidized housing projects are funded partially at the federal level, local governments are often responsible for them, as they are the ones who appoint the commissioners Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 39

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who form a housing authority like CHA or NYCHA. The authority is tasked with planning, building, and overseeing the provision of public housing to low and moderate income residents of the area in question.

Discussions of privatizing public housing became increasingly relevant after the 1970s, especially after the government slowed the production of affordable housing units after the Great Recession.34 In 1992, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began the HOPE VI program, which was one of the most prominent federal programs to support privatization, seeking to “eradicate severely distressed public housing” through revitalizing “physical improvements, management improvements, and social and community services to address resident needs.”35 The program, relying on private management and funds, converts public housing units into privatized, mixed-income developments. Over the span of 15 years, it created 108,000 new units, of which 57,000 proved affordable to very low-income residents.36 The program was implemented without any resistance; however, critics of the program frequently highlight that it used federal money to demolish public housing and consistently displace the poor.37 In fact, a study conducted in 2004 by the Urban Institute revealed that a mere 21,000 units had been built to replace the 49,828 units that were demolished (approximately 42 percent).38 NYCHA is currently facing the worst financial crisis in its history, after several decades of disinvestment from the federal government. My thesis does not delve into the roots of this disinvestment; it instead focuses on the social and economic viability of one solution that came about as a result of this financial and political context. The RAD program is one part of NYCHA’s 10 year strategic plan, called NextGeneration NYCHA, to revitalize and preserve its public housing units in order to act as a more effective landlord.

RAD works by transferring public housing units to private sector actors, such that local housing authorities and contracted developers can leverage a wider variety of financing tools to better maintain and rehabilitate the decaying amenities. Given Congress’s steadfast reluctance to address the staggeringly large multi-billion dollar deficit required to maintain habitable public housing units, supporters of the RAD program argue that this form of private involvement is necessary at this stage in order to mitigate the increasing debt, or at the very least, preserve the existing affordable units.

Initially, the RAD program was intended to convert 60,000 units to Section 8. Congress later authorized three additional increases, as demand for conversations grew rapidly. Reportedly, the program facilitated over $2 billion in capital investment, while using only $250 million in government funds.39 However, RAD is only a demonstration program — it will be terminated if not made permanent by September 30, 2020, thereby reflecting the current relevance of comprehensively assessing the program’s effectiveness in meeting public housing goals.

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Chicago

History of Public Housing in Chicago The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is a municipal not-for-profit that was created in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration to own and operate housing. With more than 50,000 households, it is the largest rental landlord in Chicago, overseeing the administration of 37,000 Section 8 vouchers. The agency is governed by commissioners who are appointed by the city’s mayor, and has a budget independent from that of the City of Chicago. Its first three housing projects of low-rise buildings built in the late 1930s — including Jane Addams, Julia C. Lathrop and Trumbull Park Homes — aimed at clearing slums and providing affordable housing for predominantly upwardly mobile, white low-income individuals. These complexes were indistinguishable from one another and notably economically isolated from surrounding neighborhoods. CHA then created a fourth project, Ida B. Wells Homes, for black families only.

In demarcating these complexes by race, CHA was abiding by guidelines set forth by the federal government at the time. The “Neighborhood Composition Rule,” a federal regulation instated in 1935, banned housing projects from changing the racial composition of the existing neighborhood by explicitly dictating that the tenants of the housing developments mirror the racial population of the communities where they were situated. The rule stayed in effect until 1949, ultimately legitimizing racial segregation and discrimination through federal housing policy for a sustained period of time, while also highlighting the underpinnings of the segregation that is still reflected in the city’s public housing today.

The real estate industry played an influential role in shaping the development of public housing as well. The industry feared the prospect of integrated neighborhoods, which could result in potentially lower property values or the creation of truly competitive public housing, or detract from private unit rentals. Consequently, this fear contextualized and solidified governmental action. For example, to ensure that public housing would not create any competition for private housing, the federal government actively provided fewer funds to build a given public housing unit than the average cost that was required to build a private unit at the time.40 Notably, the funds invested in the first four Chicago projects were roughly $5,589 per unit, nearly twenty percent lower than the average cost of private residential construction in the area.41 During WWII, CHA created housing for war-industry workers, including a large project, Altgeld Gardens, designed specifically for black war workers. After the war, CHA units provided temporary housing for veterans as well. Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949 to substantially fund and expand public housing offerings, authorizing the construction of Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 41

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810,000 national public housing units, with forty thousand units in Chicago in particular. By the end of the 1940s, Chicago’s public housing program was widely-accepted as the best in the country. By 1950, the portion of families on public aid had risen to twenty-seven percent. Yet when CHA proposed sites for projects to be constructed on open land throughout Chicago, including units near some white neighborhoods, white municipal leaders rejected those plans. The aldermen asserted that public housing in or near white communities would have a negative impact on property values, prompting white flight and the creation of new slums, and therefore, any public housing should be built in the worst slums for the poorest people. Consequently, CHA’s policy shifted to build family housing in black residential areas only, or nearby existing projects, resulting in the concentration of public housing in the city center on the South and West sides.

With more than forty thousand units of housing by the late 1950s, CHA had become the biggest landlord in Chicago. Nevertheless, public housing quickly deteriorated during this period due to flawed building design and poor maintenance. CHA kept building high-rise projects in black districts until the federal government stopped funding the construction of these buildings for family homes. In particular, between 1955 and 1968, CHA constructed about nineteen thousand high-rise units of the roughly 21,000 low-income family apartments built overall. These high-rise projects ultimately grouped together and physically isolated extremely poor individuals, contributing to a racial and socioeconomic barrier dividing the city intoNorth and South alongside “expressways, the Chicago River, [and] factories and railyards.”42 In 1965, a black CHA tenant, Dorothy Gautreaux, and a group of other plaintiffs sued the authority, accusing CHA of actively perpetuating racial segregation with its focus on only revamping projects in the black neighborhoods, deliberately keeping black families out of white neighborhoods. The lawsuit intended to expand building locations of public housing in predominantly white neighborhoods as well.43 In this landmark court decision, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, the court found that ninety-nine percent of CHA housing was occupied by black individuals. The ruling placed CHA into receivership — at which point the federal department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) took control of CHA — until the ruling was lifted in May 2010. Following the decision, most of the housing built by CHA was intended for elderly tenants, particularly in the white sections of the city. CHA’s first project for the elderly was built in 1959 — and in the decades that followed, it built forty-six new developments, amounting to 9,607 units in total.44 According to CHA, initially, public housing operated in a manner similar to private market housing, as income from rent was used to cover maintenance and 42

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operational costs. Nevertheless, as the public housing stock grew older across the country, the costs to maintain these buildings, and their rents, rose notably as well.45 In 1969, Congress passed the Brooke Amendment, requiring public housing authorities to rent only to those with very low or no income to lower rent overall for public housing residents. Though perhaps seemingly innocuous and well-intentioned, the Brooke Amendment actually “made it nearly impossible for many public-housing authorities to collect enough money to keep their properties in good condition.”46 This created an unstable financial foundation going into the 1970s and 1980s, evidenced by high concentrations of poverty, deteriorating properties, and urban decline associated with white flight. Nonetheless, the high-rise projects built prior to 1970 continued using the resources of not only CHA, but also the city and federal government. Despite the several millions of dollars spent to maintain the projects, many continued to deteriorate, unable to withstand the burden created by an increasing number of families in need.47 The operationally chaotic and inadequate agency was in dire need of change, thereby prompting HUD to take control by 1996. Under Mayor Richard Daley’s leadership in 2000, the city launched an ambitious overhaul of Chicago’s public housing with the Plan for Transformation,48 demolishing seventeen thousand units of public housing in an attempt to integrate lowincome families into mixed-income communities, and the larger “physical, social and economic fabric of society.”49 CHA is also one of the 39 public housing authorities (PHAs) that participates in HUD’s Moving to Work (MTW) Demonstration Program, an agreement first executed with HUD in 2000. The program, “initiated in 1996, expanded in 2016, and renewed in 2018”50 allows PHAs exemptions from public housing and voucher rules, providing regulatory and funding flexibility to adapt to local housing needs. As part of the MTW agreement, agencies are required to submit MTW annual plans and reports to HUD, though participation in the program does not amount to deregulation of the agency altogether. Any MTW activity must achieve one of the following three Statutory Objectives: increase housing choices for lowincome families, give incentives to families with children where the head of household is working, seeking work, or preparing for work, or reduce costs and achieve greater cost effectiveness in federal expenditures.51 All MTW Agreements are extended through 2028 by Congress. The expansion, renewal, and extension of this demonstration program reflects the myriad approaches HUD and local housing authorities are adopting in order to better improve the quality of the public housing experience, suggesting that no one solution has, thus far, consistently and effectively met the wide spectrum of demonstrated needs of social housing tenants.

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Rental Assistance Demonstration In addition to the MTW Demonstration, CHA has been using HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) to convert approximately half of its public housing portfolio to Project Based Vouchers (PBVs). While HOPE VI redeveloped many distressed public housing projects nationwide, a significant amount of that housing infrastructure is over forty years old, indicative of not only needed upgrades but accruing high maintenance costs as well.52 RAD was created to convert public housing units to either PBV units or project-based rental assistance contracts, underneath the Section 8 subsidy program. Such a conversion ultimately gives housing authorities the flexibility to use both private and public funding to support their needs and “address the nationwide backlog of deferred maintenance.”53 The creation of yet another housing policy program is suggestive of an admission by HUD that the existing infrastructure, policy, and living situations are inadequate in meeting the housing needs of vulnerable, lowincome families and individuals.

CHA is the nation’s leading PHA for the RAD program; the authority applied in October 2013 for the largest number of units approved under the current cap of 185,000, for approximately 64 public housing properties with 10,935 units each. The authority sought to use RAD to support refinancing of certain properties, as well as new initiatives, to expand affordable housing opportunities. It reports conducting more than forty stakeholder, resident, and community meetings prior to the application, in an effort to educate the community about the ways in which it envisioned RAD supporting long-term affordability.54 Through the end of 2019, HUD will have funded roughly 4,938 converted units. CHA projects approximately $49.4 million in funding for fiscal year (FY)020, resulting in an average annual rate of $10,010 per voucher. According to the FY2020 budget, the percent change in funding is down from the prior year at -18.5%, and amounting to 5.2% of the total budget for the year, suggesting the potential trajectory of federal funding from HUD in the years to come.

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Table 1: Fund Financial Summary

MTW Fund Detail, FY2020 Comprehensive Annual Budget55

Case Study Fannie Emanuel, previously referred to as Parkview Apartments, is CHA-owned property, located at 3916 W. Washington Blvd. in the West Garfield Park community on the City’s West side. The twenty-story building was constructed in 1963 and housed 181 apartment units, but closed in 2007 due to severe mechanical system problems. This case study was chosen not only because it was Chicago’s first RAD conversion, but also because its upgrades were intended to improve the well-being of senior residents — a focus on the city’s elderly population, as was characteristic of the majority of housing built after the Gautreaux vs. Chicago Housing authority Decision.56 Fannie Emanuel Housing Development LLC, a CHA controlled entity, acted as developer to redevelop the property, leveraging mortgage debt and private equity in a mixed-finance approach to provide quality housing to senior tenants. CHA transferred ownership of the property to the Fannie Emanuel Senior Housing Limited Partnership, Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 45

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consisting of a Limited Partner (99.99%) that is represented by a private tax credit investor, as well as a Special Limited Partner (0.001%), an affiliate of the Limited Partner, and a General Partner (0.009%) that is represented

by Fannie Emanuel Housing Development, LLC, of which CHA is the sole member.57 CHA, spearheading the redevelopment of the property, returned 181 public housing opportunities to the CHA’s leasing portfolio.

The goals and intentions of the developers involved, prior to the commencement of the project, are outlined by CHA in their proposal to the Chicago Board of Commissioners in 2015 as follows:

Figure 1

Corporate, Funding Goals of Fannie Emanuel Development58

The units created would be available for lease to low-income, senior tenants who earn up to sixty percent of the area median income.

Furthermore, rental assistance would be provided by HUD, supplementing the thirty percent of tenant monthly income allocated for renting the units.59 In outlining these goals and strategies, CHA is establishing a precedent of transparency to be maintained throughout the project. Notably, some of the verbiage in these goals is vague, likely intentionally so, to allow for leeway in execution.

The project’s total budget of $59,591,824 can be broken down into the following subsections from CHA: a MTW loan of approximately $20.1 million, $2.2 million from RAD PBV payments made during construction, as well as a CHA Seller Financing Loan of approximately $5 million for the sale of the property by CHA to the Fannie Emanuel Senior Housing Limited Partnership. The balance of this permanent budget will be primarily footed

by Bank of America, funding a first mortgage loan of $6.95 million and 46

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roughly $25.2 million tax credit equity from the sale of the LIHTC.60 The project began construction in December 2015. Rehabilitation work for 181 one-bedroom senior RAD units were completed in FY2017, consisting of thirty-seven fully accessible and 144 adaptable units with drastic mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and envelope improvements.61 Analysis Insights made about Chicago’s public housing are inherently tied to the city’s rich history of housing policy with regards to age and race, and the consequent manifestations of such policy into the physical form of the built environment and racial stratification within Chicago’s urban community.

CHA’s overall score is 18/25 (see Table 2 below for scoring detail)​. With regards to funding stability, the capital stack rests on Section 8. Although Section 8 funding is relatively stable as a funding source, the chance that those funds could be cut poses a threat to the long-term sustainability of the program, especially amidst evolving federal priorities and politicized actions in the face of a pandemic.

In allowing PHAs to raise capital from private debt and equity markets, RAD allows for significant capital flexibility, notably greater than that of past housing programs. Nevertheless, in the midst of great uncertainty and pending economic recession, the risks of collaborating with private entities are far greater than those associated with a bull market. This grade is therefore lower than perhaps it would have been a few months earlier, in anticipation of the potentially harmful impacts of COVID-19 on future RAD projects.

CHA communicates with its stakeholders, tenants, and collaborating organizations in a variety of ways. Importantly, its updates with tenants are particularly consistent, accessible, detailed, and demonstrate a high level of accountability to the community it serves. Its “Resident Update” presentations substantiate this claim, comprising direct and simple language, graphs and data that are manageable for a layperson, and specific sections dedicated to “How RAD Will Impact Me.” This title, while seemingly subtle, reflects an actively empathetic stance and genuine attempt to not only view the potential fears and risks from the perspective of the residents but also a concerted effort to directly address its target audience when assuaging those fears.

HUD guidelines mandate that no tenants are displaced in the conversion and guarantee residents the right to return if they are ultimately relocated during the construction period, protecting tenants against one of their biggest concerns around displacement. Nevertheless, reports on the process do not reflect any concrete channels through which resident voices could be shared and heard, reflecting the inadequate equitability of Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 47

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the RAD conversion process and outcome.

Each of the aforementioned variables shape the scalability of the RAD program. The scalability of RAD is heavily contingent on the availability of funding sources, which may not always be available and/or stable. In theory, however, RAD could be applied to all public housing units in Chicago, as its policy is written as such. Furthermore, CHA’s established standards of direct and accessible communication while fostering trust with its residents speaks to the ability of the program to be applied in other locales within or beyond the city, if similarly transparent practices are observed. Lastly, scalability will depend on the ability of the local housing authority to take into account its particular policy history and specifics of the built environment, as CHA did in selecting senior housing in the Fannie Emanuel development for its first RAD conversion.

Certain aspects of RAD conversions, such as funding stability and capital flexibility, remain relatively out of CHA’s purview, as they are definitionally tied to RAD overall and not to the particular city or site in which the conversion is taking place. Where CHA has greater control, however, is in its transparency and equity — and therefore, in part, in the scalability of RAD as well. Based on its overall score, as well as those for these three variables in particular, CHA orchestrated a process and outcome that generated more positive outcomes than drawbacks for the development’s residents. Hence, it seems to have been successful at accomplishing what it set out to do with the Fannie Emanuel RAD conversion, while honoring the needs and desires of the tenants it aimed to serve.

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Table 2

Scorecard for CHA (1 to 5, where 1 = weak performance, not meeting the indicator and 5 = strong performance, exceeding expectations. See Appendix A for further detail.)

New York

History of Public Housing in New York Housing policy in New York City initially aimed to address public health issues and substandard living conditions. In the nineteenth century, large numbers of immigrants moved to American cities in search of a better quality of life. In NYC in particular, the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880, prompting the rise in tenements, “narrow, low-rise apartment buildings”62 that were consistently “cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation.”63 Most of these overcrowded and sordid tenements were located in the Lower East Side — some converted from single-family dwellings, others newly constructed to accommodate the Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 49

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influx of immigrants. In 1890, prominent social reformer and photojournalist Jacob Riis highlighted squalor and slum conditions evidencing the dire health and housing issues of tenement living in his book How the Other Half Lives​, and urged swift action towards urban reform.64

Figure 2

Shelter for immigrants in a New York City tenement, photograph by Jacob Riis, 1888.65

By the beginning of the twentieth century, more than eighty thousand tenements had been built. They housed “a population of 2.3 million people, a full two-thirds of the city’s total population of around 3.4 million,”66 reflecting the rapidly increasing demand for and widespread dependence on these housing units. For the most part, “New Yorkers lived at the mercy of the market,”67 indicative of the lack of control most citizens experienced with regards to housing. At the time, rent control, cash grants, and tax abatements were out of the question, revealing the government perception of housing at the time as something other than a fundamental human right, and as the responsibility of private actors. Although city leaders no longer view housing provision as a responsibility other than their own, the historical connection to private investors helps contextualize the influence of private market considerations seen in policies to date.

Only when housing reformers, inspired by the European model of state-subsidized housing, advocated against the private market’s ability 50

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to sufficiently sustain accessible and livable public housing in New York did government involvement in the housing market begin.68 In May 1926, Governor Alfred E. Smith passed the Limited Dividend Housing Companies Act, the “nation’s first program of financial support for below-market urban housing.”69 Government housing only grew in the 1930s and 1940safter the stock market crash of 1929 and the recession that followed, while opposition to the government’s involvement in housing diminished. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was established in 1934 as the first agency in the U.S. to provide housing for low- and moderate-income tenants in New York City’s five boroughs.

Government-sponsored urban renewal and slum clearance were also introduced during this period, allowing room for new developments to take place.70 An increase in suburban flight and decrease in immigration rates after the Great Depression and World War II questioned the city’s ability to function with the same levels of density and overall activity, thereby prompting city officials to identify new avenues to address housing needs. Through state and federal subsidies as well as new municipal housing programs, they sought to make the city more appealing to the middle class, which was increasingly opting out of urban living in favor of suburbia.71 Notably, however,urban renewal programs displaced African Americans and Puerto Ricans, pushing them to the outer boroughs, while predominantly helping middle class white individuals. NYCHA had commissioned 148,583 affordable housing units by 1959, but failed nevertheless to systematically account for those who were displaced by the newly constructed complexes.72 Programs such as Mitchell-Lama, signed into law in 1955 to provide affordable rental and cooperative housing to moderate- and middle-income families, and Co-op City, constructed in the late 1960s as cooperative and affordable middle-income workers’ housing, revealed the strong action the city was taking in fear of losing residents of a particular socioeconomic strata to the suburbs.

The 1970s were characterized by severe disinvestment in NYC, beginning with President Nixon’s efforts to revert public policy to what it was before “the Great Depression shook the nation’s faith in unrestricted free enterprise.” Consequently, Nixon cut all federal funding for public housing in 1973.73 The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 introduced Section 8 housing and the housing choice voucher program, where the presence of private actors “was again privileged in the housing market.”74 The Reagan Administration, too, implemented housing budget cuts, creating a need for new solutions to adequately address public housing demand. This ultimately resulted in the 75 use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a tool to effectively navigate strict zoning laws and high production costs to build affordable housing units, something that continued in various capacities throughout the city’s history.

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Rental Assistance Demonstration The Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT), part of NextGeneration NYCHA — the housing “Authority’s 10-year strategic plan to repair public housing to improve residents’ quality of life”76 — creates PPPs to repair and maintain existing housing developments. In spite of historic investments by the City since 2014, significant declines in federal funding reflect insufficient 77 resources to address the increased capital needs of public housing. Thus, PACT aims to use three federal tools (RAD, Section 18/TPV, and Part 200 Disposition) to accomplish a unified goal: “improved quality of life for residents, the same rents and tenant rights, and NYCHA control.” For the purposes of this study, I focus only on 78 RAD. Case Study NYCHA’s Ocean Bay (Bayside) Apartments is a public housing complex of twenty-four buildings and 1,395 units that is home to nearly four thousand low-income New Yorkers on Beach Channel Drive in Queens. The apartments were constructed and first occupied in the early 1960s, requiring “critical maintenance” and repairs to “a deteriorating infrastructure” even prior to the devastating impacts of Superstorm Sandy in 2012 — which included severe “flooding and the destruction of the central heating plant.”79 In June 2017, NYCHA, the NYS Homes and Community Renewal (HCR), and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced $560 million in federal, state, city and private investments to finance the apartments’ “essential infrastructure upgrades, support state-of-the-art resiliency and security systems, and the renovation and preservation of the public housing complex.”80 All units of the apartments were covered under a new, Project-Based Section 8 Housing Assistance Payment through HUD’s RAD program. Citi provided the construction loan as well as permanent financing, while Richman Housing Resources syndicated the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.

The total development cost of $560 million can be broken down as follows: $213 million in New York State Housing Finance Agency taxexempt bonds and $170 million in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Equity.

An additional $1.1 million was acquired via the Investment Tax Credit generated from solar panels — the third-largest panel installation at an affordable housing development in New York State — implemented as part of an effort to improve the resiliency of the development’s buildings in the face of climate change and future storms.

The conversion was led by RDC Development, a joint venture between the private actors MDG Design + Construction and Wavecrest Management Team. In addition to a major overhaul of the development’s infrastructure and extensive renovations of amenities, the complexes 52

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underwent restoration of resiliency measures — such as “a secure flood wall, water retention swales, stand-alone electric service buildings built above the flood zone, and the conversion from one central boiler steam system to 24 individual hydronic boilers on the roof of each building”81 — to better prepare for future natural disasters. Furthermore, installations of security cameras were intended to enhance security and improve overall quality of living of the complex residents.

NYCHA engaged with Ocean Bay residents and community stakeholders as they determined the best process for addressing community needs. They accessed $325 million in funding for repairs through PACT and RAD, which notably included $194.4 million from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This catalytic infusion of capital proved critical to the viability of the project, something that other RAD conversions were not privy to and most likely will not be in the future. However, the severity of the natural disaster understandably warranted additional, albeit unconventional, support directly from the federal government. Nevertheless, it poses some questions around RAD’s long-term feasibility in NYCHA sites without support from FEMA, absent another wide-sweeping environmental hazard in the region.

Furthermore, the project also sought to implement a comprehensive social services framework, “designed to empower this community to live fuller, healthier lives and reach their full potential,”82 which is indicative of a holistic approach to restoring wellness to the community at large. Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens provided services catering to the specific needs of Ocean Bay tenants, and the Ocean Bay Community Development Corporation supported job creation in the local community. Additionally, the private actors involved in construction — Wavecrest Management and MDG subcontractors — committed to hiring forty NYCHA residents to the project, and ultimately surpassed that expectation by hiring eighty-three residents in total.

Analysis Insights into New York City’s public housing are inherently tied to the city’s rich history of housing policy around issues of race, class, and resilience. Manifestations of this policy have consequently intensified social inequity within the urban community and are further shaped by the physical compactness of the city’s built environment. Hence, any successful RAD conversion or other policy going forward must take these factors into account in a concrete way. NYCHA’s overall score is 15/25 (see Table 3 for scoring detail)​. With regards to funding stability, the capital stack rests on Section 8. Although Section 8 funding is relatively stable as a funding source, the chance that those funds could be cut poses a threat to the long-term sustainability of the program, especially amidst evolving federal Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 53

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priorities and politicized actions in the face of a pandemic. In the Ocean Bay case, NYCHA received tremendous support from FEMA, a reality that likely will not continue for future RAD conversions absent a similar large-scale emergency.

In permitting PHAs to raise capital from private debt and equity markets, RAD allows for significant capital flexibility, notably greater than that of past housing programs. Nevertheless, in the midst of great uncertainty and pending economic recession, the risks of collaborating with private entities are far greater than those associated with a bull market. This grade is therefore lower than it perhaps would have been a few months earlier, in anticipation of the potentially harmful impacts of COVID-19 on future RAD projects.

With regards to transparency, NYCHA and Wavecrest held community meetings on a monthly basis, explaining the program and providing residents updated information on the status of completion of the renovations. While NYCHA’s website provided informational sheets of facts, agendas, and initiatives in recent years, it failed to provide a larger scope of NYCHA’s history of programming and the decision-making that has led to the present. Furthermore, its documents — including proposals, budgets, and update presentations — around RAD were not easily accessible or understandable.

In partnering with community-based organizations like Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens and Ocean Bay CDC, NYCHA sought “to provide residents with social services and workforce development.”83 Although NYCHA formed tenant-working groups, a concrete channel through which residents could voice their thoughts and stay nominally engaged in the process, residents did not have any decision-making power, reflecting an apparent contradiction in the overall process and the longterm state of equity for the residents of the development. Nevertheless, HUD guidelines mandate that no tenants are displaced in the conversion and guarantee residents the right to return if they are ultimately relocated during the construction period, protecting tenants against one of their biggest concerns around displacement.

The scalability of RAD is heavily contingent on the availability of funding sources, which may not always be stable. If RAD is to expand throughout the city, NYCHA will need to account for the absence of FEMA support in these future projects. However, as it is written, RAD could theoretically be applied to all public housing units in New York City. It also seems that RAD favors large scale development companies and institutions — those with multinational level scale — over local actors and developers that may want to partake in the community-based project.

This preference may prevent the program from being fully scalable — in shrinking cities, for example — as the smaller market remains neglected and may ultimately constrain the choice of partners. Furthermore, in order to effectively and justly scale up in any capacity, NYCHA needs to first 54

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make significant strides in improving its transparency and accountability to the citizens it serves. All in all, if NYCHA is able to successfully execute RAD conversions for its entire housing stock, then it follows that housing authorities of cities across the nation should be able to follow suit more easily, as the constraints and responsibilities that NYC juggles are likely the most complicated.

Certain aspects of RAD conversions, such as funding stability and capital flexibility, remain outside of NYCHA’s purview, as they are definitionally tied to RAD overall, and not to the particular city in which the conversion is taking place. Where NYCHA has greater control, however, is in its transparency and equity — and therefore, in part, in the scalability of RAD as well. Based on its overall score, as well as those for these three variables in particular, NYCHA seems to have significant room for improvement with regards to its transparency and equitability, as a result of any future RAD conversion processes. Despite these drawbacks, the case does ultimately reflect notable positive attributes generated from the PPP, suggesting some extent of NYCHA’s success at accomplishing what it set out to do with the Ocean Bay RAD conversion.

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Table 3

Scorecard for NYCHA (1 to 5, where 1 = weak performance, not meeting the indicator and 5 = strong performance, exceeding expectations. See Appendix A for further detail.)

Cross-Comparison Analysis and Discussion There are several similarities in the urban challenges that leaders of prominent metropolises like Chicago and NYC face. The physical form and site-specific circumstances of the cities play a large role in influencing housing in particular. In both cities, the legacy of decision-making at the federal level compels local municipalities to implement policies that 56

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sometimes deviate from the true spirit of social housing: livable, accessible housing units as a fundamental human right.

CHA’s overall score is 18/25, while NYCHA’s overall score is 15/25, reflecting greater relative success in Chicago’s iteration of the RAD program compared to that of NYC. CHA’s higher score points to the longevity and the evolution of the RAD program over time, as the Fannie Emanuel conversion process preceded Ocean Bay’s by roughly two years, suggesting the potential for similar growth and improvement of NYCHA’s ongoing and future conversions, as well as those in other cities across the country.

Yet cities may hold different goals with respect to their particular resident population. One limitation of the rubric I created is that it does not explicitly account for decision making around city-specific constraints and priorities. Nevertheless, it seems that RAD inherently enables the decisionmaking of a federal program on a local scale, as is seen in varying capacities in both cases. As can also be discerned from the rubrics provided in the previous two sections, the funding stability and capital flexibility criteria assessments remain relatively consistent through any RAD conversions, regardless of the housing authority, as those parameters are influenced by HUD and by the nature of the economy at large. These two criteria play significant roles in evaluating the scalability of the program nationwide and continuation of the demonstration past September 30, 2020 — which is increasingly uncertain, given the realities of a COVID-19 recession. The variability and room for improvement on an individual, city-wide scale, therefore, exist in the efforts made towards transparency and equity in the execution of the process and the sustainability of the resulting outcome as well.

With regards to transparency, CHA’s resources — websites, budgets, proposals, resident updates, communication, and overall verbiage — were far more accessible than those provided by NYCHA. This is not to say that NYCHA was not comprehensive, however, but rather highlights that efforts made to improve access to quality, livable affordable housing, such as the RAD program, should be understood by the community that the program is meant to serve. Interestingly, there are several media articles highlighting resident apprehension around NYCHA’s embrace of the RAD program, which were then followed by tenant-working groups and other efforts to mitigate those fears. Contrastingly, there are far fewer public sources online sharing apprehension around CHA’s activity. Of course, there are a variety of factors that could feed into this, but it is clear that distrust is perpetuated by a lack of clarity and confidence on the part of the affected group, and perhaps runs deeper between residents and NYCHA, than between residents and CHA. NYCHA can thereby benefit from the tools and methods that CHA has used to communicate with its stakeholders and tenants, to be accountable not only to those it serves but also to the greater public. All else equal, if Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 57

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NYCHA could make improvements on the execution of the RAD program without FEMA’s support and adequately support its residents’ social housing needs, then it would be reasonable to assume that other cities across the nation could implement the program in some effective capacity as well. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent shifting of priorities at the federal and local level will likely pose significant obstacles to future RAD conversions in Chicago, NYC, and beyond.

While both Chicago and New York City are characterized by sitespecific constraints and will have to forge their own paths, reconciling their respective histories and myriad stakeholders, they are united by the threat of continued government retrenchment. The 2020 election will also, hopefully, arouse discussion on the treatment of housing equity, as this conversation is continually relevant and should be expanded upon by future researchers.

Conclusion

The importance of theconversation around affordable housing has never been greater. The nationwide housing crisis is only growing more dire, and in the face of a severe economic uncertainty, the stability and feasibility of PPPs as solutions to public issues is brought into question.

Public health crises, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic or natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy, expose and deeply intensify existing social inequalities and inadequacies in public systems. While there has been a bull market for the past decade, ultimately providing a positive lens through which one could view potential collaborations between the public sector and private investors or developers, future research should reflect upon what PPPs look like in a bear market, considering how private actors react in an uncertain time like this, as well as how housing authorities and their tenants are impacted.

Furthermore, reflecting on the outcome of the years following the stock market crash of 1929 as well as that of 2008 and 2009 reveals how federal attention tends to focus on stimulating the economy through actively supporting large private actors, like banks and institutional lenders, when facing significant uncertainty, while the needs of the most vulnerable segments of the population are overshadowed. On the precipice of potentially another Trump administration, there will likely be further deconsolidation of efforts to support the provision of public housing, as the federal government would provide limited, if any, attention or relief.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that private involvement and PPPs are here to stay in the provision of public housing as a means to raise capital. Despite the several approaches HUD has taken to address issues in public housing throughout history, no one solution has prevailed; yet, RAD evidently had a net positive impact on the CHA and NYCHA conversions examined in this 58

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study. Given this, I would like to advocate for further discourse to critique and challenge the structure RAD from a variety of perspectives, rather than questioning its existence altogether, without suggestion of a comparable alternative. This discourse could yield a more sustainable, equitable, and accessible housing system where possible, given the various constraints of the system.

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Notes

Orr, R. “The privatization paradigm: Jumping onto the infrastructure bandwagon.” Infrastructure Journal (2006): 16-18.

2 Osborne, Stephen. Public-private partnerships: Theory and practice in international perspective. Routledge, 2000.

3 Roehrich, Jens K., Michael A. Lewis, and Gerard George. “Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review.” Social science & medicine 113 (2014): 110-119.

4 “What Are Public Private Partnerships?” Public Private Partnership, ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/overview/whatare-public-private-partnerships.

5 Taskforce, Treasury. “Partnerships for prosperity: The private finance initiative.” London: HM Treasury (1997).

6 Garvin, Michael J., and Doran Bosso. “Assessing the effectiveness of infrastructure public — private partnership programs and projects.”

Public Works Management & Policy 13, no. 2 (2008): 162-178.

7 Van Ham, Hans, and Joop Koppenjan. “Building public-private partnerships: Assessing and managing risks in port development.”

Public management review 3, no. 4 (2001): 593-616.

8 Vives, Antonio, Juan Benavides, and Angela Marcarino Paris. “Selecting infrastructure delivery modalities: No time for ideology or semantics.”

Journal of construction engineering and management 136, no. 4 (2010): 412-418.

9 Roehrich, Jens K., Michael A. Lewis, and Gerard George. “Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review.” Social science & medicine 113 (2014): 110-119.

10 Sagalyn, Lynne B. “Public/private development: Lessons from history, research, and practice.” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 1 (2007): 7-22.

11 Frieden, Bernard J., and Lynne B. Sagalyn. Downtown, inc: How America rebuilds cities. MIT press, 1991.

12 Sagalyn, Lynne B. “Public/private development: Lessons from history, research, and practice.” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 1 (2007): 7-22.

13 Sagalyn, Lynne B. “Public/private development: Lessons from history, research, and practice.” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 1 (2007): 7-22.

14 Webman, Jerry A. “UDAG: Targeting urban economic development.”

Political Science Quarterly 96, no. 2 (1981): 189-207.

15 Ibid.

16 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Evaluation, Urban Development Action Grant Program: First Annual Report.

Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, (1979): 4-6.

1

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Frieden, Bernard J., and Lynne B. Sagalyn. Downtown, inc: How America rebuilds cities. MIT press, 1991.

18 Barlow, James, Jens Roehrich, and Steve Wright. “Europe sees mixed results from public-private partnerships for building and managing health care facilities and services.” Health Af airs 32, no. 1 (2013): 146154.

19 Roehrich, Jens K., Michael A. Lewis, and Gerard George. “Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review.” Social science & medicine 113 (2014): 110-119.

20 Frieden, Bernard J., and Lynne B. Sagalyn. Downtown, inc: How America rebuilds cities. MIT press, 1991.

21 Roehrich, Jens K., Michael A. Lewis, and Gerard George. “Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review.” Social science & medicine 113 (2014): 110-119.

22 Hodge, Graeme A., and Carsten Greve. “On public–private partnership performance: A contemporary review.” Public Works Management & Policy 22, no. 1 (2017): 55-78.

23 Garvin, Michael J., and Doran Bosso. “Assessing the effectiveness of infrastructure public — private partnership programs and projects.”

Public Works Management & Policy 13, no. 2 (2008): 162-178.

24 Newman, Joshua. Governing Public-Private Partnerships. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2017.

25 Savas, Emanuel S., and Emanuel S. Savas. “Privatization and public-private partnerships.” (2000).

26 McCarty, Maggie. “Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program: Funding and Related Issues.” Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2005.

27 HOME Investment Partnerships Program - CPD | HUD.gov / U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/ affordablehousing/programs/home/.

28 McCarty, Maggie. “Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program: Funding and Related Issues.” Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2005.

29 Roehrich, Jens K., Michael A. Lewis, and Gerard George. “Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review.” Social science & medicine 113 (2014): 110-119.

30 Bennett, John, and Elisabetta Iossa. “Delegation of contracting in the private provision of public services.” Review of Industrial Organization 29, no. 1-2 (2006): 75-92.

31 Plunz, Richard. A history of housing in New York City. Columbia University Press, 2016.

32 Ibid.

17

Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 63

Kavya Tewari

Lazin, Frederick Aaron. “The failure of federal enforcement of civil rights regulations in public housing, 1963–1971: The co-optation of a federal agency by its local constituency.” Policy Sciences 4, no. 3 (1973): 263-273.

34 He, Bo. “Privatizing of NYCHA Public Housing.” Columbia University, 2016.

35 HOME Investment Partnerships Program - CPD | HUD.gov / U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/ affordablehousing/programs/home/.

36 “FY2010 Budget” (PDF). United States Department of Housing & Urban Development. 2010 37 Harvard Law Review. “When Hope Falls Short: HOPE VI, Accountability and the Privatization of Public Housing.” Harvard Law Review 116 (2003): 1477-1498.

38 Popkin, Susan J. “A decade of HOPE VI: Research findings and policy challenges.” (2004).

39 HUD Multifamily Loans. “What Is the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) Program?” HUD.Loans, HUD. Loans, 13 June 2019, www.hud. loans/hud-loans-blog/rental-assistance-demonstration.

40 Zeimba, S. “How projects rose to failure.” Chicago Tribune 2 (1986).

41 Bowly, Devereux, Devereux Bowly, and Sidney I. Dobrin. Poorhouse.

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

42 Zeimba, S. “How projects rose to failure.” Chicago Tribune 2 (1986).

43 Polikoff, Alexander. Waiting for Gautreaux: A story of segregation, housing, and the black ghetto. Northwestern University Press, 2007 44 Choldin, Harvey M. “Chicago Housing Authority,” The Electric Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005 Chicago Historical Society, http://www. encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/253.html.

45 “About,” Chicago Housing Authority, 2020 Chicago Housing Authority, www.thecha.org/about.

46 Semuels, Alana. “Public Housing Doesn’t Have to Be Terrible.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 22 Sept. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/public-housingsuccess/406561/.

47 Zeimba, S. “How projects rose to failure.” Chicago Tribune 2 (1986).

48 Silets, Alexandra. “Plan for Transformation: WBEZ Examines Progress of CHA Redevelopment.” WTTW News, WWCI, March 28, 2017, news.wttw.com/2017/03/28/plan-transformation-wbez-examinesprogress-cha-redevelopment.

49 “About,” Chicago Housing Authority, 2020 Chicago Housing Authority, www.thecha.org/about.

50 “RAD & MTW in Chicago: Creating Greater Impact with HUD Demonstration Programs.” The Chicago Housing Authority, 2020 Chicago Housing Authority, https://spark.adobe.com/page/Ol73jvnJqn70u/.

33

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RADicalizing Public Housing

“About,” Chicago Housing Authority, 2020 Chicago Housing Authority, www.thecha.org/about.

52 Hanlon, James. “The origins of the rental assistance demonstration program and the end of public housing.” Housing Policy Debate 27, no. 4 (2017): 611-639 53 Ibid.

54 Jones, Jr., Eugene. CHA FY2015 MTW Annual Report. Chicago: HUD, March 31, 2016. PDF. 55 FY2020 Comprehensive Budget Book, Chicago Housing Authority, December 31, 2019, PDF. 56 Fannie Emanuel Development, Item No. 13, Chicago Housing Authority, August 12, 2015, PDF. 57 Ibid.

58 Fannie Emanuel Development, Item No. 13, Chicago Housing Authority, August 12, 2015, PDF. 59 Romain, Michael. “West Side rehab to create 181 affordable senior apartments,” Austin Weekly News, Growing Community Media NFP, October 9th, 2015, https://www.austinweeklynews.com/News/ Articles/10-9-2015/West-Side-rehab-to-create-181-afford ablesenior-apartments/.

60 Fannie Emanuel Development, Item No. 13, Chicago Housing Authority, August 12, 2015, PDF. 61 Jones, Jr., Eugene. CHA FY2017 Moving To Work Annual Report. Chicago: HUD, March 30, 2018. PDF. 62 Ladov, Mark. “Tenements.” Encyclopedia.com, March 18, 2020. https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-andarchitecture/architecture/tenements.

63 History.com Editors, “Tenements,” History, A&E Television Networks, April 22, 2010, https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements.

64 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Jacob Riis: American Journalist,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. October 07, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacob-Riis.

65 History.com Editors, “Tenements,” History, A&E Television Networks, April 22, 2010, https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements.

66 Ibid.

67 Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds. Affordable housing in New York: The people, places, and policies that transformed a city. Princeton University Press, 2019.

68 Anzilotti, Eillie. “The Long, Complicated History of Affordable Housing in New York,” CityLab, Bloomberg L.P., February 26, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/02/the-long-complicatedhistory-of-affordable-housing-in-ne w-york/471096/.

51

Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 65

Kavya Tewari

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds. Affordable housing in New York: The people, places, and policies that transformed a city. Princeton University Press, 2019.

70 Moelis, Ron. “The History of Affordable Housing in New York City,” HuffPost News, Verizon Media, December 9, 2016, https://w w w.huffpost.com/entr y/the -histor y- ofaffordable -housing-in-new-york-city_b_5849d4c9e4 b0151082221981?guccounter=1.

71 Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds. Affordable housing in New York: The people, places, and policies that transformed a city. Princeton University Press, 2019.

72 Anzilotti, Eillie. “The Long, Complicated History of Affordable Housing in New York,” CityLab, Bloomberg L.P., February 26, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/02/the-long-complicatedhistory-of-affordable-housing-in-ne w-york/471096/.

73 “The Nixon Budget.” The New York Times. The New York Times, January 30, 1973. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/30/archives/the-nixonbudget-fiscal-policy-tax-policy-civilian-pri orities-or.html.

74 Anzilotti, Eillie. “The Long, Complicated History of Affordable Housing in New York,” CityLab, Bloomberg L.P., February 26, 2016, https:// www.citylab.com/equity/2016/02/the-long-complicated-historyof-affordable-housing-in-ne w-york/471096/.

75 Moelis, Ron. “The History of Affordable Housing in New York City,” HuffPost News, Verizon Media, December 9, 2016, https://w w w.huffpost.com/entr y/the -histor y- ofaffordable -housing-in-new-york-city_b_5849d4c9e4 b0151082221981?guccounter=1.

76 “Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT).” Accessed April 14, 2020. NYCHA, City of New York.

77 Delivering Comprehensive Repairs, Preserving Affordable Housing and Protecting Tenants. NYCHA 2.0 PACT: Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, April 14, 2020. PDF. 78 Ibid.

79 “Press Release: Ocean Bay Renovation Announcement,” NYC, City of New York, June 19, 2017, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/press/ pr-2017/bayside-apartments-20170619.page.

80 Ibid.

81 “Press Release: Ocean Bay Renovation Announcement,” NYC, City of New York, June 19, 2017, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/press/ pr-2017/bayside-apartments-20170619.page.

82 “Press Release: Ocean Bay Renovation Announcement,” NYC, City of New York, June 19, 2017, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/press/ pr-2017/bayside-apartments-20170619.page.

69

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RADicalizing Public Housing 83

Khafagy, Amir. “NYCHA’s Embrace of RAD Program Brings a Mix of Praise and Worry,” Shelterforce, Shelterforce, October 9, 2018, https:// shelterforce.org/2018/10/09/nychas-embrace-of-rad-programbrings-a-mix-of-praise-and-worry/.

Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 67

Kavya Tewari

Works Cited

“About,” Chicago Housing Authority, 2020 Chicago Housing Authority, www.thecha.org/about.

Anzilotti, Eillie. “The Long, Complicated History of Affordable Housing in New York,” CityLab, Bloomberg L.P., February 26, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/02/the-long-complicatedhistory-of-affordabl e-housing-in-new-york/471096/​.

Barlow, James, Jens Roehrich, and Steve Wright. “Europe sees mixed results from public-private partnerships for building and managing health care facilities and services.” Health Affairs 32, no. 1 (2013): 146-154.

Bennett, John, and Elisabetta Iossa. “Delegation of contracting in the private provision of public services.” Review of Industrial Organization 29, no.

1-2 (2006): 75-92.

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds. Affordable housing in New York: The people, places, and policies that transformed a city​.

Princeton University Press, 2019.

Bowly, Devereux, Devereux Bowly, and Sidney I. Dobrin. Poorhouse​.

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Choldin, Harvey M. “Chicago Housing Authority,”The Electric Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005 Chicago Historical Society, http://www.encyclopedia. chicagohistory.org/pages/253.html​.

Fannie Emanuel Development​, Item No. 13, Chicago Housing Authority, August 12, 2015, PDF. Frieden, Bernard J., and Lynne B. Sagalyn. Downtown, inc: How America rebuilds cities​. MIT press, 1991.

FY2020 Comprehensive Budget Book, Chicago Housing Authority, December 31, 2019, PDF. Garvin, Michael J., and Doran Bosso. “Assessing the effectiveness of infrastructure public — private partnership programs and projects.”

Public Works Management & Policy 13, no. 2 (2008): 162-178.

Hanlon, James. “The origins of the rental assistance demonstration program and the end of public housing.” Housing Policy Debate 27, no. 4 (2017): 611-639 Harvard Law Review. “When Hope Falls Short: HOPE VI, Accountability and the Privatization of Public Housing.” Harvard Law Review 116 (2003): 1477-1498.

Hill, Heather. “RAD in Far Rockaway, New York: Ocean Bay Takes a Holistic Approach to Public Housing.” The New York City Housing Authority, 2020 New York City Housing Authority, https://spark.adobe.com/ page/IcDJBTR8i9ZQA/​.

History.com Editors. “Tenements,” History, A&E Television Networks, April 22, 2010, https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements​.

Hodge, Graeme A., and Carsten Greve. “On public–private partnership performance: A contemporary review.” Public Works Management & Policy 22, no. 1 (2017): 55-78.

68

RADicalizing Public Housing

HOME Investment Partnerships Program - CPD | HUD.gov / U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/ affordablehousing/programs/ home/.

HUD Multifamily Loans. “What Is the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) Program?” HUD.Loans​, HUD. Loans, 13 June 2019, www.hud.loans/hud-loans-blog/rental-assistance-demonstration​ .

Jones, Jr., Eugene. CHA FY2015 MTW Annual Report​. Chicago: HUD, March 31, 2016. PDF. Jones, Jr., Eugene. CHA FY2017 Moving To Work Annual Report​. Chicago: HUD, March 30, 2018. PDF. Khafagy, Amir. “NYCHA’s Embrace of RAD Program Brings a Mix of Praise and Worry,” Shelterforce, Shelterforce, October 9, 2018, https://shelterforce.org/2018/10/09/nychas-embrace-of-radprogram-brings-a-mix-o f-praise-and-worry/​.

Ladov, Mark. “Tenements.” Encyclopedia.com, March 18, 2020. https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-andarchitecture/architecture/t enements.

Lazin, Frederick Aaron. “The failure of federal enforcement of civil rights regulations in public housing, 1963–1971: The co-optation of a federal agency by its local constituency.” Policy Sciences 4, no. 3 (1973): 263-273.

Link, Jeff. “Affordable Senior Housing That Works,” Architect Magazine, ARCHITECT, 2018, https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/fannie-emanuelapartments​.

McCarty, Maggie. “Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program: Funding and Related Issues.” Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2005.

Moelis, Ron. “The History of Affordable Housing in New York City,” HuffPost News, Verizon Media, December 9, 2016, https://www.huffpost. com/entry/the-history-of-affordable-housing-in-new-york-cit y_b_5849d4c9e4b0151082221981?guccounter=1​.

Newman, Joshua. Governing Public-Private Partnerships​. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2017.

Orr, R. “The privatization paradigm: Jumping onto the infrastructure bandwagon.” Infrastructure Journal (2006): 16-18.

Osborne, Stephen. Public-private partnerships: Theory and practice in international perspective​. Routledge, 2000.

“Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT).” Accessed April 14, 2020. NYCHA, City of New York.

Plunz, Richard. A history of housing in New York City​. Columbia University Press, 2016.

Popkin, Susan J. “A decade of HOPE VI: Research findings and policy challenges.” (2004).

Polikoff, Alexander. Waiting for Gautreaux: A story of segregation, housing, Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 69

Kavya Tewari

and the black ghetto​. Northwestern University Press, 2007 “Press Release: Ocean Bay Renovation Announcement,” NYC, City of New York, June 19, 2017, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/press/pr-2017/baysideapartments-20170619 .page​.

“RAD & MTW in Chicago: Creating Greater Impact with HUD Demonstration Programs.” The Chicago Housing Authority, 2020 Chicago Housing Authority, https://spark.adobe.com/page/Ol73jvnJqn70u/​.

Roehrich, Jens K., Michael A. Lewis, and Gerard George. “Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review.” Social science & medicine 113 (2014): 110-119.

Romain, Michael. “West Side rehab to create 181 affordable senior apartments,” Austin Weekly News, Growing Community Media NFP, October 9th, 2015, https://www.austinweeklynews.com/News/ Articles/10-9-2015/West-Side-rehab-to create-181-affordablesenior-apartments/​.

Sagalyn, Lynne B. “Public/private development: Lessons from history, research, and practice.” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 1 (2007): 7-22.

Savas, Emanuel S., and Emanuel S. Savas. “Privatization and public-private partnerships.” (2000).

Semuels, Alana. “Public Housing Doesn’t Have to Be Terrible.” The Atlantic​, Atlantic Media Company, 22 Sept. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/public-housingsuccess/406561/​.

Silets, Alexandra. “Plan for Transformation: WBEZ Examines Progress of CHA Redevelopment.” WTTW News, WWCI, March 28, 2017, news.wttw.com/2017/03/28/plan-transformation-wbez-examinesprogress-cha-rede velopment Taskforce, Treasury. “Partnerships for prosperity: The private finance initiative.” London: HM Treasury (1997).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Jacob Riis: American Journalist,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. October 07, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacob-Riis​.

“The Nixon Budget.” The New York Times. The New York Times, January 30, 1973. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/30/archives/the-nixonbudget-fiscal-policy-tax-p olicy-civilian-priorities-or.html.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Evaluation, Urban Development Action Grant Program: First Annual Report​ .

Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, (1979): 4-6.

Van Ham, Hans, and Joop Koppenjan. “Building public-private partnerships: Assessing and managing risks in port development.” Public management review 3, no. 4 (2001): 593-616.

Vives, Antonio, Juan Benavides, and Angela Marcarino Paris. “Selecting infrastructure delivery modalities: No time for ideology or semantics.”

Journal of construction engineering and management 136, no. 4

70

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(2010): 412-418.

Webman, Jerry A. “UDAG: Targeting urban economic development.” Political Science Quarterly 96, no. 2 (1981): 189-207 “What Are Public Private Partnerships?” Public Private Partnership​, ppp. worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/overview/what-arepublic-privatepartnerships.

Zeimba, S. “How projects rose to failure.” Chicago Tribune 2 (1986).

Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 71

The Ascension of Universities as Anchor Institutions and the Threat of Gentrification: Evaluating Columbia University’s Manhattanville Project Brianna Sturkey Barnard College, Columbia University Introduction

In the United States, metropolitan areas have increasingly fostered economic opportunity for some while maintaining racial inequality for others. Gentrification has often been misinterpreted as the revitalization of neighborhoods consisting of mainly African American communities that have in the past experienced significant under-investment by the government and market actors (Smith, 2002: 438). On the surface level gentrification stimulates economic and commercial development, but emerging studies on this topic have revealed that these benefits disproportionately go to investors, and at the expense of long-term residents. Moreover, research has painted a fuller picture of how gentrification directly impacts local communities by transforming neighborhoods into socially unwelcoming and financially unaffordable areas. The scholarship regarding gentrification studies and its impacts on communities of color is relatively new in academia, and it is especially constrained when discussing the role of educational institutions as landowners.

In the United States, more than half of all universities and colleges are located in urban cities and often are surrounded by low-income neighborhoods that are also often home to majority-minority populations (Ehlenz, 2016: 715). Anchor institutions are described as being “often among the largest employers and landowners within their host cities, generating massive economic development impacts” (Ehlenz, 2016: 715). This definition accurately describes the role of urban educational institutions like Columbia University in New York City. This university is one of the three largest landowners in New York City, after the Catholic Church and the state of New York (Wiewl and Perry, 2005: 10). In addition, Columbia is one of the top employers in New York City, employing a faculty of 4,000 and more than 16,600 people in nonfaculty jobs, who combined earn more than $1.2 billion a year in wages (“Columbia University Contributes”).

As one of the largest landowners and economic contributors to the New York state economy, it is critical to examine Columbia’s unique role in the community, given it is situated between two historically Black and

Brianna Sturkey

Latinx neighborhoods— Harlem and Washington Heights—both with a disproportionate share of New York City’s low-income housing units. The socio-economic and racial composition of these communities means they potentially stand to gain the most from anchor institutions like Columbia infusing more resources into its surrounding community. On the other hand, these same neighborhoods are especially vulnerable to harm due the historical and ongoing headwinds they face from racism and socioeconomic exclusion that are exacerbated by gentrification processes.

Case Study: The Manhattanville Project In 2003, Columbia University announced their “Manhattanville Project” which has directly impacted their West Harlem neighbors. This project plans to extend Columbia’s campus from 125th Street to 133rd Street, filling almost 18 acres parallel to the Hudson River (Evitar, 2006).

University of Columbia President, Lee Bollinger, contends this project will fulfill the university’s need for more space and simultaneously bring economic benefits to West Harlem by integrating the Ivy League campus into the economic and social fabric of the local neighborhood (Evitar, 2006). Bollinger’s statements reflect the popular narrative, which is that gentrification infuses cash, increases property values, and otherwise invests in previously underserved communities. However, as this dissertation shows, this conception is likely unfounded. The expansion of Columbia University has significant adverse effects on long-time Harlem residents, even as there have been some benefits. Furthermore, Columbia has engaged in questionable development tactics, including but not limited to the aggressive use of eminent domain in order to acquire land from longtime, disproportionately Black residents. For my dissertation, Columbia University demonstrates how an anchor institution leading revitalization efforts can manipulate its status as a nonprofit institution to obscure its deployment of practices akin to how corporations pursue their interests.

Literature Review

The Gaps in Gentrification Literature The term gentrification was coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in the 1960s to describe the displacement of the poor people in London when upper-class people began moving into refurbish houses previously occupied by the working-class (Solomon, 2014). The basic principles of Glass’s terminology have remained applicable throughout the decades but leading the pack among modern gentrification scholars is Neil Smith. Smith theorizes that gentrification is a neoliberal strategy that serves the interest of capitalist production and that this strategy has replaced liberal urban policies that were less market-driven and that accounted for low-income

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residents’ interests (Smith, 2002; 427). His major contribution to the field of sociology was his invention of a three-wave analysis to identify the effects of gentrification with the second and third wave being the most central to my dissertation. Smith pinpoints the second wave of gentrification arising in the 1970s and 1980s, as strategies of gentrification become intertwined with urban and economic restructuring; and he describes the final wave appearing in the 1990s— and is the form that persists today (Smith, 2002: 440).

In general, gentrification studies consist of theories seeking to explain the economic, racial, and political impacts of this specific type of urban redevelopment on working class and poor neighborhoods. According to Smith, the first wave of gentrification in the 1950s was primarily initiated by local and state governments (Smith, 2002: 440). The second wave, also known as the “anchoring phase” occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. This phase is deeply connected to the rise of anchor institutions assuming the role of land developers as federal agencies during this period increasingly provided less funding for public infrastructure and urban development, as a majority-share of federal expenditures were increasingly being funneled into suburban neighborhoods (Smith, 2002: 440). Consistent with Smith’s final wave of gentrification, universities and colleges have capitalized on prior gentrification processes, allowing them to gain unprecedented and disproportionate power in shaping the social, political, and economic landscapes of their surrounding communities.

In Smith’s book, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, he argues that struggles over urban space have always been rooted in class-conflict and that this clash between the rich and the poor will undoubtedly lead to the formation of “revanchist cities” (Smith, 2005: 106). In these “revanchist cities,” the working class and the rich will continue to escalate tensions and violence in order to gain control over neighborhoods. Smith’s chapter on the gentrification of Harlem is particularly insightful because he contextualizes the long history of disinvestment in the area by the New York state government, landlords, and financial institutions which ultimately produced the racially homogenous black neighborhood in the 1920s (Smith, 2005: 139). He then details how a series of financial crises coupled with a decline in population that New York City experienced in the early 1970s provided the perfect conditions for gentrification to arise. Smith uses census and housing market data through which he compares indicators such as housing costs, household incomes, rent increases, and ownership rates from the early 1970s to the late 1980s to document the economic impact of gentrification in Harlem (Smith, 2005: 156). He concludes this chapter with the prediction that “a large number of Central Harlem residents will ultimately be displaced and will not benefit from the better and more expensive housing” and that Harlemites “will Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 75

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be victims rather than beneficiaries of gentrification” (Smith, 2005: 161).

Smith’s theory, while critical for explaining how key actors and institutions laid the groundwork for gentrification, is dated, given it was published in 1996. My dissertation builds upon Smith’s work by examining the role Columbia University has played as a gentrifying force in Harlem in the twenty-first century, and its unique ability to do so as a large elite university in an increasingly market-driven city.

Lance Freeman’s book There Goes the Hood, published in 2006, pivots from a mostly economics-driven analysis of gentrification to one examining the sociological factors related to gentrification in New York City’s Harlem and Clinton Hill neighborhoods. Freeman’s sociological analysis hinges on interviews with 55 New York City residents, 85 percent of whom self-identify as black, to paint a more complex picture of residential displacement than Smith offers in his work (Freeman, 2006: 11). By letting the subjects speak for themselves, he disrupts scholars’ tendency, like Smith’s, to concentrate exclusively on issues of class as the main source of contention within gentrifying neighborhoods. Instead, Freeman argues that racialization processes and racism must be at the forefront of analysis of where gentrification occurs and whose interest are served when it does (Freeman, 2006: 196). In addition, he complicates modern urban studies by exploring class tensions between long-time residents who do not all agree that gentrification is necessarily a negative development for their neighborhood (Freeman, 2006: 196). These varied perspectives about the benefits and costs that corporate investment brings residents severely underserved by government and market institutions adds nuance to literature that often emphasizes race-based solidarity among Black people.

Freeman shows gentrification is not a one-dimensional topic and his rich data collection challenges researchers to identify urban development variations across and within racial groups. My work demonstrates there are even more dimensions to account for. For example, his work does not investigate Columbia University as a significant player in the modern redevelopment of Harlem. My dissertation adds to our understanding of how gentrification has shaped and is currently shaping Harlem.

Braiding Together Gentrification and Anchor Institution Research In the past twenty years there has been more research on universities and colleges as urban developers. Many of these schools are considered “anchor institutions” because of their ability to stimulate economic growth for their respective state’s economy by employing New York residents and also because of the amount of real estate that they possess, which directly ties them to their local communities (Ehlenz, 2016: 715). But, this literature does not show the mechanisms through which universities gentrify neighborhoods, notably by taking on roles traditionally performed by city 76

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planners and by using political strategies to capture land that mirror those deployed by corporations. In addition, there is no general consensus among academics concerning whether anchor institutions yield more positive or negative consequences for local neighborhoods.

The term anchor institution was coined by Michael Porter in 2002 within urban development studies to highlight “the current power and future potential of universities, hospitals, and other institutions with long-term, rooted investments in particular locations to transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions” (Rutheiser). This definition focuses these institutions’ abilities to transform communities through various modes, including community engagement, supporting local businesses, and developing high-quality educational facilities through direct capital investment (Rutheiser). However, anchor institutions did not gain their power and status by simply existing. Universities began acquiring power because of federal government-sponsored Urban Renewal campaigns in the 1960s and the “nonprofitization” (outsourcing of government functions to community-based organizations) in the 1970s, all of which created a decentralized model that granted these educational institutions unprecedented influence over urban affairs (Silverman, 2014: 4).

William Worthy was among the first scholars to critique anchorbased development during the 1960s and 1970s through his concept ‘‘institutional rape.” The original tension between anchor institutions and inner-city communities stems from federal Urban Revitalization programs that ultimately displaced many African-American communities: “urban renewal became synonymous with Negro removal in public discourse” (Silverman, 2014: 3). Black communities’ perception of early Urban Renewal programs as federal displacement designed to strip Black and Brown people’s homes from them was not a far cry from the reality that transpired then and would transpire again decades later. Worthy argued that the residential displacement encouraged by government urban renewal programs was not confined to federal policies, but that the expansion of anchor institutions, such as colleges and hospitals, also contributed to the issue (Silverman, 2014: 5). Worthy’s conceptualization of institutional rape has provided contemporary urban studies scholars with a framework to identify the role of universities as anchor institutions and the harmful effects they often elicit.

Worthy and other critics called attention to the expansion of local institutions like colleges, hospitals, and churches in the 1970s, anticipating that their growth would have detrimental impacts on inner-city neighborhoods (Silverman, 2014: 3). His anticipation of these issues stem from the fact that during the 1970s less federal and state money was going to cities and increasingly the federal government was delegating public service provision to non-profits. Worthy understood that these series of Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 77

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actions would mean neighborhood residents had few, if any, places to turn for resources other than anchor institutions: “residents had to negotiate a more complex web of organizations engaged in urban revitalization while federal resources designed to assist residents negatively impacted by urban development were being withdrawn” (Silverman, 2014: 4). Ultimately, the shift of funding provided the foundation for a new set of relationships between governments, community residents, and educational institutions.

This set the stage for universities and colleges to emerge as the new leaders of revitalization efforts because their status as nonprofit institutions enabled them to receive federal funds for the purposes of reinvigorating local low-income areas they were situated within. This delegation of authority and resources to non-profit institutions like universities and colleges is an important historical turning point. This turning point is reflected in urban studies literature as scholars examine how and to what ends anchor institutions affect the economic trajectories of communities near them.

Sheila A. Martin wrote a widely circulated article discussing the beneficial characteristics of universities as urban developers, entitled “Urban Universities: Anchors Generating Prosperity for America’s Cities” (Martin, 2010: 1). She identifies metropolitan cities as a crucial indicator of the health of the national economy because they “contain most of the nation’s population, function as centers of culture and entertainment, offer high-quality places to live and work, and serve as hubs of transportation and economic activity” (Martin, 2010: 2). Furthermore, Martin states that universities are unique among anchor institutions because of the sheer amount of human, cultural, and economic resources they each possess and the great responsibilities they have in shaping economic and community development in recent years. Martin argues that issues cities face such as inadequate educational systems, sluggish innovation systems, aging infrastructure due to population growth, and diminishing social equity and civic capacity can all be solved by university directed policies and initiatives (Martin, 2010: 3-4). She believes that universities are well-suited to address these issues because “unlike corporations, anchor institutions cannot easily pick up and leave” (Martin, 2010: 5).

Martin supports her argument about universities by pointing to certain economic indicators. She cites a report titled “The Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (“USU”), which quantified the outcomes of universities partnerships with local economies through a survey conducted in 2009. This survey found that urban research universities are: (1) among the top employers in their cities; (2) spend $445 million annually on wages and salaries in the local economy; (3) own on average 580 acres of real estate, often in the heart of cities; (4) spend $6 billion each year on public services; and (5), state community engagement is part of their mission (Martin, 2010: 9). Martin concludes with a call to action for the federal 78

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government to give education institutions more funds to strengthen their long-term engagement and to encourage more universities to work with local communities (Martin, 2010: 21). Her conclusion that universities are inherently positive actors focuses heavily on their infusion of cash and property. But, she fails to account for the adverse social and political effects that also accrue. Martin’s one-sided account is harmful because it discounts low-income minority communities’ full range of experiences, most notably, the disproportionate rate at which they are displaced and thus do not experience reap the benefits of university led developments.

In contrast, other scholars have documented the detrimental effects of universities as anchor institutions. A compelling example of this viewpoint is the case of the University of Pennsylvania and their urban development policies in the 1990s. Meagan M. Ehlenz writes extensively on the impact of the gentrification invoked by the University of Pennsylvania, popularly coined “McPennification.” She focuses on Penn specifically because during the 1990s the West Philadelphia area was experiencing rising crime and disinvestment and as a result the university established the West Philadelphia Initiatives (WPI) to address these issues through investment and revitalization efforts (Ehlenz, 2016: 717). Ehlenz examines the impacts of the WPI from 1990-2010 using data from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey (ACS). She utilizes three major indicators to codify neighborhood change: (1) changes in total population and racial composition; (2) socio-economic trends, including poverty and median household incomes; and (3) housing trends, including dwelling units, vacancy rates, tenure status, and median home values (Ehlenz, 2016: 717718).

The WPI was a five-point plan intended to be a holistic neighborhood improvement program. Ehlenz finds this plan increased overall safety in the area, most notably by investing $165 million in University City — the portion of West Philadelphia immediately surrounding Penn — by contributing more than 400,000 square feet of retail space that was used to build a grocery store, a movie theatre, restaurants, and a hotel (Ehlenz, 2016: 726).

However, these changes were accompanied by major shifts in racial and economic dynamics. Ehlenz shows that from 1990 to 2000 White and Asian populations declined, while the Black population increased. However, during the next decade, there was a reversal: White and Asian populations steadily increased, while the Black population declined sharply (Ehlenz, 2016: 733). In addition to this, she cites that poverty rates decreased from 30 percent in 1990 to 25.98 percent in 2010, median household incomes within the area began to rise compared to areas outside the WPI target areas, and that vacancy rates fell consistently in the area — though all of these rates increased dramatically outside of where the University of Pennsylvania invested. Therefore, it is likely that high-income residents Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 79

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displaced those with low-incomes. Ehlenz argues the WPI was considered successful based on the indicators stated above, but she also argues success was not uniformly achieved throughout the neighborhood and that the benefits of the WPI were primarily concentrated within University City (Ehlenz, 2016: 737). In the end, she shows how “devolving the traditional responsibility of local government (i.e. the provision of public goods) to anchor institutions—organizations that are not democratically elected to represent a neighborhood”—can function to further harm local vulnerable communities instead of strengthening them with the resources and amenities they need” (Ehlenz, 2016: 738).

Ultimately, University of Pennsylvania revitalization efforts highlights the implication of urban universities supplementing the public sector by supplying public services and goods.

Research about the benefits and costs of anchor institutions has become critical since the early 2000s as universities and colleges have increasingly leveraged their identity as a nonmarket actor in ways obscuring how their priorities are more similar to those of corporations, rather than institutions pursuing the wellbeing of all residents. Other elite universities such as Harvard, Syracuse, and John Hopkins have played similar roles in their communities (Ehlenz, 2016: 716). Their community revitalization strategies focus almost exclusively on economic benefits that mostly accrue to their immediate surrounding areas, while ignoring the adverse impacts on racial and ethnic minorities and low-income residents. Universities’ willingness to commit financial resources towards these projects illustrates that they believe the benefits gained outweigh the negative costs. This happens in a context where: (1) anchor institutions’ roles and responsibilities are undefined, (2) there are not metrics incorporating long-time residents’ interests, and (3) there is limited or no accountability for universities’ harm to communities. Thus, anchor institutions can largely ignore the negative consequences of the gentrification they engender and focus on the benefits, thus indicating that this trend of anchor institutions playing the role of urban developer is likely to continue. One step toward evaluating universities actions would be devising criteria accounting for residents’ and communities’ needs and interests, framing urban space not just as a site from which to make a profit, but a place where basic human needs must be met. A human rights framework that outlines people’s “Right to the City” is a step in this direction.

Gentrification is a Human Rights Issue The modern human rights movement against gentrification has been coined “Right to the City,” which stems from Marxist ideology that seeks to define marginalized groups’ collective reclamation of urban space. This term was created by Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre in 1968 in his book 80

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The Urban Revolution in which he predicted “that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle” (Harvey, 2008: 28). Because Lefebvre linked early stages of urbanization with capitalism, he identified how vulnerable communities would likely be excluded from these newfound economic and social benefits that would come to urban society. As a response to this looming exclusion, Lefebvre states that “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand... a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (Purcell, 2002: 102). This right that Lefebvre outlines goes beyond a traditional conception of human rights by seeking to empower citizens to shape the city in ways that meet their needs, rather than the needs of corporations. Many in academic fields, such as urban planning and geography, have made “Right to the City” a line of research and social movements have adopted it as a call to action.

Well-known geographer David Harvey re-popularized the term in 2008 by incorporating it into his academic work. Harvey champions the idea that citizens should shape everything in the city and that this right should not just be limited to improvements in their individual status (Harvey, 2008: 23). He argues that cities transformed in the 1960s to become one of the primary generators of income and capital in American society and that this led to “the rights of private property and the profit rate [trumping] all other notions of rights”(Harvey, 2008: 23). Harvey connects periodic financial crises in America with booms and busts in urban development, noting how these cycles of crises dispossess the urban poor of their ties to their respective communities. Furthermore, he details the wave of protests arising across the world in the twenty-first century, including in Spain, Argentina, the United States, India, Brazil and China. During these protests, working class people demand their Rights to the City, which Harvey believes as having fallen into the hands of the corporate elite (Harvey, 2008: 38). Given recent global developments, Harvey redefines Lefebvre’s original concept of the “Right to the City” when he states: The Right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights (Harvey, 2008: 23).

This redefinition is not meant to be understood as an individual legal right, but instead as a collective social movement that is aimed towards fighting against the increasing privatization of public infrastructure, housing, and utilities. International human rights law recognizes the right Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 81

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to adequate housing as outlined in Article 11 of The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (“ICESCR”) (Tars, 2018: 13).

However, to date, no political entity at any level of government has formally recognized housing or the “Right to the City” as a fundamental human right. Because modern gentrification often intensifies existing racial and economic inequality for minority communities, scholars interested in the equitable distribution of resources should pay particular attention to how those most vulnerable experience infusions of capital. “Right to the City” is literature that takes a step in this direction because it provides a framework for legal recourse to address the effects of residential displacement.

Methods

My dissertation connects academic work on gentrification, anchor institutions, and human rights to examine Columbia University’s development projects in its surrounding neighborhoods. Neil Smith’s three wave analysis of gentrification provides the primary structure for my thesis as I trace how Columbia has interacted with Harlem over the past decade, often working outside of public awareness and with minimal resistance from government at any level. My sources include legal documents that analyze the application of the eminent domain law in the United States throughout the decades, articles from Columbia’s student-run newspaper the Columbia Daily Spectator which trace the lobbying strategies Columbia employed to realize its expansion project, and lastly I tack the university’s fulfillment of the commitments they made to the Manhattanville community as expressed in the Community Benefits Agreement. A majority of the newspaper articles I cite come from the Columbia Daily Spectator. Perhaps counter intuitively, given the paper is run by people who benefit from Columbia’s resources, the Columbia Daily Spectator has been instrumental in uncovering otherwise unknown information about the university’s agreements with New York state officials. These articles in conjunction with Smith’s analysis enable me to investigate Columbia’s actions as it pursues its interests in the neighborhood.

The Socio-economic and Racial Evolution of Harlem from the Mid-twentieth Century to the Present

Harlem has been widely recognized as a mecca of Black culture, talent, and innovation for decades. After the Civil War, many AfricanAmericans escaping Jim Crow oppression in the South fled to northern and western cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and New York (McGruder, 2015: 3-4). New York, because of its location along the East Coast, linking it to major railroad routes, became a popular destination for tens of thousands of African-American migrants. The 300,000 Blacks that arrived during the twentieth century were part of The Great Migration, during 82

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which over six million Black people left the South (History.com Editors, 2009). While Harlem has had a large Black population for decades, it is not one uniform neighborhood. It consists of two major areas: East Harlem and West Harlem. Manhattanville, the site where my research is focused, is part of West Harlem. The portion of West Harlem I investigate, Manhattanville, has its own unique history, separate from the famous 125th Street corridor.

Manhattanville begins at roughly 123rd Street and extends northward to 135th Street. It was originally an important trading outpost due to its lowlying topography, which enabled ready access to the Hudson River (Huff, 2019). It is popularly believed that the name Manhattanville comes from 125th Street’s original name: Manhattan Street. Historically, Manhattanville was a common area for New Yorkers to build mansions and farms because of its high land and unobstructed views of the Hudson. The discovery of a freshwater spring in 1832 initiated the start of industrialization of the area (Huff, 2019). This industrialization process led to the construction of the city’s first cable car system to facilitate movement between neighborhoods and businesses. Manhattanville was where the very first cable car was tested. It ran along what was then 10th Avenue from 125th up to 186th Street (Huff, 2019).

In addition to the neighborhood being at the forefront of New York’s industrialization period, Manhattanville was progressive regarding public education in the twentieth century. Manhattanville Free School, established in 1927, provided tuition-free education to the local community and many credit this institution as having a significant influence on the formation of the public school systems throughout the United States (Huff, 2019). As this brief history shows, although Manhattanville is constitutive of Harlem’s collective history, there is much that sets it apart from nearby neighborhoods. It is critical to account for variation among Black communities, as the tendency has been to homogenize Black neighborhoods based on their shared experience of race-based exclusion. Appreciating the distinct histories of Harlem neighborhoods, like Manhattanville, shows the complexity of Black New Yorkers’ experiences throughout the city’s history.

But even with an eye toward the heterogeneity of Black communities’ experiences in New York, a pronounced pattern of government neglect emerges, particularly from the 1950s to 1980s. The Harlem Renaissance, which flourished from the 1910s to the mid-1930s, helped establish the neighborhood’s collective reputation for perseverance and resistance in the face of racial discrimination, resulting in the community not receiving adequate public services and infrastructure investment (History.com Editors, 2009). It also solidified Harlem’s status as a cultural hub for Black writers, artists, intellectuals, and poets. Prominent Black icons, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes resided in central Harlem during this rich era and contributed to elevating Harlem’s reputation Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 83

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(History.com Editors, 2009). However, the reputation Harlem built during its renaissance could not protect it from the next several decades of a nationwide pattern of systemic government and market underinvestment in Black communities, through policies such as “urban renewal.” In April of 1964, Manhattanville and Central Harlem were among five New York City neighborhoods targeted for “slum clearance.” According to a New York City Planning Commission report these were areas where “blight and deterioration [were] so advanced that much of the recommended renewal treatment [was] likely to be redevelopment” (O’Kane, 1964).

With neighborhood demolition on the horizon coupled with the intense racism and discrimination that defined the 1960s, tensions between the New York City government and Harlem residents culminated on July 16, 1964 when a white off-duty police officer shot 15-yearold James Powell (Stulz, 2018). This event sparked a race riot and this civil unrest lasted for six days, resulting in one resident’s death, more than 100 people injured, 450 arrested, and about $1 million dollars in property damage (Stulz, 2018). This uprising marked the beginning of Harlem’s decline and the “hyper-ghettoization” of the neighborhood. This hyper-ghettoization was further intensified in the 1980s during the height of the crack epidemic, which disproportionately affected Black communities nationwide and exacerbated the economic and social strain Harlem residents experienced (Zukin, Trujillo, Frase, Jackson, Recuber, and Walker, 2009: 50). During this period, the New York City government could not even sell homes in Harlem for $1. The city acquired these homes after owners did not meet tax obligations. In this context of plummeting property values, banks refused to grant loans to finance renovations in Harlem, which were desperately needed after a series of violent uprisings in the 1960s (Zukin, Trujillo, Frase, Jackson, Recuber, and Walker, 2009: 50) In addition, New York City in the 1960s to 1980s, like many major cities across the United States, experienced a mass exodus of its white residents. This process is commonly known as “white flight.” This dramatic loss of white people reinforced the decline of Black New Yorkers in places like Harlem. The combination of social and economic ills Harlem endured from the 1950s through the 1980s created a desperate housing situation for Harlemites. But the 1990s were another turning point in Harlem. During this decade, there was renewed government interest in the area, exemplified by a series of state and local laws and targeted commercial investments designed to increase property values and ostensibly the quality of life for Harlem residents. However, in the end, many long-time Harlem residents did not benefit from this investment because they could no longer afford to remain in the neighborhood, as rents and other costs of living increased.

Those who remained in Harlem were forced to compete in an increasingly overcrowded and competitive housing market, a market with fewer and 84

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fewer affordable units.

The initial stages of gentrification in Harlem were triggered by New York State’s introduction of the Rent Regulation Act in 1997. This act allowed landlords to increase the rent of regulated apartments by between 18 and 20 percent upon each vacancy and once the rent reached $2000 the landlord would be able to remove the unit from the regulated housing stock (Newman and Elvin, 2006: 47). This act allowed landlords to increase the rent of regulated apartments by between 18 and 20 percent upon each vacancy and once the rent reached $2,000, the landlord would be able to remove the unit from rent-regulated housing stock (Newman and Elvin, 2006: 47). Thus, the Rent Regulation Act encouraged landlords to engage in various unscrupulous tactics, some of them illegal, to generate more opportunities to increase rent. Examples of these practices range from charging excessive rents for stabilized units, to not providing services, to rotating tenants to different units in their buildings in order to capture the rent increase (Newman and Elvin, 2006: 47). These tactics were consistent with the state’s interests because by removing units from the regulated market the landlord could start charging free-market rates, resulting in increased tax revenue for state and local government (Hevesi, 1996). Arnold Goldstein, president of Samson Management and chairman of the Rent Stabilization Association which was New York’s largest landlord organization in 1996, affirms this perspective when he states: free-market rates are “an opportunity [for the city] to raise the assessment and obtain more tax dollars” (Hevesi, 1996). While deregulated apartments mean higher tax revenues for the city, deregulation also undermines moderate and lowincome residents’ capacity to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods because they can no longer afford the cost of living. Thus, state policy, as set forth in the Rent Regulation Act, led to many African Americans being pushed out of their Harlem homes. Moreover, once gentrification processes gained momentum in Harlem, businesses increasingly catered to new high-income residents, making it more challenging for moderate-income residents to meet their needs within a few blocks of their homes. Increasing commercial development exacerbated pressure on housing as more people sought homes in Harlem, thus increasing housing demand and landlords’ ability to find tenants willing to pay higher rents.

In addition to the Rent Regulation Act of 1997, the targeted redevelopment of 125th Street, sponsored in part by New York State and City governments and federal government subsidies during this time period, functioned to further pressure low-income residents throughout Harlem. Harlem is attractive to residents and businesses because of the neighborhood’s short commuting distance between Midtown and Lower Manhattan (Zukin, Trujillo, Frase, Jackson, Recuber, and Walker, 2009: 49-50). In the 1990s, an array of New York state agencies facilitated the Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 85

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development of today’s 125th Street, a 24-hour destination filled with retail and entertainment venues. The Harlem Community Development Corporation (a subsidiary of New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation) and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ) established by the U.S. Congress in 1994, together supported commercial investment through a series of coordinated policies and interrelated organizations (Zukin, Trujillo, Frase, Jackson, Recuber, and Walker, 2009: 50). The main source of funding for business development in Harlem during the 1990s came from UMEZ’s $300 million infusion of capital and other financial assistance. The program granted loans to new retail stores, establishing the Harlem Shopping Complex in the year 2000, consisting of the AMC Magic Johnson movie theatre, Old Navy, Modell’s Sporting Goods, a Disney Store, and other chain stores. According to an “economic summit meeting” on Small Business in Crisis organized by the Harlem Business Alliance, between 2003 and 2005, 55 small businesses were shut down in the face of the emerging chain retail stores in the area (Zukin, Trujillo, Frase, Jackson, Recuber, and Walker, 2009: 61).

In addition to commercial investment subsidies, the city government rezoned the avenues in Harlem to permit the construction of high-rise apartment houses with retail stores on the ground floor. The city encouraged the construction of new residential units through an “inclusionary” zoning policy, which permitted higher and denser buildings (Zukin, Trujillo, Frase, Jackson, Recuber, and Walker, 2009: 50). New York state offered tax reductions and abatements to private real estate developers if they included some “affordable” apartments in their residential projects — the exact number required was never specified. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines unaffordable housing as paying 30 percent or more of one’s income for housing (“History of The Federal Use of Eminent Domain”). In 1970, 30.3 percent of West Harlem’s population paid 35 percent or more of their income for housing. The percentage rose to 35.5 percent in the 2000s (Social Explorer). The impact of the publicprivate partnerships between commercial agencies, landlords, New York State, and New York City governments in the 1990s transformed Harlem into a popular tourist destination by the early 2000s.

Gentrification processes in New York City were and continue to be embedded in multifaceted public policies and market practices that transform the image and racial and socioeconomic mix of certain city neighborhoods, such as Harlem. Harlem’s experience with significant post World War II gentrification dates back to the 1990s. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was in office from 1994 to 2001, initiated an age of “zero tolerance policy” regarding crime and disorderly conduct (Recoquillon, 2009: 8).

Under this regime, police practices often amounted to harassment, whereby drug addicts and dealers, homeless persons, and street merchants were 86

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removed from public spaces to “improve” Harlem’s image. This approach to public order and policing was motivated by city officials’ desire to attract private investment to the area by depicting Harlem as “safe” and a place where socio-economically advantaged people could find the services and goods they desired (Recoquillon, 2009: 8).

Giuliani’s methods paved the way for large-scale gentrification in Harlem. The effects of gentrification are evident in the shift in the racial composition of the area and the extent of access to affordable housing in Harlem over the past several decades. From 1970 to 2000, the Black population in West Harlem decreased from 97.4 to 62 percent and the White population increased from 2.5 to 11 percent (Social Explorer). During this same time period, housing became increasingly unaffordable in West Harlem. In 1970, 30.3 percent of West Harlem’s population paid 35 percent or more of their income for housing. The percentage rose to 35.5 percent in the 2000s. Although race and socio-economic status are distinct concepts, they overlap in consequential ways in the lives of Black Americans. Legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation have disproportionately affected Black people’s access to job and housing markets, rendering them particularly vulnerable to displacement. Thus, when analyzing the statistics of rising housing unaffordability in West Harlem in the early 2000s, it must be coupled with an understanding of racialized capitalism—that is, how when the housing market discriminates based on factors, such as income or wealth, this inherently disadvantages Black people.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued to build upon Giuliani’s policies of state-sponsored gentrification during his time in office from 2002 to 2013. Bloomberg initiated the rezoning of over 80 neighborhoods in New York City (Recoquillon, 2009: 4). According to Forbes Magazine in 2008, Bloomberg was the eighth richest person in the United States. He built his wealth by maintaining close relationships with the financial and real estate sectors and it is through these same relationships that he advanced capital investment in Harlem (Recoquillon, 2009: 4). It is under Bloomberg’s administration that Columbia University announces their “Manhattanville Project,” which coincides with Bloomberg’s goals of achieving wide-spread redevelopment in urban neighborhoods throughout New York City.

In 2003, Columbia University began its expansion projects, many of which were consistent with Bloomberg’s development priorities.

Tracing government and market underinvestment from the 1950s to 1980s, juxtaposed against the millions of dollars in subsidies granted to private developers in the 1990s, shows how New York State and New York City policies were forms of state-sponsored gentrification. I examine the complex historical relationships between Harlem residents, New York state and local governments, and private investors over the past several decades to reveal the mechanisms through which Columbia University pursued Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 87

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its Manhattanville Project and its consequences for long-time Harlem residents.

Columbia’s False Promises and Questionable Strategies

Columbia University is a 265-year-old Ivy League institution that prides itself on the ideals of diversity, globality, and inclusion, as its administrators actively seek students and professors who reflect these principles (“University Mission Statement”). On its undergraduate admissions website Columbia highlights how racially and economically diverse their student population is, with a student body consisting of roughly 50 percent students of color and 50 percent receiving needbased financial aid (“Columbia by the Numbers”). One of Columbia’s major motivations for pursuing the Manhattanville Project is the desire for more space to accommodate students and faculty. The university contends it has less space per student than any other top-ranking university and that to maintain Columbia’s status as an elite institution, the university’s expansion is critical. (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008) Analyzing Columbia University as an anchor institution, a civil society organization that plays a crucial role in its local community and economy, further helps explain why the Manhattanville Project is a Columbia priority. In 2003, the university had more than 20,000 students and 9,000 employees (Bagli, 2003). Moreover, in 2003, Columbia was the 12th largest employer in New York City and the largest recipient of research funds in the city. A major selling point of the expansion project is that the redevelopment of Manhattanville would create 6,900 new jobs. According to Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger, this project represents “an opportunity in Manhattanville to create something of immense vitality and beauty” (Bagli, 2003). Columbia specifically targeted Manhattanville because the New York City Urban Renewal Programs of the 1960s transformed the neighborhood into a non-residential area that has since been recognized by the state as being “underutilized and [lacking] community amenities” (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). Furthermore, the area’s close access to public transportation and location between Columbia’s Morningside Heights and Washington Heights campuses makes this location ideal (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). Columbia has leveraged these narratives of economic stagnation and deficiency of community resources within Manhattanville to justify its significant development in the neighborhood. The university’s inordinate power stems from its role as an anchor institution. However, solely framing Columbia’s actions as that of “savior” of Manhattanville obscures decades of government and market disinvestment that created the conditions Columbia identifies as the reasons why its development project is a net gain to the community.

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How Columbia Set Itself Up for Success Making the connections between New York City government public policies and laws that began to slowly build the pathway for gentrification in Harlem in the 1990s, is key to understanding how these processes severely constrained the Manhattanville community as it negotiated with Columbia over development decisions. Neil Smith describes the final phase of gentrification as “transforming whole areas into new landscape complexes that pioneer a comprehensive class-inflected urban remake” and that “these new landscape complexes now integrate housing with shopping, restaurants, cultural facilities [...]” (Smith, 2002: 443). The Manhattanville Project is consistent with Smith’s final phase of gentrification. Indeed, Columbia President Lee Bollinger frames Manhattanville in these terms when he highlights how the expansion of Columbia University “will bring economic and other benefits to our neighbors” and how this project will “be physically and spiritually integrated into the fabric of [the] neighborhoods and this city” (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008).

However, this narrative of integration and economic benefits for West Harlem in reality runs in direct contrast to the needs and wants of the local community. Moreover, Columbia University, working in tandem with New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (the “EDC”), began purchasing various properties in Manhattanville several years prior to officially announcing the expansion project. This partnership between Columbia and New York City demonstrates how the university flit between its identity as a non-profit educational institution promoting the ideals of inclusivity and one of urban land developer coordinating with government entities based on what best suits the university’s interests, irrespective of local residents’ desires.

In 2001, Columbia and “numerous other organizations,” began working with the EDC towards their joint goal of redeveloping the Manhattanville area (“One Planner’s Blight”). A year later in 2002, the EDC issued a master plan for redevelopment. At the same time, Columbia purchased 67 different tax lots in Harlem. In October of 2003, Columbia had already gained control of 51 percent of the properties in the “Project Area” outlined in the EDC masterplan (“One Planner’s Blight”). Thus, the university had already bought more than half of the land needed for their Manhattanville campus prior to announcing their goals publicly.

Furthermore, in its capacity as a landowner, the university allowed properties within its control to deteriorate to create conditions allowing it to invoke eminent domain laws, which then enabled Columbia to have the remaining parcels they sought declared “blighted,” and thus easier for them to acquire (“One Planner’s Blight”). Taken together, Columbia’s strategies are similar to how for-profit developers pursue their interests. The university’s actions Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 89

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also raise questions about the extent to which Columbia has operated in good faith toward the Harlem community, particularly the university’s use of eminent domain to acquire properties.

A Brief History of Eminent Domain in the United States

Early examination of eminent domain law in the United states during the late 19th and early 20th centuries reveal that eminent domain seizures were primarily involved the federal government taking private properties for public use purposes, such as the building of public buildings and defense installations and transportation infrastructure (“History Of The Federal Use Of Eminent Domain”). Another stipulation of eminent domain, as developed in U.S. case law, is that property owners must be paid the fair market value of their land. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” (“History of The Federal Use of Eminent Domain”).

In 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court first analyzed the use of federal eminent domain in Kohl v. United States (“History of The Federal Use of Eminent Domain”). A landowner challenged the power of the United States to condemn land in Cincinnati, Ohio for the purposes of transforming the property into a post office building. This trend of the federal government seizing lands on behalf of building quasi government entities persisted throughout the1930s as New Deal policies sought to establish national parks and build large-scale irrigation projects. And it continued after World War II when over 20 million acres of land were acquired through eminent domain with a majority of those properties converted into airports and naval stations (“History of The Federal Use of Eminent Domain”). Even in the 1950s during the problematic Urban Renewal programs, eminent domain law was still being principally invoked by the federal government, under which properties in a disproportionate number of Black neighborhoods were deemed “blighted” and were transformed into new public housing units (“History Of The Federal Use Of Eminent Domain”). Overall, from the late 19th century to the early 1950s, there was general consensus that “public use” meant a tangible project designed to benefit the public as a whole.

Kelo v. New London Kelo v. New London was a landmark decision that led to the widening definition of “public use” and established the precedent for property being able to be transferred to a private entity or owner for the purpose of economic development (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of New London, Connecticut, authorizing city officials to use eminent domain to appropriate private 90

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property to sell to private developers because the city believed developing the land would increase tax revenues and create jobs (“Kelo v. New London”).

Susette Kelo and others whose property was seized, sued New London arguing that the city violated the Fifth Amendment because selling private property to private developers was not considered “public use.” In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld that New London’s actions qualified as public use because it was following an economic development plan, even though the land was not going to be used by a majority of the public. Moreover, the court’s majority advised against a literal interpretation of “public use” and insisted upon a “broader and more natural interpretation of public use as ‘public purpose” (“Kelo v. New London”). Altering the original definition of “public use” to mean “public purpose” highlights the broadening of eminent domain powers to include the interests of profit-making entities in ways that potentially reduce individuals’ and communities’ capacities to resist corporations’ development plans.

Perhaps presciently, in Kelo, Justice O’Connor wrote a dissent in which she stated that “any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,” and that “the beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms” (O’Connor, 2005). Justice O’Connor recognized how the Kelo decision granted city governments the ability to transfer wealth in the form of land from the politically weak to the politically powerful. This case expanded anchor institutions’ capacity to act as land developers.

In 2002, Urban Studies scholar Michael Porter defined anchor institutions as “the current power and future potential of universities, hospitals, and other institutions with long-term, rooted investments in particular locations to transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions” (Rutheiser). The emergence of anchor institutions in the early 2000s coincides with the expansion of the term “public use,” stemming from the 2004 Kelo decision. This timeline of events is not coincidental; rather, it demonstrates increasingly decentralized government processes since the 1950s, with anchor institutions as one focal set of beneficiaries (Silverman, 2014: 4). By expanding the beneficiaries of eminent domain law to include private corporations, universities have contended they too are catalysts for economic growth and the courts have usually agreed. The decision in Kelo ushered in a new era of eminent domain law, one allowing universities and private entities significant latitude to determine what is beneficial for the public, even if the greatest benefits are reaped by private owners.

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The evolution of eminent domain reflects the changing dynamics between the federal government, anchor institutions, the market, and Black people in an increasingly globalized and industrialized world.

Every state has a different eminent domain process and utilizes different measurements and definitions of “blight” in order to confiscate land (Piper, 2010: 1151). Generally, to determine that a property is blighted, the condemning authority must prove that the area indicates “one or more factors that are detrimental to the safety, health, morals, or welfare of the community” (Piper, 2010: 1151). However, this broad definition incorporates arguments for blight that range from economic factors to physical property damage. In a post-Kelo society, claims of failing or undesirable economic conditions are factors states can use to determine blight and have become increasingly popular justifications. Some examples of these arguments include stagnant property values, excessive liquor and adult stores, high business vacancy rates and the most controversial of all — economic stagnation (Piper, 2010: 1152). The absence of a specific definition of blight that is applicable to every state allows officials to use a wide variety of factors to justify condemning properties. As I discuss below, Columbia University uses “economic stagnation” as their defense during lawsuits brought against them in 2006 and 2009 due to their actions leading to the use of eminent domain to acquire land for their Manhattanville project.

In New York State, claims that a property is “underdeveloped” or “economically stagnant” can be grounds for declaring it blighted, and thus providing sufficient evidence for eminent domain law to be invoked (qtd. in Piper, 2010: 1194). Language in Yonkers Community Development Agency v.

Morrisbrough (1973) underpins arguments involving economic stagnation as a determinant of blight. This case established an abundance of factors can contribute to blight, including, but not limited to: irregularity of the plots, inadequacy of the streets, diversity of land ownership making assemblage of property difficult, incompatibility of the existing mixture of residential and industrial property, overcrowding, the incidence of crime, lack of sanitation, the drain an area makes on municipal services, fire hazards, traffic congestion, and pollution. (Piper, 2010: 1151-1152).

In addition to these wide and varying elements that can contribute to determinations of blight as established by Yonkers v. Morrisbrough, the New York constitution and New York City municipal law provide another framework that outlines the eminent domain power legislators possess.

New York State cedes considerable eminent domain powers to corporations and quasi government agencies. This ultimately has consequences for minority communities whose neighborhoods have been primed for declarations of blight due to serious government disinvestment 92

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and Urban Renewal Programs dating back to the 1950s. The New York Constitution outlines a basic framework for eminent domain powers. Article XVIII, section 1 grants state legislature the power to clear areas that are “substandard and insanitary” (Piper, 2010: 1156). Additionally, under section 502 of the New York General Municipal Law, the definition of a “substandard of insanitary area” is “interchangeable with a slum, blighted, deteriorated or deteriorating area, or an area which has a blighting influence on the surrounding area” (Piper, 2010: 1157). The interchangeable nature of the words “substandard area” and “blight” functions to expand the conditions under which eminent domain can be used in the state. Furthermore, article XVIII, section 2 of the New York Constitution gives the legislature the authorization to “grant the power of eminent domain to any city, town or village, to any public corporation and to any corporation regulated by law as to rents, profits, dividends and disposition of its property or franchises and engaged in providing housing facilities” (Piper, 2010: 1156).

Since the decision in Kelo, the United States Supreme Court has expressed the view that determinations of “public use” should be referred to the legislature instead of the judiciary branch and this has paved the way for redevelopment authorities to exploit eminent domain law, so long as their development ideas are at least partially related to a public use (Piper, 2010: 1162-1163). This deference to the legislative branch is dangerous to AfricanAmerican communities who are often targeted by private developers.

A study conducted by the Institute for Justice revealed that eminent domain abuse in New York City disproportionately affects communities with substantial numbers of ethnic and racial minorities or people with lowincomes (Piper, 2010: 1176). Permitting economic stagnation to be a factor in blight determinations exacerbates this issue because it punishes people with low incomes for not using their property in a “desirable” way from the government’s perspective. People with low incomes and minority groups have for centuries endured racism and discrimination, which has limited their access to housing and economic markets, leading to their having far less political influence, and consequently making them extremely vulnerable to powerful actors who control eminent domain procedures.

The broadening of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, coupled the U.S. Supreme Court’s deference to legislative decisions, has severely curtailed lower federal courts’ and state courts’ power to interpret eminent domain cases according to the original, more restrictive, definition—and this has had devastating impacts on minority populations.

Columbia’s Controversial Use of Eminent Domain

Timeline of Events Prior to Legal Action When Columbia first announced the Manhattanville project, Community Board No. 9 (CB9) —West Harlem’s most local form of government —immediately sought to curtail the university’s power to influence the state to invoke eminent domain for the purposes of the university’s expansion project. However, this was not enough to stop Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 93

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Columbia from pursuing all possible avenues to achieve its goals, including leveraging their political connections to obtain the remaining properties that refused to sell to them in the Project Area. Below, Figure 1 details the actions taken by the university before, during, and after their announcement of their Manhattanville project in 2003.

Figure 1

Legal Battles Frustrated by deal making between Columbia and the state done outside of public scrutiny, the Manhattanville community mobilized and took legal action against the university and challenged their use of eminent domain. In November 2006, the Harlem Business Group filed a lawsuit against the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) for failing to disclose the use of eminent domain for the purpose of the Manhattanville Project (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). Two more businesses filed a lawsuit in January 2009 against the ESDC by Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage owner Nick Sprayregen and gas station owners Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur. These businesses refused to sell their property to the university and subsequently their land was declared “blighted” (Astor, 2017).

The fundamental question in these court cases was whether the expansion of a private university could be constituted as a public good. Columbia’s General Project Plan described the Manhattanville community in the early 2000s as having a “…high percentage of lots with deteriorating, insanitary and/or underutilized property conditions” and stated that the area “has been suffering from long-term poor maintenance and disinvestment” (Astor, 2017). Officials of the University claimed the new campus would bring tangible benefits for the local community by creating thousands 94

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of jobs and visually and educationally revitalizing the neighborhood. On December 3, 2009, the Appellate Division rejected the use of eminent domain in Parminder Kaur, et al. v. New York State Urban Development Corporation, etc. in a 3-2 decision (“One Planner’s Blight”). Pointing out the irony that Columbia owned or had under agreement 72 percent of the lots within the Project Area, the court hinted that the deterioration and “blight” conditions found were the fault of the university as a part of their redevelopment efforts (“One Planner’s Blight”). Furthermore, Justice James Catterson ruled that invoking eminent domain in Manhattanville was illegal and that the expansion of Columbia did not constitute as a “public good.” Secondly, Justice Catterson ruled that ESDC’s decision to hire Allee King Rosen and Fleming (AKRF) to conduct the blight study when the company was already a consultant for the university, was clear evidence of “collusion” between the ESDC and Columbia (Astor, 2017). Ultimately, the Appellate Division’s decision in Kaur v. New York State Urban Development Corp. differed significantly from earlier legal precedents in which eminent domain seizures based on arguments of underutilization were normal and accepted (Piper, 2010: 1152-1153). Even though the Kaur decision was overturned in the New York Court of Appeals in 2010, the contrast between these decisions exposes the ongoing dispute regarding eminent domain abuse in New York City and the struggle over the term “public use.”

Although the Appellate Division was astute in their analysis of how Columbia’s lobbying relationship with the state was a key factor enabling the university to be able declare the neighborhood as blighted, the Court of Appeals shunned this evidence in favor of a more Kelostyle decision.

The Appellate Division rejected the notion that economic underutilization should be a factor in determining blight in Manhattanville, because they observed that eminent domain takings were made merely to assist Columbia in gaining control of the remaining properties that refused to sell to them and did not embody a public use purpose: “The ultimate private beneficiary of the scheme for the private annexation of Manhattanville was the progenitor of its own benefit” (“One Planner’s Blight”). Moreover, they recognized that “having committed to allow Columbia to annex Manhattanville, the EDC and ESDC were compelled to engineer a public purpose for a quintessentially private development: eradication of blight” (“One Planner’s Blight”). The Appelleate’s decision was guided by the evidence of collusion between the university, the ESDC, and the state. The Appellate Court recognized how their decision in favor of the plaintiffs reflected Justice O’Connor’s dissent in the Kelo decision, where O’Connor asserted that transferring private property to private entities like Columbia would result in “the beneficiaries...likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms” (O’Connor, 2005). However, this Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 95

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logic was not heeded by the Court of Appeals which overturned the Kaur decision six months later.

One of the main reasons for the Court of Appeals rejection of the Appellate’s decision in Kaur was to affirm the state’s eminent domain power. The Court of Appeals argued that the Appellate Division erred by substituting their own judgment for that of the ESDC. The court emphasized that “[i]t is only where there is no room for reasonable difference of opinion as to whether an area is blighted, that judges may substitute their views as to the adequacy with which the public purpose of blight removal has been made out for that of the legislatively designated agencies” (Piper, 2010: 1181). This reasoning echoed earlier precedents established by Kelo that determinations of “blight” and “public use” should be referred to the legislature instead of the judiciary. The Court of Appeals declared that “any… limitation upon the sovereign power of eminent domain as it has come to be defined in the urban renewal context is a matter for the Legislature, not the courts” (“One Planner’s Blight”). Furthermore, the Court of Appeals dismissed arguments that ESDC and AKRF were colluding with the university under the pretext of aiding the university in eminent domain takings. The court chastised the Appellate Division for declaring there was no blight in Manhattanville prior to Columbia acquiring the majority of land in the Project Area by citing the “Urbitran Blight Study,” commenced in 2003 by the EDC, which demonstrated evidence that the area was blighted prior to Columbia’s acquisition (Piper, 2010: 1182). Ultimately, the Court of Appeals heavily scrutinized the decision of the Appellate Division to reconcile the stark contrast between their decision and the legal precedent established in Kelo, that eminent domain powers were legislative and not judiciary. Thus, the deference to the legislative branch regarding eminent domain law is the primary vehicle through which land is redistributed to private industries like Columbia University, with minimal legal protections in place for historically vulnerable and politically less powerful communities, such as Manhattanville.

Controversy Over Kaur A site of tension between eminent domain law and protecting communities of color lies in the courts yielding determinations of “blight” and “public use” to the legislative branch. This immense power of the legislative branch presents massive challenges to communities mobilizing against gentrification measures because they are deprived of judicial intervention. What was the most alarming about the overturning of the Kaur decision was that Columbia had begun purchasing property in the area starting in the early 2000s and by the time the court cases were brought against them, almost 9 years later, the university owned 60 percent of the land involved in the blight study and controlled more than 80 percent of 96

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the vacant property in Manhattanville (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). The Appellate Division, unlike the Court of Appeals, did not miscalculate Columbia’s role in stifling the economic development of the neighborhood in order to cultivate conditions favorable to a blight determination. A study conducted by the ESDC in 2002 did not find blight conditions and even recognized the economic potential of the West Harlem community if it were to be rezoned (Piper, 2010: 1178). In addition to this evidence that Manhattanville was not in depressed economic conditions in the early 2000s, the 2002 West Harlem Master Plan revealed that the neighborhood was actually in a period of economic rejuvenation (Piper, 2010: 1184). By refusing to review the ESDC study and defer to the legislative branch, the Court of Appeals ignored ample evidence that Columbia had used its lobbying efforts and close relationship with the state to pursue eminent domain takings. Moreover, the 2004 Urbitran blight study that the Court of Appeals used to dismiss claims of collusion allegedly used biased methodology to diagnose the conditions in the Manhattanville area. The study did not produce any individual building reports, nor any evidence of interior inspection to substantiate their determinations of blight (Piper, 2010: 1185). By disregarding the Appellate Division’s decision, the Court of Appeals effectively sanctioned the gentrification and the resulting displacement of the largely African-American community of Manhattanville by upholding the view that eminent domain powers are above the purview of the judiciary.

Another controversy regarding the overturn of Kaur is the lack of specificity regarding factors contributing to blight and elected officials’ tendency to use claims of economic stagnation to justify use of eminent domain for the benefit of redevelopment enterprises. There are a variety of factors that are outside of a property owner’s control, such as the structure’s age and diverse ownership of the property or area that agencies may consider when determining blight (Piper, 2010: 1170). Currently, government officials have become increasingly concerned with properties that are underutilized because they deprive local and state governments from extracting the highest possible tax revenues from neighborhoods.

One of the justifications for the ESDC’s blight study in Manhattanville was that estimated tax revenues during construction could possibly total $112 million for the state and $87 million for New York City (Piper, 2010: 1173). Since blight is so broadly defined and the courts refuse to intervene, agencies that conduct blight studies are given significant discretion to determine what is considered blight and often those determinations are guided by whether the city or municipality thinks an area meets their economic standards. Consequently, private entities have learned to hire consultants willing to find blight regardless of the consequences inflicted onto the surrounding community, and Columbia University’s actions do Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 97

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not deviate from this pattern.

There is mounting public concern regarding the accountability of quasi-governmental agencies and the extent to which the social and political interests of the public are being protected over private economic interests. By allowing unelected officials, such as ESDC members, to condemn property on behalf of the government without having to consult with the local community, raises questions about the dangers of letting an agency, or an entity it hires, to be the judge of when the public use requirement is fulfilled when it is evident that they are motivated by outside factors (Piper, 2010: 1174). Evidence of outside motivation influencing blight determinations can be seen when analyzing the financial relationship between the ESDC and Columbia. As early as July 30, 2004, the ESDC entered into an agreement with Columbia to conduct a blight study, “which provided that Columbia would pay ESDC’s costs associated with the Project” (Piper, 2010: 1185). A Columbia Daily Spectator article in 2005 reported that Columbia paid the ESDC $300,000 during the same year the study was conducted (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008).

The Appellate Division was aware of these facts and when the ESDC tried to appear impartial by hiring AKRF, which was at the time a consultant for the ESDC and Columbia, to handle the blight study, the court found that ESDC instructed them to use a methodology that was biased in Columbia’s favor (Piper, 2010: 1179). Although the ESDC replaced AKRF with Earth Tech because of the conflict of interest, the organization utilized the same flawed methodology, which found extensive building code violations.

The Appellate Division dismissed these findings, citing that such evidence could be found in almost every neighborhood in New York City (Piper, 2010: 1178-1179).

In the end, the decision in Kaur and its aftermath reveals the decreasing avenues available for local citizens seeking relief from gentrification processes in their local neighborhoods. Residents most likely to be affected have few, if any, alternatives to judicial review because they have less political influence than entities pushing for development.

Nonetheless, courts across New York state have upheld the view that eminent domain authority resides in the legislative branch despite overwhelming evidence in Kaur that Columbia: (1) owned the blighted properties and was therefore responsible for the deteriorating conditions (2) effectively paid for the blight study conducted by the ESDC, AKRF and the Earth Institute and most importantly (3) the beneficiaries of the Columbia project would be limited to employees and students, thus failing to meet the criteria for the public use doctrine.

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Columbia University is very important to the brand of New York City and state officials recognize how the growth and success of this Ivy League school directly affects the economy and politics. In response to the Court of Appeals decision, the ESDC had this to say: The ESDC is pleased that the petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court that was filed by opponents of the Columbia Manhattanville project has been denied and that the New York Court of Appeals decision stands. This victory represents a significant step toward achieving the many goals of the project, including strengthening New York as an international center for premier education and academic research programs, improving facilities and infrastructure within the footprint and the surrounding community, generating thousands of jobs for New Yorkers and creating much-needed open space in the neighborhood (Chaban, 2010).

This statement exemplifies the close relationship Columbia maintains with the state and how their destinies are intertwined. The ESDC’s statement reiterates how the victory for Columbia in Kaur would help strengthen “New York as an international center for premier education and academic research programs” by “generating thousands of jobs for New Yorkers and creating much-needed open space in the neighborhood.”

These sentiments about how integral the university is to the New York economy and political landscape are also expressed by the former governor and mayor, who had their own redevelopment motivations that required Columbia’s control of the Manhattanville neighborhood.

Governor David A. Patterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2009 both voiced overwhelming support for Columbia’s expansion plan because of how well this project would complement the city’s development and rezoning initiatives in West Harlem. On May 20, 2009, Governor Patterson released a statement regarding the final approval of the general projection plan, and he hinted that the partnership between Columbia, the ESDC and the state had a significant influence on pushing forward the Manhattanville project despite the legal controversies: I am delighted that the work and cooperation of our partners at Columbia, the Mayor’ s Office, and Empire State Development, as well as local elected officials and members of the community will help ensure that Columbia maintains its role as one of the foremost educational and cultural institutions in the world and a major New York employer” (“Latest News on Columbia Manhattanville”).

Echoing the Governor’s sentiments of partnership, Mayor Bloomberg released a statement in the same year revealing how the Manhattanville project would help extend the city’s efforts to transform the West Harlem landscape:

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These two statements by the governor and mayor reveal how Columbia effectively functions as an apparatus of the state with the joint goal of gentrification. Neil Smith describes the second and third wave of gentrification as the “systematic partnership of public planning with public and private capital” (Smith, 2002: 441). This “systemic partnership” that Smith describes, fully captures the underlying reasons why the state was such a fierce champion for the Manhattanville Project. In the end, Columbia’s expansion was the last puzzle piece in New York City’s longstanding efforts to redevelop the Hudson River waterfront and West Harlem.

Community Benefits Agreement: A Tool for Equitable Development or a Mechanism of Pacification?

West Harlem residents have not been oblivious to the previous efforts by the state or Columbia to gentrify their local neighborhood and contrary to popular opinion, a majority of residents are not entirely against Columbia’s expansion. The dissemination of inaccurate information has contributed to this common misconception that people are either completely for or against the Manhattanville project. In fact, many local residents understand that the expansion will take place. However, their main concern is ensuring that this expansion will not disrupt the lives or livelihoods of their neighbors (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). Community Board No. 9 was created in the 1970s as a response to the failures of the Urban Renewal Projects of the 1950s.

It is a means through which the community can directly influence urban planning efforts in its neighborhoods. CB9 runs from 110th St. to 155th St. West of Morningside, St. Nicholas, and Jackie Robinson Parks. Although CB9 communicates and makes plans in conjunction with various government agencies, their resolutions are not legally binding, which limits their negotiating power with Columbia. CB9 spent over a decade creating a sustainable and inclusive redevelopment initiative called the 197a plan. The plan was later adjusted with the goals of facilitating a sustainable expansion of Columbia University that preserved the character of the West Harlem community without displacing existing residents (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). The 197a plan began construction in 1991 and had undergone almost fifteen years of public hearings in efforts to incorporate community input to ensure a comprehensive vision of the future for West Harlem (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 100

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2008). On June 18, 2007 the plan went public and in September of the same year, CB9 substantially revised the plan with the objective accommodating Columbia’s expansion. A summary of some of the key recommendations are as follows (Community Board 9, 2008: 3-4): • •

• •

•

study and adopt contextual zoning in appropriate areas of Community District 9 mandate; affordable housing in the district, preserve existing affordable housing, and increase the number of housing opportunities for low, moderate-andmiddle income residents, including seniors; proscribe the use of eminent domain for acquisition of private property fir conveyance to another private owner; support the development of Manhattanville’s Harlem Piers Waterfront Park and other new open space and provide improvements to existing open space; expand landmarks and historic district designations in the district;

• •

•

•

support local business development and study expansion of commercial development along 125th Street; identify sites for new public schools and explore strategies to improve services for aged and young people, including consideration of the feasibility of providing multigenerational arts and cultural facilities; explore the development of underbuilt sites for housing, community facilities, or mixed residential/commercial buildings; proscribe the use of eminent domain for acquisition of private property for conveyance to another private owner;

In the broadest terms, the goals of the 197a plan were to ensure that future development initiatives respected the strong cultural and economic foundation of the community, preserved affordable housing, and stimulated the job market for local residents. Columbia’s expansion goals conflicted with these objectives in demonstrable ways. Ultimately, the state sided with the university because the state and the university shared interests.

In 2007, when CB9 issued their revised version of their original 2004 plan, they requested the adoption of a Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning provision to promote the creation of affordable housing as a component of the Manhattanville project (Community Board 9, 2008: 17). CB also proposed adjustments to boundary lines between Subdistricts in favor of more community access that benefited small business (Community Board 9, 2008: 17). The City Planning Commission rejected these two recommendations and their reasoning parallels Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger’s, vision for Manhattanville. The Commission found that the proposed Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning was “not consistent with city policy” and that they only “encourages the construction and preservation of affordable housing in appropriate locations using discretionary, bonusable zoning provisions” (Community Board 9, 2008: 17).

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Moreover, the Commission proposed that CB9 “should work with the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), EDC and other local organizations to promote economic development” and that they do “not endorse the plan’s recommendation to use zoning incentives to encourage small businesses” (Community Board 9, 2008: 34). The rejection of these two proposals reveal the apparatuses through which gentrification takes place and reiterates Smith’s definition of gentrification as “a powerful, if often camouflaged, intent within urban regeneration strategies” (Smith, 2002: 446). This report by the Commission affirmed Columbia’s primacy in New York City officials’ vision for maintaining the city’s economic vitality, stating: “Columbia University is of significant importance to the City and the State as a center of educational excellence and a source of economic growth” (Community Board 9, 2008: 16). Recognizing Columbia as a “source of economic growth” further establishes Columbia University as a critical anchor institution. The ascendance of anchor institutions aligns with Smith’s principal argument that gentrification functions as a neoliberal global strategy. The intent of the Rent Regulation Act in 1997 stems from the same logic as what underpins the City Council Commission’s refusal to implement Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning to protect housing affordability and small businesses in Harlem. Columbia’s use of eminent domain has had many of the same consequences as the emergence of chain retail stores in West Harlem in the 1990s—they have displaced local residents and businesses.

Basics of the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) The community benefits agreement (CBA) Columbia agreed to regarding the Manhattanville project was designed to reconcile the differing visions for neighborhood development between the university and CB9.

Commissioned by New York City, the CBA is a contract signed by community organizers and a real estate developer of a proposed project. Typically, this document requires the developer to provide specific amenities or opportunities for local workers in exchange for community support for the project (“Community Benefits 101”). Early in 2005, the City issued funds to support the crafting of a CBA between the CB9 residents and the university (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). However, hopes for unity and solidarity between local community members and the university were short lived because Columbia made undisclosed deals with the State of New York to guarantee the university’s plans for West Harlem would be achieved regardless of community opposition.

In April of 2005, the Columbia Daily Spectator obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that exposed an undisclosed deal between Columbia trustees and New York State officials in which the trustees asked the state to condemn several businesses in the Project Area 102

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with the promise of $300,000 to cover any legal fees (Carhart, 2005). CB9 passed a resolution in 2004 unanimously condemning the use of eminent domain, but the university never took a clear stand on the issue (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). Because Columbia is a tax-exempt entity, the institution cannot exercise eminent domain power on their own; it is entirely the responsibility of the state and private institutions. The undisclosed deal Columbia made to push its interests outside of direct negotiation with CB9 severely damaged the relationship between the community and the university. A year later, in 2006, the West Harlem Business Group filed the first lawsuit against Columbia regarding its use of eminent domain (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008). Despite these obstacles and growing mistrust of Columbia among many Harlem residents, in 2009, CB9 and Columbia signed a CBA with substantial economic and other amenities promised to the West Harlem Community.

In 2009, in efforts to improve the relationship with the community after the scandal with the state and ESDC, Columbia agreed to invest $150 million through the CBA to improve the local community (Kim, 2018).

The university committed to provide CB9 residents with: job readiness programs, $20 million for an Affordable Housing Fund, access to a variety of Columbia facilities, a high-achieving public school in the area, local scholarships for students, prioritization in university hiring for construction and university jobs, and various social programs (West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement, 2009: 12-40). The West Harlem Local Development Corporation was established in March 2006 to administer CBA funds and monitor Columbia’s compliance with the CBA through the submission of annual reports by the university. (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, 2008).

An important caveat is that the CBA is not an indefinite agreement; it expires on December 31, 2040 (West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement, 2009: 41). The expiration date is another sticking point between the community and Columbia, as it legally protects the university from being required to engage in further community relations after 2040 (though it may voluntarily do so), potentially incentivizing the university to delay implementation of aspects of the agreement, as delay in start date does not extend the agreement’s timeframe. The community’s concerns in this regard are not unwarranted. In 2020, almost twenty years after the CBA was signed, a majority of Columbia’s promises remain unfulfilled.

Issue #1: Misleading Hiring Reports One of Columbia’s major commitments to support economic development is a promise to have 50 percent of the construction workforce for Manhattanville consist of Women, Minorities, and Locals (M/W/L) from Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 103

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CB9 (West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement, 2009: 18-21).

The CBA requires Columbia’s Manhattanville construction manager to negotiate and sign a Project Labor Agreement (PLA), a separate contract that outlines labor practices and conditions. This PLA is required to provide for a construction period in which at least 40 percent of hours worked will be completed by M/W/L workers (Bell, 2019). In 2018, a hiring report submitted

by Columbia claims the university surpassed these goals, with 42 percent of construction spending having gone to M/W/L subcontractors and roughly 50 percent of work hours having been completed by M/W/L workers since August 1, 2008 (Bell, 2019). However, these statistics are misleading because close analysis reveals that the work hours were not being evenly distributed amongst the three categories. Local subcontractors have received about 21 percent of total spending on the project, but local workers are documented to only have completed less than 8 percent of total work hours (Bell, 2019).

This number is significantly less than the commitment. CB9 has expressed concerns that although legally the university is checking the boxes for hiring and work hours, the prioritization of local workers remains illusory.

Issue #2: The Affordable Housing Crisis in the Wake of Manhattanville Another major criticism leveled at Columbia includes the institution’s failure to adequately incorporate affordable housing in the Manhattanville project, as well as how the project has led to rising real estate values in the area. Soaring real estate values have made it almost impossible for the WHDC to use the $20 million Affordable Housing Fund to purchase property. The Affordable Housing Fund is designed to be released in two $10 million lump sum payments in accordance with Phase I and Phase II of the Manhattanville project. But this complicated structure has proven to be problematic. In 2018, the Columbia Daily Spectator discovered that 1 percent— only $100,000— of the $10-million-dollar fund allocated for the first phase of the Affordable Housing Fund had been spent (Kim, 2018).

This low spending of the first installment from the Affordable Housing Fund can be attributed to how Columbia’s expansion project has initiated gentrification processes in the area and contributed to skyrocketing rents and a scarcity of vacant properties.

Because Manhattanville is absorbing multiple redevelopment initiatives executed by both the New York state and Columbia University, the $20 million fund established in 2007 is no longer commensurate with current real estate values. In January of 2011, Columbia transferred the first $10 million installment to the WHDC, but receiving this initial payment was wrapped in bureaucratic red tape (Kim, 2018). The WHDC was required to find a fiscal sponsor and an administrator for the housing fund before receiving the money from escrow and although the WHDC entered a partnership with the Tides Foundation in 2012, it took almost two years for them to find 104

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an administrator. In addition to these obstacles, President of the WHDC, Kofi Boateng, explains that $10 million is not sufficient buying power in Manhattanville. For example, he states that the WHDC was considering purchasing the parking lot in front of the office located at 423 West 127th Street as a potential location for development, but it would have cost $36 million (Kim, 2018). In response to these obstacles, the WHDC pivoted from trying to buy vacant property to testing-running a homeownershipassistance program that is expected to give 22 tenants at 644 Riverside Drive the opportunity to buy their properties with loans that would be payable in three years with zero percent interest (Kim, 2018). However, because the fund is set up to be released in two installments of $10 million dollars, this presents another obstacle. There is no clear timeline for when Phase II will commence and trigger the release of the final installment of the fund. Due to this uncertainty, the WHDC noted that “The second installment may not materialize for at least 10 years from [2014]” (Kim, 2018). The inability to purchase property for the purpose of affordable housing is not the fault of the WHDC. As Boateng states, the organization is “doing the best that [they] can with the ten that [they’ve] got…” (Kim, 2018).

The problems that Columbia set out to correct by establishing the Affordable Housing Fund have actually been exacerbated by the expansion project itself. According to the CBA, this fund was originally “intended to provide a range of flexible and affordable financing products to communitybased and private developers” (West Harlem Community Benefits Agreement, 2009: 16). Due to the fact that in 2018 there was less than four percent availability of vacant land in CB9, coupled with soaring property values, the fund has been transformed into a homeownership-assistance program in an attempt to salvage the purpose of the Affordable Housing Fund which expires in 2024 (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019:1). In the end, the WHDC’s failure to secure affordable housing units has not been for a lack of effort, but rather reflects the inadequacy of the commitments Columbia made in the CBA. Positive Aspects of the CBA The CBA was constructed to provide equitable and sustainable development within the CB9 district. Although the agreement does not cover all the nuances of the relationship between the university and locals, there have been undeniable tangible benefits that have come from this document. From 2009 to 2018, Columbia has paid $33,250,00 of the $76 million-dollar fund to the WHDC (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 3).

Notable expenditures include: $10.8 million awarded to 173 local nonprofit organizations; $4.7 million in grants to 59 nonprofit organizations in education, which affect 12,000 public schools students; and $2.7 million in Summer Youth Employment, which has placed more than 2,000 CB9 youth in summer jobs (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 33).

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In general, the WHDC was not designed to provide the same relief as the federal government does with direct support, instead the organization had guidelines which state that awards are made for projects (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 15). Thus, if the question is whether the grants have made a measurable impact in the lives of West Harlemites, the answer would likely be “no.” This answer is because the money given has gone into funding nonprofits and their individual missions and as a result, these organizations have visible benefits with measurable impact because of the their direct association with WHDC (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 15).

The Relationship between Gentrification and Human Rights

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that gentrification and the “neighborhood revitalization” it engenders, is not experienced evenly across racial and ethnic groups and the class spectrum. However, the misconception that benefits are more equitably distributed continues to persist in part because of the belief that the rise of anchor institutions, like universities and colleges, always spurs urban economic development in previously disinvested areas in ways that benefit everyone. Few scholars have investigated how anchor institutions and cities’ destinies are linked.

A strong and vibrant city enables educational institutions to attract world-renowned professors and gifted students. In return vibrant anchor institutions become a part of the city’s brand, acting as a magnet attracting talent and successful business to the cities in which they are located. This symbiotic relationship is a win-win situation for people who can afford to stay in these “revitalized” neighborhoods. In reality, this joint partnership intensifies historical inequality because often those who are priced out of their neighborhoods are minorities and low-income residents. Although there is no specific language in the human rights field to describe gentrification as a human rights violation, this does not mean that it does not have human rights implications.

In response to World War II, the United Nations was established and subsequently the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was promulgated in 1948. UDHR established a common standard of living for people all over the world, regardless of location (“Universal Declaration of Human Rights”). For the first time in history, this document outlined fundamental human rights that were to be protected across the globe. The right to housing was codified into the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966 (Tars, 2018: 13). Article 11 of this covenant recognizes the “right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions” (“International Covenant”). In 1992, The United States ratified the ICESCR and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1994 (Tars, 2018: 13). Both of these documents recognize the right to freedom from discrimination, including in housing. One

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reason why the word gentrification does not appear in these documents outlining international human rights standards is because the term was not created until 1964 by sociologist Ruth Glass. However, Article 11 has been understood in the modern era as a basis for protection against processes of gentrification because it details the human right to “adequate housing” and “continuous improvement of living conditions.”

Housing is universally viewed as one of the most basic human rights because it has a direct impact on one’s physical, mental, and emotional states, as well as one’s overall quality of life. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which oversees the ICESCR, outlined the seven elements they believe compose the human right to adequate housing: (1) security of tenure; (2) availability of services, materials, and infrastructure; (3) affordability; (4) accessibility; (5) habitability; (6) location; and (7) cultural adequacy (Tars, 2018: 14). My dissertation shows that a majority of these elements have not been maintained as Columbia has pursued the Manhattanville Project. Rapidly escalating home prices in Manhattanville, an area that has been historically deprived of economic opportunity on the basis of the neighborhood’s racial composition, constitutes a human rights issue. The effects of failing to meet these seven core principles that make up Article 11 of the ICESCR has had devastating consequences for residents in the CB9 district.

As a result of Columbia’s expansion, the Manhattanville community has reported a variety of concerns, including a lack of high-quality public education, high unemployment rates, disproportionate crime arrests, and most grave of all — lack of affordable housing (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 20). The absence of affordable housing options in the area is directly connected to the racial transformation of Manhattanville from a racially and economically diverse neighborhood into an affluent white one. A 2019 report by the WHDC warns that the deficiency of affordable housing units in the neighborhood cannot be underemphasized because it is a main driver contributing to the decreasing number of Black and Hispanic residents (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 18). Figure 2 is a chart from this WHDC report, which represents the changing demographics of the CB9 district from 2008 to 2019 (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 18).

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Figure 2

Since the inception of the Manhattanville project, CB9 has warned about an insufficient supply of affordable housing units in Columbia’s vision for West Harlem, noting this would have adverse effects on a majority of longterm residents. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines unaffordable housing as paying 30 percent or more of one’s income for housing (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2018). In 2019, CB9 found that 23 percent of residents in the district were paying 50 percent or more of their income on rent (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 20). These struggles to afford rent in the area can be explained by 2019 Census data, which reveals that the CB9 district suffers from chronic poverty that exceeds 35 percent of its population and high unemployment rates that tend to be two-to- three times higher than the national average (Second 3-Yr. Strategic Plan, 2019: 24). The purpose of these statistics is to highlight how gentrification has real ramifications in the lives of racial and ethnic minorities and that their access to affordable and adequate housing should be treated as a universally protected human right, not as an option that can be willfully ignored.

Policy Recommendations: What is the Government’s Responsibility?

The United States government must take deliberate and targeted steps to ensure compliance with all of the obligations recognized in the ICESCR. One action that the government could implement would be codifying a measure of blight that applies to every state with minimal 108

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room for interpretation. Defining blight in a way that prohibits economic development takings would greatly benefit low-income and minority communities because they are more likely to reside in neighborhoods eligible to be deemed “blighted.”

In addition to this, the U.S. could ratify an amendment to expand the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution to state that “just compensation” for eminent domain takings must reserve money for residents forced to relocate and that this compensation must reflect prevailing rents and other aspects of the cost of living. This could include a process that provides an easy transition for displaced residents to new housing that is superior to the blighted and deteriorating structures that they had been living in, while also allowing them to remain as close as possible to their original communities, if they desire. Unfortunately, these values are hard to quantify, but these measures would make the government take into account variables outside of economic compensation to ensure the “continuous improvement of living conditions” that is outlined in Article 11 of the ICESCR. Moreover, grassroots organizations fighting gentrification in major urban cities can pressure local and state governments into formally recognize housing as a human right. By using international standards set forth in the Bill of Rights, local groups can initiate policy change by forcing legislators to create concrete policies. A list of possible actions that legislators can implement now are outlined by the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, whose guiding principles are to ensure that housing is affordable, stable, habitable, and accessible (Bartlett, 2016).

• •

• •

Mandatory inspections laws: Municipalities and other government agencies need to be responsible for ensuring that all meet certain codes of health and safety; Rent controls: Rent increases would be regulated by law to give tenants the opportunity to continue to live in their residential properties homes. Or, current residents could receive a rental subsidy to make up for the increase in Property tax laws: Tie property rent; taxes to the purchase price of buildings, which would help keep communities control over development; Create community-based zoning boards: These boards will regulate zoning and give taxes affordable for long-term residents and provide low-income residents with tax relief;

Conclusion: We All Have a Right to the City

What would America’s future look like if housing was a human right?

By using Columbia University’s Manhattanville project as a case study, we have a glimpse of what a world would look like without the protection of affordable housing. My dissertation has examined how Columbia’s role as an anchor institution, leading revitalization efforts in West Harlem, has obscured how their behaviors evince capitalist practices akin to how corporations pursue their interests. I argue that certain strategies related to development, such as the abuse of eminent domain, constitutes a human Barnard/Columbia Urban Review | 109

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rights violation because they intensify socio-economic marginalization of racial and ethnic minorities in America. By framing local residents’ right to the city, it will contribute to the slow materialization of an urban political movement which demands that long-term residents have social, economic, and political control over the cities in which they reside and helped build.

I believe that a human rights framework presents a way forward for those directly impacted by practices of gentrification occurring through anchor institutions or other government sanctioned policies.

Henri Lefebvre’s original term “Right to the City” argues that all people have the right to remain in their homes and to shape the political and cultural landscapes of their communities. Neil Smith’s work is an important touchstone for people who champion the Right to the City movement and who view gentrification as the result of a “systematic” effort to increase commercial real estate value of an area through methods of rezoning, eminent domain takings, and tax abatements for developers. Furthermore, Smith details how partnerships between local governments and federal agencies are responsible for transforming low-income communities and encouraging developer investment in certain areas. Smith’s and Lefebvre’s scholarship have taken on new meaning in the 21st century as many universities and colleges throughout the United States have followed in the footsteps of Columbia to expand their urban campuses.

For example, New York University is in the process of a development project called NYU 2031, which plans to extend the university in and around Greenwich Village (Shah, 2018). This expansion has ignited gentrification concerns. NYU has been granted the right to proceed with its development by New York State’s highest Court of Appeals (Shah, 2018).

It is no coincidence that the Court of Appeals was the deciding factor in both Columbia’s Manhattanville project and NYU’s 2031 plan. In fact, it signals that in the future more elite educational institutions will model the mechanisms and actions employed by these two institutions to achieve their expansion goals if nothing is done to curtail this type of behavior. In the end, housing means so much more than just a roof over one’s head. To fully understand the significance of the harmful gentrification effects that anchor institutions elicit in local communities, one need not look further than the example set by Columbia University.

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