While the arrival of many young professionals has helped to rejuvenate Brooklyn in recent years, the accompanying increase in housing costs has put heavy pressure on a broad range of residents. There has been a great deal of discussion in New York City and elsewhere on the need to create affordable housing, but not quite so much on the rapid loss of affordable apartments. For Brooklyn and many other urban areas, it’s an important issue – affordable units are being lost more quickly than they can be built.

The Center for the Study of Brooklyn, which is in the midst of a study of housing displacement in Brooklyn, sponsored a panel discussion with four experts on the subject on June 9, 2006 at Brooklyn College. The speakers were: Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida, assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of demographic research for the Center for the Study of Brooklyn;  Lance Freeman; assistant professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia University and author of “There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up” (Temple); Rev. Jim O’Shea, director of Churches United for Fair Housing, an organization that has pressed for affordable housing in the Williamsburg and Greenpoint sections of Brooklyn; and Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. The moderator was Sharon Zukin, Broeklundian professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and author of many books and articles on urban culture and development. She was introduced by Paul Moses, director of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn. Participants in the audience included many people active in housing issues at community-based organizations. We welcome your comments on this discussion.

Sharon Zukin: I don’t really have any expertise in residential displacement, although I am extremely interested in commercial displacement, which is a factor in and a reflection of the lack of affordable housing. It’s a tendency that we believe we see but we can’t really document lower income people being pushed out of their neighborhoods by upgrading or revitalizing the streets around them. And I say “can’t really document” because this is an intellectual as well as a political problem. How can people counter the arguments of economic development officials and real estate developers and elected officials when they say we need to build, and developers need to build what is most profitable for them? How can we evaluate displacement? What are the tools that we need? And then, what negotiating strategies are most of effective to provide affordable housing for the city’s population?

These are the sort of questions that we at the college have been talking about for the past few months, and we desperately need you to coordinate with us to try to answer these questions. So first I’d like to call on my colleague, Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida, an assistant professor of sociology here at the college.  Aviva has a PhD from our department, sociology, and a graduate degree from the CUNY Graduate Center. She has done research on her own for her PhD on Russian immigrants in New York City and she has been working for the last few months on trying to block out demographic changes in Brooklyn and what a study of displacement in the borough might look like. Aviva?

Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida: As Professor Sharon Zukin said, these are really first steps – a work in progress. I have been thinking about housing displacement because I live in Brooklyn and somehow trying to get a house - and because I study immigrants and ethnic neighborhoods and ethnic commercial strips, which are really related to the topic of displacement. …  I’m a sociologist and I think, as Professor Zukin said, it’s a really interesting intellectual and theoretical sociological question as a well as a political issue. And so that’s how these things came together for me to try to study displacement.    

So here are the big questions that at least I’m interested in: Are people in Brooklyn experiencing housing displacement? Again, we talk about it with anecdotal data. People have all kinds of interesting stories about it, but I really was trying to get systematic, large scale data to answer this question. So, are people experiencing housing displacement? If so, where? In what particular places? Who are these people? We have guesses. We have underground information, but again, I wanted to get some empirical data to answer these questions for me. And if so, where do the people go? The bottom line is these people that are being pushed out of their residences, where do they go? Do they go to different neighborhoods in Brooklyn? Do they stay in the city? Do they stay in the state? And again there are a lot of stories, personal stories, but I wanted to get more information about that.

As you know, it’s not easy.  There are big questions …  We don’t have adequate data. It’s really hard counting the people that aren’t there. We can count the people who are there, and where they are and what they do, but we’re really looking to somehow find information about people who left. And so that’s pretty difficult. Also there’s  relatively little [sociological] literature on this … Two of the people who I think have done really the most work on this topic are sitting right here. I really want to thank you and I appreciate your work; you really helped me a lot. And I think there should be a lot more done. I think it’s a very important topic, and so I think this study can hopefully bring us a further understanding of this issue.

So: big problems, little solutions. Here’s how I try to go about solving or starting to answer these questions. I analyzed the 2000 census data, trying to explore patterns that are related to housing displacement. The next step for me is to compare the 2000 to the 1990, and do a backwards analysis of changes over time to figure out what is the pattern and so … based on past patterns, to try and understand something about what the future will bring.  If we can identify with this analysis some places where housing displacement happened or will happen, we can go there and do some qualitative work, talking to people, to community activists, to organizations and try and understand a little bit more. So what we’re going to present here is briefly my first stage, which is analyzing the 2000 census. … In my way of thinking about housing displacement, I thought there are basically three main  issues that are probably of influence.

The demographic characteristics of census tracts, that is, here are the variables that are actually used in my analysis, the percent white in each census tract, the percent foreign born, the percent of large families, and the median per capita income in 1990 as well as the density of rental apartments, trying to characterize census tracts using these variables.

The other group of variables is residence characteristics, and that includes the percent of owners in the tracts – or the percent of occupants that are owners relative to the percent of renters of course, the percent owner-occupied new houses – that is, people moving in relatively recently buying residencies in tracts, the percent of recent renters in each census tract, the percent of people living in the same house, and recent young-adult movers, that is, trying to figure out who’s moving, and how many people in a tract are actually people that might actually have been displaced, or the other side of it – people that are coming in because of gentrification. There is, at the end, some balance of people moving in and people moving out and I’m trying to get a handle on that.

And then the third factor is housing costs. In trying to understand housing costs I looked at the percent of households paying low rent (and low rent here is the census definition of $300 – $600); percentage of households spending more than half of their income on rent. I think that’s an important indicator of people who might be at risk of displacement. If you’re paying low rent, and that is more than half your income, a little rise in the rent prices is an important push factor, and so I wanted to try and look at the pattern there. And the last one is the percent owner-occupied high-cost houses. So again, if there’s a tract where we see a growing number or a large number of very expensive houses together with people who are paying low rent and where rent is more than half of their income, those could be phenomena that are causing displacement. … 

And so I took these different characteristics and tried to figure out how they work together, and as I was analyzing the data I found some very interesting patterns. Let me share some of them with you. What occurred to me as a really good way to describe what I saw is “segregated diversity,” because if you look at the general distribution of data for the borough it’s a diverse borough: racially, in terms of income, in terms of education, in terms of countries where people come from.  However, at the census tract level, it’s a very segregated place. So yes, the borough is very diverse, but people in their daily life, in their neighborhood, experience quite a lot of segregation.  And so I found that to be interesting, and I found that to be an important factor in trying to understand displacement, and I’ll talk about that in just a little bit.  The correlation between the different characteristics of tracts – that is, between the demographics, the residents, and the housing costs – tend to change together. The fact that these three types of factors change simultaneously suggests that the segregation is multi-faceted, that there is a correlation between the types of families, the types of housing and the tracts, which I think makes this issue of segregation even more important in understanding displacement.

And so, I’ll spare you the statistical terminology, but I did a procedure called cluster analysis, and the result of that showed that there are four types of tracts in Brooklyn.  If you take all these three types of factors, all these variables I showed you before, combine them together and analyze the data, it appears that there are four types of tracts, which is what I’m going to spend most of my time talking about. And for lack of better names, I’m going to call them tracts 1, 2, 3 and 4. If you could help me with names, that would be excellent.  So let me just show you what these tracts look like. The first indicator are differences in median per capita income.  And so we have four types: in type 1 census tracts the median per capita income is $12,090 per year.  So if you take the household income and divide it by the number of people in the household, this is the central tendency that describes the median per capita income. In type 2 census tracts, it’s almost $21,000, which is almost double. In type 3 census tracts, the per capita income is $71,000, six times more than type 1 census tracts ... So you can see only from this -- and this is only the distribution of income -- there are quite large differences between the different types of census tracts that are based only on income.

Type 1 census tracts, the type with the lowest per capita income, almost 60% of Brooklynites live in these kinds of census tracts. About a third live in type 2 census tracts where the income is about $20,000, and type 3 and 4 are really, really affluent, high-end census tracts where the housing is really expensive, and type 3 and 4 census tracts account for about 10% of Brooklyn’s population.  What really struck me is that 60% of Brooklyn residents live in census tracts where the median per capita income is $12,000. I found that to be a large number. 

Let me show you some other differences and some other indicators, and here I’m only comparing type 1 and type 2, the big clusters. So 60% in type 1 and 30% in type 2, I just want to show you the differences between these types of census tracts in some indicators.  So the racial distribution, the percent white, the percent owners, the percent young adult movers, the percent of small housing units, the percent of households paying low rent, and the percent of households paying more than half their income for rent – and so, again I found these differences to be quite striking.  In type 1 households, as you can see, only about 30% of residents are white compared to type 2 census tracks when it’s almost 60%.  So what that practically means is that 60% of Brooklynites live in very racially segregated census tracts, again, I think, an important factor.  Again, striking differences between percentages of owner occupants.  Young movers – I wanted to track these young movers because I think it’s important to realize who’s moving and into what kinds of tracts people are moving. Not very big differences, but still, around half of the movers are young movers.  These are people usually with young kids. These are families that really live in the neighborhood, interact with the environment and the schools and the services which I think is important for understanding.

Percent of small housing units – this is important in relation to percent of large families, but I didn’t want to put too much data on the board. Quite a lot of small housing units in both census tracts. This is, I find again, very striking. In type 1 census tracts, about 30% of the residents pay low rent, and about a quarter pay more than half of their income for rent. And so, I think these are the two most important indicators of things that might cause housing displacement. 

Some differences between type 1 census tracts and type 3 and 4 census tracts – let’s quickly look at that.  This is the percent white, there are two sides of racial segregation. In type 1 census tracts, only 30% of the residents are white. In type 3 and 4 census tracts, it’s above 70%. These are either predominantly white or predominantly non-white neighborhoods, or census tracts.  Again, a large jump in ownership in affluent census tracts, much more ownership than in type 1 census tract, much more movement of young adults into these census tracts, not much difference in size of housing units.  Look here, much less of the residents in types 3 and 4 census tracts pay low rent.  These are census tracts where the rent is much higher, and less of the people pay more than half their income for rent.

So this is my map, and you take each census tract that is assigned a number, and then you map the types of census tracts. I found this map very interesting, I mean, not many surprises.  In the Brooklyn Heights area you see the affluent census tracts – types 3 and 4, yellow and blue. You see more blue census tracts and the yellow are really the higher end census tracts where housing is very expensive, where really it’s predominantly white, where the rents are high.  What I found interesting about this is really the way things are related to each other. Just a general look, you see a lot of orange. These are tracts that are predominantly non-white with low per capita income, where most Brooklynites live. Most of you are from Brooklyn, so this is not a big surprise for you.  The northern part of Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene, affluent Park Slope, look at Greenpoint over there, so a lot of orange, but also a lot of blue.  What I think is going on, and if we think about housing displacement, and the bottom line here is that orange next to blue or yellow presents risk of housing displacement. Somebody told me that I should show this to real estate developers and make a lot of money (audience laughter). 

But this is where this is going, this is 2000 census data and we’re six years later, but if I’m right, then if I can show that this is the trend, then we can probably be quite certain about what’s going to happen in the next few years.  But also it’s good to know that the analysis represents reality, which means this is valid and which means that we can further try to understand what’s going on with this analysis. So some places – Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene section – these orange tracts look to me in real danger. They might not be orange anymore, right? If there’re not orange anymore, we need to go there and see where people went. If people experience housing displacement there, that would be a good site to study.

Audience member: How about a housing project?

Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida: Right, but then the dynamic is interesting, how that’s more likely to change  than, suppose, these types of tracts. I think it’s the proximity between different types of tracts that is enlightening regarding the risk for housing displacement.  Another place to focus on are these places right here, I think Greenpoint, around the places that are becoming more and more affluent.

Audience member: That’s very deceptive because only in the southern tier do people actually live.  So the expanse of it is very deceptive in an industrial area.

Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida: But still, it’s telling. It’s telling in terms of the pattern of the relationship between the types of census tracts.All of you know more than me about what’s happening on the ground, I’m showing you what the big census data tells us and how I think it might be helpful.

Audience member:  Plus there’s a huge battle going on in that area.

 Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida: Right, that’s exactly where the action is.

Audience member: [after discussion of map] … I think you should take all the tracts that have less than 200 people or some very low density out of the analysis.

Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida [after further discussion]: So, where do we go from here?  I really like these pictures so I had to put them up. This is the Gowanus Canal as you probably know, and this is an old, old picture of Williamsburg. I thought these are good places to look at. Here’s what I’m going to do, where I’m going to take this, and I hope maybe some of you will join us in this journey.  I want to further explore this relationship – theoretically, empirically and practically – this relationship between social segregation and the risk of housing displacement. I think it opens a whole research agenda. You can compare historically; you can see what happens from 1970 to 1980 to 1990 to 2000 and see how census tracts change and what does that mean for people paying low rent and people in public housing.  You can compare between boroughs and you can compare between cities and see what kinds of distributions happen between these different types of census tracts, because I think it’s this relationship between the types of census tracts – between how many orange we have, how many green, how many blue and how many yellow – and how they’re spread around the urban space that will determine the risk and the actual occurrence of housing displacement. I think we should conduct more qualitative, on the ground, focused studies and I think we should engage in the discussion which I hope will start today of what are the policy implications of such work, and what kind of action plans we could be taking to avoid people being displaced from their houses. I thank you.

Sharon Zukin: Thank you Aviva. I’m always thrilled when a PowerPoint presentation is actually interesting. (Audience laughter)

Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida: Was that a compliment? (Laughter)

Audience member: That was a Sharon Zukin compliment.

Zukin: That was fascinating. That’s a compliment – the compliment was coming. It was not only interesting, it was fascinating. For those who are a little bit older, and have long memories, the hypothesis that you ended with reminds me of what people used to say about the expansion of ethnic minority neighborhoods back in the 1960s and 1970s where people, urbanists, were talking about filter down of old housing and blowout of population pressure from a low-income population that did not have a lot of opportunities to move into these houses. So it’s interesting to see what comes around over the years. I’d like to lead quite logically to Lance Freeman, whose research in the last few years will actually answer the question that has lodged in our minds, which is what happens when a neighborhood is upgraded or gentrified? Is it possible that some of the old residents moved completely away, or did they move a little bit away? How can we attack the question of what happens when a neighborhood is gentrified? Lance Freeman is an urban planning professor at Columbia. He has worked in the New York City Housing Authority as well as other public and private research organizations, and he actually, like Aviva, can work with numbers. So Lance, please.

Lance Freeman: Ok well, I want to thank Paul and Aviva for inviting me here to participate in this panel. I’m really excited about having the opportunity to share with you all some of the research that I’ve been doing on displacement. I also have a PowerPoint presentation. Hopefully it will be as interesting as Aviva’s was.

Sharon Zukin: I’m very excited. (Laughter)

Lance Freeman: So what I’m going to do is talk briefly about some of the research that I’ve been doing on gentrification and displacement. I’ve gotten interested in this area and this topic, specifically wanting to focus on the link between gentrification and displacement.  So I’m going to talk briefly about some of the research that I’ve done and try to wrap it up at the end with some ideas I have about thinking strategically about affordable housing and the issue of gentrification and displacement.  I came to this topic a few years ago, actually probably about four years ago. Frank Braconi, who used to direct Citizens Housing and Planning Council, now with the city, we got together and we would occasionally collaborate on research projects. And one project we wanted to look at was to try to quantify the relationship between gentrification and displacement.

As Aviva has suggested, it’s very difficult to measure displacement because the people who are displaced are logically no longer there, so it’s very difficult to really get a handle how much displacement has occurred in a particular neighborhood.  And although a lot has been written about gentrification going back several decades now, you have to look at what has been written in terms of trying to document the amount of displacement that has occurred.  The research is very thin because it’s very difficult to actually measure that.  So, what Frank Braconi and I did was, we said, Well, let’s compare neighborhoods that are experiencing gentrification to neighborhoods that are not.  And let’s look at residential turnover in these two different types of neighborhoods, and our thinking was that in the neighborhoods that were experiencing gentrification, you would expect to see higher rates of residential turnover, right, because people were being displaced in comparison to the other neighborhoods where gentrification was not occurring. So that was our logic, and we used some data from the census.

This analysis took place looking at data from the 1990s, I have not had a chance to update it with some more recent data so everything I say should have that caveat kept in mind.  But essentially, that’s what we did. We made this comparison. Much to our surprise, we actually found that there was less residential turnover in the gentrifying neighborhoods, in particular focusing on poor households, and we found that they were about 20% less likely to move if they lived in a neighborhood that we classified at gentrifying in comparison to poor households living in neighborhoods that are not gentrifying.  We also looked at people who did not have college degrees, and again we found that those who did not have college degrees were actually less likely to move if they lived in a neighborhood that we classified at gentrifying in comparison to a neighborhood that we said was not gentrifying.  As to sort of further check our results we looked at the rate of rental inflation -- in other words, how much did rent increase in a particular neighborhood during the 1990s -- and again we still found that people living in the neighborhoods that had the higher rates of rental inflation were actually less likely to move. 

I also note that around this time, Jacob Vigdor did a similar study in Boston looking at residential turnover in gentrifying neighborhoods in Boston, comparing it to residential turnover in neighborhoods that were not gentrifying, and he found a similar result. Now these results seemed counter-intuitive to me; they were the opposite of what I expected to find.  Logically, given that you would expect to see higher rates of displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, you would expect to see more residential turnover. You would expect to see people more likely to move, but that was actually the opposite of what we found.

So, what was going on here, having explained that? Well, one of the things that we also found was that the people who were moving into the gentrifying neighborhoods were of higher socio-economic status, so they were more likely to have higher incomes, to have more education, and they were more likely to be white as well. Another thing that we found was for poor households that were living in gentrifying neighborhoods, they had an average rent burden of 62%. So their rent burdens were astronomical. It’s typically suggested that a household should pay no more than about 30% of their income for rent. These household were paying more than twice that. And this was actually higher than the rent burdens we found for poor people in the non-gentrifying neighborhoods. So it seems like part of what was happening in New York City in the 1990s was that although poor households were not necessarily leaving these neighborhoods more quickly; they were being replaced by higher socio-economic status folks, and the people who were staying were paying exorbitant amounts of their income toward rent.

So the results are somewhat counter-intuitive, and I’ll just share with you some of the reactions, in particular one that I thought was telling.  It was an article written in the New York Observer describing these results. These were some of the comments in regard to these findings. (Laughter)  I wouldn’t go as far as to say the results were crap, but admittedly, there were some flaws in our analysis. Frank Braconi and I, we focused on New York City neighborhoods, but because of the limitations of this data, we had to define neighborhoods using areas that were the equivalent of, say, a community board, which is rather large. There’s a lot of internal variation within an area the size of a community board. So that was one potential problem with our analysis. Another potential problem is that we really don’t know why people were moving. We’re observing people moving, but we don’t know why they move. We’re inferring that if we can control enough factors, we can conclude that’s displacement, but we really don’t know for sure.  So that was two potential problems. We also don’t have a sense of where people were moving to.  So when people did move, we don’t know where they went.

So those were some shortcomings with that analysis, and so I wanted to extend it to a larger or a different data set and I wanted to address that.  To do that, I used a national sample, using census tracts, similar to what Aviva did with her analysis. I used the same logic. I compare residential turnover, I compare people living in neighborhoods I consider gentrifying to people living in other neighborhoods, again, to see if they are more likely to move if they are living in gentrifying neighborhoods. These data that I used, I used a longitudinal data set that actually follows households over time. So every year, they re-interview the same people. They’ve been doing this study since 1968, so you can actually follow people and see where they move when they do move.  It also allows me to look at who’s moving into gentrifying neighborhoods, so in many ways this is an improvement over the study that Frank Braconi and I did that only looked at New York City.

This study also asked the respondents why they moved, so if we see someone move, we can actually identify the reason that they give for moving.  Now we can better pinpoint the extension to which they are being displaced or if they are moving for some other reason.  The basic logic is, to the extent that we should link gentrification to displacement, we should see people giving reasons that would classify as being displaced when they move in these neighborhoods.  That’s the basic logic behind this approach.  One challenge using this national data set working with census tracts is how do you identify gentrification?  … Frank Braconi and I, both of us are natives of New York. Both of us live and work in New York. We can kind of intuitively look at different neighborhoods and say this one’s experiencing gentrification.  When you’re working with a national data set though, you can’t do that unless you’re so knowledgeable that you know all the neighborhoods in the country. 

I didn’t have that information, so I had to develop a metric to try to measure gentrification. I used census tracts, and I tried to capture five elements: central city neighborhoods, neighborhoods that previously were populated by low-income households, neighborhoods that previously experienced disinvestments – these are relatively poor neighborhoods that experience disinvestment, and to capture gentrification - its people who are moving in, who are relatively affluent, and neighborhoods that experiencing and increase in investment. I’ll be happy to talk about these measures in detail, but for the sake of time I’m just going to briefly describe them. As with the New York City study, I also looked at rental inflation as sort of an alternative measure. 

So what did I find using this alternative approach looking at a national sample of neighborhoods across the country?  Well, here we actually didn’t see any difference in mobility rates.  The likelihood of moving was about the same between the two types of neighborhoods.  In terms of displacement though, the displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods was about 40% higher. So, people living in a gentrifying neighborhood are 40% more likely to give a reason for moving as one that we could classify as displacement.  But note that the likelihood of being displaced is not that high. So it is higher in the gentrifying neighborhoods, but the actual absolute value is not that high.  If you look at the rental inflation results, they are similar.  The results of the two studies seem to suggest that in gentrifying neighborhoods, residential turnover is not that much higher in the gentrifying neighborhoods, and particularly in New York, they actually seem to be lower.  If you look at a national data, it’s about the same, but people give a reason that we could classify as displacement more likely. But in terms of absolute numbers, it’s not that high. The actual rate of displacement, at least according to this data, is not that great.

Audience member: To what degree did you factor in rent control or rent stabilization?

Lance Freeman: Well, in New York City, that covers everyone. We could see if people were living in a rent-stabilized apartment or subsidized housing.  In the national data set, you could only control for, is the housing unit subsidized in some way or not?  So it did not control for rent-controlled specifically -- only if they were receiving some type of housing subsidy. 

Audience member: Is that an explanation for people who were staying in gentrifying neighborhoods, that they were in rent-controlled housing?

Lance Freeman: In New York City that did play some role, although I’m not sure that that would cause the rates to be lower, but I do think it might dampen it somewhat.  So, I still want to explain what’s happening.  It’s one thing to say, well, displacement’s not that great or residential mobility is not that high, but obviously these neighborhoods are changing over time.  They obviously are. In fact that’s how I defined them, that they were changing in some way.  So what’s going on? Well one thing I also found in the national study was that when people did move in the gentrifying neighborhoods, they were more likely to leave the neighborhoods. So most moves tend to be relatively local, but in the case of gentrification, when people move, they tend to move outside of the neighborhood. We’re not sure why that is but it could be because they can’t afford to stay in the neighborhood when they do move. And again, if you think about a neighborhood as a dynamic entity, when we look at neighborhoods we tend to think of them as static but they’re always changing, people move in and out. The reason why they look the same is because people who leave are replaced by similar people. That appears to be less likely the case in a gentrifying neighborhood. People are moving, but they’re moving outside the neighborhood, and if you look at who’s coming into the neighborhood, you see less poor people, less blacks, and more whites and more people with high incomes.  So it seems like the neighborhoods indeed are changing, not so much because people are leaving more quickly, but because they are being replaced my more affluent, more white, more highly educated people. And when people do move, they are moving outside the neighborhood. That seems to be what’s driving the demographic change that Aviva noticed and that many of us notice in our everyday lives – at least with the data that I looked at covering the 1990s. 

So briefly, to sum up what we should do about this, this is based on some other research I’ve done, more qualitative research looking at gentrification in two neighborhoods in New York City. … Some people will argue that there are potential positives in the case of gentrification, of rising housing values. You have increased wealth of homeowners. In many cases, particularly in very poor neighborhoods, you can have an improvement of many services. You have more affluent people, more highly educated people and they can bring additional political capital to the neighborhood, so they can actually demand better services.  And we have to balance that out against some of the negatives of gentrification. Displacement is one, but there are also conflicts over neighborhood norms, resentment about people moving into the neighborhoods.

One point I would like to make about affordable housing, in addressing the issue of gentrification or displacement, as Aviva’s study suggests, it’s likely to be more of a problem in certain neighborhoods, and I think in thinking about developing affordable housing, we want to target it specifically to neighborhoods that might be most vulnerable to the threat posed by gentrification. … Policies like inclusionary zoning, for example, whereby new housing sets aside housing that is affordable. Here is another idea I thought about, using some sort of tax increment financing, whereby increases in property values which then translate to increased property taxes are set aside for affordable housing, specifically in that neighborhood. And lastly, some type of policy that would target subsidies like low-income housing tax credit, or other tax credit programs, that target affordable housing, specifically to those neighborhoods that are undergoing the most change.

In general, affordable housing policy has not necessarily tried to focus on those neighborhoods that are experiencing gentrification. They are either focused on neighborhoods that are already very poor, or there might be some policy described to de-concentrate poverty, but I think if we’re concerned about displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods or preserving affordable housing opportunity in those neighborhoods, I think we need to think about targeting affordable housing to those neighborhoods. And I think these are some brief ideas that might begin to address that problem. And just to sum up, I think hopefully what you would take away from this is in thinking about the issue of displacement and neighborhood change and gentrifying neighborhoods, the actual mechanisms might be a little different than what we might assume. We have to pay attention to who’s able to move into the neighborhood in addition to who’s being forced to leave. In terms of how to address that, I think we want to try to target our resources to these neighborhoods rather than just building affordable housing in general because that won’t necessarily allow for the targeting of subsidies to specific neighborhoods. And I’ll end there.

(Applause)

Sharon Zukin: Thank you Lance, I’m sure that we will look forward to the publication of your book called “There Goes the ‘Hood.”  Thank you very much for raising terrific questions.  I had a great interest in the commercial changes by the recent moves out of the neighborhood and also I’ve an interest in that sort of targeting to those very neighborhoods that government policy often tries to upgrade and change. That’s a very tricky and interesting strategy.  …

Audience member:  In your studies, was there any factor of historically working class neighborhoods that become hot and trendy? In other words the people who have been there are very often minorities in the working class who very often do in fact own their homes, so they cannot be forced out, they own it. On the other hand, the property values go way up without their income going up so maybe they have a large increase in real estate taxes because of increase of property values. Has that been a factor for families who all of a sudden have a much larger real estate tax bill without an increase in their income?

Lance Freeman: Yes, it does happen. I think it tends to be more of a problem for elderly households who are on fixed incomes. Some cities have adopted policies to try to address that so that they’ll either freeze taxes for elderly households or give them some type of rebate or something like that.  That certainly is a problem for elderly households. In my study I’m able to capture what’s happening among elderly people who generally tend to move less than younger folks. I didn’t see in the data any evidence that they were more likely to move, I don’t know if that’s because of the effectiveness of these policies or not, but that could be responsible for that.

Sharon Zukin: I think I’m safe in calling Brad Lander back to the microphone. I’m delighted to welcome Brad back to speak at Brooklyn College. He came to talk to students here about Atlantic Yards a couple of years ago. It was just a tremendous asset for me and my class. His dynamism and his knowledge is very deeply rooted in Brooklyn realities. Brad directed the Fifth Avenue Committee in Park Slope for a decade.  He took it from being a merchants’ association to a very active and influential agent of protest against gentrification. He is now the director of the Pratt Center for Economic and Environmental Development, and is just one of the most knowledgeable and interesting people I know.

Brad Lander: Thanks very much for that very overly kind introduction. It really is an honor to be here. It’s great, this The Center for the Study of Brooklyn, and I’m really honored to be a part of one of its events and especially in a room with people I have learned so much from, so thank you so much for the invitation. Though I do have a PowerPoint, I’m not a real academic. As Sharon said, I’ve spent most of my career at the Fifth Avenue Committee in community development and community organizing, sort of on the ground in a neighborhood, and then more recently at the Pratt Center. We are a team of planners and architects and some policy work, but working in conjunction with community organizations all around the city – certainly a lot in Brooklyn – but all around the city on issues of affordable housing, community economic development and environmental justice, and so we’ve sort of been grappling with these issues quite a lot. Especially with the Fifth Avenue Committee, which was born in Park Slope and now works in Park Slope and Sunset Park and Red Hook. For those 10 years, there wasn’t a day that someone didn’t come into our office and a family that was having a negative experience of gentrification in the community, more directly about displacement or more indirectly about rent burdens and other challenges. Certainly that led me to be one of the people that when Lance’s data first came out, had a hard time believing it, although I don’t think I’m any of the quotes that he mentioned. It certainly pushed me to think much harder, as I’ve shifted to Pratt, about what’s going on, and I’ll try to reflect a little on that.

First, I want to take a quick step back, because I think making the question too narrowly only about gentrification on the one hand and displacement on the other can miss some of what’s happening in these neighborhoods as well.  By gentrification: meaning the narrow fact of white yuppies moving into a neighborhood … The causes are much more than that and the consequences are also much more than displacement, which I think Lance alluded to around rent burden. I just wanted to take a quick step back there. This is just one way of looking at it, but I think these four factors are something we have to really take into account – in New York City anyway. This broad shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and what’s that meant for neighborhood transformation in Brooklyn and the city, the ways in which that’s all also gone along with substantial immigration leading to rising population which is just an enormous upward price pressure on housing supply – really separate from gentrification, a very constrained housing supply in a built out city that can’t produce housing to match a growing population, and gentrification are what, amongst declining federal subsidies and other kinds of things, but which sort of contribute to this broad housing crisis. I’ll just talk for a minute about those things.

This is just one way to look at the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, if you look from post-WWII to today, it’s actually even bigger, when we had over a million manufacturing jobs to today when we have less than 250,000. But broadly, we’ve shifted from an economy rooted in manufacturing, which had as a result of unionization, had a substantial number of more middle class, more blue collar jobs, to an economy that’s largely a service economy, and that has income implications that we’ll look at, and also planning and geographic implications.

One real problem, for starters, well before gentrification, is the economy we’re getting is much more income-polarized than the economy that we had. And so if you look at the data over the last 25 or 30 years, it’s a relative small set of folks at a higher income who see substantial income gains, whereas the majority of folks and those at the lower, more moderate incomes have either had flat incomes or declining incomes. This is about from 1979 through 1999, but the trend has actually continued into 2000 and data for 2004, New York City gained a small percent of families earning above $150,000, a lot of families earning less than $35,000 a year, and essentially lost families earning between $35,000 and $150,000. 

Just to look over time at what some of this has meant, and this is a crude indicator, this is just housing starts – new housing being built. But I think one thing you can see taking place here is – this is early 1970s and the fiscal crisis, and accumulation of what was happening in New York City, a bit of a bump up in the mid-80s – sort of the first wave of gentrification. What interesting is how low housing starts fell again through the late 80s and early 90s, they were as low as they’d been in the 70s, and then this sort of dramatic revolve around the last few years.

Again, though I want to emphasize this in not really about gentrification entirely, the last factor in those four that I mentioned is immigration. The city has gained more than a million people since 1980 and is projected to gain more than a million people again over the next 20-25 years. And the housing supply simply can’t grow to match, despite these numbers for a variety of factors I won’t talk about. At one level what you’ve just had is the fundamental laws of supply and demand. We have a lot more people and we don’t have a lot more housing units. Part of what’s led prices to rise is that core fundamental. And looking forward, that’s projected to continue.  Now if something substantial changed in the broader global economy that undermined the sense that there would be a set of service, generally of the lower end that are bringing people, maybe something would change. I think the demographic trend makers say that’s going to keep happening. I think it’s important to think of that sitting underneath gentrification, which then in certain neighborhoods, which quickly become places where people have resources, will quickly and more likely want to live. You have spikes, and we’ll look at that in Brooklyn in just a minute.

So that’s all broadly a set of market trends. I want to try, in just a minute, to bring in the Bloomberg Administration and some of sort of what has happened that developers and planners in recent years have said, “What does this mean for us?” And I’m not going to do a lot on that, but I do want to put up this chart. The administration has largely done four different types of rezoning and redevelopment efforts, and a few of them are the big projects. These couple areas where manufacturing has been rezoned to residential – the big two in Brooklyn have been Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, but then a number of others around the city, the west side being the biggest, and a few more coming – Willets Point and Sherman Creek and Manhattanville – efforts to upzone some of the business districts.  In these other places down here below, certainly some of these are gentrifying neighborhoods.

What is happening in much wider geography, in the outer boroughs all around the city including Brooklyn, is development taking place that people don’t want in their neighborhoods. Now, that’s a whole other issue that we’re not going to talk about today. It really is a whole separate question about density and these issues about over-development and the feeling that the market is bringing development pressure people don’t want. They don’t like the tear downs, the new tall buildings. That’s not necessarily about incomes, and I mean the interesting thing is the place with the most pressure for downzoning has been is not in gentrifying neighborhoods. It’s in a set of working class neighborhoods, many white and white-ethnic, but also in Southeast Queens and Jamaica and a whole set of places that are largely African-American where people have just said, “Enough, we don’t want more development.” And we can talk about whether that’s good or bad in a minute.

The interesting thing is in the gentrifying neighborhoods, the city has said well, we’ll let you rezone the side streets not to allow new development, but we got to find some places to allow growth. We have all these new people coming into the city, we have all this development pressure. This should probably be worded into sort of maybe balanced neighborhood rezoning where growth has been capped on the side streets but allowed on the wide avenues for new transit. And I just love this picture so I threw it in, and actually it’s different now. There’s a third luxury tower right here.  But in some ways I think what the administration was really responding to – what developers were really responding to – is exactly this set of shifts. So wait a minute, we can charge $3,000 a month for rents here? And then there’s all these little manufacturers in there using up this gorgeous view of Manhattan and this land? Something’s got to give. And of course, it has been giving in many, many neighborhoods. And this gets to some of the issues of commercial gentrification, although I’m not going to talk quite as much about them right now.

What does that mean? That broad set of trends, including gentrification, but also all these other development trends – what does it come to mean for tenants? I just want to quickly go through what the 2005 housing and vacancy survey was. Lance’s data looked at sort of the shifts up through 2002, this one isn’t out yet even in the micro data level or maybe it is. I haven’t looked at it yet at the micro data level. But the big picture, from 2002 to 2005 the median tenant incomes were down pretty significantly, almost 6%. Median rents were up more than 8%.  The number of families paying more than 50% of their income for rent grew dramatically – from about half a million to 575, 000.  That includes half of the households earning less than $25,000 a year paying more than 50% of their income for rent. And the median rent burden for tenants living in unsubsidized housing grew dramatically in just those three years from a bit over 40% to 50% of their income for rent. This matches the statistic that Lance mentioned that in those gentrifying neighborhoods, lower income households tend to pay something that is astronomical…

I want to pause here one second because I think this is the place for me to mention one or two things about how I’ve kind of wrestled with Lance’s research, and partly what I’ve asked is this question: What’s happened to people?  So I accept what the data says. Maybe they’re not moving out of their neighborhoods in higher numbers than in lower income neighborhoods. But what’s happening? And it seems to be one of four things that is happening. Some certainly are being displaced, and I was really glad to see in the data this effort to start looking at displacement – more voluntary and involuntary moves. It seems to me people move out of poorer neighborhoods because they’re dissatisfied with the services or the safety or the quality of those neighborhoods where they’re more likely to move out of gentrifying neighborhoods because they can’t pay the rent in some way or other. So, some set of people are being displaced. An enormous set of people are paying much more of their income for rent, which obviously has all kinds of consequences. People are crowding much more – that, actually we don’t have stats here, but the crowding stats are up dramatically. Or, some kind of public policy is mitigating their need to move.

This is where I do think I’ll come back at the end to the importance of rent regulations and regulatory policy, but I do want to point out another wonderful nugget in the first publication of Frank Braconi and Lance’s work. It suggested that tenants living in regulated buildings in those neighborhoods, which had to be five units and above or at least old units under rent control, were I want to say half as likely, I’m not sure if that data is right, but significantly less likely to be displaced than folks living in the small buildings – the unregulated buildings – in those neighborhoods. And I actually think it spoke to the power of rent regulation as one way of helping people stay in the neighborhood.  You can decide whether that’s important or not, but I do think that’s really good evidence that rent regulation in New York City enables people in gentrifying neighborhoods to stay in those places. Unfortunately, rent regulation is under enormous attack politically. It’s really been dramatically undermined in the way it’s been administered. And so this is just a graph of units being deregulated as a result of high rent de-control. Once a unit gets to $2,000, it can be taken out of rent regulation, and while that seems like a lot of money, increasingly it is two or three families sharing a place or a lot of ways in which it is not necessarily upper income people.  A couple quick slides on Brooklyn and then I’ll end my talking about organizing and strategies.

First, Corcoran just did their first Brooklyn report and these are the neighborhoods that they picked. Now, the trends I’m talking about matter in many, many more neighborhoods and I really appreciated the research that we saw before. I think it is so interesting. And some of the kinds of consequences that gentrification can lead to aren’t in these neighborhoods at all.  I don’t know if anyone’s been reading Juan Gonzalez’s stories about this landlord called Pinnacle, which is a development company that does exactly what you suggested, which made your maps and has a master portfolio of 20,000 units in precisely those neighborhoods and goes in and essentially does everything it can to get rid of rent stabilized tenants by doing the true and false major capital improvements, fixing up the buildings. But these are the neighborhoods that Corcoran looked at, and I think certainly one of the notable things they thought is the single largest one-year increase in sales prices anywhere in the city from 2004 to 2005 is in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. These are one year increase numbers from 2004 to 2005 – only in sale prices, we talked about rents a minute ago. Certainly, the thing that is “gentrification” exists dramatically, with or without displacement.

And I don’t know how many people saw this study that ACORN put out in a political context. This party verified the Atlantic Yards, but I do think it’s worth paying attention to the data that they gathered looking at the new developments in downtown Brooklyn: about 6,000 units, almost 95% of them luxury, in an area where according to their data, in Community Board 2, with dramatic racial change over the 10 years of this census, due to whatever factors.

And I do think we want to say here, and I think to some extent Lance implied it, but it’s worth naming it – the anxieties over race in neighborhood change are a big part of what has been the lightning rod of the gentrification question. They’re a lot of what’s on people’s minds, there are a lot of black people I think feel how people interpret their neighborhoods being taken away. And certainly, I know Lance has thought a lot about this and has been in the midst of that dialogue. I want to end here and spend my last couple minutes talking about strategies and what we do about it. And then I know Jim will really pick that up as well from an even more neighborhood and community organization point of view.

To me, what Lance’s research really said was that low-income families were really on the unfortunate end either way. Either they’re in relatively poor neighborhoods without good services and without a lot of safety and so they want to move out of them, or they’re in improving neighborhoods and they either have to pay an astronomical percent of their income for rent or be displaced.  I mean that’s an exaggeration and not true of everyone, but we want a public policy that addresses both of those problems. We certainly, big picture at the macro level, have an economy whose growth and development instead of largely lifting the boats of the people at the bottom is actually I think doing harm. We’re not sharing the benefits of development well in this economy really at either end of this equation. I’ve been at the Fifth Ave Committee for 10 years, that was the community organizing and community development work we tried to do, and now at the Pratt Center the kind of work we try to do with neighborhoods to kind of help them figure out what makes sense.

I do want to confess that I think there’s a lot of tension in these. Lance talked a little bit about traditional New York City production strategies of creating affordable housing historically in low income neighborhoods – in many ways with dramatic success. Those neighborhoods have become places where people want to live, but it obviously has this challenge. It doesn’t address the issues we’re talking about today. It doesn’t address gentrifying neighborhoods, so we’ve moved in those neighborhoods to a set of strategies I call leveraging the market. This was mostly what Lance was talking about, inclusionary zoning which lets people build more and more market rate housing if they include affordable housing, tax increment financing, tax incentive programs, and on specific projects, community benefits agreements which could bring in the inclusion of affordable housing and accountable development standards on those projects. And I’ve been part, and so has Father Jim, of trying to do this. Because when development is coming, you’d like it to bring affordable housing to the places it’s bringing. But it also is a troubling thing because it’s part of feeding a market which has these broader implications that I’ve been talking about.

So I also want to talk about strategies on the other side of the chart, and if I had to put all my eggs in a basket right now in New York City, I would put them all in this basket, and this is a little bit of a difference because it does seem to me that investing in preserving people’s abilities to live in affordable housing in improving neighborhoods does have a critical set of regulatory policies and actions that makes a big difference. And I do think that rent regulation, I don’t necessarily want to get in a big debate about rent regulation, has a big impact in enabling people to stay in those neighborhoods. Certainly, public housing, I mean I think a large number of the places that you looked at that have stayed neighborhoods where more lower income people live amidst gentrification are neighborhoods where public housing or subsidized housing like Mitchell-Lama was developed, and we got to find ways to preserve that kind of housing.

And then there’s been a lot of other kinds of organizing, which I also even while doing it  had mixed feelings about, these sort of displacement-free zones, because they are largely polarizing strategies. We in the Fifth Avenue Committee helped people in small buildings who are not protected by rent regulations, whose landlords were seeking to double or triple their rent, to bring very local organizing pressure on their landlords and lenders not to displace them, and it’s a polarizing strategy and it doesn’t feel that good. And yet there was sort of this question of what kind of growth do we want to see in our neighborhoods, and what kind of values and norms do we want to have. Those aren’t going to be deep implication strategies I don’t think. But they certainly do matter. One thing I think I was very pleased about in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning and in the West Side was that some special anti-displacement rules were put that if a developer displaces existing families directly in order to build new development, they have even higher thresholds of affordability. I’m sad to say that these anti-displacement rules have not been built into the standard inclusionary zoning program in New York City. We got them in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Hudson Yards, but the administration does not want to include them in other re-development areas, and I think that’s unfortunate.

And then finally it’s critical that we do more to, maybe economic diversity is not quite the right word, to also attend to incomes, to where are the manufacturing jobs, to what kind of businesses can stay in those neighborhoods, what kind of protections do we need for manufacturers and small businesses, and how did people actually benefit from the new jobs being created with some other kinds of economic policy strategies? I think you can hear in my narrative some uncertainty and some questions about which of these strategies to try. Certainly in plenty of neighborhoods where I’ve been part of promoting inclusionary zoning as a strategy, there are people who don’t want the development that’s coming and what organizers can say, “Let’s stop development, that’ll help.” I’m not persuaded that stopping development will solve the problems we’re talking about today, honestly. I do really feel these tensions and on the one hand feel like we’ve got to try to  have the market do more to benefit a wider range of people, and then on the other hand see all the places where if we don’t invest in more regulatory and preservation oriented strategies, our market leveraging strategies won’t be enough either. I’ve probably opened more questions, at least for myself, than I’ve answered, but I appreciate the opportunity to think together with all of you.

Sharon Zukin: Thank you very much. You’ve opened up a lot of boxes for us. We turn next to Father Jim O’Shea who is both a Catholic priest and the owner of a master’s degree in social work, so I feel I am welcoming another sociologist. He’s also an activist in Bed-Stuy. He is the first director of Churches United for Fair Housing, which has worked for preserving and developing affordable housing in north Brooklyn. He participated in the negotiations that resulted in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning, and I welcome him to speak about his experiences with us.

Rev. Jim O’Shea: I don’t have a PowerPoint presentation. I feel like I’m overdressed and unprepared. (Laughter) However, it is nice to be here. I have a lot of respect for Paul Moses and it’s nice to be invited. Displacement is certainly something that is important to us in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, so I wanted to offer a couple of thoughts today – a couple reflections, about displacement. My disclaimer is this only comes out of Greenpoint-Williamsburg, northern Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s a big city. There are a lot of factors that happen in different neighborhoods, but this is more the story that comes out of particular situations and particular things that happen in Greenpoint-Williamsburg. So that’s where these reflections come from. And some of them are just reflections on attitudes.

I wanted to begin, again we tell stories, a couple weeks ago a man called the office and said that his pastor had recommended that he call me. He said, “I’m 78 years old. I’ve lived in Greenpoint my whole life. I’m a widower, I have no one else, and I was paying $500 a month for rent. It’s a small house, I’ve lived in this building my whole life.”  He said that someone had just bought the building, and they want $1750, and the landlord told him he needed it next month, and he said, “I don’t know what to do.” As he was telling me this, he was telling me his story. He talked about his wife, Green Point, the church, and all the things that happened, the history, the community, and all these things – nice stories about who he was. But at the end of all those nice stories he got back to the question. “Can you help me, Father? What can I do?” And I said, “I don’t know what you can do. You can put your name on a list and put in an application for senior housing.” But ultimately there was nothing he could do. He didn’t know where to go. And I think that’s what displacement is about in Greenpoint-Williamsburg. It’s the reality that all of a sudden this man’s apartment is very valuable. But his life, his story, was not that valuable, so he has to move on. 

So that’s kind of what gets people, at least in our community – what’s gotten people involved and gets people organized.  The level or organizing in Greenpoint-Williamsburg is incredible, and it’s difficult to organize people, but people feel this issue. One of the things that Paul and I have talked about for a couple years, and one of the things that drives me crazy is when you think about changes and neighborhoods, it’s the language that sometimes we use when we talk about it. And it’s typically language that’s used in the more dominant culture talking about these transitions in neighborhoods. And we kind of laugh in a sad way, but typically some of the newspapers in the city – the real estate sections – use words like talking about people going into these neighborhoods as “pioneers” or “settlers” or “colonizers.”  These are quotes. There was one I remember, I think it was the New York Times Magazine, the headline was “How hipness moves block by block.” It talked about the Lower East Side, and the caption underneath was, “Watch out Chinatown, you’re next.” And you think about the words that we use, but it really loses, misses, the story about what actually happens. It’s kind of a very specific attitude that thinks about these movements as kind of victims.

One of the things it’s very interesting to think about – sometimes our own history in terms of the dominant culture of this country likes to think its movements don’t have victims.  That’s very important to us. We like to think that nothing we ever do causes any problems.  We fight every Columbus Day about who Columbus was and what did he do. Did he discover a new world or destroy an old one? We still fight about that. We’re very uncomfortable with that – thinking about movements that actually cause victims. You know the West, how the West was won – we love those stories with John Wayne and the Alamo, but we don’t like to tell the story of typically the people who were in the west. So we have ways that we sometimes talk about things and we have ways of trying to think and convince ourselves – defend ourselves sometimes – that our movements don’t have victims, but in fact they do. There’s no way that movements happen to neighborhoods where victims aren’t left.

Movements cause consequences. It’s an interesting thing if you think about it. One of the things I think it’s important for us to do when we talk about displacement, as we talk about trends, as we talk about numbers and facts and figures, is to be willing to do what’s very uncomfortable for us, which is to tell a story. And to be willing to be honest and truthful, and at least as fellow neighbors, to not have to defend ourselves against what’s happening but to be able to say, “This is what’s happening.” We don’t have to defend ourselves. Movements happen. Development happens. We can’t stop that. There are people in Williamsburg who would say – I know one guy who gets up and talks to college kids – he says, “Please don’t come to Williamsburg. Tell all your friends. Please don’t come to Williamsburg. We can’t take any more people.”  There are people like that, although I don’t think it’s realistic. It’s important though to tell the story of what’s happened. Again, we make our movements and like to believe there are no victims in them, and we also like to wrap ourselves in sometimes very positive language, things like “pioneers” and “urban warrior,” the “settler” and “destiny,” all the things that we’ve used in our own country. 

One of the things that we say too is, “The neighborhood’s getting better.”  For who is it getting better? It certainly might be better for the person who can get The New York Times now, but if you talk to that widower, he probably wouldn’t say that the neighborhood is getting better. The other thing is we tell these stories of these communities, I think about where we [Churches United for Fair Housing] have our office in Transfiguration Church [in Williamsburg], …  there’s a community that served the poorest people of New York City for 50 years. It was a neighborhood that was abandoned by people, the police, the healthcare system, the education system. The poorest Puerto Ricans and Dominicans came to that community. And what they did in 50 years is incredible. If you visit that community, they sustained a school to raise their children in, they opened immigration offices and social service offices, an AIDS hospice. The roots of those people in that community are incredible, but their story has to be told. When you say the neighborhood is getting better, let’s also remember what you’re losing. Let’s remember who’s there.  Let’s remember what people did in these neighborhoods, and not be afraid to tell those stories.

One thing we do in Greenpoint-Williamsburg is we try to organize one another, we try to work with the churches. And I think maybe one of the things we’re able to do is to try to tell the story. And so I guess I would end with that. If there’s a discussion after this we can talk about whatever it is that we need. Thank you.

Sharon Zukin: Certainly when you talk about individual men and women, you make the situation clear and also dramatic. Father O’Shea also underlined something that I hate to call a cause of change, and that is the role of the media, but in fact, The New York Times and magazines like New York Magazine and Time Out since the 1960s -1970s have constantly beat the drum for different sorts of stores, different sorts of ways of viewing a neighborhoods, which leads affluent people to see them as more desirable and to see themselves as pioneers or smart shoppers – smart shoppers who can see the potential, as they say – in a neighborhood and to appreciate this stories … It’s an excruciating task to try to bridge the different sorts of experience and data as we said that we talked about today. Let me open up the floor. Does anybody want to ask a burning question that they’ve been holding on to?

Audience member: Yeah, I have a question for my colleague over at Columbia University. When he said that there was ... the value of the home goes up ... Unfortunately, the taxes went up, and these people cannot afford to pay the taxes. So unfortunately, they get displaced because they can’t afford the taxes. They’re thrown out. And also with downzoning, what happens is that some people get displaced again. In Canarsie there’s these row houses - they get displaced because of the downzoning because what developers do, of course as we all know, is take these homes and try to get three- or four-family houses carved in half. So unfortunately there’s people being displaced by downzoning also. Homes get knocked down, and then they make them unaffordable for other people.

Sharon Zukin: Does anyone want to speak to this?

Brad Lander: Well first of all, Canarsie hasn’t been downzoned, and the zoning that you have happens to be more than what the houses that exist. So the reason that the developers are buying those houses, knocking them down, creating row houses, is because the zoning allows them to … So it’s not a case of downzoning. It’s because the zoning that you have allows more than what the neighborhood is requested by, so it’s a need for downzoning.

Audience member: Yes, sorry, I misspoke. It’s a need for downzoning because there are people being displaced because of the lack of downzoning.

Sharon Zukin: Often there’s a lack of information, I want to say an ignorance, which is not a negative term, but just a lack of information about the existing zoning in an area on the part of residents, property owners sometimes, commercial tenants, and a lot of times people don’t realize that they’re living or operating a business in a district that’s not zoned for their use. And they have no legal aid to stand on to try to stay in that area. On the other hand, you raised the same broad question that Brad Lander and Lance Freeman have raised, and that’s the question of changing public policy that is very determinedly  going in a different direction. Reinvigorating rent controls, changing zoning to allow people to stay and businesses to stay in areas where they have starkly been. This is a big problem, how to change public policy, aside from the general entrepreneurial shift of all city government. It’s a really big problem, and it seems even less manageable at times than changing conditions in a small neighborhood. Of course, we’re lucky in New York City. We have the five borough presidents who can champion our causes, but the borough presidents’ offices are under enormous pressure too, I imagine. So it’s a real problem trying to find any elected officials, from city council members to borough presidents to people in the mayoral administration who would even be at all receptive to the sorts of changes we’re talking about.

Rev. Jim O’Shea: We talked about policy changes: the biggest problem in fact are the real estate and developers  who have contributed to the … council members and so forth. … The real estate and the development industry … benefits when there’s gentrification taking place. Not the people moving out, not the people moving in. It’s the real estate and development industry.  Public policy change has to come from probably campaign reform and making sure that there is some control on the real estate and development contributions to the policy makers.

Sharon Zukin: Well that would be a nice initiative or referendum or one of those things to put on the New York City ballot – banning campaign contributions. I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing at the desirability of that – banning campaign contributions from real estate developers.

Brad Lander: On the one had I entirely agree with that, and I’m pretty sure that the Real Estate Board of New York keeps an enemies list of mom and pop stores. At the same time, there are some hard problems to solve which are not all about the influence of real estate development. And I think the strains of growth – if we’re going to add another million people to the city over the next 20 years, that’s the equivalent of adding the current populations of Boston and Miami to the five boroughs, so that’s a hard problem. One solution I suppose is don’t let them in. And certainly there are people in Washington who are firm that that’s the answer. Another answer is let them live in the Poconos, or crowd them into basements, so I do feel like this is a problem we have to own together. A concern that I have is that on the one hand, you have developers who want to make as much profit as they can from development interests and who often will essentially say, “Look, this is what’s happening,” and kind of weaken all the regulatory mechanisms we have, on the other hand what that leads to in communities all over the city is either, “Don’t move here, college students,” or “We don’t want any more development. Let’s downzone our neighborhood and let the growth go somewhere else.” And we’re in a very polarized time right now around development and growth as a result of that. That’s not going to serve our city well. And I do think it needs more political power to planning and enabling the kind of growth that happens to work for neighborhoods and work for a wider range of families.

Rev. Jim O’Shea: When you put that on the table then you also have to ask the question: Do we have to become Bombay? Do we have to become Sao Paolo? Do we have to become Moscow? What about all these other areas out there? What about teleconferencing? So it’s not that people have to be in a dense area, that Manhattan has to become a population of 8 million alone, and that Brooklyn has to become a population of 5 million alone.

Sharon Zukin: Well you know there have been discussions about spreading growth in a regional metropolitan area for decades that have not succeeded mainly because of the political jurisdictions. New York state can’t reasonably negotiate with New Jersey. New York City can’t reasonably negotiate with the most inner ring of older suburbs. It would be nice if some of the new housing could straddle the city borders, but Brad is right that the jurisdictions won’t let us do that, so there are pressures on how to keep the city dense and vibrant and receptive to newcomers, while also keeping large swaths of it affordable to the people who are already here and for the newcomers who will need a reasonable place to live.

Audience member: I think it’s important to know what the definition of “affordable” is.

Sharon Zukin: Does anyone want to take a stab at that? We’ve seen the information about the enormous rent burden that a lot of people in the city suffer from and we’ve also heard about declining incomes in the city.

Lance Freeman: One of the things that the city has done. If your familiar with Harlem for example, many of the buildings that were under the city’s control that were rehabilitated that were marketed as affordable or moderate income, the income that’s based on is the median income for the metropolitan area of the entire city, and that’s substantially higher than the median income in Harlem for example, and I think a lot of residents in Harlem were resentful because it’s almost like a slap in the face that they say this is affordable housing, but it’s for someone making $50 or $60,000 dollars a year, so I think the city would say the trade off would be that with deeper subsidies they could build less housing. So admittedly there’s a trade off, but it certainly inspires resentment.

Sharon Zukin: Is there any new way to keep – where’s the leeway to negotiate the definition of affordable?

Brad Lander: This is actually where the opponents in Greenpoint-Williamsburg did a really good job because all affordable technically means is that it’s targeted that people would pay 30% of their income for rent without telling you what the income is. And there are 20 different affordable housing programs, some for people who are homeless and some for people who are middle-income, and everything in between. In a broad brush way, that’s appropriate. A lot of people have a need for affordable housing and we want programs that produce housing that’s affordable at a pretty wide range of levels. I certainly usually argue for focusing on the place where need is greatest, but I also believe that we also want teachers and other folks to be able to live in the city. One thing that Father Jim and other folks in Greenpoint-Williamsburg did is insisted in the negotiations that there be a meaningful chunk of housing for people earning $20,000 a year and a meaningful chunk of housing for people earning $40,000 a year and a meaningful chunk of housing for people earning $60,000 a year. And there is sometimes leverage in negotiations to do that, and this is one area where I think the Bloomberg administration has – I was one of the critics of the first housing plan they put out because I was really concerned that it wasn’t going to go deeply enough, and I think they’ve spread out what they have. The bigger problem is that it’s great that they have a plan to preserve 165,000 units of housing that spread across the income span, it’s just that there’s 3 million people who can’t afford housing at a wide range of income levels and everyone who doesn’t get one of the affordable units – for every time there’s an affordable housing project there’s a hundred times as many applicants, and so you got 99 people who think well that’s not affordable housing for me, which why I think preserving the affordable housing we do have and rent regulation and some of these broader strategies are too important because at least the way we produce it now, we’re not going to come anywhere close to producing new units of affordable housing to a wide range of people…

Audience member: I’m wondering what you take to be the relationship in the existence between rent regulation and the statistics that you presented about turnover rates in gentrifying neighborhoods, and sort of how that might factor into accounting for them.

Lance Freeman: Well, I think it’s definitely the case that in general, if you look at the data that I analyzed, residents in rent-regulated apartments will move less because they’re protected by rent inflation and they probably a lot of times have a good deal, a subsidy they have that they’re hesitant to want to give up. So it’s certainly the case that rent regulation helps them stay in their apartments. In terms of the specific analysis that I did, comparing turnover in the gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods, I think it plays less of a role in that because you have rent regulated apartments in both types of neighborhoods, so I think it’s something else going on between those two neighborhoods that is responsible for the differences I found.

Audience member: I guess my question, quite frankly, is what would happen in the gentrifying neighborhoods if you didn’t have the rent-regulated apartments? Would the rate of turnover be higher? You’re right, I mean there might be other factors that should be taken into account, but my question is without the rent regulated…

Lance Freeman: The question is – across the board the rates would be higher – so I think the question is would it be that much higher in gentrifying neighborhoods? Certainly I would expect that to be the case, but the way the study was structured, I can’t really answer that directly. But I would suspect that that would be the case because they have a larger implicit subsidy. In many neighborhoods, the difference between the market rate and rent regulated apartments are less so nowadays, but certainly in the past there wasn’t really that much difference, but now in the gentrifying areas you would expect to see a big difference and so, if you take away the rent regulation, then there’s less reason for them to stay there.  Is the question asking do I see that in other cities?

Audience member: Yeah, comparing certainly with other parts of the country exactly how that plays into it.

Lance Freeman: There aren’t that many cities left that still have rent regulation.  Boston killed theirs, there’s a couple cities in California that still have it. But because of the way the sample was constructed, I did have enough cities or parts of the country that had rent regulation to see it.

Brad Lander: Did you include New York, the New York neighborhoods, in the national study to see if there were any interesting divergences between the New York neighborhoods in the other study?

Lance Freeman: That’s a good question. Yes, so some of the New York neighborhoods are included in the study. But I’m looking at a national sample, so to an extent you have people, and there people living in New York City that were in the national sample, but it’s different in that in the New York City study, I had all the New York City neighborhoods, every one in New York is included. In the national sample it was just where people happened to live. New York City is a pretty big city so we do have some people form New York in this larger sample, but it’s harder to pinpoint what’s going on in this national study because it’s a national sample and we have a few New Yorkers, but not enough to really draw any firm conclusions about what’s happening in specific neighborhoods in New York City.

Sharon Zukin: … I believe that the majority of census tracts across the United States, excluding the coasts and excluding some high-amenity areas, like, I don’t know, Boulder, Colorado or some ski resorts in Utah, that housing prices are not as dramatically rising as in New York City. So even if you look at some inner city neighborhoods in Chicago, where there’s a determined policy of tearing down public housing and not re-housing the same number of people from those units in the same neighborhoods, housing prices in general are so much lower – correct me if I’m mistaken – housing prices are so much lower that there isn’t that pressure like we’ve got in New York City to pay so much money and so much of a share of household income for housing. Also, rent regulation in New York City may be a city policy, but it’s approved by the New York State Legislature. So there’s a whole lot of levels of government to get through to get that sort of regulation in place. Somebody in the back had hand up over here, yes?

Audience member: I believe that not enough attention has been paid to the possibility of mixture zoning. For example, before 1961, communities such as Red Hook, where I come from, had twice as many people as it does today, and thousands of more jobs. But at the same time, it was mixed use, and had been mixed use for over a hundred years. And there are a number communities throughout New York that were similarly adversely impacted by the zoning of industrial-only zoning, which continues today in vastly more areas that are actually needed. Under the rubric of industrial zoning, we have large amounts of land that are used for vehicle storage, for example, only on the grounds of garbage trucks and bus storage operation. There is no reason why we can build above those. Now the developers don’t like this because it doesn’t allow them the pristine footprint that they need, but in a way, it would accomplish and make more correct with the history of these working class communities that would produce jobs and housing at the same time. But the city has ignored this and allows many who would claim that we need all this industrial land to essentially try to land bank for future, large projected operations – for example, Atlantic Yards.

Brad Lander: I agree with some of what you’re saying for sure. We’ve been big advocates of a different kind of mixed-use zoning than what the city currently has that would facilitate additional development but would require the retention of what manufacturing exists. Unfortunately, what the city calls “mixed-use zoning” makes residential development entirely as of right in the neighborhoods that are now manufacturing, and so a developer in any of the existing mixed use zones just gets rid of the bus lot as soon as they buy it and turns that into a shi-shi retail store because there’s no requirement to maintain the balance. And so once you have the New York City mixed-use zoning, it’s effectively a zone of conversion.

Audience member: That’s why we could use groups as a component of that, and then enforce those use groups.

Brad Lander: I guess I don’t agree that advocates of manufacturing retention have been that successful, preserving or land banking all that much, it seems to me that as much gets converted as the New York City Department of Planning has planned to convert and that they’ll gradually get to the rest of it.

Sharon Zukin: That suggests an interesting possibility of community groups doing a land survey of their own and suggesting development sites in their own districts. Okay, one more question.

Audience member: I was just wondering what advocacy can be done. I mean, development, it’s happening. It’s happening no matter what. Is there a way, kind of what Professor Freeman was talking about, with the tax increment financing of diverting the gigantic profits that developers … like somehow taking a percentage of the huge profits not only of developers but maybe of individual homeowners that are making on their own homes, somehow taking that percentage and diverting that into affordable housing.

Sharon Zukin: This sounds as popular as something to do with the estate tax. This is certainly an interesting idea. I don’t want to outlast your patience for the morning. I do want to make a pitch for joining together, at least in a coordinated research strategy that would combine collecting the stories that Father O’Shea talked about to personalize some of these disputes, of conflicts, of these upgrading neighborhoods and also to try to collect some quantitative data, some numbers, that would be useful. And so, I hope Paul Moses has all of your contact information and if we send out an email asking you to join with us to sort of link up your organizations to the college, you’ll be receptive to that.

Paul Moses: Well, thank you. I’ll just say first of all, thank you very much to the panelists. You were all excellent. Thank you Sharon for doing such a great job as moderator also. And thank you all very much, first of all for your comments. What you’ve already put into this discussion, as Sharon said, we’d like to continue it. We’d like to build on this. It seems there’s a lot that we know already, but a lot more to know about the subject. And it’s something that, as Brooklyn residents, touches us and our lives very deeply. So thank you all for coming.

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