Rally for Housing

The Rally for Affordable Housing

The Interfaith Assembly leads the rally

First: The invite to the rally

Please join the Interfaith Assembly and other faith leaders and people of faith: 

To bear witness to the critical need for supportive housing 

for the most vulnerable New Yorkers

Wednesday, August 10, 2016 

 9am to 10am

At Governor Cuomo's New York City Office 

633 3rd Avenue (btwn. 4oth and 41st street) 

and to urge the Governor to release the 

full funding for 6,000 units of supportive housing 

over the next five years by signing, without delay 

the MOU for the 1.9 Billion in the state budget 

for affordable and supportive housing 

This presence in front of the Governor's office will be the third weekly Wednesday witness in partnership with the campaign 4 NY/NY housing to let the public and the Governor know that New Yorkers across the state call on him to act now to sign the MOU for the full $1.9 billion. We hope you will help us send the message that New York's people of faith stand with our most vulnerable neighbors in calling for action NOW. 

Fully six months since Governor Cuomo pledged to produce 20,000 units of supportive housing over the next 15 years, and over 100 days since the Governor and State Legislature included 1.9 billion in the state budget for affordable housing including 6,000 units of supportive housing,  a mere $150 million has actually been authorized. 

As the Daily News  

reported last month 

about the memo of understanding still unsigned 

"Gov. Cuomo, Legislature deadlocked on $2B affordable housing plan for New York"

The lives of New York's most vulnerable residents are not a bargaining chip!! They are our mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, children and neighbors. 

Supportive Housing development is an endeavour that involves multiple partners and years of planning and coordination. The current $150 million authorization severely constrains our partners' ability to gain the long term commitments from funders, developers, property owners and others required to move forward on the scale of development that our current crisis demands. Every delay in signing the full Memorandum of Understanding truly means that many of our most vulnerable neighbors will suffer and some will actually die prematurely from the lack of appropriate housing and needed services.

Marc L. Greenberg

Executive Director
Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing

165 West 105th Street, NY NY 10025

O-212-316-3171, C-917-913-0098

Assembly DirectorMarc Greenberg and activists from 5th Avenue Presbyterian

The Press release:

gather on Wednesday, August 10, at 9am in front of the NYC office of Governor Andrew Cuomo to bear witness to the crisis of homelessness and call on the Governor to exercise his leadership and sign an MOU with the State legislative leaders to release 1.9 billion dollars in the New York State budget to fund 6,000 units of supportive housing state wide over the next 5 years. 

Faith leaders will include: The Reverend Peter Cook, Executive Director of the New York State Council of Church, The Reverend Robert Foltz-Morrison, Executive Presbyter, Presbytery of New York City, Dr. Anne Klaeysen, Leader, New York Society for Ethical Culture, Sister Carol De Angelo, Sisters of Charity of New York, Iman Boukadoum, Interfaith Center of New York, The Reverend Robert Brashear, Senior Pastor, West Park Presbyterian Church, Marc Greenberg, Executive Director, Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing, and others, and will be joined by members of the Micah Faith Table and of the Life Experience and Faith Sharing Association – including men and women who have themselves been homeless. 

In November of last year, in an effort spearheaded by the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing, nearly 300 faith leaders called on the Governor and the Mayor to commit to produce 35,000 units of supportive housing over the next 15 years, and this June over 150 faith leaders endorsed another letter urging the Governor and State legislative leaders to sign the MOU to release, without delay, the full 1.9 billion in the New York State budget for affordable housing and supportive housing for New York’s most vulnerable households.

 “As the legislative session closed on June 18th we were dismayed and deeply disappointed to learn that the Governor and State leaders agreed to release a mere $150 million of the 2 billion dollars in the state budget for affordable and supportive housing.  Every delay in signing the full Memorandum of Understanding means that many of our most vulnerable neighbors will suffer and some will actually die prematurely from the lack of appropriate housing and needed services. We see no reason to delay this effort one more day!” – The Reverend Robert Foltz-Morrison, Executive Presbyter, Presbytery of New York City. 

Presbytery Exec Robert Foltz-Morrison addresses the rally

‘With 20,000 households across the state of New York approved for supportive housing each year but only 1 in 6 actually obtaining it, our most vulnerable citizens need our elected officials to stand up for them TODAY and sign the Memo of Understanding for the full 1.9 Billion Dollars – a true 5-year commitment and not a series of one year allocations.  Signing the MOU would send a powerful signal to members of our communities, the general public, advocates, stakeholders and the entire country that New York is serious in its determination to end homelessness and help to affirm the public’s faith that Government is committed to help all citizens to live full and decent lives.  New Yorkers look to Governor Cuomo and our State leaders to do their job and sign the full MOU NOW” -- The Reverend Peter Cook, Executive Director, New York State Council of Churches 

Marc with Peter Cook of the New York State Council of Churches

“As people of faith, we believe that decent housing is the God-given right of all people. Our elected officials have done their part, they've budgeted the money. All it requires is the governor's signature. And still Governor Cuomo refuses to sign. It is simply wrong, in every sense of the word, to hold the lives of our most vulnerable neighbors, hostage to political whim. Governor Cuomo, sign now!” – The Reverend Dr. Robert Brashear, Senior Pastor, West Park Presbyterian Church, Chair, Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing

Pastor Robert Brashear and Robert Foltz-Morrison

“Today, I stand with faith leaders to bring to our awareness our brothers and sisters who need a place to live, a place they can call home, especially those in need of supportive housing. Too often, their stories are not known, their voice not heard. We need to get to know them, listen to their stories and respond.  We are one family, brothers and sisters to each other. I give thanks for all who are working to address this injustice. 

Sisters of Charity of New York join with Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing, faith leaders and others who urge Governor Cuomo and New York State legislators to sign the MOU on Supportive Housing. The MOU is one way to bring forth new life for those in need of supportive housing.

Pope Francis, in Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home, states: “Disregard for the duty to cultivate and maintain a proper relationship with my neighbor, for whose care and custody I am responsible, ruins my relationship with my own self, with others, with God and with the earth. When all these relationships are neglected, when justice no longer dwells in the land, the Bible tells us that life itself is endangered.” -- Sister Carol De Angelo, SC, Director of Office of Peace, Justice and Integrity of Creation for the Sisters of Charity of New York.

“The New York Society for Ethical Culture was the first community to answer Mayor Koch’s call to provide shelter for our most needy neighbors. After 30 years of giving comfort and support to women in transition as they take the necessary steps to self-sufficiency, finding a new home and job, we join our colleagues from throughout our great state in calling on our Governor to do his job and sign the MOU without delay.” Dr. Anne Klaeysen, Leader, New York Society for Ethical Culture.

“Supportive housing is the best, most humane, and most cost effective way to provide chronically homeless people the support they need. Providing supportive housing to our most vulnerable residents saves government’s money -- $10,100 per year, per tenant here in New York – by reducing hospitalizations, detox and rehab programs, and incarceration.  But supportive housing development is an endeavor that involves multiple partners and years of planning and coordination.  The current $150 million authorization severely constrains our partners' ability to gain the long term commitments from funders, developers, property owners and others required to move forward on the scale of development that our current crisis demands  .  The lives of New York's most vulnerable residents are not a bargaining chip!! They are our mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, children and neighbors.” – Marc Greenberg, Executive Director, Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing

The letter signed by 150 faith leaders reads in part:  ““As members of the clergy and the leaders of faith based communities and service organizations, we are on the front lines of providing support to the 80,000 homeless children, women and men in our communities. From Montauk to Massena, Brooklyn to Buffalo, too many individuals and families with serious social service needs simply cannot find and maintain permanent, affordable housing and get off the streets.” … “With the stroke of a pen, you can begin to change that”.   

As people of faith, we know you each share our belief that the true values of a society are revealed in the way it treats the neediest and most vulnerable among us. That is why we are writing you today to encourage you to finish the job by signing the Memo of Understanding your budget requires before those funds can be spent, and those 6,000 new units of supportive housing can be built”.

(For press people – for more info – marc@iahh.org – 917-913-0098)

What I said at the rally:

I need your help to try and figure something out.  We all know there’a crisis in affordable housing.  Maybe 80000 homeless. We got busy…those of us who work in the area of housing did our job. We wrote up programs and proposasl. And delivered them to our elected officials. Those of  us in the fauth community did our job. We wrote letters, we communicated with our elected officials.Told them of our concerns. And lo and behold, they listened. And praise the Lord, they did their job. They budgeted 1.9 billion dollars for affordable housing.  That was six months ago. SO where’s the money? Someone must not be doing their job. Who could it  be? Gov. Cuomo Maybe? So our first message is:  do your job.

The second is: sign the memo. Now.

To use the most vulnerable in our society as political bargaining chips is reprhensible. To hold them hostage is morally worng. We are here to say that stops now. 

Addressing the rally

Fight, fight, fight: Housing is a right...

7/16

Pastor Bob praying for housing justice

Fight, fight, fight, housing is a  right.

Got a late call from Marc from the Interfaith Assembly on Housing and Homelessness.

Marc Greenberg and the Assembly were there.....

Big rally downtown demanding decent  housing for all. Lots of sponsors including  various unions and community  groups, New York communities for Change (which used to be ACORN), Faith in New York ( a project of the community organizing group PICO National Network), Churches United for Fair Housing and our Interfaith Assembly.And many others. Even though I’m really short on time, I go.

The rally begins at the First Houses, site of the first public housing projects in the US.

We began at the First Houses

I’m anxious to speak and leave, but because of the turnout, I have to go on the long march to the Seward Houses , a new project where affordable means incomes above $60000 a year and work buy non-union groups. At the end of the march, I’m asked to open with prayer. Before I pray, a 16 wheeler rolls by,the driver blowing his horn in solidarity and raising his fist.

I start by saying that there are homeless people on my steps every day with their worldly possessions.  And then I open by quoting the prophet Isaiah:

Isaiah 58:6-8 

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

We are not asking the mayor to take the homeless poor into his house, or anyone else for that matter. But we are asking that polices be put into place that can bring people the shelter they deserve.

Holy One,  we thank you for this mighty gathering of people. Gather their spirit into one spirit, their voice into one strong voice that can speak loud and clear and be heard.

Holy One forgive our city for turning its back on a record number of 61000 homeless, including women  and children. As we tithe for our churches, let our city tithe of 10% of new housing for the homeless people. Open hearts to provide legal counsel for the  30000 facing eviction.

Add our voices to the over 250 faith leaders who have called for the cooperation of the governor and mayor to produce 35000 units of new affordable housing. Grant them a spirit of  creativity and cooperation.

Let those with open hearts and minds and spirits in city hall and the chambers of Albany hear our plea. Let the radical sustaining power of the holy spirit remain with us until we have  established that housing is a right.

These things we pray in your  holy name and presence.

Amen.

There are a few Hallelujahs....

                                                                                                  ****

I am hot  and tired when I get back to the church. I meet Don to go his house, sit on his patio under the stairs and talk about how we begin moving our developing center forword.

Berlin 5: With equal quality for all

2/9

Schiller Park UNESCO cultural heritage houses

Micah takes me on tour of two of the six modernist housing estates recognized by UNESCO as world cultural  heritage sites. The two we see are on the edge of Schiller Park and the other the Weisse Stadt. These estates are expressions of the social democrat consciousness of post World War I Weimar Germany. The movement reflected a commitment to free workers from the tenements and provide housing for a variety of incomes with equal quality for all, each with their own kitchen and indoor bathrooms and most with balconies. 

Bruno Taut

The states we see are the work of Bruno Taut. Under the direction of Walter Gropius and chief city architect Martin Wagner, Taut became the chief architect of the GEHAG, a housing construction cooperative that continues to this day. Influenced by the Garden City ideal of urbanism, part of the Bauhaus movement, and using visual lines common to the deco era, Taut’s work is an expression of a Utopian visionary with practical principles. Between 1924 and 1931, his team produced over 12,000 units of housing. Forced into exile by the Nazis, Taut later worked in Japan and ultimately Turkey where he was given a hero’s burial in the national martyr’s cemetery.

For me, walking through these estates is like being is a wonderland. Part of it is the  lines of 1920’s architecture I grew to love in Tulsa, whether the outrageously ornate deco or the simpler objectivist style. But more so, it’s the idea, an expression of optimism and hope that a better world is possible ( as my Occupy friends would say..). A world where decent housing in a healthy and aesthetic environment were a basic human right, not a luxury reserved for the few. These ideals were somehow brought into concrete (literally) reality even as the terror was about to descend.

Drive through house

So who's building affordable housing today? In New York City, creation of affordable housing has slowed to a trickle. And most of what is developed is trickle down, IE, housing that has decreased in value. The 421a program (which West-Park was going to use) actually wound up with most of the  money going to market rate housing through tax concession trade offs. Most new construction has come from community organizing groups like Manhattan Together (IAF) and the SRO conversions of the Westside Federation for Senior and Supprtive Housing (WSSFSH). 

It’s also strange to ponder the political moebius strip that defines contemporary urban preservationism. On the one hand, in New York City,  if more affordable housing is going to be created, it’s got to be vertical, in opposition  to preservationist ideals. On the other, neighborhood activists rightly oppose tax free properties like churches being turned into fertile ground for developers. The opposition to our original West-Park proposal crossed a lot of ideological lines, from those who wanted simply to protect their view, to anti-development activists, to preservation fundamentalists, to those opposed to affordable housing to those simply wanting to preserve neighborhood coherence and cultural heritage. I was always uncomfortable that you could make a progressive argument either way. The loss  for us of some 24 million dollars in value through a government declared landmark decision is a reality we haven’t fully recovered from yet. The whole issue raises questions that challenge our conventional wisdoms. And for us at   West-Park, the questions are not philosophical  but very real and present..   

At the end of the day, I train down to Dahlem to visit Zeljko and Uli. They've organized a special showing of the Second Meeting at the Niemoller House. When I get off the subway, I'm amazed to see a snow globe scene as there are several inches of fresh snow on the ground. It's quiet and almost magical. I hear there's a blizzard hitting New York City.                        

 

It just doesn't work

7/27

The place is buzzing with a film crew shooting in the church. I’m late for my appointment and find we’re being held outside while a scene is finished. Teddy’s talking with the film crew and Allegra who’s come to see me. She’s a Princeton student doing a summer internship with the Interfaith Center of New York City. My friend Matt, now a dean at Princeton has sent her my way to talk about interfaith. And my experiences with Occupy. 

I say how for me interfaith is a way of life. All of us only get a glimpse of what’s behind the door. How we learn through dialectic discourse and beyond dialectic to multilectic. 

Why did I welcome Occupy? My lifetime of commitment. The heritage of this little church. The opportunity to participate in an historic moment. As part of the struggle that goes on before us during us and after us. To be in our moment. To engage in discourse with people around the spiritual issues that were being raised by the Occupiers, even while they were militantly not religious. 

Allegra sees a spiritual content to what’s happening globally that wasn’t there before. I talk about the move from the discourse of liberation to transformation, materialist analysis to holistic. How the arc travelled by Rubem Alves has resonated with me.  My call to the intersection of beauty and justice, ethics and esthetics. 

And I finish with my sense of the death of the church as we have known it. My desire not to waste anymore  time trying to save it but to be involved in the ministries  that are seeking to give birth to something new. 

She’s going to bring some students back in the fall. I walk outside with her. I hear my name and am surprised to see Vivian, one of the longtime Frog & Peach Theatre Company members, in a nurse’s uniform. She’s got a role in the movie. I remember her in Macbeth, Hamlet. Her favorite was Richard III.  Simon who was in their Midsummer Night’s Dream is with the movie, too. The frenetic, creative energy is easy to feel and Teddy’s totally taken by it. 

I take a break to see Landmark West!'s  screening of Vanishing City by Jen Senko and Fiore De Rosa (http://www.vanishingny.org/).  It’s a searing exploration of the effects of Bloomberg’s Luxury City Development model and the elimination  of affordable housing. The effect of 2.3 billion dollars in tax abatements for luxury buildings. The 421a program (that was going to fund West-Park’s development project) saw 96% of its tax credits go to luxury developers. How single family conversion becomes a ruse to nullify rent stabilization. And the city’s removal of rent subsidies hurts the small, neighborhood based landlords.  For the first time, I see a place of coalescence between the preservationists and housing advocates.  The luxury model destroys neighborhoods. In forty years, we‘ve gone from a city that was 41% blue collar to one that’s less than 11% with the largest increase in the low wage service sector  that the luxury sector requires.  One of those interviewed in the movie is Fred Siegel, who I know mainly from a friend’s Hanukkah parties. His analysis was striking  as I understood how the luxury model doesn’t even work for old school capitalists, because, well, it just doesn’t work.  

I get back in time for the opening of Glen’s play, Dem Dahk Days Down South, which grew out of his summer Theatre workshop. Marsha is handling the ticket sales, Max and Jason are running the bar. It’s a story of an African-American woman from Harlem who goes down to the south to rediscover her roots at the beginning of the Civil Rights era. I’m happy to see a cast of mainly African-American actors in a project that was born here. And happy to see that Steve dug in and learned the music and is the accompanist. And to see Jennifer in the cast. Just wish more people were here. That old pr issue again. And I wish Glen were here to see it. Look forward to his return from Birmingham. This is good.

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