Getting some air, by for the love of BROOKLYN

The Bushwick Housing Independence Project — another brainchild of Father Powis, former chief of St. Barbara’s Catholic Church — is an organization that helps people fight eviction from, and get repairs made to, their rent-regulated Bushwick apartments. NYT’s David Gonzalez makes much sap of a serendipitously (for the reporter) placed portrait of MLK in a particularly stinky building being targeted by Bushwick Housing Independence: “Bushwick Tenants’ Dreams Are Mired in the Stench.” The landlord has offered buyouts to the tenants: two years of rent and help finding another regulated apartment somewhere else. It seems to me if Bushwick Housing Independence cared even about the near-term well-being of its clients, it would tell them to take the money and run. Are we to believe that existing another 30 years in a crummy railroad is what passes for “dreams” in Bushwick?

What mostly bothers me is BHIP’s Orwellian name: nothing about an organization that demands landlords become the de facto guardians of their customers evokes “independence.” Being independent means taking responsibility for one’s own life. Demanding that your rental apartment be considered, for all intents and purposes, your property with NONE of the duties ownership generally entails is the opposite of taking responsibility. It’s to demand to be taken care of like a child and simultaneously be allowed all the freedoms that come with adulthood. Unfortunately for the “children” this situation is unsustainable long-term and when it ends, they find themselves with few skills for coping with life as the adults they are. This then somehow is the fault of everyone else in the world who didn’t save them from their own personal failings.

Priorities are truly skewed in this city. Even if the situation were sustainable, even if it were just, it is not in any way “independence.”