Prospective candidates at the New Kings Democrats meeting in mid-May.

As the Barack Obama campaign secured a hard fought victory in the Democratic primary this week, a core group of Obama volunteers from North Brooklyn are turning their grassroots activism toward more local concerns. Matt Cowherd, a lawyer and delegate candidate for Obama in New York’s Democratic primary, and Rachel Lauter, a recent Brown University graduate who works for the City of New York and a candidate for County Committee, have co-founded New Kings Democrats, a new political club that will build off of the online network of activism that helped drive Senator Obama’s fundraising and turnout to record levels in the primary.

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CB4 meeting

Brownstoner today wonders if Brooklyn’s Community Boards are on their way out, given their ineffectualness and ever-deepening lack of funds. The commenters on the post are (as of this writing) unanimous in their acceptance and even cheer at the approaching demise of the CBs. They complain of “NIMBY seniors” who are “out of touch” with the new realities of their neighborhoods. These descriptions and more resemble Bushwick’s Community Board 4.

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State Assemblyman Vito Lopez, left, and Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez

Aaron Short, usually of the Bushwick Courier, a print-only local tabloid, has been so kind as to impart us with knowledge of our local political establishment. If you’d like to see more local politics (from someone who knows about such things), let us know! –Jeremy

With a new political club meeting in Bushwick meeting for the first time this week and several candidates beginning to weigh runs for city council in 2009, now is as good a time as any to go over the political landscape in our neighborhood and how it will be changing over the next year.

Bushwick resides in New York State’s 12th Congressional District represented by Nydia Velázquez and the 10th Congressional District represented by Edolphus Towns. At the state and local levels, Bushwick resides in the 53rd Assembly District represented by Vito Lopez, the 54th Assembly District represented by Daryl Towns, and the 17th Senate District represented by Martin Malave Dilan, as well as the city’s 34th and 37th Council Districts, represented by Diana Reyna and Erik Martin Dilan, respectively. Brooklyn Community Board Four serves most of the neighborhood, below Flushing; Brooklyn CB1 serves the "Morgantown" area that shares political institutions with Williamsburg. (Queens CB5 is in charge of the Ridgewood part of the neighborhood past Cypress and Wyckoff.)

State Assemblyman Vito Lopez and Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez are two of the most powerful political leaders not only in Northeast Brooklyn but in the entire city. Both endorsed Senator Clinton for President and enjoy close relationships with her; Lopez and other county leaders hosted Senator Clinton at Cono’s in Williamsburg in October last year and Velázquez has appeared at several Clinton campaign fundraising events, including one at Hunter College in Manhattan in February. Congresswoman Velázquez is the chair of the House Small Business Committee, overseeing $200 billion in annual federal programs and contracts, and sits on the House Financial Services Committee, including the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity. Assemblyman Lopez is the Chair of the Committee on Housing and a member on the Economic Development, Job Creation, Commerce and Industry Committee. Lopez is also, not insignificantly, the Chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. It is his responsibility to field and recruit candidates for a variety of political offices ranging from circuit court judges to city council. With so many similar committee assignments, you would think they would be working together on housing and economic development issues for North Brooklyn, but the two have been feuding for years, ever since Lopez refused to back Velázquez for her congressional run in 1992 and again in 1998.

Lopez and both Dilans have enjoyed a close relationship for decades. Erik Dilan succeeded his father into City Council office in 2001 after his father was term-limited and then won a State Senate seat in 2002. Councilman Dilan’s appointment to Chair of the influential Housing Committee raised eyebrows around Brooklyn, and he often works with Lopez’s office regarding housing legislation in both legislatures. Congresswoman Velázquez got her political start interning with Ed Towns, and is closer with Towns and other African-American political leaders in central Brooklyn. Councilmember Diana Reyna got her start in politics as Assemblyman Lopez’s Chief of Staff though she has often tried to carve her own path during her two terms in office. It remains unclear what office she will run for when her term ends in 2009.

New York political observers often break down the Bushwick political scene into the Lopez and Velázquez camps, but the reality is more complicated. A number of newer organizations have been appearing on the political landscape seeking to mobilize and pressure older political constituencies. Groups like Make the Road New York are contemplating backing candidates for office while Bushwick Impact is organizing parents and child care professionals and Arts in Bushwick is trying to work with seniors and children in local public schools. The New Kings Democratic Club, remnants of Obama campaign volunteers in North Brooklyn, met for the first time this past Thursday to discuss how to field candidates for county offices. Whether these organizations can lay the groundwork for a new political base in Bushwick will be dependent on how well they can connect with immigrants, artists, and young professionals settling in the neighborhood.

The curve on that chart is so high I can fit a pic of Vito under it!
(Chart from Federal Reserve paper on demographic shifts in wealth [pdf])

Your moron State Assemblyman and local political boss Vito Lopez has a bill currently rotting in Albany that would extend rent stabilization from buildings with a minimum of six units to those with three, but just for tenants over 62. It has no co-sponsors, of course, because the other Assemblypeople aren’t retarded and/or don’t have any interest in helping Vito cement in his constituency of poor people that he can whip into a hysteria and then lead to the voting booths.

Here’s the, um, eloquent “justification” of the bill:

“Senior citizens need to be protected from landlords who increase their rent to proportions beyond their financial means. The elderly should not be penalized for living in dwellings, which consist of six units, or less. Presently, the law stipulates that rent stabilization may be granted to senior citizens residing in dwellings containing more than six units. Most senior citizens are presently sustaining themselves on a fixed income. This bill would prevent excessive rent increases and harassment about eviction from landlords because the tax rebate acts as an incentive.”

Vito. Did you plagiarize this from someone’s ninth-grade civics class paper? That’s not nice.

But seriously, it’s 2008 and the government is still pitting the various (somewhat arbitrarily defined) classes against each other? I understand divide and conquer, I just think it’s vulgar and out of place in a liberal democracy.

Some facts:

*When prices rise, it is not a punishment. In fact, it is a mechanism by which scarce resources are more efficiently allocated. I’d be interested to find out whose moral compass is used to determine “excessive” rises in rent.

*More senior citizens may have a fixed income, but that does not mean it’s a low one or that they are not wealthy. In fact, senior citizens are the wealthiest segment of society. It would be rather perverse to transfer yet more wealth from a less-wealthy demographic to a wealthier one.

Why is an overly complicated regime involving tax breaks and more regulation being proposed when the government could just subsidize the rent of the seniors instead of — oh wait, I forgot to put on my scheming power-hungry politician thinking cap on. More employees to run more bureaucracy means more voters and political machine cogs for Vito!

You got it all squared away, huh, Boss?

Residents finally moved into the gut-renovated Bushwick Initiative buildings across the street from me this weekend, four months after they were completed. Oh, the Bushwick Initiative? That’s where the City uses your tax money to fix up someone else’s private property for them, with a guarantee that all the people who lived there before can move back in afterward — with the same rent, of course. Where these families have been warehoused for the past two years, I can’t imagine, I mean — what are they, cattle? Don’t they have plans and dreams? They just live wherever the City plops them? What is the point of this?

Well, whatever, it seems like a great deal for everyone involved: the landlord gets his building overhauled for cheap and doesn’t even have to hire his own contractors; the tenants get fancy new apartments for the same rent which they can somehow — isn’t the point of regulated rent to help the poor? — then afford to fill with a truckfull of new furniture (see photo above); and the political bosses get to keep their subjects in Bushwick, while appearing far-sighted and magnanimous. Who am I missing? Oh yeah, the taxpayers who fund all of this, especially the losers who were unsavvy enough use their own damn money to invest in this neighborhood only to be spit in the face by this whole crooked, corrupt “Urban Renewal, Fourth Time’s a Charm!”

Is it even necessary to mention that Bushwick is exactly as rundown as its proportion of rent-regulated apartments would suggest? The Bushwick Initiative is just the City putting a sad little band-aid on the giant ax wound it created in New York’s housing situation.

The bright side is that ultimately, none of this matters. The desperate fight against the natural order of the market, though backed by practically unlimited pools of cash looted from middle class pockets, is failing on the most important front: the big picture. For all the City and “private” organization RBSCC’s idiotic talk of “revitalizing commercial corridors” though this or that program, it’s happening without them as entrepreneurs take their own initiative. So they renovated a handful of crappy apartments here and there in an arbitrary bit of Bushwick? Well, sorry, no medal for them — developers and landlords have rehabbed and built thousands of units in Bushwick in the same time. Bureaucracy is so dumb and lumbering it doesn’t even realize its much-touted grand efforts are but a drop in the bucket compared to what ordinary people, working mostly in their own interest and of their own direction, have done for Bushwick.

That’s initiative.

photo by Hrag Vartanian

This pop art grafitto is just before the Bogart L entrance. Haha, vote. Hey, it made a difference all those other times!

I’m used to living in a city that’s #1 in a lot of stuff: my hometown of Miami was simultaneously the poorest city in the United States (and that’s averaging in multi-million-dollar mansions and penthouses) and that with the highest proportion of HIV diagnoses. Also, I think South Florida is the most likely region that you will get your car stolen, since the Port of Miami is the main way they leave the country, disguised in cereal containers on their way to a Haitian chop shop. Oh, don’t forget that Miami has always been the drug capital of the US.

So no surprise from me this morning when Hrag Vartanian sent me a link to a map on which the New York Times plotted the top 200 most violation-laden buildings in the city, and Bushwick shows up (with Bed-Stuy as a close second) as a pretty much solid sea of red. Almost as many violations plague Bushwick as all of the Bronx combined. Crown Heights and East New York are pretty bad, too.

You’d think those areas experienced some kind of riots or arson or decades of general neglect and purposeful destruction by landlords and tenants, and that now since there’s zero profit to be made on the worst buildings, there’s zero reason to fix them. You know, if you thought about it rationally. But I know it can be so fun, and probably quite satisfying, to just declare certain people to be saints and others to be evil, and stomp your feet in righteous indignation and wave big stuffed rats in the air and declare that you have the right to force someone else to house you.

A few blocks from me, on the side of a bodega, a small wall-side billboard always has a poster for the armed forces that is quickly defaced. The latest one I noticed just the other day: a local armed with permanent marker spelled out exactly what he feels about the United States military. Bushwick is disproportionately beset by recruiters and propaganda because of its demographics. I’ll give a cheer for this kind of graffiti.

Know what I’m sick of lately? Activist types showing up here, getting all up in our faces about our part in advancing gentrification — or at least that we don’t weep enough about gentrification. The worst part is that for all their many hundreds of words on the subject, they can never seem to get any real ideas across. They’re infected by vapidity and are crammed full, top to bottom, with empty rhetoric. It’s hard to even look sometimes.

I had actually been somewhat avoiding the subject of gentrification, mainly because whether we debate it or not, it’s inexorable, a given. I didn’t see the point. What little bits I let slip as I otherwise walked on eggshells here brought me nothing but whining and hate posts. So you know what? Fuck it. I’m putting down the shield I use to bounce weak anti-gentrification spitballs back at their launchers and pulling out my bazooka — and I’m taking no prisoners.

Take, for example, poor Katie. She’s a volunteer at Make the Road by Walking, every Bushwicker’s favorite two-million-dollar-a-year protest organization. She’s a freshly-minted college liberal on a mission to “combat inequality in all its incarnations.” Aw. But it seems after Round One, she’s been KO’d. What a disappointment. more »

Borinquen Plaza, East Williamsburg

Have to admire the New York Sun’s ability to spin an editorial into a news story. On May 15, they made decent arguments (I disagree with a few items not worth getting into) for a wholesale give-away of New York’s public housing units to the people who live in them. Then this morning, after a week of poking around town searching for quotes from economists and social workers, the Sun published an article demonstrating support for last week’s editorial’s demands and assertions.

It’s fun to see this because I have been saying this for a while. The projects, built in the wake of the city’s program of “slum clearance” from the 30s to the 50s, and then with some built after parts of the city, including Bushwick, burned down in the 60s and 70s, have ironically remained the only slums left in this entire city of 8 million. Slum-like properties that are not city-owned are always directly adjacent to those that are. I advocate just handing the current residents a deed to their unit, and having the city withdraw from providing housing altogether. The article goes into the pros and cons, so I won’t restate them here. I do have one addition to the “pro” camp that nobody seems to be addressing: future affordable housing stock once the current inventory is converted to market-rate property.

What will happen to the poorest of the workers in the city — those who do the most menial jobs which require no skills? How will they afford housing in the city if they’re making typical unskilled wages? As with any product, when demand for labor rises but supply of labor does not, labor prices rise. In New York, everyone can agree there is a high demand for maids, janitors, drivers, and other no- or low-skill jobs. Hourly wages here are already slightly higher than most areas of the country — much higher percentagewise than the federal minimum wage.

What would happen to these workers if their housing converted to market-rate? Would they all immediately leave the city workerless: floors unmopped, beds unmade, shelves unstocked? Of course not, the idea is ridiculous — their labor would simply also revert to market-rate, whatever that may be in a city where a normal apartment costs $2000. If you think the rich will go without their domestic help, you are living in a fantasy world. And that brings me to my final point — public housing is in part an indirect subsidy for the richest among us. Sure, we all rely on people working unskilled and hourly jobs to keep the city running at its most basic levels. But the wealthy simply use more labor than the middle class. Mandating cheaper-than-market housing makes it easier for the rich to continue to pay a pittance for labor, instead of what it truly costs to maintain a decent labor force in New York City.

We’ll all still ultimately pay in the wake of significantly higher wages, this is true, but we will pay only the exact amount we rely on the labor of the unskilled. There’s no doubt this is much more efficient than involving massive, expensive bureaucracies to do what the market does on its own: keep workforce housing in the city, like it does in every other city without public housing.

Incidentally, I’m well aware there are quite a few physically and mentally sound people in subsidized housing who don’t work at all. That should be ended even if the city stays in the housing business. And yeah, I know they will make out like the bandits they are if they are handed a piece of property that may be worth millions. Did they earn it? No. But then again, living in them for any length of time might be payment enough. Get rid of the projects. Everyone will be better off.

UPDATE: Haha, the Sun considers this post evidence of building momentum.

More support for the Sun’s plan to give public housing tenants their apartments comes from, of all places, Bushwick, Brooklyn…