Editorial
Rebuilding New York

Our hearts first and foremost go out to any members or friends who lost loved ones in the horrific attack on the Twin Towers. We extend our love and sympathies to you. We also want to thank the dozens of you who called and e-mailed asking about us. All of our board, staff and active volunteers are all right.

In light of such an enormous and horrible event the call "to get back to business as usual" seems hollow. From a tenant’s perspective, however, one thing remains clear: New York City was in a housing crisis before Sept. 11, and it remains so afterwards. In some ways the situation is much worse. The paltry portions of city, state and federal budgets set aside for housing--construction, inspection, legal services, and enforcing rent regulations--stand to take massive cutbacks to cover greater spending for the military and subsidies to large business.

Now is the time to move forward on the one thing all mayoral candidates this year agreed on--the investment of billions of dollars in affordable housing, as the foundation for a healthy New York economy. The tragic loss of life on September 11, 2001, must not mean that millions of people in New York City continue to face a critical shortage of housing. We must raise the issue that now, more than ever, affordable housing and strong eviction protections need to be a central part of New York’s future.

As New York City embarks on a multibillion-dollar rebuilding program in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the creation of hundreds of thousands of apartments affordable to low and moderate-income families must be part of the effort. Equally important, the rush to respond decisively to the challenges ahead must not lead to the sacrifice of democratic planning, community input and environmental review, which developers always want to circumvent. Tenants must also be vigilant in ensuring that the real-estate industry does not ride the coattails of this tragedy to further destroy tenant protections.

Investing billions of dollars in permanently affordable housing must be part of healing the economy in New York City, along with creating living wage jobs and reducing class size in public schools. Even the business community recognizes that the availability of affordable housing is key to New York’s competitiveness. State Comptroller Carl McCall recently documented that the availability of housing is more important than crime or many other factors in influencing business to remain in or relocate to New York City. Last June, major business leaders joined the Coalition for the Homeless and 120 other groups in proposing the "Housing First!" (see July Tenant for pro and con views of this platform) call for a $10 billion investment in affordable housing.

The "new" New York must also recognize that it makes no sense to spend billions of dollars creating affordable housing without doing a better job preserving the existing supply, which is been lost at an accelerating rate. Skyrocketing rents have fueled record profits, while hunger has increased and the number of homeless families and individuals in New York City is now higher than any time since the Koch administration.

Development on the West Side of Manhattan and in other areas of the city will remain a critical issue, given longstanding schemes to displace existing residents and businesses for large-scale projects. Given the increasing divergence of the rich and poor in our economy in recent years, the Republican "trickle-down theory" of providing economic assistance only to the wealthy and to the business community will only accomplish a further redistribution of wealth in the wrong direction.

The most important key to success in rebuilding New York will be the degree of public participation in making the decisions and setting priorities. The next mayor--it now looks as if our democratic process will not be subverted by an extension of Giuliani’s term--will have an opportunity to invest tens of billions of dollars, enough to make a difference and possibly enough to set the tone of how this city will look in the decades to come. But calls for an omnipotent commission or new public authority with powers of eminent domain and the ability to condemn and displace existing communities while bypassing planning boards and environmental review are the wrong way to go. The people of New York City should be the ones to decide the blueprint for our future.

At the national level, we must resist the efforts of the Bush administration--who stole the last election in Florida and serve at the pleasure of corporate America--to make decisions unilaterally. Precisely because we don’t want to see more World Trade Center attacks, either here or abroad, Met Council opposes the Bush call to war. We further deplore the racist attacks in the past weeks on Arab, Asian and Muslim Americans, both physical and economic. And we urge people to steadfastly oppose any modern McCarthyism that would curtail civil liberties or label those who dissent as "unpatriotic." It is precisely in times of crisis when the free flow of ideas and information is most crucial.

At the same time, we also hope for reflection in the peace and other progressive movements. If progressive organizations are to form an inclusive coalition and successfully challenge the call for war and xenophobia, then now is the time to for compassion, not rhetoric.