The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  Global cities do tend to create a certain bubble. New York and London, I would put them in a class on their own. They are much more cosmopolitan cities. The degree to which they’ve become unaffordable is something that has happened in tandem. Central London is the worst-case scenario. There are whole parts of Central London that are just vacant all of the time. They are foreign-owned places and the people who own them are hardly there. Huge neighborhoods. You probably wouldn’t have the same feel for that in New York City but there’s probably a lot of absentee owners.

  Outside of London and New York, it’s pretty easy to find the footprint of globalization in cities, especially in developing countries. You go to Shanghai and you know where the expatriates will be living and you know what kind of amenities they’ll be demanding—and they’ll be getting. And outside of those areas you’re living in a completely different city. In the Gulf States it’s even more egregious because local elites and Western expatriates are living in a bubble, and they’re a very tiny percentage of the population, and the other 95 percent are migrant labor workforce. In its most extreme form, I would say that’s the manifestation of globalization. That bubble created by global cities.

  It’s uneven but in developing countries you’re going to see more of a disparity between the bubble and everywhere else. But then you get to New York, a place at the other end of the spectrum, and it’s more difficult to say where the edge is. And probably even more so in Central London. There’s really not much left in Central London that people would consider to be affordable.

  A lot of urbanists will talk about global city regions instead of simply global cities. There are seven or eight of them in the US that are talked about as global city regions, and they can incorporate three or four cities. Like the Great Lakes region, which stretches from Chicago to Toronto; and Seattle and Portland and Vancouver, which are part of the Cascadian global city region. And that’s an interesting way of looking at. It’s beyond the metro region, it’s a whole regional cluster that can compete globally. A lot of the advanced cities have been thinking about global city regions and planning transportation patterns that make sense for those regions. Like the area between Frankfurt and London, which has been conceived and developed as a cluster in terms of transportation.

  We’re hoping there’ll be some time of transition in the policy temperature when de Blasio takes over. I’m a little skeptical but you wouldn’t have to do very much to differentiate yourself from what Bloomberg has done. Forty percent of the city has been rezoned in this space of time. And if overall the goal has been to promote high-density development—fine. I’m not an opponent of high-density development. But it’s not affordable development. How you actually create density or encourage density in an affordable way is the big challenge. And he had no interest in doing that, other than to pay lip service to it. But with de Blasio you have a lot more than lip service going in. And you have a lot of goodwill and the power of a lot of people so we’ll see what happens. But community planning is different from urban planning. It’s less technical. There are people involved. It’s not about the rationalization of space and land use. It’s about the lived experience of people and what they want in their neighborhoods, and their right not to be displaced, which is a very important part of the right to the city.

  If you’re elected and you want to show that participatory planning and participatory budgeting—both are ideas that de Blasio has paid lip service to in his campaign—if you want to show that will actually be meaningful then you have to take steps to guarantee that they will have some impact or else people won’t bother to show up at these meetings.

  Most of the community board meetings I’ve attended play out with a severe downward trajectory: there is some life at the beginning—microphones are held close to the mouth, thoughts are projected, patience is upheld, despite the demands of bureaucratic procedures—but then an agenda item runs a few minutes over its allotted time, a member of the public speaks until he has said everything that he wants to say, and before long the meeting is in its nth hour and everyone has devolved into lifeless, yet still irritable, robots. One community board member described the final hour of the meetings as the “elect Hitler” portion of the evening because “everyone’s so tired they’ll vote yes for anything just to close the debate and move on. You could hold a vote to elect Hitler president of the universe and everyone would say ‘ay’.”

  The drone of the meeting could provide the perfect white noise for falling asleep if it weren’t for the one row of people—usually half a dozen, maybe a dozen—who are making all that racket, waving all those signs about something that, for whatever reason, hasn’t riled the other 99.99 percent of people who live in the neighborhood. The school auditoriums, libraries, and public housing community rooms where these meetings are held are generally not more than half full unless there is a marquee issue reverberating in the press such as the demolition of an eighteenth century stone church or Ikea’s application to build a store in Gita’s neighborhood of Red Hook.

  During meetings, a lot of community board members—the men with loosened ties and sweat-stained shirts, the women with furrowed brows bearing massive headaches—are visibly exhausted from a long day of work. This is their spare time. Many are small business owners in the neighborhood or working professionals who have their own interests in mind just like everyone attending the meeting. On certain micro-issues, the board’s recommendations can guide state government decisions—whether or not to give a new bar in the neighborhood a liquor license, for example—but, as Cea Weaver pointed out, it is not until votes are cast by mayoral appointees and city council members that any stance has a direct bearing on the shape and composition of a neighborhood.

  The people in this city have had these experiences watching community boards being overridden. The NYU expansion plan, case in point. The community board here voted almost unanimously against it. And that made no difference whatsoever to the planning commission. No difference whatsoever to our elected representative in City Council, Margaret Chin. So when people look at that process and they say, “Yes, we can spend a lot of time working on this, getting all worked up about it, working toward some kind of solution that we believe is the right one and then it means nothing”—you’re going to generate apathy that way. So let’s see if de Blasio is going to do it differently. So far the people he’s appointed are all political hacks. And that doesn’t betoken much of a transition. No new names in the Rolodex.

  He laughs.

  With the lack of new names in the Rolodex, with the reappointment of city officials like Police Commissioner William Bratton, an unsettling continuum emerges, one that exists above and beyond two mayors like Giuliani and de Blasio who have wildly different politics and priorities:

  I think that the permanent government of New York are very wealthy people who are unelected and they make their desires known. Not to us but to elected officials in all sorts of ways. Elected administrators who are familiar with the past, who are familiar with governance, and who know how to carry a government forward. In the course of their experience they have learned all the customs and rituals of pleasing the permanent government. And that’s what you get. The pressure does come from them. They expect the city to be governed in their interests. That is quite clear.

  26.

  Rob Robinson is trying to steal the attention of elected officials from the permanent government:

  I get access to all the policy and planning folks in the city, the commissioner, but then they’re afraid because I get access to Washington—the human rights work that I do also gives me access to high-level government folks, right? So the policy and planning folks have to hear me out.

  Rob works with the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative in downtown Manhattan. Though he sits in a rather formal conference room with large windows looking out over the financial district, he is in blue jeans and a baseball cap. This fifty-seven-year-old African American does not do frills. A cane rests against
the chair next to him.

  I grew up on suburban Long Island, went to college on a football scholarship. I went to the University of Maryland, and my dad told the school the only way he would sign off on me getting that scholarship was if I would still get a full four-year education if I got hurt. And they bought into it. I injured my hip playing but I still was able to complete college.

  So I came out of school and grew up in the restaurant business. I was a chef, right? It’s what I knew how to do, I did it since I was a little kid with my dad, and the doctor told me my hip is going to deteriorate the more I stand on it. So I eventually had to change careers and ended up in customer service.

  The company I worked for moved me to Miami in March 2001, and in July, I was called into the general manager’s office, told there’s no more money in the budget for your position. I was stunned, shocked—thirteen years—but I wasn’t angry. I was confident. Alright, I’ll get a job. But Miami was going through tough economic times, and I just kept fighting through it. A year passed and I’m running out of unemployment, I’m running out of severance pay. Another year passes, and I tap out my bank account, then my 401(k). Before you knew it, I ended up on the streets of Miami, homeless. Spent two years on the streets, found my way up to New York City, spent ten months in a New York City homeless shelter.

  When I was in the shelter, there were issues that I thought needed to change, and I started pestering. People call it organizing; I call it pestering.

  He smiles.

  I needed to bring things to the attention of the staff. I kept telling my caseworker and nothing changed. I’d go to her boss, nothing changed, and I wrote letters to the guy who runs the whole thing and he came to the shelter saying, “I want to meet the guy who’s writing me these letters—this is a guy from the shelter?”

  He laughs.

  You know it was friggin’ incredible. He said he was impressed because I wasn’t just listing a bunch of problems—I gave him possible solutions and he found value in them.

  So he pushed me into something called the New York City Coalition on the Continuum of Care, which monitors about $110 million dollars that goes into the shelter system. Sometimes I scratch my head like, you know, I just wanted to build a better shelter—how’d I get over here?

  Rob is the exception on the twenty-four-person steering committee that decides how that $110 million flows through the system. The formerly homeless don’t generally make it to the table where the decision-makers gather but this is where Rob finds himself. Over the past decade he has worked with several local and national organizations—Picture the Homeless, Take Back the Land—collaborating with groups around the country that want to engage in direct action: eviction defenses; breaking into foreclosed houses and moving the homeless in. He is often ferried to DC to give lawmakers fieldwork perspective on housing policy. He works with organizations in metamorphosing cities like Budapest and Berlin, and speaks at conferences in Switzerland and Brazil and Columbia. Despite his profile, Rob mainly lives off of a monthly $1,600 disability check, supplemented by honorariums from speaking engagements. He says this is the happiest time in his life.

  The Department of Homeless Services, which is not far from here, has a budget of $850 million. So that combined with the $110 million that we oversee, in New York City it is about a billion dollars spent on homelessness. It sounds great when you hear the number but it’s problematic because when a body is warehoused in a shelter it’s not getting into the root cause of the solution, it’s a temporary Band-Aid.

  So I’ve been able to articulate going through homelessness and that’s been valuable because it challenges power and it challenges the solutions that government and some of these agencies came up with.

  Now there is a lot of push back on me, which I don’t mind, saying, “Well, how can you talk about us that way? You benefitted from the shelter system.”

  And my response is, “Yeah, I did benefit: I got an inside look on how you operate and how you’re not getting at the root cause.”

  And I’m going to articulate that as widely and as broadly as possible.

  I think we’ve been effective because we’ve just had something handed down from the Human Rights Council in Geneva saying the United States is guilty of criminalizing the homeless. The way they push people out from public spaces when they have no alternatives, people have to go to the bathroom and they go in the bushes and end up getting a ticket that just prevents them from getting a job because now you have a crime, or you got locked up, you can’t produce bail, you got a record, that record follows you, you can’t find housing, it just exacerbates an ongoing problem. The council looked at a specific case and under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, they said, yes, the Unites States is criminalizing the homeless. So it’s raising awareness now, Geneva is shining a spotlight. Not only that, but the Unites States is due to go through something called the Universal Periodic Review next year, where all of its peers in the UN get to ask the United States publicly, “Why are you criminalizing the homeless?”

  It gives a person like me more ammunition to really expose the issue and try to make change. A former professor at CUNY Law taught me the value of using the human rights framework; it makes people focus. Here in this country, we’ve always tended to say, “Ah that’s something international; we don’t violate human rights.” Even our government will point its fingers at other governments but here is Geneva saying, “United States, you’re violating human rights.”

  Multiple incidents in cities across the country prompted condemnation from the United Nations. In March of 2014, for instance, Albuquerque police shot a mentally ill homeless man multiple times. He had been standing about ten feet away from the trio of law enforcers, and he was carrying lots of gear, including a knife, because he had been camping illegally on public property. When he took the shots and fell to the ground, motionless, the police continued to shoot at him—now with “beanbag” rounds, pelting the skin instead of piercing it. Then they released a K-9 unit to tear at the man’s leg. The incident can be observed by anyone who cares to watch it because it was recorded by a helmet-mounted camera worn by one of the cops. In the video, the man does not react to the dog’s bite. As his leg is yanked in various directions, the man remains as he had been before the beanbag rounds and the animal attack: motionless.

  In their report, the Human Rights Committee openly questions if the United States is in compliance with a human rights treaty it ratified in 1992 and makes several sensible suggestions about how to fall into compliance—funding municipalities that implement alternatives to criminalizing homelessness, if not abolishing the criminalization of homelessness altogether. But the tendency across the country is exactly the opposite and many cities are strengthening laws that target the homeless: restricting camping, sleeping, or sitting for too long in a public space. Informal tent cities that sprung up after the collapse of the housing market in 2007 are mostly broken up now, some of the inhabitants put into shelters, some given one-way bus tickets to far away places, and some locked up for violations that ultimately have everything to do with survival: seeking shelter, food, and clothing. In November of 2013, Los Angeles politicians debated making it illegal to feed the homeless on the streets if local residents complained. And at the beginning of 2014 in New York, a fifty-four-year-old mentally ill veteran named Jerome Murdough died in a Rikers Island cell that had a temperature of 100 degrees. A prison official told the Associated Press that Murdough “basically baked to death.” He was serving a sentence for trying to sleep in the stairwell of a housing project.

  In defense of the government, there is a real effort now, looking at New York City and other big continuums like Los Angeles, where they are saying no more money going into transitional housing. Generally you would come off the street, go into an emergency shelter for up to six months then transitional housing where you can stay anywhere from six months to twenty-four months with the hope of you finding permanent housing. What we found is
people falling off the cycle, coming back in through emergency shelter, so it was almost a merry-go-round. The care providers running these transitional facilities call themselves not-for-profit but somebody’s profiting—their beds are always full—and it’s a little bit of a merry-go-round. You’re not helping that person get to independent living or permanent housing.

  When you’re in a shelter, you get a family looking for services in the Bronx, and they finally get placed around eleven o’clock at night, and they have to get on the school bus and be trucked into Brooklyn, so they get in bed at one o’clock in the morning. Then the mom has to wake the kids up at six o’clock—’cause they go to school in the Bronx—so she’s got to get on the subway and take them. It’s absurd—absurd!

  That money being spent on temporary housing, or temporary shelters, they’re throwing it in the garbage because if you put that money in permanent spaces, people have a permanent place to live. All of a sudden health care doesn’t become an issue because you have stability of a home, you find a doctor, you find a school for your children to go to—so a home is the basic foundation. And home is more than a house; it’s a sense of community, so when you don’t have a babysitter you know the family down the street will watch your kids—all of these things that make your life work and allow you to do things every day fall into place once you have a home. HUD5 and other government agencies finally realized that and made transitional housing the lowest priority for funding, which is a good thing. There are some other issues within HUD but I think that is one good thing that the government is doing that I’ll speak in favor of.

  And when the Bloomberg administration did something, well, it was only because of pressure from the federal government. Bloomberg always had this business mentality, which I get, business does do some things well. I often have to challenge the organization I work for, which will totally dismiss general corporate practices. I will say corporations are successful because they do some things well, right? We can borrow some of that, we don’t have to borrow the entire picture, but they do some things well and you have to admit that. But by the same token I think they lack the compassion that is necessary, numbers outweigh morality and that’s problematic. I need to get to a bottom line and I don’t care who I run over to do that—that’s the basic fundamental system we have in this country now, capitalism. And it lacks compassion. It’s about greed and this totally dismisses you and I as individuals.