As Luxury Apartments Rise, Homelessness in New York City Reaches Highest
Levels Since the Great Depression
Monday, October 23, 2017
By Alex Jacobs, Truthout | News Analysis
(Photo: John St. John)
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, as of August 2017 homelessness
in New York City has reached its highest levels since the Great Depression.
Of the more than 61,000 people without homes, nearly 23,000 are children.
During a three-month period of 2016 in just the Bronx alone, there were over
15,000 warrants of possession entered in housing court, meaning a landlord
could subsequently evict the tenant. There is an invidious racial component
to homelessness in New York as well. About 58 percent of shelter residents
are Black and another 31 percent are Latinx.
Giselle Routhier, the policy director for Coalition for the Homeless, the
nation's oldest direct service organization assisting those without homes,
describes the current situation in New York as a "lost decade." Back in
2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg restricted access to federal subsidies, and
instead instituted a series of time-limited rental subsidies. "Between 2005
and 2014, there's been this huge spike in homelessness as those subsidies
were not working," Routhier told Truthout. Since then, Mayor Bill de Blasio
reinstated access to federal subsidies, "but the city needs much more," she
said.
In the Shadows of Riches
The New York metropolitan area is one of incredible contradiction. It
simultaneously contains 33 of the richest 100 suburbs in the country, as
well as the single poorest congressional district in the country. The
Yankees play baseball just down the street from apartments devastated by
careless landlords who fail to provide heat, cooking gas, or proper
extermination services for the Bronx's pervasive rat problem. All of this is
just a 15-minute train ride into Midtown, one of Manhattan's centers of
finance and shopping. New York isn't just a tale of two cities, it's an
absurd horror story, and it doesn't need to be this way.
Supertall skyscrapers have started to mark New York's skyline.
Four-thirty-two Park Avenue carries the most notoriety. When construction
completed, condos went on sale at a price range of $7 million to $95
million. About 80 percent of the units have sold. But instead of simply
existing as a scar along the skyline, 432 Park Avenue exemplifies the
reality of homelessness in New York in vulgar detail.
The tower sits mostly empty. Its purpose as a condominium is neither to
house people nor is it even an occasional vacation home; its purpose is to
be money storage for the wealthiest of the world. Now, instead of
potentially losing millions if assets are frozen in their home countries,
the rich can instead pump that money into New York City real estate, content
to never call that apartment a home. A cruder term for this practice would
be money laundering. Four-thirty-two Park is but one of many offending
buildings along the "billionaire's belt" south of Central Park.
Legally, you cannot sleep in Central Park at night. Police canvass it and
kick out the homeless. But in the daytime hours, a strange thing occurs.
Obstructed by these numerous supertalls, the sun casts shadows on the park,
on homeless people seeking some amount of refuge. The homeless and the
vacant buildings can both look at one another, but in New York City, never
shall they meet. Four-thirty-two Park and the slew of supertall, mostly
vacant apartment buildings are testaments to a city that ignores the
neediest of its residents.
Income Inequality as Violence
When we talk about wealth and the poorest Americans, we oftentimes talk
about rural Appalachia or the amorphous "white working class." Rarely do we
talk about New York City. That people have to walk train cars begging for
change in one of the richest areas in the country should offend anything
approaching common sensibility. Instead, the Metropolitan Transit Authority
plays recordings telling passengers not to give out money.
Wealth does not exist in a vacuum. At some point, it becomes violence. New
York City Councilmember Fernando Cabrera represents a poor part of the
Bronx. In July 2017 he explained to a crowd that millionaires are rich
because they can handle more pressure, that they have more to worry about,
and that it's "harder being rich than being poor." But poverty in the Bronx
means living side-by-side with disease-carrying rats. It means having babies
boil alive in a homeless shelter site when a radiator bursts even though the
landlord knew that it was defective.
Councilmember Cabrera thinks being rich is hard, but we know being poor is
fatal. The wealthiest live 14 years longer than the poorest 10 percent.
Mayor de Blasio said that if it weren't for private property laws protecting
the kind of gross real estate practices embodied by 432 Park, we would be
able to have a city that met its residents' needs. Maybe it's time to start
considering workarounds to these laws. Vancouver rolled out an "Empty Homes
Tax," imposing a 1 percent tax on residences left vacant for at least six
months. Other cities imposed similar measures, with Paris taxing second
homes at 60 percent. Assuming an average price of $10 million for each
apartment at 432 Park Avenue, a Vancouver-like 1 percent tax would generate
an additional $10.4 million for New York City. If these homes cannot be
seized for actual use for those who need it in New York, then this seems
like a relatively gentle countermeasure to the violence perpetrated by the
rich on those without homes that live on its streets.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Alex Jacobs
Alex Jacobs is a graduate of Northwestern University Law School where he was
president of the American Constitution Society and served as senior editor
on the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy. Follow him on Twitter:
@afjfromfla.
