Tag: gentrification
How A Tip About Habitat For Humanity Became A Whole Different Story

How A Tip About Habitat For Humanity Became A Whole Different Story

Reprinted with permission by ProPublica. This story was co-published with IRE.

by Marcelo Rochabrun

Last August, I obtained dozens of internal documents from the New York City affiliate of Habitat for Humanity. The story my sources had in mind alleged that the nonprofit had become unwittingly involved in a massive money-laundering operation. Former employees had already voiced similar suspicions to their superiors and Habitat had asked a friendly law firm to look into the matter. The lawyers had found nothing of the sort, though, according to a one-page report they prepared.

When ProPublica and the New York Daily News finally published my story eight months later, it didn’t focus on money laundering at all. Instead, the story detailed how the charity’s management of an ambitious housing initiative had led to the displacement of low-income families in Brooklyn, families who had been forced out of their homes just days or weeks before Habitat moved to buy their former apartment buildings, which the charity described as “long-vacant” structures. Worse, federal money that was meant to fight the foreclosure crisis helped fund the project that displaced these people.

The lesson I learned as I navigated the reporting process is that when sources come forward with a particular story idea, even if that doesn’t pan out, other stories may be hiding in the background. I looked into the money laundering story and concluded that, for a number of reasons, it didn’t check out. But the memos and emails that had made their way to me suggested that Habitat was involved in something troubling in a different way. One employee had complained to Habitat’s whistleblower tip line that the New York affiliate was spending “federal money to throw low-income New Yorkers out of buildings.”

It was mostly by coincidence that I made sense of this allegation. At the same time as I dug through Habitat’s documents, I was also working on an investigation on the failures of New York City’s rental protections with a ProPublica colleague, Cezary Podkul. It was through this reporting on the intricacies of the rental market that I saw the whistleblower’s allegations through a different lens.

Habitat’s project seemed to have a design flaw. In an effort to spend funds efficiently, the charity had prioritized buying vacant multi-family buildings in a poor — but gentrifying — neighborhood of Brooklyn.

However, a project focused on finding vacant multi-family rental buildings is no simple endeavor in this city.

Most of these buildings are covered by the state’s strongest rental protections — called the rent-stabilization law — which afford tenants the right to renew their leases in perpetuity, no matter how many new owners come in or how many mortgages they default on. Checking the buildings’ tax records showed that these protections covered all but one of the buildings acquired by Habitat. And the neighborhood Habitat picked was filled with stabilized buildings. In other words, Habitat had been looking for vacant buildings in an area where buildings rarely, if ever, go vacant. Supporting this, the charity’s struggles to find vacant buildings were well documented in the records I had reviewed.

As a result, it seemed that a project that ultimately targeted rent-stabilized multi-family buildings was a recipe for problems. Housing experts told me as much. “You don’t find multi-family buildings 100 percent vacant unless somebody has done something really, really, really bad,” one expert told me. Another one concurred. “Empty multi-family buildings were tough, if not impossible, to come by anywhere in New York City, even at the depths of the recession,” he said.

With all this background information, I really just needed to figure out two questions to prove or disprove this story idea, which, at this point had also piqued my editor’s interest.

How do you find out how long the buildings were occupied?

How do you find out when Habitat for Humanity first expressed interest in purchasing any particular building?

I first went to Brooklyn housing court. If any of the building owners who sold to Habitat had been trying to get rid of their tenants, then they would most likely have filed eviction cases. The cases I found gave me a list of former tenants to begin tracking down.

It’s important to see not just when a case began but also how long it dragged out. Throughout the length of a case, it was reasonable to think that a tenant would still be living in the apartment. My first findings from housing court showed that a couple of buildings had had tenants in them just months before Habitat closed on them. This was a good start. However, in any real estate transaction, the closing is only the culmination of a negotiation process whose length is impossible to predict simply from the closing date. Finding when those negotiations had started was trickier.

I then filed public records requests with the city, asking if tenants at any of the buildings Habitat ultimately purchased had ever complained about issues such as lack of heat, water, rats, noise and any other maintenance complaints. More than the issues themselves, I was concerned about the dates, since this would prove somebody was living in the building. The records turned out to be extremely helpful, and, while they mentioned no names, they mentioned specific apartments within the buildings. At this point, using Nexis and other public records databases, I could figure out who used to live in each particular unit.

Not knowing exactly what I expected to find, I also filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. I was just hopeful that, buried in the paperwork, a Habitat employee or a federal official would have noted the exact dates when negotiations began on specific buildings. I didn’t expect, however, that HUD was aware that the buildings had been recently occupied. A senior official at HUD had told me early during my reporting process that he wasn’t aware of any irregularities in Habitat’s paperwork.

While filing FOIAs can be a dead end with many federal agencies, HUD promises to respond within a few months. I filed two separate requests. One was for the “entire file” involving Habitat for Humanity’s New York City project. The other was for any communications between Habitat-NYC and HUD. The logic behind filing this way is that dividing your request into smaller units can help you avoid “complex tracks” — FOIA-lingo for being stuck in the slow waiting line.

Indeed, HUD emailed me a couple months later saying they had identified close to 1,000 pages of relevant records to fulfill both of my requests. However, there was a surprise: HUD had decided to show Habitat the records it intended to disclose to give the charity a chance to challenge their disclosure. The move was frustrating — although it was a judgment call on the part of the agency that was ultimately grounded in FOIA law. But HUD’s decision helped drag out my request for an additional four months. To my surprise, I got all the records in the end, either because Habitat did not oppose the release of the records or because HUD overrode those concerns.

Records-wise, I based most of my reporting on court, city and HUD reports, which I then compared with Habitat’s internal documents. From there it was straightforward enough to create a timeline. HUD’s records proved to have what I most needed: signed documents attesting to the date Habitat had “first visited” the properties it sought to acquire. In one case, HUD records showed Habitat first visited a property 15 days after the last recorded tenant filed a complaint about the building with the city. In another case, Habitat was already negotiating a purchase 20 days after the seller had sued the last remaining tenant, trying to evict her.

As I tracked down tenants using Nexis or through their relatives, I had really just one question for them: When did you move out? Talking to them almost five years after their move, I was concerned they would not remember or provide me with contradictory information. I made sure during the interviews not to offer the dates I had independently found for fear of influencing their answers. In the end, all their answers matched the documents I had obtained.

The Cure For Expensive Cities Is Moving Vans

The Cure For Expensive Cities Is Moving Vans

A funny thing didn’t happen on the way to the digital revolution. It failed to empty out the cities. If knowledge workers could communicate from anywhere, the futurists figured, why would they subject themselves to the traffic and noise of urban life? They could easily move their screens to a mountain chalet, beach house or Mediterranean cafe.

The opposite happened. Instead of spreading out, many members of the “creative class” scrunched themselves into a handful of acres in a few select cities. As a result, housing prices have exploded in London, New York and San Francisco — and are rising fast in Boston, Seattle, Denver and other centers for tech and finance. The elite apparently want to be around good restaurants, high-end shopping and other elites.

And so what happens to the longtime residents of modest means and new arrivals serving the gentry’s needs? When an influx of genius coders pushes small-apartment rents into the thousands, working families of four get pushed out.

The solution to the high cost of shelter is to increase the supply, say some economists, real estate interests and politicians owned by the real estate interests. In cities bounded by water, that means increasing population density.

That can be part of the answer. Some decaying industrial areas may be ripe for new development. But here’s the problem:

Many of the most desirable urban neighborhoods are desirable precisely for their quirky small houses and low-slung apartment buildings. Local shops and restaurants line their main streets. Replace these structures with a forest of sterile towers and you destroy what made these areas valuable in the first place.

Zeroing in on London, The Economist blames “faulty land-use regulation” for the city’s high cost of housing. It prescribes building on the “green belt,” which was created to preserve open space around the central city — and scoffs at rules protecting views of the iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Guess only the penthouses would have the views.)

Like much of the “build, baby, build” crowd, the magazine parades its agenda behind the banner of diversity and fighting income inequality. Well, let’s ask. Would turning our old cities into soulless Singapores make these places more affordable?

The Economist complains that population density in central London is only half that of New York. Thing is, the rent for a centrally located one-bedroom apartment is 22 percent higher in New York than in London. In hot real estate markets, increasing supply can also hike demand.

For example, building booms in Williamsburg and other gentrifying parts of Brooklyn have attracted more moneyed people while leveling the tenements where poorer folk used to live.

There are remedies for the high cost of housing. One is to move elsewhere. It could be to a lesser neighborhood or nearby town served by public transportation. (Clamor against high rents tends to focus on upscale districts.)

And don’t forget the other great metropolises in this vast land of ours. Columbus, Omaha, Nashville, Baton Rouge and Spokane, to name a few, cost a lot less. They have great bars, hip districts and housing to die for.

As for the lower-income residents who remain in expensive cities, one fix is to pay them commensurate with the cost of living. A $15-an-hour minimum wage in the pricier locales makes total sense.

In sum, the notion that only a handful of ZIP codes can quench 21st-century ambitions is strange. The technology that lets Cleveland make video calls to Honolulu ought to be used. As for mingling, there’s now a Starbucks everywhere.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: A man pauses in a park along the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey April 7, 2016, as the skyline of New York’s Mid Town Manhattan and the Empire State Building is pictured during sunset. Picture taken April 7, 2016. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

Shelter From The Storm: Homelessness At Its Worst Since The Depression

Shelter From The Storm: Homelessness At Its Worst Since The Depression

The scale of the homeless population is so massive, it’s difficult to visualize. But Ian Frazier, writing in The New Yorker, comes close when he illustrates it: “Yankee Stadium seats 50,287. If all the homeless people who live in New York City used the stadium for a gathering, several thousand of them would have to stand.”

From coast to coast, homelessness in America is rising.

According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s biennial report, which was published Monday, the homeless population in Los Angeles County increased 12 percent over the last two years. Encampments—such as tents, makeshift residences, and people living in vehicles—increased 85 percent to 9,535, the report notes.

The Los Angeles Times blames the rising homeless population — 44,369 since January — in part on gentrification. With rents increasing and new luxury residences replacing the cheap hotels, motels, and single-room apartments that offered sanctuary to the poor, housing for the transient is growing scarce.

The increase in homelessness is exacerbated by the changes wrought by gentrification, but is rooted in a lack of funding for shelters and other services, once handled by the city, which have now largely fallen on the shoulders of religious not-for-profit groups. High unemployment rates and a void of legal protections has hindered progress further.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has pledged to eliminate homelessness among veterans in the area, offering to house all homeless vets by the end of the year. Though Garcetti said that this project was more than halfway done, the number of homeless veterans remains at about 4,400, only 6 percent lower than it was two years ago.

This news comes after the Obama administration offered $30 million in grants and services to Los Angeles County, which has the largest homeless-veteran population in the nation.

New York City maintains a legal right to shelter for its homeless, but it has more than its share of issues when handling its homeless population. Homelessness in New York is the highest it has been since the Great Depression—60,167 people are homeless, meaning about 1 in every 152 New Yorkers lives on the street.

Homelessness “is both the problem and the symptom,” says the Bowery Mission, an organization that has provided services to help New York City’s homeless for over 130 years. According to its mission statement, homelessness is both the result and cause of “chronic substance abuse, financial instability caused by unemployment or underemployment, mental illness, domestic violence, sexual victimization, and more.”

However, as in L.A., it’s not all terrible news. The homeless population has dropped 5 percent since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office. The record decrease — 92 percent in the borough of Queens, for instance — does not diminish the fact that the majority of the homeless are situated in the city’s center. “Nearly 60 percent of New York City’s unsheltered homeless population is in [midtown] Manhattan,” according to prominent advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless.

City officials announced that they will commit $100 million in annual spending to measures aimed at ameliorating the homeless crisis. The money will be directed toward more affordable housing, legal assistance, and job training, according to a recent New York Times article.

But one problem stands out from the reports on the Los Angeles and New York City homeless populations: The statistics are underreported, reflecting how difficult it is to accurately record the total number of people living without permanent shelter.

Furthermore, many of the unsheltered homeless reject help. “Normally they will not accept service unless it’s on their own terms,” reports the Times.

Recovery for the homeless is a multitudinous process. The Bowery Mission’s stance is that any effective solution will need to take into account the individual’s spiritual, physical, and emotional needs, and that the homeless should not be pushed to the fringes of our cities.

Photo: J J via Flickr