Acknowledgements

The author would like to that Nicole LaRusso and the staff of the Wagner Review for the opportunity to, and their help in publishing this paper. The original thesis from which it was adapted could not have been completed without the help and support of the Metropolitan Studies Program and Gerard Fergerson; Frank Morales and the community activists of the Lower East Side for their inspiration and passion.

Introduction

The East Side must look for its regeneration to an influx of a population much higher in the economic scale. It must no longer lose its people who prosper. It must put on a white collar.—Loula Lasker, 1928 (Abu-Lughod, 1994, p. 102)

Many complex forces have worked together to transform New York City’s Lower East Side from the immigrant port-of-entry and low-income housing district it once was into the trendy and gentrified neighborhood it has become. This paper will analyze some of the forces that began to take effect just before the stock market crash of 1929, and those that continue to have an impact today. Traditionally, many sociologists, urban anthropologists, and economists such as Peter D. Salins, Raymond Vernon, Peter Marcuse, and John Mollenkopf have explained the forces behind this transition with economic models and theories of consumer sovereignty. Authors and politicians from former Mayor Edward I. Koch to Rudolph Giuliani have offered other benign explanations for the process that has almost completely changed the social and economic characteristics of the Lower East Side. A minority of academics, including Janet Abu-Lughod and Neil Smith along with local activists such as Frank Morales, have hinted at other, more insidious explanations for the displacement of poor and minority residents from the district.

In the 1970s, while abandonment ravished the Lower East Side, a young population of counter-culture artists and musicians began to move into the northern portion of the district, beginning a process of “social� gentrification. This segment grew then gave way to wealthier and more mainstream young urban professions (or so-called “yuppies�) in the 1980s, although the counter-culture atmosphere and its residents continued to thrive. In the 1990s, students and professionals were the dominant new arrivals, which perpetuated the economic gentrification of the earlier decade. The racial make up of this group is diverse, but anecdotal evidence suggests a considerable presence of white residents. Accurate data is illusive due to the transient nature of recent residents. Both artists and young professionals have actively gentrified the district, displacing the earlier residents.

The history of redevelopment in the Lower East Side has been a 70 year struggle between area residents and the local, state and even federal governments. Even as the ethnic and demographic composition of the area has changed, each new resident group has actively resisted the efforts of government and the real estate industry to “improve� the area. The tale of this resident-resistance movement is told here, using their perspective and voice to examine the question: What is the ulterior motive, if any, for the displacement of the poor and minorities from the Lower East Side district? Who stood to benefit from the displacement and redevelopment that has occurred? Did the government, at any level, assist in the process to achieve goals of social control, rather than social improvement?

Key Definitions

This paper concerns the area of Manhattan known as the Lower East Side (LES), which coincides with Community Board District 3 (see map). Its boundaries are 4th Avenue and the Bowery on the west, 14th Street on the north, the East River on the east, and the Brooklyn Bridge on the south. Within this area there are many smaller neighborhoods including the East Village (14th Street to East Houston, west of Avenue A), Loisida (14th Street to East Houston, around Avenue C), the Lower East Side neighborhood (the part of the district below East Houston Street), and various other smaller neighborhoods whose borders are constantly being redefined.

“Gentrification� is an important concept in this paper, and it is important to make clear its usage here. Gentrification describes the process by which middle-class "gentry" displace working-class or poor residents in a neighborhood. Sociologist Ruth Glass first coined the term in 1964 to describe how, “Many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle class – upper and lower.� She noted that gentrification progresses, “rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed� (Glass, 1964, xviii).

Early gentrification in neighborhoods like the LES was a little different. The process usually started with the arrival of artists and musicians—bohemian types—followed by the businesses that catered to them—cafes, bars and galleries. This social gentrification quickly began to displace the “original� occupiers and was then followed by middle-class or white-collar gentrifiers—professionals working in the Financial District to the south and the Midtown Business District to the north. The gentrification of the 1970s could be called social gentrification, while the wave that began late in that decade and continues today is more of an economic gentrification. The distinction will become apparent by the end of the paper after the differing characteristics of the gentrifiers are explicated.

“Improvement� is another important concept in this discussion. It is used by different factions to mean different things. Politicians, planners and developers speak of improving the district. In their case the word means “redevelopment,� a formal planning term for upgrading the physical infrastructure and increasing an area’s property values. In most cases, politicians, planners and developers view the addition of new housing stock as an improvement. Often, the improvements made by local government agents are not directed at the current residents of a district but instead are aimed at attracting higher class (economically and socially) residents to the area. Self-help community activists also describe their actions as improving the neighborhood. In most cases, they mean improving the physical characteristics and quality of life for the current residents. In this paper, the author uses the latter definition of “improvement.�

The author often uses “government� to denote individual and institutional government actors and the roles they played in the redevelopment of the LES. Often, the actions of government agents and planners serve the interest of the moneyed elite and real estate industry. The labels “politicians� and “planners� are used in a similar fashion. The interests of these players often run contrary to the interests of community gardeners, squatters and residents, especially in the history of the LES.

Much has been written about the rampant real estate disinvestment that took place on the LES and in other inner-city neighborhoods around the country during the 1960s and 1970s. The LES has been a particularly popular study area. Rather than rewrite all the volumes that have been written on the subject, this work investigates some major themes of disinvestment during the late 1960s through early 1980s—abandonment, the tax structure, redlining, slum clearance, and reduction of city services—in order to uncover an underlying government goal of social control of LES residents. Analyzing the history of shifting government policies with respect to of housing subsidies, law enforcement and other service provision suggests that these policies were ultimately intended to defuse the inner-city powder keg of resident resistance. By fragmenting low-income residents, government made way for a different social and economic class to repopulate the area.

Traditions of Resident Resistance to Redevelopment

In the 70 year effort to “redevelop� the LES, the city, state, and federal governments have enacted land disposition policies that have, either wittingly or otherwise, served the real estate industry and disempowered area residents. In New York City, most land use decisions have benefited real estate developers more than they have benefited the current residents of the neighborhood. Such decisions have resulted in the displacement of residents and the disruption of voluntary associations, as discussed later. These policies include the use of urban renewal powers, selective enforcement of building code, tax foreclosure, provision of city services, and demolition and sale of city owned (in rem) properties.
Yet, despite these ongoing efforts to change the LES, the residents most adversely affected have resisted. Although she wrote about the slum clearance of the 1930s, Suzanne Wasserman’s words resonate for each subsequent wave of gentrification:

Both renewed tenant activism and economic reversals contributed to the failure to alter the LES. In addition, and not to be underestimated, was the deep commitment and attachment Lower East Siders had to their neighborhood. While it could not prevent all development, it did strengthen resistance against displacement. Developers and planners had underestimated how attached residents were to their community. They had viewed the resident population as transient and passive, ignoring the power of tradition and the attachment to place felt by East Siders. This attachment to place energized their fight for better conditions and stimulated opposition to gentrification (1994, p. 109).

The population of East European ethnic holdovers and Puerto Rican newcomers exhibited a similar “attachment to place� during the 1960s as did their predecessors. During the 1970s, residents of the Alphabet City area held their ground and created community gardens that exhibited their attachment to the neighborhood. Again in the 1980s, when the newcomers included artists and young anarchist types, they too showed a strong attachment to the neighborhood they had appropriated. This newest group expressed their resistance with the slogans: “Mug-a-yuppie,� “Yuppie: GO HOME!,� and “Gentrification = Class War,� which were popular toward the end of that decade (F. Morales, personal communication, Dec 3, 1998). During each period, politicians, developers, and planners did not redevelop the district as successfully as they had hoped because,“[they] both ignored and trod on Lower East Sider’s attachments to their community.� (Wasserman, p. 111).
Cloward and Piven offer a self-preservationist explanation of the local resistance to renewal in the late 1960s. Just as Wasserman’s explanation fit later generations, their’s fits earlier ones:

Confronted with the stress of upheaval, the loss of neighborhood and the prospect of greatly increased rentals these people were the hardest hit by the costs of renewal but were not to receive the benefits provided by the new development. They were people already together in neighborhoods, united by a common deprivation or threat of deprivation to the neighborhood, and in no significant way appeased by any benefits. The new developments included chiefly high-rental housing; slum clearance was no boon to slum dwellers for whom it meant mainly dislocation (1972, p. 19-20).

Spatial Deconcentration Theory:

Government Motives for Redeveloping the Lower East Side

Since the 1930s, the city’s renewal policies resulted in the wide scale disruption and dissolution of many established minority communities. Many sociologists, anthropologists, historians and others have written of these effects in relation to the LES. In the early 1980s a theory of “spatial deconcentration� emerged as a probable government motive to redevelop the area. Originally proffered by Yolanda Ward, a 22 year-old black Howard University student and member of the Washington, D.C. based Grass Roots Unity Conference and co-chair of the City Wide Housing Coalition, spatial deconcentration theory is based on a military strategy for establishing control over urban areas (Morgan, 1983). It appears to have first been outlined in the Kerner Commission Report in 1968 and later referred to explicitly in Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) documents uncovered by Ward and her colleagues. The Kerner Commission, formally known as the National Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders, was convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the wake of the wide spread urban rioting of the late 1960s. Johnson charged the commission with examining the cause of the urban riots and developing strategies to control or prevent future unrest (Ward, 1980).

Spatial deconcentration theory has since been a subject of hot debate among some urban scholars, anarchists, and activists. It is a set of housing, economic development, and land-use policies designed to disperse low-income populations. Deconcentration of the poor is achieved through slum clearance, aggressive tax collection, and code enforcement resulting in foreclosure or condemnation of slum buildings. Section 8 Certificate and Voucher programs, which encourage relocation by providing the poor with portable housing allowances, is a more recent spatial deconcentration tactic. Since the targets of such policies are often poor minorities, theorists speculate that the policies' goal is to re-establish white, middle-class dominance in the inner-cities. Although spatial deconcentration theory did not surface until 1980, it has implications that relate to the inner city abandonment that escalated after the Kerner Commission released its 1968 report. The theory also provides an explanation for the slum clearance and urban renewal policies of earlier decades.

Anthony Downs, a consultant to the Commission, had developed what he called the “Law of Dominance� even before his tenure with the Commission. He observed, “Whites—like most other middle-class citizens of any race—want to be sure that the social, cultural, and economic milieu and values of their own group dominate their own residential environment and the educational environment of their children� (1968, p. 1338). Downs further developed this theory through his work with the Commission where it is presented in the policy recommendations of the Report’s 16th and 17th chapters (1970; 1973; 1994). Downs predicated the revival and future stability of the inner-cities on re-introducing and maintaining white, middle-class dominance. This “law of dominance� is at the heart of the spatial deconcentration theory. While working at both the Brookings Institute, and the Manhattan Institute (a conservative think-tank that influences Giuliani administration policy), he has used dominance theory to shape public policy (Morales, 1997; PC Morales, Nov 9, 1998).

Downs steeped his theory of spatial deconcentration in the rhetoric of integration and equality (1968, p. 1340-1). Piven and Cloward, however, make a strong case against integration through spatial deconcentration due to its hindrance of the achievement of equality:

Minority groups will win acceptance from the majority by developing their own bases of power, not by submerging their unorganized and leaderless numbers in coalitions dominated by other and more solidary groups…In these terms, then, physical desegregation is not only irrelevant to the ghetto but can actually prevent the eventual integration of blacks in the institutional life of this society. For integration must be understood not as the mingling of bodies in school and neighborhood but as participation in and shared control over the major institutional spheres of American life. And that is a question of developing communal associations that can be bases for power—not of dispersing a community that is powerless (p. 198).

Advocates of integration policies claim that poor and minority residents are able to access better community resources through such policies. However, by deconcentrating poor and minority populations, the government dilutes any political or social power these groups have. Particularly on the LES, where traditionally there is very little economic or political capital among individuals, communal associations and community groups are tools for acquiring and wielding political power. Urban renewal, forced relocation and evictions wreak havoc on community associations, destroying their power and effectively de-politicizing the poor.

Christopher Mele writes that, “Spatial deconcentration of Puerto Rican residents…displacement from their homes by urban renewal projects, and the unscrupulous tactics of landlords, inhibited the formation of the community-based self-help organizations that had been crucial in easing the transition for earlier immigrants� (p. 130-1). Mele draws a comparison between the Puerto Rican immigrants of the post-war period who, in large part, did not match the success of the predecessors who were able to achieve success and move out of the LES. He attributes the success of the earlier generations to the strong social networks they formed through self-segregation in the neighborhood, an option that the government’s housing policy hindered for later immigrants (Jargowski, 1997, p. 13).
Jacobs discusses the important role that community groups play in creating political power by mobilizing votes to influence the political decisions that effect the community:

Of course other qualities than sheer population size count in effectiveness [of a district] – especially good communication and good morale. But population size is vital because it represents, if most of the time by implication, votes. There are only two ultimate public powers in shaping and running American cities: votes and control of the money.…An effective district—and through its mediation, the street neighborhoods—possesses one of these powers: the power of votes. Through this, and this alone, can it effectively influence the power brought to bear on it, for good or for ill, by public money. (p. 131)

The two other strengths that Jacobs refers to besides money are “good communication and good morale.� Spatial deconcentration and planned shrinkage undermine communication and morale through the destruction of communities. Not only does the Puerto Rican population of the LES experience the primary barrier of language (it is still a problem in the community garden preservation battles of today), there is the added obstacle of geographic dislocation caused by urban renewal, landlord abandonment, and evictions. As Mele and Jacobs point out, this geographic dislocation hindered the type of organizing that fosters the development of political power. Spatial deconcentration also decreases the number of voters in a district, as it has in the LES.

Disinvestment and Planned Shrinkage

Clearing the Way for Redevelopment of the Lower East Side

Disinvestment of the LES began in the 1960s in response to the stagnating incomes and rising poverty caused by the city's loss of 438,000 manufacturing jobs between 1959 and 1975 (Fitch, 1993, p. 106). As blue collar jobs left the city, Puerto Rican residents of the LES and other "slums" who filled these jobs were less able to pay the high rents commanded by landlords. The government-sponsored urban renewal and slum clearance of the 1930s through late 1960s demolished entire neighborhoods, reducing the city-wide stock of low-rent housing units. This government-induced decrease in supply coincided with an increase in demand due to immigration. The combined effect was an increase in market rents. In addition, Piven and Cloward observe that, “Slum profits have depended on collusion between city agencies and landlords: In return for non-enforcement of the codes, the slumlord takes the blame for the slum and enables the city to evade the political ire of the ghetto� (1972, p. 158). This symbiotic relationship combined with the scarcity of units permitted landlords to profit on slums without maintaining the quality of the housing stock. Increasing unemployment and poverty resulting in rent delinquency combined with the unavoidable expense of rapidly deteriorating buildings, caused the profitability of the slum to disappear in the late 1960s. Landlords responded by halting reinvestment in their buildings to maintain profits.

Redlining and the decline of essential services such as garbage collection, and police and fire protection were among other factors that lead to the abandonment of the LES. Jacobs wrote, “The Lower East Side of New York, an area of great potential….was doomed by black listing [alternately called redlining].� (1961, p. 302) This process of disinvestment is caused when banks deny mortgages and insurance companies deny coverage to real estate owners within a specific geographic area. Economists and urban geographers often site redlining as one of the first steps of disinvestment. These factors resulted in a general quid-pro-quo policy of “planned shrinkage� (Van Kleunan, 1994, p. 298-9; Harris, 1991, p.140).

Like others in the South Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn, this district was generating very little tax revenue while costing the city great expenses for social services. These neighborhoods were an economic drain on the financially troubled city. Planned shrinkage, a policy conceived by Roger Starr in 1966 and officially implemented during his tenure as Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development under Mayor Abe Beame in 1976, was a way to expedite the “death� of these troubled neighborhoods to make way for their eventual redevelopment (Wallace and Wallace, 1998, p. 18-19, 24-25). All those with the means to relocate did, while those without often fell victim to forced displacement and relocations. or rampant inner-city crime.

Urban geographers such as Neil Smith, Peter Marcuse, and Peter Salins explain in great detail how landlords milk the financial viability from buildings through disinvestment (Smith, Duncan and Reid, 1994; Smith, 1996; Marcuse, 1984; Salins, 1981 and 1980, p. 99-115; Jacobs, p. 316). According to Salins’ theory, “Graduated disinvestment involves the deliberate shedding of one or another owner responsibility vis-a-vis the property in order to reduce expenses, or increase rental income, in the full knowledge that this will render it worthless.� These responsibilities include the payment of debt service (especially mortgages), the payment of property taxes, upkeep expenses, the careful selection of tenants, and adherence to the law (1980, p. 100). After this first stage of disinvestment, speculative investors can then make money on these properties by purchasing them with low down payments. Through another round of aggressive rent collection, tax and mortgage delinquency, shirking of maintenance responsibilities, writing off unpaid rent, and depreciating the property’s asset value these investors can earn a short-term profit (p. 14). Salins writes “that with each turnover in ownership, purchase is predicated increasingly on a risk-taking strategy of short-term rental income exploitation, and less on a conservative strategy of long-term asset value maintenance� (p. 103). After all the short turn profits are squeezed from these properties, eventually neighborhoods face the final stage of disinvestment, permanent owner abandonment.

Smith developed a rent-gap theory that recognizes a point “whereby the actual capitalized ground rent (or land value) under the present use is substantially lower than the potential ground rent that could be appropriated at that location under a higher and better use� (Smith, et al, p. 150). These circumstances are integral precursors to longer-term reinvestment in slum neighborhoods. When disinvestment and abandonment have sufficiently devalued property, there is an economic incentive for reinvestment. By this theory, disinvestment and abandonment are integral parts of the reinvestment and gentrification process. Anthony Downs stated it more bluntly in 1982 when he wrote, “A certain amount of neighborhood deterioration is an essential part of urban redevelopment� (1982).

After landlords abandoned them in the late 1970s, the city took title to over 500 properties through tax foreclosure known as in rem proceedings (Abu-Lughod, 1994, p. 2). Before 1978, the city did not begin in rem proceeding until a property fell more than twelve quarters in arrears. A 1978 law originally introduced by Mayor Beame reduced the threshold to four quarters in an attempt to increase tax payments. There are two ways to explain the change in the threshold. The first is that the Beame administration assumed landlords faced with the shorter grace period would pay back-taxes to protect their investment. The other possibility is that the city wanted to expedite tax foreclosure on the more than 1,000 LES buildings in chronic tax arrears in 1978, and by doing so expedite Starr’s slum clearance through his “planned shrinkage� strategy (Smith, et al, p. 160). In essence, tax foreclosure became a critical tool to clear slum neighborhoods and assemble property for future development after the city lost the explicit, legislated power and federal funds to do so in 1973, when the federal government terminated the Title I Urban Renewal Program.

The city proceeded with land assemblage in slum neighborhoods using the new tax arrears threshold. As Salins notes, this practice ushered in “the preliminary stage to their [the buildings’] imminent disappearance from the housing stock� (p. 111). Since many of these properties were occupied at the time of foreclosure, the result was reduction of the available housing stock for residents of the LES.

In addition to lost housing through tax foreclosure, many of the properties in the LES were burned in the final stage of landlord abandonment—arson for insurance. Sociologist Mercer Sullivan writes:

During the 1970s…large areas of New York City burned, especially poor neighborhoods in which disinvestment in housing took many forms…It is probable that arson was responsible for much of the burning of…the Lower East Side…Arson represents the most extreme and criminal form of disinvestment…. The historic pattern of fires in the city shows quite dramatic rises from about 60,000 reported fires in 1960 to rates of over 120,000 per year throughout most of the 1970s, peaking in 1980. In 1981 the fires began to decrease…at the same time that the real estate values began to sky rocket (Sullivan, 1991, p. 233).

Epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace and ecologist Deborah Wallace show in their 1998 book, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled, how this widespread arson was a product of fire-service cuts resulting from planned shrinkage. Arson served both the landlords through insurance pay-outs as well as the city through slum clearance.

Non-tax generating properties were an additional economic burden to the beleaguered city government during the fiscal crisis of the mid 1970s. The city essentially abandoned some of the worst buildings, relocating tenants to other sites to maximize occupancy. Then these emptied buildings, some 3,400 units on the LES, were demolished to reduce maintenance costs (Schmelzkopf, 1995, p. 366). As the economy rebounded and reinvestment began towards the end of the 1970s, the city began to transfer properties to developers. The city’s large portfolio of vacant property and selective enforcement of the shorter tax arrears threshold helped assemble attractive sites and allowed for creative payment plans that stimulated reinvestment and development. In some cases, the city sold properties to real estate investors for the back taxes owed (Smith, et al, p. 154-5). Over the next two decades, except for the recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sale of these properties became a source of capital for the city.

To raise revenue in the 1980s, the Koch Administration made many properties on the LES available for the middle- and high-income redevelopment that politicians and planners have favored for the district since the 1920s. The Dinkins and Giuliani administrations followed suit, with the Giuliani administration essentially halting all in rem proceedings and adopting a policy of selling all city-owned, tax-foreclosed property (Zielbauer, 1999).

Planned shrinkage through abandonment and tax foreclosure was a strategy for implementing spatial deconcentration. It reduced and displaced the low-income population through the demolition of housing and then redistribution of land. A generation earlier, Title I urban renewal programs had the same effect in the southern and eastern portions of the district. Both urban renewal and planned shrinkage helped to clear a path for future reinvestment and redevelopment that occurred in 1930s through 1950s, 1980s and 1990s.

Although the housing projects of the 1930s and 1940s did provide a mix of middle- and low-income housing, they also had an effect on the political activity of their residents. A system of rules stifled political organizing and activism of public housing tenants. Piven and Cloward believe that public housing tenants’ behavior is influenced by their dependant relationship on the government for housing. They write:

What concessions the unorganized poor did get actually inhibited their capacity for political action. This is especially true of public-welfare and public-housing programs in which benefits are made conditional on compliant behavior by recipients. The poor, dealt with as supplicants by functionaries who can evict them or cut off their checks at will, are rendered more helpless in exchange for the benefits they receive (Cloward and Piven, 1972, p. 260).

The Housing Authority went so far as to ban organizing and certain other political meetings in housing projects’ communal spaces. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the city exerted similar control over other communities through the co-optation of self-help housing and neighborhood improvement movements.

Resident Resistance

A Community Abandoned Helps Itself

“To overcome slums, we must first regard slum dwellers as people capable of acting upon their own self-interests, which they certainly are. We need to discern, respect and build upon the forces for regeneration that exist in the slums themselves, and demonstrably work in real cities.�—Jane Jacobs (1961, p. 271)

Jane Jacobs calls attention to the major problem of the urban renewal strategies of the 1930s through 1950s. She argues that politicians and planners have long regarded residents of slums like the LES as unable or unwilling to improve their neighborhoods on their own. They viewed slums and their residents as problems to be eradicated, devoid of resources. Government renewal projects reflected this view, focusing on depopulating and demolishing entire neighborhoods to make way for the redevelopment and repopulating of these areas.
Self-help activists on the LES have proven the politicians and planners wrong through their countless hours spent improving their neighborhoods, not just for themselves, but for their neighbors as well. One of the most compelling examples of a self-help movement is that of community gardening. Community gardening has implications that reach beyond the quality of life improvements for those participating directly in the self-help activities. These neighborhood-initiated, community-controlled projects have a positive effect on the surrounding areas in almost all cases (Schmelzkopf, 371-373). Gardens are open to all people who will respect the hard work invested by the gardeners themselves. They start a ripple effect of community involvement often playing integral roles in block associations and general neighborhood improvement. They are the “forces of regeneration� to which Jacobs refers, and which the politicians ignore.
Unlike many property owners, resident self-help activists did not abandon the LES, particularly the Alphabet City neighborhood. Since the 1970s, these community activists have likely numbered in the thousands. By 1995 there were approximately seventy-five community gardens in the district averaging one hundred active gardeners or members each. At its peak in 1997, the city-wide population was estimated at 15,000 gardeners in more than 800 gardens (M. Perin, personal correspondence, Nov 4, 1998). This core of volunteer activists works to improve their quality of life by improving the neighborhood and reclaiming vacant lots from drug dealers and users. Unfortunately, in recent years they have seen the products of their hard work destroyed by the city’s land disposition policies. In many cases the city actively worked towards the demolition of viable gardens situated on city-owned land to facilitate market-rate (which in new York City effectively means middle- and upper-income) developments. Many activists and residents consider the city’s motivation for the disposition of these properties dubious, at best.
The city government justifies its land disposition policies with economic explanations while thoroughly ignoring the invaluable social and political assets self-help movements represent for the community. The suppression of these self-help movements is deleterious to those involved, while advantageous to politicians and the developers who fund their election campaigns. On its face this idea contradicts conservative advocacy of self-help as an alternative to reliance on government support. The Giuliani administration has championed “personal responsibility� and suggests that New Yorkers should rely more on themselves than the government, but in this instance, the administration has thwarted the most genuine attempts by gardeners to help themselves.

Let It Blossom!, Let It Grow!

The Rise of Community Gardening
In its modern form New York City community gardening rose out of the rampant real estate abandonment of the 1970s. New Yorkers around the city, fed up with trash-strewn, rat-infested vacant lots, cleared the rubble and began to plant gardens (Ramirez, 1997; Schmelzkopf, p. 371-372). Although this most recent period of community gardening dates back to the early 1970s, the idea of community gardens is much older. There has always been a concern over the creation and preservation of open space in New York City. Frederick Law Olmstead, the creator of Manhattan’s Central Park, wrote on the subject of smaller parks. It seems that he may have envisioned the community gardens of a century later when he wrote in 1870 that the benefits of “numerous small grounds so distributed through a large town that some one of them could be easily reached by a short walk from every house, would be more desirable than a single area of great extent however rich in landscape attractions it might be� (1996, p. 341). Even Robert Moses, whose construction projects decimated many neighborhoods in the 1950s, envisioned a place for small parks. Residents often viewed Moses’ “Vest Pocket Parks� as failures (Francis, Cashdan and Paxon, 1984, p. 135), but they may have helped to pave the way for the community gardening movement (Alpern, 1973, p. 412).
The benefits of such “scattered oases� are many. Moses’s Vest Pocket Parks utilized the awkward plots of land left over after construction of the new highways. Residents of the communities he ravaged, however, viewed them as a token offerings that did not mitigate the adverse impact of the highways. Olmstead, on the other hand, clearly recognized the environmental benefits of such spaces, often referring to parks as the “lungs of the city.� Gardens also work towards the goal of creating a more civil society providing city youth with an alternative to street life and vice (LeGates and Stout, 1996, p. 335). The Regional Plan Association (RPA) observed that many playgrounds, intended for this purpose, were underutilized. Its 1928 report read:

The lure of the street is a strong competitor [to the play ground]… It must be a well administered playground to compete successfully with the streets, teeming with life and adventure. The ability to make the playground activity so compellingly attractive as to draw children from the streets and hold their interest from day to day is a rare faculty in play leadership, combining personality and technical skill of a high order (Jacobs, p. 84-5).

Community gardens are this type of dynamic playground. Children can participate in various educational activities from gardening to social, cultural, and political activities. The efforts of community gardeners can lead to the cultivation of lively community spaces playing host to a multitude of activities. People of all ages use gardens, and the inter-generational contact acts as a draw for many children, adolescents, and elders. In the gardens, children find teachers, mentors, friends, and role models. In this way, community gardening acts as stabilizing activity by creating common goals with recognizable rewards for neighborhood residents working together (Naimark, 1982, p.9; PC Perin; PC Jeffery Wright, Nov 6, 1998; Schmelzkopf, p. 373-4).
Community Gardens also help mitigate the lack of open space citywide. The Trust For Public Land and other open space groups have labeled New York as the worst American city in terms of public open space with a city-wide average of roughly 1.5 acres per 1,000 persons. The LES has an even lower ratio of 0.72 (Conserving Open Space, 1996, p. 73). Additionally, there is very little informal (un-regulated) public space available in which groups can meet. The high cost of real estate certainly is a factor in the scarcity of such space. Community gardens provide a “free space� for political and social interaction as well as the enjoyment of nature. Public parks like Tompkins Square are no longer the venues for lively political activism they once were. The city has set rules of conduct that all but ban political activities in these spaces through lengthy and overly restrictive permitting processes. Gardens also serve as outlets of expression and self determination shaped by the people who use them. This self-determination vests gardeners with feelings of ownership and control (PC Wright; PC Morales; PC Perin; PC Margarita Lopez, Nov 30, 1998; PC Sarah Ferguson, Oct 27, 1998; Schmelzkopf). Furthermore, gardens make city streets more livable by providing an escape from the built environment (Jacobs and Appleyard, 1996, p. 169-175).
During New York City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the LES was in dire need of the benefits that community gardens offer. Real estate abandonment, neighborhood disinvestment, and arson left gaps in the tenement lined blocks of the historically slum neighborhood. Empty lots where buildings once stood became de-facto garbage dumps and illicit drug bazaars. Community residents, frustrated with the degraded quality of life that existed and the city’s lack of action and services, took matters into their own hands. Loose knit groups of neighbors began to clear lots and plant gardens in an effort to make their neighborhood safer and more livable (Martin, 1998; Raver, 1997; PC Wright; PC Lopez; PC Morales).
Crime and abandonment make tenants prisoners in their own homes, further compounding the problem of street crime. Community gardens bring residents out of their homes and onto the street. Jacobs’ “eyes on the street� theory recognizes the positive impact that the presence of law abiding citizens has on reducing crime. As she wrote:

You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are less conscious, normally, that they are policing.The basic requisite for such surveillance is a substantial quantity of stores and other public places sprinkled along the sidewalks of the district. (p. 36)

Gardeners have a vested interest in the reduction of crime as residents and as “owners� of a garden. Instead of spending their leisure time in their apartments, gardeners spend it in their gardens in view of the street. This public display has a compound effect. Not only does it lead to mutual-policing, but as Jacobs observes, “The site of people attracts still more people� (p. 37). The more people, the more eyes and the safer the neighborhood. She continues, “[This] is something that the city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible.� Jacobs suggests that the secluded courtyards of public housing projects often become dangerous havens for vice because there is nothing to see, and it is difficult to be seen. Residents often abandon these bland courtyards for the street corner with its parade of foot and vehicular traffic. The other pitfall of such courts is the lack of “ownership� felt by tenants whose housing conditions are not self-determined but rather dictated by the government. By comparison, the community gardens are interesting to the eye because of their design and the activity surrounding them. Gardeners feel and exude a sense of empowerment and ownership that draws them and other local residents to the gardens. The vest-pocket parks and a later HPD program to build gardens on vacant lots were not as well received or successful as the self-help community gardens because of the self-determination factor involved with the latter (Schmelzkopf, p. 375; Francis, et al).

A Time To Reap

Gentrification Threatens Community Gardens

The gardeners of the LES began, in most cases, as squatters. They seized abandoned property and improved upon it. It was not until 1978 that the city government recognized this method of community renewal and institutionalized it with the creation of the Operation Green Thumb program. Green Thumb, a quasi-governmental agency created with federal community development block grants, was empowered by the city to issue leases and oversee the management of community gardens city-wide (Martin, 1998; Raver, 1997; Schmelzkopf, p. 375). Under the Green Thumb Program, the city considers gardens an interim use of the land until a higher, more permanent use, such as housing development, can be found for the property. While many gardens sought and received Green Thumb leases, the city placed a moratorium on new leases in 1984 in response to the rebound in the real estate market. Evidence of this rebound is the number of properties in tax arrears for twelve quarters or more, which dropped from 324 in 1984 to 79 in 1985 (Smith, et al, p. 160). Even so, more gardens sprung up without official mandate (Schmelzkopf, p. 377).
Green Thumb was aimed at co-opting the initiative of the community garden movement. Continued participation and official recognition or permission were predicated on adherence to certain city-defined standards. Piven and Cloward recognized that such “Governmental programs for the poor are likely to diminish whatever collective political vitality the poor still exhibit�(p.25). The city used Green Thumb to bring the movement and its participants under control through co-optation and regulation. For example, under the Giuliani administration, the Green Thumb program and the Parks Department created a “Garden Report Card� to judge the value of gardens on subjective qualities such as garden-design and plant-choice in considering them for lease renewal or permanent status. The report card penalizes gardens for building structures like Casitas, small houses or shacks common in Latino gardens, while no such penalty exists for gazeboes. Growing vegetables like corn is also frowned upon, but grape arbors appear to carry no such penalty. Non-compliance with the rules, standards, and norms of the Green Thumb program can result in termination of a lease, eviction, and sale at public auction.
As Piven and Cloward pointed out, the assistance offered to those in need often comes at a price. There is a trade-off between government assistance or programs like Green Thumb and self-determination or autonomy. This raises the question of whether or not the express purpose of offering the assistance is to exert social control over the assisted. One can only hypothesize that the intended consequence of drawing the poor into government-controlled housing and community improvement programs is the social control of these same people. Some in the community gardens movement feel that if it were not, these government sponsored programs would permit the self-help efforts to continue unimpeded. Minor rules and regulations force self-help activists to act as supplicants to politicians and government agencies who determine their fate. Rules dictating acceptable garden design can be embellished to include rules against garden activities such as political rallies or other activities that challenge the city government.
The interim status of gardens was a non-issue while the real estate market was soft. At the end of the 1970s, there were more vacant lots than anyone knew what to do with. The burgeoning economy and housing market created strong demand for new housing construction in Manhattan. The LES was one of the only districts with undeveloped land that was conveniently situated near both downtown and midtown Manhattan.
As this demand grew in the 1980s and discussion of large-scale development resumed, particularly the planned LeFrak project on the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a mounting anti-gentrification force galvanized. An inter-racial coalition of low-income housing advocates mobilized forming the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council (JPC), and ultimately blocked the LeFrak project, a highly subsidized, predominantly middle-income and luxury co-op development with only a small percentage of low-income rentals.
The JPC went on to broker a deal with the Koch administration known as the Cross-Subsidy Plan. This plan divided the city owned properties in the district for disposition. The administration agreed to turn over many abandoned buildings to non-profit housing groups for low-income housing that would be financed through the sale of vacant lots for market-rate development. Despite its seemingly good intentions, the plan was flawed. Many of the vacant lots were not vacant, and many of the abandoned buildings were not abandoned.
The JPC sold-out the self-help gardeners and squatters pitting them against non-profit and market rate housing developers (Abu-Lughod, 1994, p. 313). The conflict between the self-help activists and the low-income housing community created a negative image of the self-help movement. Housing advocates framed the issue as one of affordable housing versus gardens or squats. The reality of the deal was that more gardens would be sacrificed for luxury or market rate housing then for affordable housing. Most of the proposed “new� affordable housing would actually be created by recycling the districts fast dwindling stock of abandoned city owned buildings.
The city pushed many of the lots and gardens in the district through the Universal Land Use Review Process (ULURP) before 1987, preparing them for sale to market-rate developers under the cross-subsidy plan. By the late 1980s, developers acquired site-control of many vacant lots and garden lots on which to build housing (Kannapell, 1995). The creation of the low-income housing through the Cross-Subsidy plan was largely dependant on the revenues generated by the sale of the lots. The Black Monday stock market crash and subsequent real estate bust foiled the program by temporarily reducing the demand for luxury housing. During the ensuing recession, residents transformed many ULURPed lots into gardens, and HPD did construct some new low-income housing around Avenue C during this time. These projects were financed with capital funds advanced against the future sale of city owned lots through the cross-subsidy plan. When the real estate market rebounded in the 1990s, and their sale became viable, many of the lots were thriving community gardens.

Is the Battle Lost?

Today, renovation and gentrification have almost completely transformed the Lower East Side. Twenty years ago, entire buildings sold for tens of thousands of dollars while today co-op apartments sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The LES is no longer a low-rent district. There may still be some tenants paying low rents, but they likely moved in before the early 1990s. Many politicians and developers as well as new residents attribute the district’s transformation to the natural laws of the market. Many people accept that gentrification is inevitable and beneficial. Few, however, express concern for where the displaced residents will go. At the height of the 1980’s boom, one developer reportedly explained, “They will be pushed to the river and given life preservers� (Abu-Lughod). The tragedy of displacement through gentrification involves more than the displaced. The entire culture of the neighborhood changes, and often the very characteristics that attracted the gentrifiers in the first place are lost to the process they perpetuate.
Such is the case on the LES. As the district advances through the gentrification process, the artists and musicians that helped establish the area’s attraction twenty-five years ago are being displaced. The independent, locally-owned businesses that made streets unique and lively are rapidly being priced out of the area. There is also a mounting “anti-nightlife� sentiment in the Community Board and the city government (Tran, 1999, p. 56). The very industries and institutions that brought the neighborhood back from the brink of desolation are now being banished. The planners’ and real estate developers’ goal of gentrification has been accomplished. The poor and politically threatening radicals have, in many cases, been disempowered. The inner city is becoming sanitized in the way Downs prescribed. The threat of unrest and disorder is gone. Although the less radical and diverse newcomers have displaced the traditionally charged atmosphere that resulted from the Lower East Side’s historic ethnic and racial diversity, there are signs that the activist spirit of the district is not yet lost.

The Last Wave

Gentrification in the 1990s
The most recent wave of gentrification, marked by new renovations, construction, and increasing rents, picked up during the economic recovery in the early 1990s. This time, along with artists priced out of SoHo and Greenwich Village, an increasing student population moved into the district. The real estate industry used students as another wedge to gentrify the East Village and drive up rents. Students differed from prior waves of tenants in many ways. Whereas most tenants move into a neighborhood and plan to stay for an extended period, students are significantly more transient, often moving frequently and leaving altogether when their studies have concluded. They usually have a lease guarantor—their parents, minimizing the possibility of rent default. Aggressive landlords can easily intimidate students who are often not native to the city and will move out rather than put up a fight if threatened with extra-legal evictions. Some landlords even tell students they cannot renew their lease, a violation of the rent code. Students are also not as active in local politics or social movements and generally remain withdrawn from longer term residents. These characteristics make them the perfect tenants for landlords looking to increase rents with minimum hassle.
Rent stabilization and long term tenants kept many rents in the district below market rate. Current rent regulations grant landlords a significant rent-increase when tenants move out and a new tenant signs a lease. In a few short years, a rapid succession of student tenants could more than double the rent of an apartment until it is no longer affordable to many students. As the district became more desirable in the mid to late 1990s, landlords constrained by rent regulations began to require extensive financial credentials to secure a lease. Many owners will not rent to tenants who cannot show incomes of 30 to 60 times a month's rent. Additionally, many newcomers claim that management companies have requested two to five years of tax returns before renting apartments. These requirements raised the bar for tenancy making leases attainable only for high-salaried professionals or students with wealthy parent-guarantors. Just as many artists before them were priced out of the district as a result of the gentrifying effects of their own tenancy in past years, many students are now.
Discussions with other residents of the neighborhood and building superintendents suggest that the most recent arrivals have been young professionals. Observation of the neighborhood reveals increased traffic of professionally dressed young people during traditional commute times. Additionally, new bars and restaurants opening in the neighborhood cater to a wealthier crowd. I Coppi, a Tuscan tratoria on 9Th Street just west of Avenue A, carries wines priced from $35 to $1000 a bottle. These observations are evidence that white-collar professionals characterize the present wave of gentrifying tenants, which effectively fulfills the vision laid out by planners in the 1920s.
The city continued to support and assist the process of gentrification through the auctioning of community gardens, community centers, and squats in July and November of 1998, often for market rate development. These efforts do not merely “inhibit the formation of community-based self-help organizations,� as Christopher Mele suggests; they destroy successful self-help models that have been created, often times, over many years. After a community has created a community garden on an abandoned lot, the process of auctioning this lot and destroying the garden does not simply involve the razing of some plants and walkways. It means the destruction of a complex and vital community along with the object around which it was created. Just as Ida Susser argues with respect to the symbolic importance of a home, gardens represent more than just open space—they are an integral part of forming the psychological ties that create a sense of community (Susser, p. 213).
The implications of destroying these gardens goes beyond the immediate physical and social loss. The consequences also include the disenchantment of an entire community that has seen such an organization destroyed. According to Morales, the community’s will and ability to organize is degraded after experiencing such loss and defeat. Both Jacobs and Mele concur that the destruction of community organizations results in a loss of social and political power. With each defeat witnessed, the community becomes weaker, until there is none left at all. Many local activists including Morales, Perin, Wright, Ferguson and others believe that weakening the community is one goal of community garden demolition. As Jacobs noted, “Either way, seduction or subversion of the elected is easiest when the electorate is fragmented into ineffectual units of power� (Jacobs, p. 13). To the politicians, including Mayor Giuliani, who so often cater to the real estate interests that contribute heavily to electoral campaigns, the fragmentation of the local electorate is to their advantage. Strong communities such as those on the LES often resist real estate development; thus the destruction of these self-help movements is advantageous to real estate developers and can be considered a motivation for some political decisions that achieve these ends.
Poor people, no matter how active in the community, do not make significant financial contributions to political campaigns. For the most part, the only political power they possess is the power developed in community organizations. The land disposition decisions made by politicians with strong political, financial, or personal ties to real estate developers often results in the destruction of these organizations. This process of disempowerment has existed for decades in the LES and continues today.
The city government’s actions have followed a tacit policy of social control through the destruction of self-mobilization and community controlled self-help movements. While politicians at many levels of government -- from George Bush and Bill Clinton to Rudy Giuliani -- have advocated and encouraged self-help as an alternative to reliance on government support, at a local level, this “advocacy� often has been merely rhetorical. It is one of the great ironies of gardening and other self help movements. When wealthier communities provide funds for neighborhood improvements it is championed. However, when poorer communities take it upon themselves to improve their surroundings, they are thwarted.
It is not likely a mere coincidence that the city’s current policies towards land disposition coincide with those of Anthony Downs. Downs is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which is a think-tank that is highly influential on the Giuliani administration. Author Robert Fitch recognizes that such “foundations and their free standing off-spring like LISC [Local Initiatives Support Corporation] and the [New York] Housing Partnership, could set neighborhood economic agendas by their funding priorities. They would decide what constituted economic development� (Fitch, 1993, p. 155-6). Similar foundation-funded private institutes and think-tanks have had an influential role in shaping public policy in recent decades. Deborah and Rodrick Wallace identify the roll of the Riverside Research Institute, the Rand Institute, and the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council in the development and implementation of planned shrinkage (Wallace and Wallace, p. xi-xiii, 24-5). These “institutes� and the academics who lead them operate beyond the reaches of electoral politics and public scrutiny (Fitch, p. 141-2, 155-6). The spatial deconcentration policies that Downs set forth in1968 have been present in the actions of both Democratic and Republican administrations through the present day.
As Mayor, Rudy Giuliani has aggressively disposed of city-owned property for the purpose of building middle-income housing usually in marginal and gentrifying districts such as the LES. The private non profit New York Housing Partnership has been involved in numerous low-density middle-income subsidized housing co-ops around the city and on the LES. In most cases, these homes have not been affordable to the residents of the neighborhood, often requiring incomes that are double or triple the median incomes in the surrounding areas, and their construction has advanced gentrification, particularly on the LES.
In some instances, Partnership projects displace thriving community gardens or squats, both of which represent the residents’ hard work to solve their own problems. Examples are the 5th and 13th Street Squats that the city “owned� and handed over to the private developers Asian Americans For Equality (AAFE) and the Lower East Side Coalition for Housing Development (LESCHD), respectively. Both of these developers are politically well connected to the Giuliani administration—AAFE through campaign contributions and LESCHD through donations and former City Council member and LESCHD principal, Antonio Pagan, now a commissioner of labor in the Giuliani administration. Well-connected Donald Capocia of BFC Development is responsible for the Del Este Village developments that displaced four community gardens including the Chico Mendez Memorial Mural Garden and the 10BC or Little Puerto Rico Garden. Pagan, LESCHD, and AAFE also have been instrumental in the demolition of other gardens and the eviction of squats on the LES. AAFE is the developer for a middle income New Homes Partnership project on the former site of the Rodriguez Garden on Suffolk Street. Before its demolition, the city transferred the 5th Street Squat building to AAFE control for development as subsidized rentals. In the two years since a small fire and subsequent extra-legal demolition, the site has become a trash-strewn lot.
Low-rent units removed from the housing stock in the 1970s through arson, abandonment and demolition were often replaced by moderate and now luxury rental or co-op and condo units. One can look to contemporary examples such as the scattered site Del Este Village co-ops, Tompkins Square Court, and CD280 luxury rentals as just a few of the market rate projects recently built east of Avenue A. These are only the larger, new construction projects; there have been smaller renovations and conversions such as those of some long vacant buildings on East Houston Street near Orchard Street into studios commanding rents in the $3,000 range. Almost three decades ago Cloward and Piven observed, “The new developments included chiefly high-rental housing; slum clearance was no boon to slum dwellers for whom it meant mainly dislocation.� Their observation is equally poignant today; there is no intrinsic benefit to the existing community from the housing that replaces gardens or squats. The current residents are facing the threat of deprivation of community space and affordable housing. The developments that replace these community-used properties will likely result in the further gentrification of the neighborhood, causing additional displacement of low-income and minority residents.

Community Activism

In the face of adversity, Lower East Siders have risen again to fight against what some call the “cultural genocide� caused by gentrification. The recent development of broad-based activist coalitions almost parallels that of a decade earlier. The activist population is somewhat of an anomaly. Today’s community activists, ironically, are representative of some of the earlier waves of gentrification. They are overwhelmingly white, educated young people, and artists.
Local activists have moved a little closer to electoral politics since 1997. On the LES, many anti-gentrification groups and individuals united to back City Council candidate Margarita Lopez. Lopez had a long history in the activist community advocating for low-income housing and minority rights. She was one of the original members of the JPC and was instrumental in getting minority representation on Community Board 3. The summer of 1997 galvanized political support for community garden preservation. Many candidates for Council, Borough President and Mayor held rallies in community gardens around the city. Those who were elected, or re-elected, Council Member Thomas K. Duane (for State Assembly), Council Member Lopez, and Borough President C. Virginia Fields, have all advocated for garden preservation. Although battles have been lost such as those over Del Este Village and the Suffolk Street Project, there has been mounting support to stop the sale and transfer of community gardens. The New York City Housing Partnership abandoned future development plans for the LES in 1998 citing community resistance as the cause. A few gardens such as Green Oasis (8th St. between Avenues C and D), 6BC Botanical (6th St. between Avenues B and C), and 6B (6th St. at Avenue B) have even been transferred back to the Parks Department as permanent sites. The Community Board and Parks Department have recommended other gardens for permanent status. In many cases, the Giuliani administration has not yet honored these recommendations and is continuing its plans to sell off many of the sites (PC Perin, PC Wright).
Opposition to the disposition of gardens has taken many forms. At a November 1998 land auction held by the Department of citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), protestors from a group calling itself “Jimminy Cricket� released 10,000 live crickets. The action garnered news coverage in all mediums. In addition, Council members and state representatives have been hard at work drafting legislation to prevent further sale of community gardens. Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden released a report showing that auctioned city-owned land often remains fallow for many years. In the case of auctioned gardens, they revert to the trash-strewn lots gardeners worked so hard to transform. In February 1999, the More Gardens! Coalition staged a walk out of a DCAS hearing for a May auction. After leaving the hearing room, the protesters occupied the City Hall rotunda and sang pro-garden songs. Some of these demonstrators, many of who worn bug and plant costumes, were arrested.
On April 11th 1999, Reclaim the Streets, a group that contests the privatization of public space, took over a section of Avenue A, transforming it into a garden with potted plants, see-saws, music, and dance for several hours before being dispersed by the police. A day earlier, pro-garden groups from around the country staged a rally in Bryant Park as part of a weekend conference under the title “Standing our Ground�. A critical mass of support has developed in the last two years for public space and gardens. In April of 1999 the Giuliani administration rejected a $2 million offer from the Trust for Public Land to buy 135 community gardens (including 115 slated for May auction) but later reached a deal with the New York Restoration Project. At a time when the city has a multi-billion dollar budget surplus, the argument that these properties must be returned to private hands and the tax rolls cannot justify the sale of precious open spaces rather than their preservation. The administration also argues that the need for housing is too great to permit the use of these properties for anything but housing. Some of the properties intended for sale are too small to be built on under today’s zoning regulations (4,000 square feet), and as the Golden Report showed, many auctioned properties are not developed for housing after they are sold. Future city actions around this explosive issue are unpredictable, and there is a sense in the garden community today that anything can happen. Garden supporters have vowed to fight any threats to community gardens, and their numbers are growing inside and outside city government. Instead of breaking up the social movement, gardeners and open space activists have become “united by a common deprivation or threat of deprivation to the neighborhood� (Cloward and Piven, p. 19). Once again the real estate interest-serving politicians and planners in government underestimated residents’ attachment and commitment to their neighborhoods

Conclusion

Government land disposition decisions shaped and reshaped the Lower East since the late 1920s. The most visible physical changes occurred in the depression and post war eras when slum clearance razed entire neighborhoods and the communities they harbored. Economic and social unrest during the 1960s staved off wholesale renewal but ultimately led to rampant abandonment and “burn-out� by the mid 1970s (Mele, p. 126). The spatial deconcentration policy that came out of the Kerner Commission was a direct attempt to disperse poor inner-city citizens into ineffectual minority populations spread among the tri-state region’s white majority. This spatial deconcentration policy has taken the last thirty years to manifest in the LES, starting with the simultaneous abandonment, speculative reinvestment, and gentrification of the 1970s and early 1980s. The economic boom of the 1980s signaled another push to gentrify the neighborhood for a new generation of white collar professionals. The Black Monday stock market crash thwarted this attempt in an eerie replay of the 1929 crash. Just before both market crashes, pressures to replace the poorer residents of the district were at their peak. As we enter the new millenium, the forces of gentrification have almost completed the economic and social transformation in parts of the district from low-rent slum to high-rent district first envisioned by politicians, planners, and developers more than seventy years ago.
Along the way, many social networks and self-help movements have risen, particularly during the ebb of gentrification pressures when the city has neglected the district’s needs. Among them, the self-help housing and the community gardening movements served as a regenerative force to combat the ills of landlord abandonment and arson. These social movements fulfilled the specific needs of many in the diverse community when the city government would not. Often times, the participants in these movements were directly responsible for the neighborhood renewal, beautification, anti-crime measures, and artistic or alternative culture that have made the district an attractive place to live, even for those able to afford pricier areas. Yet they acted as a base of power to resist gentrification and displacement, making them targets of the city government, rather than heroes. In the last 25 years, the city government made numerous decisions that threatened to destroy community movements and depoliticize the population. Yet the community continues to fight for its preservation. As Abu-Lughod wrote in 1991, “The government did not play a passive role, but indeed sought to encourage certain outcomes and discourage others� (p. 123). The motive for this encouragement was social control over and replacement of poor and minority residents in the district with a new, higher-class population.

Post Script

Leading up to the December 1997 demolition of four community gardens for the construction of Del Este Village, the movement became increasingly organized. Those demolitions galvanized a large group of garden preservation activists citywide who are fighting the city’s attempts to sell off community gardens. In the days leading up to the May 14, 1999 city auction of 114 gardens, the movement received generous public support from the news media and non-profit organizations including the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and the New York Restoration Project (NYRP). In a controversial eleventh hour deal, the NYRP offered the city $2.4 million for the 114 properties, despite the objection of many garden supporters who oppose on principle the concept of buying properties from the city. The TPL is in the process of creating local land trusts for each of the five boroughs to oversee community gardens and work towards permanent preservation of these open spaces. In the eleven months since the deal, some “saved� gardens deemed to have less “promise� have been taken back by the city and sold for auction.
Even with an outpouring of public support, including that of elected city and state politicians, the Giuliani administration maintains a policy of selling community gardens at auction. The State Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer, is also working towards garden preservation in the courts. He has brought a law suit under a state law that requires approval by the state legislature before any park land can be sold. The contention is that Green Thumb Gardens are parkland. To bolster this case, the “Samson Bill� is under consideration in the state senate to designate all community gardens, Green Thumb or not, as parkland. The City Council is working also working on legislation to preserve gardens. Numerous other groups have filed suite on other grounds including civil rights violations. The courts have acted favorably towards gardens but the administration has appealed many rulings and gardens have been demolished while their fate is still being determined. On February 14, 2000, Esperanza Garden was demolished by BFC to make way for a mostly high rent project.

Foot Notes

Editorial note: This work is excerpted and adapted from a larger paper written for a Senior Honors Thesis in the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University’s Undergraduate College of Arts And Sciences during the academic year 1998-1999.

“In rem� is the term for tax-foreclosed buildings.

A comparison of his 1968 Daedalus article and the Report Of the National Commission on Civil Disorders’s 16th and 17th chapters reveals that the two are almost identical.

For example, Mayor Giuliani was forced to return significant campaign donations from developers after the Campaign Finance Board ruled them to be illegal. News coverage during the 2000 Senate Campaign revealed $11,000 in returned past illegal donations from BFC Developers’ principals. BFC has been an active developer in District 3, responsible for the demolition of many community gardens. (As reported in the New York News Media in February-March 2000)

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