De Blasio’s Affordable Housing Fight Shifts to Neighborhood Battles

When the Council and the mayor struck a deal last week that all but guaranteed the administration could move ahead with its housing plan, political observers said it was an important moment.

“This is a linchpin for the housing program,” said George Arzt, a veteran political consultant and former communications adviser to Mayor Ed Koch, who put securing this deal right up there with the administration’s launch of pre-kindergarten.

Both are big campaign promises de Blasio is checking off the list, Arzt noted, adding, “To get this done …is very significant for his program and for his legacy.”

Arzt has worked for de Blasio in the past and is a lobbyist now; some of his clients are developers. But he also knows the challenges of the affordable housing game. When he worked for Koch, the city created 190,000 units of affordable housing. But Arzt says Koch had a distinct advantage: the city was building on land it owned.

De Blasio has set out to top that number without the benefit of cheap land by using different tools — from zoning changes to tax incentives —to reshape the market itself. Tuesday’s vote is just the first step. Now focus shifts to individual plans for 15 different neighborhoods where residents are still scared it will fuel a wave of gentrification and displacement

That's where someone like Reverend David Benke comes in. He's the pastor of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in East New York, the first neighborhood up for local rezoning. Benke has made his home there for decades. His church is a community hub. His Councilmember, Rafeal Espinal, lives about a block away.

On a chilly Thursday last month, as the mayor was still trying to build support for the citywide rezoning changes, Benke attended a closed-door meeting with community leaders at City Hall in the Blue Room, where de Blasio normally delivers his press conferences.

Espinal was also there, joined by Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who also represents the neighborhood.

They all sat around a square of tables. Each community leader was given an opportunity to speak and Benke went first. Dressed in his purplish-blue bishop’s regalia, he talked about displacement and the stress caused by speculators trying to push out homeowners.

“Our folks are being afflicted,” said Benke. “Every person here…receives a phone call, a robocall, a flier or a visit to sell their home. Every single day, they are afflicted with [someone] who says, ‘I can take this off your hands for cash now.'”

The mayor credited Benke with raising, “powerful points in the meeting.”

“We know right now that we can do a lot to stop evictions from rental apartments by providing legal services to folks threatened with eviction,” the mayor said in an interview with WNYC last week. “We don’t have as good a model to protect homeowners that might be the subject of speculators.”

Still the meeting worked – for now. Espinal is on board for the citywide rezonings. But he’s not sold on the plan for East New York. His community leaders are worried about traffic, schools, overall infrastructure. All those concerns will be funneled into a final plan for rezoning the neighborhood and another city council vote next month.

While the mayor speaks sympathetically, noting how quickly the city has changed, he offers a note of caution.

“You know the reference, ‘It’s better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.’ There’s a lot of people cursing the darkness now and I feel for them. But we better find something practical that we can do to keep working people in this city…and this plan is the best way to do that.”

The plan will be tested one neighborhood at time until the housing is built. But the score may be settled sooner than that, when the mayor is up for re-election next year.