Instead of visiting potential housing opportunities in person, I had to conduct impromptu meetings with other tenants or landlords through Zoom a couple thousand miles away from my future home. Because of the unprecedented housing circumstances caused by COVID-19, I – like far too many other young people looking to live in New York City – fell prey to an extremely predatory and illegal housing situation.

Upon finding what seemed to be an idyllic metropolitan solace in the very first Bed-Stuy brownstone I virtually toured, I naïvley moved in sight-unseen on July 15th. Initially it seemed like a perfect fit; the property itself was a traditional Brooklyn brownstone first constructed in the late 1880s. There was immediately some obvious structural damage to the building, but I was charmed by the Tiffany-blue interior, the 13-foot ceilings, the bay windows in my room and my five wonderful roommates. Because of these cosmetic, surface level attractions, I thought I would be able to ignore the sagging floorboards or the occasional sparking electrical outlet.

“The house has always been something we stopped and looked at for as long as we lived on this street,” said Tio Hernandez, one of my neighbors. “But after a while it wasn’t because the house looked good no more. It was because it was starting to crumble.”

In August of 2020, I had my very first encounter with the dangers the house on Willoughby Avenue posed. I was taking the trash out and inadvertently stepped on a rotted piece of plywood painted the same terracotta shade as the concrete surrounding it. Instantly my foot burst through the structure and I collapsed down the flight of stairs leading to the basement that the decomposed basement cover had concealed. Luckily I only sustained superficial injuries, but the incident itself led to a series of confrontations from our hostile landlord. Initially he accused me of tampering with the basement in order to lead to my fall, then claimed I had never fallen down in the first place, before finally saying he would fix the damages. 

After enduring months of endless new property damages and a second personal injury – where my bedroom window gusted into my room at a high speed hitting me in the face – my household decided to call 311, a NYC citizen hotline of sorts that allows individuals to seek help for numerous types of disputes, COVID related questions, report power outages and other public issues. We contacted the hotline to request an inspection of the property to be conducted in order to document the lack of repairs and inaction on the part of our landlord.

Following the inspection, on Dec 22, 2020 my household awoke to several alarming notices attached to our front door. The most glaring of them all reading in bolded print “The City of New York has deemed this property uninhabitable and all residents must vacate the property within seven days”. 

On Dec 29, 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed and approved an eviction ban or moratorium, essentially establishing that no one in the state could be evicted from their homes on the basis of COVID-19 related non rental payment. Tenants must show documentation of a “COVID related hardship” that led to their inability to continually pay rent in order to qualify and benefit from this moratorium. However, this new eviction ban doesn’t protect many populations of New Yorkers who are facing housing instability or homelessness. 

New Yorkers – like me – who were forced to vacate their homes due to unsafe living conditions documented by New York City’s Housing Preservation & Development office (HPD), are not protected by Cuomo’s eviction moratorium because they don’t meet the criteria necessary for federal protection. Because of this, thousands of tenants are threatened with homelessness if they cannot or do not have the means to relocate or find new dwellings by the allotted time frame. 

“It is really a frightening prospect for many tenants who maybe don’t have the means or options to live in safer homes or are being threatened by predatory landlords,” said Alexander Morris, a volunteer with the mutual aid group, Brooklyn Eviction Defense (BED). 

One perhaps unforeseen silver lining in the struggle for equitable housing and defense against exploitatory landlords is the increase in community organization and aid. When I first moved to NYC, it was my expectation that I wouldn’t necessarily be embraced by my surrounding community. Perhaps there would be polite interactions and daliences, but I subscribed to the belief that New Yorkers simply weren’t neighborly and didn’t concern themselves with the everyday goings of the strangers around them. However, I was entirely mistaken.

The day we woke up to the vacate notice I called several mutual aid groups and free legal service hotlines to see what, if anything, could be done to advocate for myself and my roommates. Immediately I was met with an outpouring of support, concern for my well being, and an abundance of help.

One day my landlord threatened to come and illegally change the locks before Dec 29, the day we were supposed to leave the premises. Fearing for my safety and my belongings, I contacted Brooklyn Eviction Defense and within 30 minutes, nearly 15 volunteers arrived to physically block anyone from Smart Equities or my landlord himself from entering the premises. This constant circulation and rotation of strangers were not only putting their own health and wellbeing at risk, but doing so because they knew we needed help and didn’t have any other options or resources. And BED is only one of dozens of similar organizations in the five boroughs that offer similar services. 

“When I was being illegally evicted from my home on Dean street this summer, I couldn’t believe the sheer amount of people who showed up for us,” said Scout Gottfried, a tenant who was this past summer similarly embroiled in a tenant-landlord housing dispute. “I mean, our community raised thousands of dollars for us during the whole ordeal, brought us meals regularly, and stood guard in front of our house to make sure we were ok. It was something beautiful during such a horrendous ordeal”.

While the dramatics of my own housing dilemma are drawing to a close – squatters recently occupied the vacant hull of the building I used to call home and we have attended our last virtual NYC housing court proceeding – it is obvious that the coronavirus pandemic will only continue to intensify the dire housing situation in this city. With thousands of tenants facing eviction come May when the eviction moratorium is lifted, it is imperative that we continue to serve the needs of those facing housing insecurity and enact a more exhaustive eviction moratorium for the duration of the pandemic. 

The post Willoughby Avenue housing nightmare appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Our first episode takes listeners to Crown Heights, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in central Brooklyn, where two high rise residential towers threaten to block the sunlight upon which the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s greenhouses rely. Rents are rising fast in Crown Heights, and affordable housing is increasingly hard to find, but will community members welcome more housing even if it comes at the expense of a thriving botanic garden?

Additional Reading:

• Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability (Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O’Regan)
• City NIMBYs (Vicki Been)

The post Crown Heights – Franklin Avenue appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Our final episode focuses on Inwood, one of the last affordable neighborhoods in Manhattan. The Inwood rezoning has faced community scrutiny and legal challenge since it was proposed in 2018, and its future remains uncertain. When a city with a scarcity of housing can’t build more, what happens? How can communities ensure their neighborhoods will stay affordable if wealthier households will move in regardless of whether or not there is new development?

Additional Reading:

• Does gentrification displace poor children and their families? (Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sherry Glied)
• Do New Housing Units in Your Backyard Raise Your Rents? (Xiaodi Li)
• The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market (Evan Mast, Upjohn Institute)

Homepage photo courtesy of AMNY

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“You’d think people are lined up to go to a really popular concert or something,” said Julia McNally, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society. In reality, the people on line are struggling tenants, many of them facing the hovering threat of eviction.

Inside the cramped courthouse, tenants make their way through crowded hallways cluttered with baby carriages, walkers, and wheelchairs, as they settle in for what is often a grueling day in a system that has become known to attorneys like McNally as New York City’s “eviction mill.” At security, tenants are told to give up any food and water they have on hand and funneled into wide hallways to await their time slot. There is no child care available at the Bronx housing court so wailing babies and impatient toddlers often accompany their anxious parents.

But today, the stressful hustle and bustle of housing court has been traded in for silence. There is no line outside or inside housing court, in the Bronx or in any other New York City borough. On March 13, as coronavirus continued to spread throughout the city, a coalition of New York’s largest landlords announced a voluntary 90-day stay on evictions. Then, two days later, New York courts made it official, putting an eviction moratorium into effect indefinitely, with Governor Andrew Cuomo later specifying that it would last at least 90 days. Non-essential court employees were told to stay home. Housing court went dark.

Throughout the city’s five boroughs, tenants are waiting in limbo, anxious to see how the coronavirus crisis will unfold and how it will impact people who have  only recently stopped paying rent and those already in eviction proceedings. New York’s City Council reported that tenants in more than 19,000 New York City apartments were evicted during the 2018 calendar year. By the end of 2020, that number could look positively minuscule.

With many tenants out of work and rent strike movements growing, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find any kind of historical precedent for the current crisis.

“This pandemic is unique, in terms of its economic impact,” said Céline Gounder, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “So it’s going to have an impact in terms of evictions in a way that, frankly, most of the others have not. You haven’t seen the world economy destroyed by a pandemic like this before.”

For one of New York’s busiest courts, it has been a considerable adjustment. As of 2018, the City Council reported that the Bronx had the highest eviction rate of any New York City borough, with 1 eviction for every 79 units in the county. Eviction petitions in the borough have steadily risen even as the median household income has remained stagnant, skyrocketing to more than 69,000 in 2017 – 39 percent of the city’s total. The state’s eviction moratorium means those petitions are effectively on pause for at least the next three months – and that tenants can continue to withhold rent for as long as the moratorium proceeds. As the first day of April drew closer, landlords and real estate experts prepared for as many as 40% of tenants to skip their rent payments.

“This rent moratorium has definitely made it very difficult both financially and emotionally,” said Richard St. Paul, director of the New York Small Home Owners Association, which represent small landlords in the city. “These small home owners depend on the income to provide for their families and also take care of their homes.”

With a rent cancellation bill stalled in the state legislature, skipping rent could prove a temporary solution to a widespread problem for tenants. As current legislation stands, tenants cannot currently be evicted for failing to pay rent. But once the state’s eviction freeze ends, the courts may well have to deal with a surge in holdover evictions, including both the thousands that were being processed when the freeze went into place, and potentially thousands more thrown into the system as out-of-work tenants delay rent payments during the pandemic.

A study from the non-profit Community Service Society found that only 30% of New Yorkers have more than $1,000 saved in preparation for an emergency. With the country’s unemployment rate rising as high as 13 percent, those numbers could be a recipe for disaster.

For Mary O’Leary, who belongs to a Brooklyn tenants association, this hypothetical precarious financial situation is all too real. “I am able to pay back rent currently,” she said, “but that’s because I haven’t gotten sick. Say I do get COVID-19. To pay those medical expenses, I will no longer be able to pay rent.”

Tenants at 1234 Pacific Street in Brooklyn are staging a rent strike to press landlords to reduce rent during the coronavirus pandemic. Photo provided by Mary O’Leary.

In April, O’Leary joined two-thirds of her building’s residents in a rent strike, refusing to pay rent until landlords meet a set of demands, including cutting rent in half for tenants for the duration of the crisis and potentially removing the requirement in full for tenants who have lost work as a result of the pandemic. It’s a choice she made partially to support neighbors in more precarious positions, and partially to make sure she’ll be protected in the future, as the crisis continues.

McNally and her fellow tenants are bracing for their landlord to take them to court if the moratorium ends and rent cancellation legislation has not been passed. But if a backup in eviction proceedings leads to a three-lane pileup once the current crisis is resolved, this already-complicated situation may become virtually impossible to navigate.

Set foot in Housing Court and you’ll often hear a chorus of names being called by landlords’ attorneys, struggling to settle with the tenants they’ve been tasked to find. After discussing the possibility of reaching a settlement, attorneys and tenants will go before a court attorney, who may in turn encourage a settlement. Only then does the tenant appear before a judge.

In a normal time, this standard level of institutional crowding means speed is king in Housing Court. For landlords who may be in the process of evicting multiple tenants, that speed is an asset. For tenants, it often means settling with landlords without a chance to find a lawyer,  said McNally, the Legal Aid attorney.

Tenants have only recently gained the right to counsel. And since the introduction of the right to counsel model in 2017, which was part of broad housing reform legislation, the cacophony in the bustling court has only grown louder. When McNally, now a supervising attorney at Legal Aid who works in Queens, enters the courthouse, her first priority is to find the tenant she is representing. “We just go into the courtrooms and yell out the tenants’ names to try to make that connection with them,” she said. Courtrooms scattered across three floors mean attorneys have to run back and forth as the day progresses.

Along with Housing Court reform came a movement towards staggered appointment times, at 9:30, 10:30, and 11:30. As the next appointment time closed in, McNally described a frantic rush to dispose of earlier cases, with court attorneys yelling out every name on their list even as tenants’ and landlords’ attorneys are doing the same – all in the same courtroom where a judge is hearing cases at the same time.

These changes aren’t the only piece of legislation in New York’s movement towards housing reform. In June 2019, the newly-elected Democratic majority in the New York State Senate passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

For activists in pursuit of more affordable housing in cities like New York, the new law instituted important changes. It placed limits on how much rent landlords can recover after renovating or otherwise improving a building, as well as limits on security deposits and an attempted limit on broker’s fees, which is currently in arbitration.

Most significantly, the law made it easier for tenants to avoid huge rent increases between lease renewals. Before the Tenant Protection Act, landlords were able to charge tenants a “preferential rent,” somewhere below the legal regulated limit, before raising the rent up to that limit when the tenant renewed their lease. The 2019 law restricted this ability.

“Before the HSTPA, landlords could charge tenants below what the legal regulated rent of the unit was, but then at lease renewal could raise that up to the legal regulated rent, even if that represented a dramatic rent increase for the tenant,” said Charles McNally, who serves as communications director at NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy. (He also happens to be the husband of McNally, the Legal Aid lawyer.)  “Now, if a landlord offers a preferential rent, the tenant is entitled to a rent increase based on that preferential rent, not on whatever the legal regulated rent is, even if it’s higher.”

Some landlords say these new restrictions are making it difficult to keep buildings in order. A lawsuit filed by the Buildings and Realty Institute of Westchester in the February following the law’s passage charged that the bill, which changed the existing Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974, created new hardships for landlords.

St. Paul of  the Small Home Owners Association agreed.

“The new [Tenant Protection Act] of 2019 already placed a number of limitations on landlords’ ability to deal with tenants who are not paying rent,” he said. “This rent moratorium has added more financial pressure….that they already had to bear as a result of the change in law.”

But according to Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All, the laws still leave landlords with the upper hand. “What we have right now is a lot of folks fac[ing] retaliatory evictions, or consequences for complaining about living conditions, or landlords simply raise the rent because they want someone out,” Weaver said.

Now, Housing Justice for All is fighting for a rent freeze, as well as rent, mortgage, and utility suspension for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.

Housing Justice for All is also continuing to push for a good-cause eviction provision, which would prevent landlords from evicting tenants for retaliatory or frivolous reasons.  “A good cause eviction would give you the right to renew your lease with a limited rent increase that covers the landlord’s costs and allows a modest profit but doesn’t allow for price-gouging,” Weaver said.

A good cause eviction provision was originally included in the Tenant Protection Act, championed by freshman State Senator Julia Salazar, but it failed to pass in June. Now, tenants are facing a world that feels primed for exactly the concerns Weaver raised, with landlords pushing renters out of homes over concerns that may not take the current global crisis into account.

Within moments, the Zoom chat was blowing up. It was a recent weekday evening and a local city council member was hosting a virtual town hall on housing issues during the pandemic, and tenants had lots and lots of questions.

“What is the impact of notice of late payment for future leases and credit?” read one text.

“How do I go about breaking my lease?” said another.

The meeting’s host, Michael Grinthal of TakeRoot Justice, had to ask attendants to limit their questions until the end of the Zoom call. There was a lot to get to first.

In the past, Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal’s office had held a housing clinic in person, on the first Wednesday of every month. Tenants in the councilwoman’s district on the Upper West Side could attend and raise questions about their rent, about conflicts with landlords, and about housing policy in general. In New York, housing can be a sticking point in even the best of times, and meetings like this one are a necessity for tenants throughout the five boroughs.

But now, with in-person gatherings restricted, the housing clinic has moved online. “We’re improvising, just like everyone else,” Councilwoman Rosenthal said in her introduction.

“We’re going to try to reach as many questions as we can,”  Grinthal said. “I know there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of things that people want to know, so we may not get to every question.”

Across the occasionally scratchy connection of Zoom’s video chat, lawyers from TakeRoot Justice and the Goddard Riverside Law Project described the changes tenants would face with Housing Court’s closing.

Some answers were simple. Evictions remain restricted in New York, except in cases where a landlord can prove a tenant is an immediate physical threat.

Others were more complex. Grinthal noted that as part of the eviction moratorium, the governor had ordered all sheriffs and marshals to cease carrying out evictions.

“It is illegal, and it always has been illegal, even before this crisis, for a landlord to evict somebody without using a marshal or a sheriff,” Grinthal said. “[That’s] what we call a ‘self-help eviction,’ where a landlord locks somebody out on their own.”

In cases where a tenant has been in residence for more than 30 days, such a situation is indeed illegal, and New York City police officers are trained specifically regarding how to handle them. But that hasn’t stopped some landlords from taking advantage of the crisis to change apartments’ locks, according to a Buzzfeed News report.

“We are definitely concerned that more landlords are going to be tempted to resort to illegal lock-outs, now that they cannot use marshals or sheriffs to do legal evictions,” Grinthal said.

In such cases, Grinthal noted that Housing Court remains open and available to assist tenants in emergency situations. Tenants must simply file a claim reporting an illegal lockout.

But for eviction cases already in progress when the state’s eviction moratorium came through, tenants remain in limbo – granted a brief reprieve, but unsure of what the future may hold. Tenants who have been ordered to leave  their apartments have seen their cases frozen. Landlords may not move to evict them until the moratorium has been lifted.

Grinthal said some of those tenants who had retained legal services may hear from judges about the possibility of settling with their landlords, but remote court proceedings will not extend to eviction cases for as long as the moratorium remains in effect.

On April 6, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore and Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence K. Marks released a statement announcing that state courts would resume operations remotely, allowing essential and emergency court operations to proceed. Landlords pounced, hoping that the memo might provide an opportunity to continue hearing existing eviction cases.

Tenants’ attorneys disagreed, and after a few days, so did the courts. Housing Court Supervising Judge Jean Schneider penned a letter confirming that eviction cases would not proceed remotely. “The court system’s administrative orders and the governor’s emergency orders continue to stay all eviction proceedings and bar all evictions statewide,” Schneider wrote. “Within this major limitation, we are looking for ways to move cases along where we can.”

When the crisis does come to an end, tenants and landlords alike are preparing for what State Senator Brad Hoylman called a potential “tidal wave” of evictions. In early April, Hoylman and fellow state representatives Liz Krueger and Jeffrey Dinowitz introduced the Tenant Safe Harbor Act, which would prohibit landlords from evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent during the eviction moratorium and for six months after it ends. Another bill, from State Senator Michael Gianaris, would cancel rent for 90 days following the act’s passage.

Housing Justice for All has voiced concerns with Hoylman’s bill, claiming that its allowance of “money judgements” for landlords essentially amounts to a form of debt collection. “Basically, a money judgement says that while you can’t be evicted, your landlord could still take you to Housing Court,” Weaver said.

But it will still take some time for any tenants to head back to Housing Court. Back in Councilwoman Rosenthal’s remote housing clinic, Grinthal warned that the courts are unlikely to reopen at full operating capacity. “What will happen when the courts reopen is an excellent question,” he said. “It’s very unlikely that the courts will just suddenly one day be completely open for business and everything will go forward, because the courts themselves are going to take some time to phase back in and get things going again.”

St. Paul, who represents small landlords, sees the situation concluding in much the same way it did before the crisis began. “It’s going to be resolved with a lot of negotiation that already takes place in the courts now, where most cases are negotiated with a settlement, versus going to a trial,” he said. “What we’ll see right now is that there will be a huge uptick in people…looking for money rather than still seeking evictions, because it’s so difficult to evict a tenant based on…the fact that they haven’t paid rent.”

To Weaver and her colleagues at Housing Justice for All, the situation remains dire, for tenants and landlords alike, and clearly requires immediate attention.

“We’re trying to get the governor to cancel rent,” Weaver said. “We want a hardship fund for small landlords, but the reality is that we think the economy’s going to be suffering for long after COVID-19’s public health crisis has receded, so we really need some longer-term intervention.”

John DiLillo  is an NYU undergraduate journalism student in Prof. Rachel Swarns’ Advanced Reporting: Law & Order

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On her way to stay with her family for spring break, and until in-person classes resumed, she packed the essentials, leaving the rest behind in her New York University dorm room. 

That Sunday, the government of Puerto Rico put in place a curfew. And on Monday, to her dismay, a memorandum from her university announced that all dorms would be shutting down, giving approximately 12,000 students living in housing less than a week’s notice to move out, and advising them to do so within 48 hours.

“It was contrary to everything they had told us up until that point,” she said. “They could have told us to move out before spring break. Everything I own is in that room.”

All over the US, universities have been closing down student housing in response to the new coronavirus outbreak, some of them turning the dorms into facilities for quarantine or temporary hospitals. The situation has been escalating day by day, and institutions have been struggling to quickly respond to an unprecedented crisis.

New York has been hit particularly hard, and is quickly becoming the epicenter of the outbreak in the US. 

The email sent out by NYU President Andrew Hamilton on March 16th offered to have student’s belongings packed and shipped for free and assured they would be reimbursed for the rest of the semester. It instructed those who were away for spring break and planned to return to “do so as soon as possible”.

It also gave students the possibility to petition for an exception, noting that “the bar will be high” and warning them that they might still be asked to move to another house. According to several students, the university only responded to their requests on Thursday, three days before the final deadline to move out.

“I decided to seek temporary housing, because of how long it took for them to respond to the housing requests,” 23-year old graduate student Pak Ho, said.

Like Ho, who is originally from Hong Kong, hundreds of international students, who are around 27% of residents, were put in a complicated situation, unable to go home, because of travel restrictions, health concerns and fear of not being able to return soon.

“I can’t go back because of the visa issues and travel bans that are already on Iran,” a graduate student who asked to not be identified because he is considering pursuing legal action against NYU, said. “[Getting a visa] was a really, really, really hard process. Now the University is asking me to go home. They didn’t think about it in terms of international students, who don’t have any place here and they can’t go anywhere.”

He found a temporary place to stay, through the help of a coalition of students and the GSOC student-worker union, which dubbed themselves the “NYU COVID Coalition”. In response to the initial memorandum, the group promptly took the role of advocating for students and forming a system to pair up people who could provide any type of housing and students in need. 

The Iranian student did get his petition for an exception approved, but still preferred to move out.

Students have noted the generosity they’ve felt from people offering up the homes, either for a place to crash or for storage, and also from the NYU COVID Coalition. Just not from NYU.

“Through my four years at NYU, I’ve gotten a sense that they don’t care about their students,” Nagovitch, who is a fourth-year housing resident, said. “And that was just completely validated.”

Iraj Eshghi, a student worker who is part of the NYU COVID Coalition, said the group is especially concerned about the way NYU handled the process of moving people out, more than the decision to close dorms.

“At least the way it was done for graduate students, was they out of the blue,” he said. “ I wouldn’t entirely blame NYU for that, because it seems like nobody was prepared for this.  But just the way NYU dealt with it was particularly harmful [to students].”

On March 17th, one day after the announcement that housing would be closing, Senior Vice President for Student Affairs Marc Wais sent out a more informal email as a response to the initial backlash. It highlighted how they would now be offering the possibility for students to have their possessions locked in their room, and how only “students who are in day-trip range” should return to campus to pack up their belongings.

It also offered some further explanation as to why students were being kicked out of housing: for their own safety and for the university to possibly be able to offer up its dorms as a state contingency plan in the event of hospitals being overwhelmed.

“I know that some of you may feel that the University should have anticipated this decision earlier,” Wais wrote. “Nonetheless, I can promise you that it is not the case that NYU knew all along that it was going to end up here.”

Pavement Pieces reached out to the Office of Student Affairs, for an interview with Marc Wais, but could not get one in time for this article. The questions sent via email also remain unanswered.

“I understand why they closed residence halls, I understand everything that they explained in the second email,” 22-year-old senior Jana Cholakovska, from North Macedonia, said. “I was mostly upset about the language and the fact that they made it seem like we had known rather than them convincing us that it was all going to be fine. In fact, you know, we were convinced for a very long time that we were not gonna be kicked out”?

Wais talked about the situation in an article published on Tuesday, March 17th, in the New York Times.

“Mr. Wais indicated that many students had not heeded earlier calls to leave their dormitories. ‘Altogether, this was the opposite of what we needed’,” the article said. 

But just a few days before, on the 12th, an email from NYU Residential Life & Housing Services stated, “the residence halls remain open at this time, supported by NYU staff members.”

In fact, most students, even resident advisers, said that they were completely blindsided on Monday by the announcement that the dorms would be closing. 

But in just several days the spread of the virus continued at an alarming rate. It became clear that dorms could only be used by students who had no other choice.

By the end of the week, some of the students who asked to have their possessions packed and shipped were still struggling to figure out just how that process was going to happen. 

“I have packed some of my stuff. But some of my stuff isn’t packed and there’s no way I can go back,” Lyvi Wren, a 23-year-old student from Canada, said. “I get that they’re going to pack things up and ship them. But when are they going to do that? What are they going to do about things in the common area?”

Others have raised questions about, for example, who exactly would be doing the move, the number of things that could be shipped and whether there would be an insurance policy. Overall, the lack of information has kept everyone in a state of unease.

“You’re at a point where you don’t know who to talk to,” Nagovitch said. “Instead of answering the phone, a little voice comes up and tells you to go check the coronavirus website for updates.”

A statement put out early in the week by the Inter-Residence Hall Council addressed some concerns regarding the way the housing situation was managed, including the lack of information regarding their decision.

“This was done without any notice to any of the groups that represent or work for NYU Residents,” it said. “We recognize that extreme measures and decisions are increasingly common across the nation, but it should be recognized that consulting students about decisions that impact student housing and well-being will logically create better decisions.”

They also addressed health concerns, regarding the way the university called on their students to go back to housing to get their belongings. Contrary to the recommendations that have been given out by authorities, they advised students to travel back to New York and to come together at the same time in the halls, “almost certainly” leading to gatherings of 10 or more people. 

“I completely understand why they did it,” Cholakovska said. “But I think that they put their students in danger when they told everyone to come back immediately and preferably move out within 48 hours. My first fear was, ‘oh my god, this is going to create a bottleneck effect where all of us are going to start moving out in the same at the same time’.”

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Nestled into a compact segment of South Brooklyn, the Raymond V. Ingersoll Housing project is encircled by more prosperous neighborhoods. The Metrotech Center sits directly across Flatbush Avenue to the west, alongside NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. But now, the Ingersoll Houses also find themselves at the center of a heated debate over the future of public housing in New York City.

The Ingersoll project is operated by the New York City Housing Authority, which is currently under fire for systemic neglect and abuse of its 400,000 tenants. Last June, federal prosecutors accused the authority of covering up appalling living conditions for public housing residents, including lead paint, faulty heating, and infestation by roaches and rats. The report ultimately led to the city government accepting greater oversight from the federal government as it moves to alleviate the crisis.

In Ingersoll, deprivation has taken the form of intermittent heating, which puts pressure on families with young children. Despite this, residents reject the pessimism that colors public perceptions of New York public housing. Resident Janai Tucker cited familial bonds and the project’s sense of community as sources of strength for its residents.

“Sometimes the neighborhood can be dangerous,” Tucker said. “But it’s like a family…it’s all built up off of family members. There’s people that lived in Fort Greene five years ago, and they have family in Fort Greene, so their kids can know people in Fort Greene.”

Dwayne Fussell, a former public housing worker, has lived in the Ingersoll project his entire life. And for him, the community’s prospects have improved significantly since the turbulence of previous decades, although heating remains a major concern.

“The heat and hot water is not as great as it used to be,” Fussell said. “I’ve seen that they’d dug up all the ground and put these big lime-green pipes down here, and I don’t see what it’s supposed to have done. But now, if you look they’re putting the right pipes down there. Now, the heat is starting to come up and the hot water’s starting to come up.”

These improvements haven’t completely remedied the situation, however. The main obstacle now, according to Fussell, is consistent heating.

“You need heat and hot water all the way around, from morning, noon and night,” he explained. “But it’s still not like that. At night, a person that has a child, an infant, in the house, why do you have to bundle up that infant in layers of blankets at night, when you’re supposed to have the heat at night? I went through this with my son. My son is 16 now – I went through this since then.”

More than anything, Fussell seemed to take heart from his fellow Ingersoll residents, and the communal spirit they embodied.

“You have a lot of productive people here in the projects that does good,” he said. “It’s not all as bad as everybody make it seems.”

One of Ingersoll’s productive residents is Michael Pabon. An Iraq War veteran, Pabon assists his neighbors as a carpenter and electrician. And after 12 years in the project with his wife and son, Pabon feels optimistic about the community’s future.

“NYCHA have improved, but they do have their faults,” Pabon said. “Living conditions at times are, bad. And that’s all with a phone call, within the system. You have to let them know what’s going wrong, what’s broke, and what a tenant can expect to get fixed. But other than that, this neighborhood has come a long way in the last 20, 30 years.”

Ingersoll resident Michael Pabon sees a bright future for the project’s residents. Photo by Teddy Haines.

Apart from NYCHA responsiveness, Pabon cited other improvements in the neighborhood’s quality of life. He pointed out recent construction of a laundromat and other amenities, as well as the project’s increasing ethnic diversity.

“Lot of nice Asians, Africans, Indians, there’s a big ethnic melting pot here, and for the most part, everyone gets along,” Pabon said. “You have those very few that unfortunately make the neighborhood not so nice. But we have to live with it, and we make the best of it.”

The post Housing projects residents find community despite harsh living conditions appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

On Thanksgiving day, it was 22 degrees in New York City. It was the kind of cold that seeped through walls and drafted through windows. Viviana Wrenn was one of hundreds of New York City Housing Authority residents in the city who didn’t have heat. She and her son, who turned one-year-old just a few days before, huddled under blankets near her space heater to stay warm. After one month of living in the Stebbins Avenue Bronx NYCHA development, she said her apartment was heated less than 30 percent of the time.

Wrenn is not alone. Of the estimated 400,000 people living in the NYCHA housing developments, countless filed complaints over the Thanksgiving holidays about lack of heat, hot water and other essential services. The news reports closely about the lack of heat and hot water followed other recent public investigations into lead, mold, and vermin infestations that marred the agency’s reputation. NYCHA has launched several smaller programs to address certain  developments’ most pressing problems, but with older buildings and costly system issues, even minor repairs are a challenge.

“I’ve had nothing but problems since I’ve moved in,” Wrenn said. “I’ve just got out of the family shelter system. I was living in the shelter system since I was pregnant. I was lucky enough to get an apartment with NYCHA.”

Viviana Wrenn lives on the 800 block  of Rev James A Polite Avenue.   Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

But the process of moving was riddled with issues. First her keys didn’t work. Then the apartment unit she moved into wasn’t clean and the door looked like it had been pried open by a crowbar. The intercom system for the entire housing complex didn’t work. Wrenn filed complaints repeatedly. They were marked as completed – but nothing changed. She contacted management. She stopped maintenance workers in the hallways. Nothing changed.

“I feel like they are constantly trying to pass the buck,” she said. Every system in place for Wrenn to address her issues failed her. Between working and taking care of her young son alone while her husband served his prison sentence, trying to make her home livable drains her remaining energy. “Whenever you put a ticket in for heat or hot water, they don’t contact you. They don’t have maintenance come and check what could possibly be wrong.”

“It’s very frustrating. I give my son a warm bath, and as soon as I take him out of his bath, he’s shivering. In his towel. Which is wrong.”

Caridad Nova also lives in NYCHA housing. She lives in the South Jamaica projects in Queens. Her heat works and her windows don’t let in the cold air, but her ceiling lets in the rain. She’s lived in NYCHA housing almost her whole life with the exception of two and a half years she spent living in the family shelter system. Nova lives with her daughter, who is only three years old.

“Every time I report that I have a problem in my apartment, they don’t come on the day when I ask them,” Nova said. “Like right now, I have a leak in my living room, right? And everytime it rains, it’s like it’s raining in my house. I reported it before, and they never came. So I reported it again.”

Nova said that she’s had the leak in her ceiling for three weeks. Every storm brings cold, wet weather into her apartment. She and her daughter developed asthma while they were living in the family shelter system, and the damp air doesn’t help. Previous studies have found links between people who live in shelters and high rates of asthma.

“I haven’t gotten any of my furniture yet because I’m waiting for them to fix what they need to fix,” Nova said. “They need to renew NYCHA, NYCHA buildings, they need to do something. Because this is crazy. Everything is getting worse by the day.”

The conditions Wrenn and Nova described have caused a public crisis. Lynne Patton, who oversees New York and New Jersey’s Division of the Federal Housing and Urban Development agency expressed extreme dismay on Twitter following the circulation of a video of a NYCHA resident recorded her ceiling leaking. “Dear Migrant Caravan: We know the majority of you seek asylum for a better life in America,” Patton wrote, to people fleeing “abject poverty” in their home countries. “Well, with all due respect, don’t come to NYC.”

While Patton’s comments were not widely accepted by many New York City politicians – NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson called the remarks a “publicity stunt” – those living under the conditions of NYCHA housing aren’t batting an eye at dramatic comparisons. On Dec. 3, the water at the Patterson Houses, another development managed by NYCHA that is also in the Bronx, lost all water. Tenants were forced to line up on the block in cold temperatures in order to get water from fire hydrants.  

The rules posted at  a NYCHA development on Rev James A Polite Avenue in the Bronx.  Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

“Staff have been working on repairing the house pumps and are in the process of setting up temporary pumps now,” NYCHA officials said in a statement to the press about the Patterson water outages. “This is yet another example of the problems we face given our aging infrastructure, but we must do better providing basic services despite these challenges.”

New York City Council member Rafael Salamanca represents the 17th District and 15,000 NYCHA residents. His district has the third largest population of NYCHA tenants. His office has made a point of actively showing up at NYCHA developments when issues facing residents go unaddressed. He is aware that NYCHA will sometimes only address an issue after they’ve been publicly called out.

“From broken elevators to huge holes in the walls to leaking roofs, many of the 15,520 NYCHA residents I represent live under terrible conditions, and it’s an utter disgrace,” said Council Member Rafael Salamanca Jr. “NYCHA is broken. Years of mismanagement and dwindling federal investment has left hundreds of thousands of NYCHA residents in unlivable apartments.  NYCHA is NYC’s biggest landlord and they should be able to address the basic requirements demanded of any landlord. My office has been working hard to remedy issues constituents face and hold NYCHA accountable.”

Throughout an endless number of issues, NYCHA’s response – if there is one – has targeted specific and immediate issues. Following the multiple news reports this year about unfulfilled maintenance requests (like Viviana’s), NYCHA announced a program in July 2018 to fulfill 50,000 requests through 2019. The program is called NYCHA Cares.

“NYCHA Cares is the latest demonstration of the Authority’s renewed commitment to improving our residents’ quality of life both today and tomorrow,” said NYCHA General Manager Vito Mustaciuolo in a statement to the press. “We are focused every day on making sure our residents know that we are not only listening to their needs but also working proactively to deliver tangible results.”

The maintenance repairs happened in “blitzes.” Hundreds of work orders would be filled in over a single Saturday. On Dec. 8 five different developments were repaired – none of those developments were Caridad Nova’s or Viviana Wrenn’s. Posts on NYCHA’s Twitter account showed sinks being repaired, door knockers being fixed and plumbing issues being addressed.

“Saturday maintenance work order blitz is kicking off at 5 [sic] sites across the City” the agency wrote on Twitter. “If you’re a Baruch, Patterson, Kingsborough, Ravenswood or West Brighton resident, management offices are open for recerts and other assistance until 4:30 today.”

But even as work orders are being addressed, residents are still having to endure daunting living situations in the interim. Viviana Wrenn was told that she would have to wait until Dec. 21 until her broken fridge (which was broken when she moved in) was fixed. NYCHA previously filed that her work order was fixed– but Wrenn still tapes her fridge shut with duct tape.

While work orders can be filled and issues like clogged toilets and broken fridges can be fixed, if maintenance workers do show up – citywide issues with aging infrastructure and lack of sufficient funding leave residents like Caridad Nova and Viviana Wrenn feeling like they’ve abandoned by their local government. They are systemic issues that cannot be repaired in a maintenance “blitz.” As the temperatures continue to drop, residents without heat and hot water might have to live through more cold holidays – and hope that the rain and snow stays out of their living rooms.

“If you wouldn’t live in our buildings in these conditions,” Wrenn said. “Why would you make us live in these buildings in these conditions?”

The post Left in The Cold: NYCHA housing residents wait endlessly for repairs appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Nestled between rising luxury apartments and the country’s largest public housing development lies the future home of Amazon’s new headquarters. For the low-income and homeless residents in Long Island City, the incoming business serves as a reminder of rampant gentrification and social injustice.

Felix Guzman, 37, is homeless and has spent time in and out of shelters, including in Long Island City. He believes that the billion-dollar company’s move is going to destroy what remains of the city’s affordability for thousands of families.

“Queensbridge actually has the biggest project in the United States,” Guzman said of the area just north of Long Island City. “Seeing how rents are being raised all over the place, do we really need a situation where excess is right next to poverty?”

Queensbridge public housing. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

After repeated attempts, Amazon did not respond to comment about what they believe their impact on New York’s homeless community will be. New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio stated the company will prove beneficial to New York City, but has not mentioned it’s direct impact on the homeless community.

Within days of someone leaking Amazon’s news on Nov. 5, housing interest in the area saw a dramatic increase. According to StreetEasy, the number of searches to purchase a home in Long Island City increased by 283 percent. That number only increased again once Amazon officially announced its plans Nov. 13, with a surge of 519 percent.

According to Amazon, the average income for their New York workers will be $150,000 a year. But the median income for Long Island City, Queensbridge and Ravenwood, is only $28,378. This insurgence of high-income residents will be be reflected in rental costs and surrounding businesses, and with 19 percent of Long Island City residents living in poverty, 9 percent facing unemployment and 48 percent feeling heavily burdened by rent, Amazon opponents believe hundreds of people will be displaced.   

Mario McMichael, director of programs and new initiatives at The Partnership for the Homeless, has seen this happen countless times in other areas of New York City and predicts the cost of living in Long Island City will only increase.  

“We know that the property values of the units immediately surrounding this area where Amazon will be will double, triple and quadruple,” McMichael said. “The expectation of the workers being there earning an average salary of $150,000 will want to live somewhere close to where they want to work. That displaces the people that are living there now.”

As Amazon moves in, so does rampant gentrification

McMichael believes tenant laws are not strictly enforced throughout the city. One of the most common problems his organization sees in gentrified areas is landlords forcing lower paying tenants out to attract those who will be willing to pay more.

“What we find is that the people at the low end of the totem pole also get just terrible, despicable landlords that violate all sorts of housing laws,” he said. “These families typically get pushed to the outer fringes, like places that aren’t the most desirable, places where there may be more poverty and higher instances of crime. They get pushed there until, of course, those places gentrify too.”

Homeless New Yorker Nathylin Flowers Adesegan, 72, leads a group of people on Nov. 26 as they march to the Amazon Bookstore on 34th street to protest Amazon opening a new headquarters location in Long Island City. Photo by Li Cohen

Nathylin Flowers Adesegan is just one of the many who have been pushed out. After living in her rent stabilized apartment for decades, the 72-year-old now shares a small, double room with three other women in a homeless shelter.

“I lost my apartment because the rent went from $475 to $1,319.16 a month,” she said. “I was there 34-and-a-half years. So many of us have been evicted and pushed out of our neighborhood and shiny new buildings pop up all around us. We can’t afford to live in them and it’s set to get worse when Amazon comes.”

While Adesegan is grateful to have a roof over her head, she explained that living in a shelter requires individuals to accept degrading treatment.

“What’s it like to live in a shelter? I have a curfew at my age. I can’t cook dinner. I have to go through a TSA search every time I go in and out. I get rationed toilet paper because the plumbing is so bad,” she said.

Research conducted at Baruch College found that it costs New York City approximately $3,522 a month to run adult shelter facilities per single adult and approximately $5,623 a month for shelter facilities that house families, though the specific number of family members was not specified in the research results.  

“What kind of luxury apartments could we have for that money?” Adesegan asked.

For the more than 800 families expected to be displaced by Amazon’s move to Long Island City, finding a solution that benefits their future and well-being will likely be difficult.

According to the Department of Homeless Services, finding a safe and steady place for the more than 60,000 people in the shelter system – and the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 not accounted for in shelters – is difficult. The Department’s Shelter Scorecard Summary for October showed that there are 485 buildings with shelter units in New York City’s boroughs and more than 12 times as many shelter violations, including health, fire, building and code violations.

In New York City even the highest-paid corporate moguls are at risk of falling to the economic bottom and being forced into these conditions. Michael Ball, 38, used to be a producer for Sesame Street, but when he suddenly lost his job, he was immersed into the city’s silenced world of homelessness.

“I’ve been homeless for two-and-a-half years,” he said at a protest against Amazon on Nov. 26. “I don’t really come from anything. I worked my way up from a low production assistant all the way up to the top [at Sesame Street] and it just so happened in my life that I ended up in this situation.”

What angers so many homeless individuals and support organizations is the fact that the city government chose to pay Amazon nearly $3 billion in subsidies to build its headquarters in the city. The company will receive $897 million from the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program, $386 million from the Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program, $505 million in grant funds and $1.2 billion in “Excelsior” credits. Meanwhile, The Department of Homeless Services will only receive $2.06 billion for Fiscal Year 2019 and one of the few homeless shelters in Long Island City that opened this past March was already bought out in a $36.5 million deal in November.

“The immediate need is housing, specifically affordable housing, but the long-term ongoing need is education and workforce development,” McMichael said. “So I definitely think putting money into both of those, that money definitely could have been used that way.”

Guzman agreed.

“If a company is going to come to the city to establish a headquarters why do the taxpayers have to subsidize that?” he said. “After we flipped the senate we find that we do have the money in fact. It’s a little bit disheartening and infuriating to hear repeatedly that we have no money, but they are able to find the money to subsidize a billion dollar corporation and one of the most wealthiest men in the world to bring him here, and buy him a home when we have more than 89,000 New Yorkers without them.”

The truth about Amazon’s employment

While the echoes of New York City’s officials dropping billions of dollars on Amazon’s shiny new floors ring through Long Island City, the only sound thousands of New Yorkers hear is the reminder that Amazon’s promises are not all that they seem.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announce that Amazon will establish a new corporate headquarters in Long Island City, Queens. The announcement was made during a Nov.13th press conference. Photo courtesy of the New York City’s Mayor”s office

The company announced they are bringing 25,000 jobs to their spot in Anable Basin, about half of which will be technology-based and the other half split between miscellaneous positions. Many are convinced that most of those positions will already be filled by Amazon employees who move to the city.

Adesegun says this is just ‘what companies do.’

“They take over public spaces, public lands and they build and the most horrible part about this is that the democratic process was subverted,” she said, noting that the rate of homelessness drastically increased when the company opened its headquarters in Seattle in December 2016.

The positions that are not already occupied, including human resources, administration, custodial and communications, will likely require advanced degrees and experiences that many of the people that are displaced by the new headquarters do not have.

Kate Barnhart, director of the homeless LGBT youth advocacy organization New Alternatives NYC, explained that a company bringing in significant jobs for an underprivileged community is different from bringing in jobs that an underprivileged community is qualified for.

“A lot of their jobs require a certain degree of technical skills and our folks who are homeless or low income don’t have that,” she said. “So they end up bringing in people from outside who have skills they want, but then they are bringing in more people and that’s putting pressure on the already strained infrastructure of an area.”

A look through Amazon’s recently available jobs for New York City show that many positions require nearly a decade of experience in leading corporate projects, at least a bachelor’s degree and endless technical skills. Even smaller jobs, such as the merchant assistant that entails helping with fashion purchases, require at least two years of relevant work experience, a high school diploma or GED and Microsoft Excel experience.

While the jobs within Amazon may be hard for the poor to fill, McMichael noted that a new headquarters will create the opportunity for smaller businesses to rise in the surrounding area.

A struggling community offers solutions

New York’s homeless community and its advocates made it clear that their primary concern is being heard in the loud sounds of Amazon’s soon-to-be construction.

“Maybe they should hire a significant amount of workers that are displaced persons,” Guzman said. “If you’re going to displace or you’re going to change the dynamic for people, perhaps there should be a compromise or an exchange, not just a total transfer of power for the tenants.”

Barnhart suggested a similar tactic, also putting an emphasis on long-term career development for underprivileged individuals.

“One of the things I think Amazon should do is create a program where they make a commitment to hiring a substantial number of homeless and very low-income individuals,” she said. “Not in minimum wage jobs, but train them to have a really meaningful employment with the company.”

Guzman, just does not want the homeless to be left behind.  

“To leave the shelter system is a chess game in itself,” he said. “No one should feel like a pawn to a system that just doesn’t validate humanity.”

The post As Amazon moves in, New York’s homeless forced to move on appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Protesters gathered outside an East Harlem town hall meeting last night to push back against Mayor Bill De Blasio’s plan to rezone some sections of the neighborhood.

They held up signs that said things like “East Harlem is not for sale,” and “Say no to racist rezoning.”

Salome Leon was one of the protesters. She’s part of a group called Movement for Justice in El Barrio, which aims to stop gentrification in the neighborhood.

“We’re here because what De Blasio is saying is a lie,” Leon said. “He keeps saying rent won’t go up with these new developments, but they will, and we won’t be able to afford it anymore.”

Leon said she’s lived in the area for the last 19 years. She raised her children just down the street from the Johnson Community Center, where the town hall meeting took place.

“De Blasio keeps using the affordable housing mandate as an excuse for these buildings being built. But the landlords aren’t complying,” Leon said. “We want him to ditch the rezoning plan. It doesn’t help the people who live here.”

The East New York Neighborhood Plan was announced by the mayor’s office in 2015, and is meant to create 1,500 new affordable housing units in the borough, according to De Blasio.

Contrary to what Leon and her fellow protesters claim, De Blasio said the rezoning would actually help more people get out of shelters and into permanent housing.

“When this is all over, we’ll have four thousand, five thousand people into new homes,” he said.

Last year, the city council passed the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing bill, which forces developers in certain areas to make at least 20 percent of a building’s units affordable housing units.

Ethel Velez is president of the New York City Housing Authority’s Manhattan North Council of Presidents.

She pushed back against the mayor at the meeting, asking why so much money was going into building new affordable housing, while the existing units were falling into disrepair.

“Public housing is the only low income housing option that we know of,” Velez said. “If we’re going to talk about preserving public housing, then we need money, too.”

Some residents also pushed De Blasio about his motives for the rezoning, claiming he was giving out development contracts to campaign contributors.

“I have spent plenty of time in the last four years taking on landlords and developers,” De Blasio said to the town hall participants. “I’ve done a lot that goes against any interest of the real estate industry. So you might disagree with me on the vision, but don’t look for a motive that isn’t there.”

De Blasio also said current affordable housing buildings will never be switched over to private companies — a concern that many Harlem locals brought up over the course of the two hours.

“East Harlem has the highest amount of affordable housing units in the country,” De Blasio said. “If we don’t keep investing in new affordable housing, though, a huge number of people won’t be able to continue living in the city.”

New York City mayor Bill De Blasio addresses questions about the plan to rezone East Harlem during last night’s town hall meeting. Photo by Kristen Torres

The rezoning plan says the city will rush the construction of 1,200 new public and private affordable housing units over the next two years in the neighborhood.

It rezoned certain areas of East Harlem to allow construction of mixed use buildings, meaning developers can have storefronts on the ground level, and housing units on the upper floors.

“Look, I get it. There’s a lot of bad connotation when it comes to saying anything we do is privatized,” De Blasio said. “But everyone is going to keep what they already have. We’re just taking the opportunity to develop new units.”

The post East Harlem residents protest planned rezoning appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

The first day of fall in New York City was today and it was marked by quintessential autumnal weather. The sun was in the sky, accompanied by low humidity and a crisp breeze. It was the perfect day for Community Access, a mental health and supportive housing nonprofit, to host a tenant bike ride on Governors Island.

“I haven’t been on a bike in over 30 years,” said Antoinette Whiting, 51, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I spent a lot of my youth doing things that weren’t too good, so I’ve never been here. I didn’t even know (Governors Island) existed, and it’s just really awesome.”

Whiting is one of the thousands of people Community Access has served in New York City. The nonprofit’s mission is to expand opportunities for people living with mental health concerns to recover from trauma and discrimination.

“I was in the shelter and I was going through a pretty dark area in my life,” said Timothy Davis, 28, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “Community Access definitely helped me. They helped my self-esteem, they helped me job wise and most of all they got me a place I could call home.”

Through the Housing as Healthcare model, health and wellness activities were integrated into Community Access tenants’ everyday lives. The bike rides began two years ago.

Community Access’ partnership with Citi Bike helped to make this bike-share event possible. Through the partnership, Community Access received 30 Citi Bike keys to use wherever bikes are available for staff members to lead group rides.

“This is not something that our tenants may have gotten to do otherwise,” said Rica Bryan, 31, Community Access’ Health and Wellness Coordinator. “People can choose to use the Citi Bikes, or explore the island on foot.”

Timothy Davis, 28 of Crown Heights, Brooklyn was excited to be on a Citi Bike. He participated in the Community Access bike ride on Governors Island today. Photo by Lauren Garry

While this was the first year of the partnership between Community Access and Citi Bike, today’s event was not the first tenant bike ride they’ve hosted on Governors Island.

“The first time I was overcome with enjoyment,” said Davis. “I’m super stoked. This is a great day to be out here. It’s beautiful. “

Davis’ excitement was palpable. He smiled, skipped and ran around with enthusiasm, and even tried some tricks on his Citi Bike.

“This is special because there’s a whole lot of negative things going on right now and for us to come together as different people from Community Access, to come together and share this excellent experience is totally awesome,” said Davis.

Bryan described the part of the day she most looked forward to as “sharing in the joy of being together, being in a really beautiful place, and gathering our Community Access community.”

Eugene Smith, 61, of Morris Heights in the Bronx was happy to be out in the fresh air and having stability in his life.

“I’ve been with Community Access now for nine years, and until now, I’ve never lived in a place for nine years in my entire life consistently,” he said

Tenants and employees worked like a family. They helped each other put on helmets, adjust bike seats, and even to balance on the bikes.

“We’re all in this together, to figure out how to support each other,” said Bryan. “I’m getting connected to some really wonderful people who haven’t always had opportunities to thrive or live to their full potential, so I feel great to be with them today.”

The post Using exercise to promote mental health appeared first on Pavement Pieces.