[via The Daily Gotham - Chuck Schumer at Stuy-Town Press Conference]

Upon reviewing these video clips, there's one thing that I just realized about Schumer's shpiel : He's calling out MetLife's possible use of public land for free due to eminent domain as a playing card in the negotiations.

Does this mean, if it is true they did not pay for the land, that there are potential grounds for demanding from the company to pay what is owed to the city and with interest? Could there actually be any repercussions to MetLife's weaseling out of paying for the land they used to develop Stuy-Town?

More importantly, what effects, if any, could this have on development projects like Atlantic Yards and Williamsburg?

Hmmmmm.

You can find this clip at YouTube as well.

HUD Admits Defeat at Prospect Plaza Houses:
Plans to Sell Public Property to Private Developer

MEDIA ADVISORY
June 13, 2006

From:
Prospect Plaza Tenants Association
Milton Bolton, President

CONTACT:
Raul Rothblatt
646-498-6093
Raul@BatsonForBrooklyn.com

We're being hit with overdevelopment for the rich but destruction of housing for the poor."
-- Bill Batson, Co-Chair, CB8 Fire Safety Committee
Assembly Representative Candidate, 57th District

"If a country can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable, then we are providing a poor example. We should not act like a patchwork of rich and poor neighborhoods, or Red states and Blue states. If we are one country, we have to act that way and stand up for the neediest among us."
-- Chris Owens, Congressional Candidate, 11th District

Brooklyn -- Back at the end of the last century, the federal government developed a plan to renovate the Prospect Plaza houses. The buildings were vacated, and the buildings sat unused. Judging from their actions, NYCHA didn't seem to think the $22 million allocated for the project was important enough to use. HUD has now admitted its failure in the NYCHA Annual Plan for Fiscal Year 2007. Instead of using money budgeted for renovation, it has decided to privatize the remaining buildings. The document, dated April 21, 2006, states:

"NYCHA will dispose of Prospect Plaza to a developer for the mixed financed development and rehabilitation on all three Prospect Plaza properties."

The missing millions seem tragic, but the loss of taxpayer money is not nearly as horrible as the cost in human lives. Between 1999 and 2003 tenants of the 365 apartments were moved to other New York City public housing projects to make way for renovation of three towers - two 15-story and one 12 story building. These residents were promised a better life, but will there be public oversight? What is the community input in the new construction? NYCHA promises the former tenants new housing, but can they even find them? Given the very poor record of NYCHA over the course of a decade, it is rather unlikely that the people who need it will get any help.

WHO:
Milton Bolton, Prospect Plaza Tenants Association
Bill Batson, CB8 Fire Safety Committee Co-Chair

WHAT:
Press Conference Defending the Public Housing Stock

WHEN:
4PM, Wednesday June 14, 2006

WHERE:
1786 Prospect Place (between Saratoga and Howard Aves.)
Brownsville, Brooklyn

IN CASE OF RAIN:
281 Dumont Ave. at Rockaway

The Drum Major Institute and AM New York have come out with an article outlining class discrepancies in asthma rates. Asthma is an under-recognized, national problem which had been increasing in prevalence. Since 2002 there may be evidence of a plateauing of this increase, but it remains a problem for many Americans. Some facts from the American Lung Assn for context:

In 2003 it was estimated that 20 million Americans currently have asthma. Of these, 11million Americans (4 million children under 18) had an asthma attack.

Current asthma prevalence in adults ranged from 5.6% in Georgia to 9.9% in Maine and Massachusetts.

After a long period of steady increase, evidence suggests that asthma mortality and morbidity rates continue to plateau and/or decrease. In 2002, there were 4,261 deaths attributed to asthma -- an age-adjusted rate of 1.5 per 100,000.

Close to 1.9 million emergency room visits were attributed to asthma in 2002.

In 2003, asthma accounted for an estimated 24.5 million lost work days in adults.

The annual direct health care cost of asthma is approximately $11.5 billion; indirect costs (e.g. lost productivity) add another $4.6 billion, for a total of $16.1 billion dollars. Prescription drugs represented the largest single indirect cost, at $5 billion. The value of lost productivity due to death represented the largest single indirect cost at $1.7 billion.

Lung function declines faster than average in people with asthma, particularly in people who smoke and in those with excessive mucus production (an indicator of poor treatment control).

The Drum Major institute and AM New York's article shows that children in poor, minority areas of NYC are FAR more affected by asthma than children in richer, whiter areas of the city. Here are some excerpts:

Sadly, tens of thousands of children in New York City with asthma choke for air every day, in all five boroughs, and our elected officials are doing far too little to help them.

While asthma affects New Yorkers in every neighborhood, it affects many more people in low-income communities of color. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Health has found that asthma rates in Bushwick and Williamsburg are 400% what they are in the city as a whole...

Among the primary findings of the report is that most New Yorkers who suffer from asthma live in unhealthy housing. Of the 300 asthmatics who were interviewed, an astounding 69% reported living in cockroach-infested apartments. Sixty-seven percent said they had excessive dust in their apartments, and 47% had rat or mouse infestation problems. One out of three asthmatics reported mold in their apartments.

Asthma rates in these two neighborhoods are four times the city average!! That is a BIG hint that there is a major health problem in those neighborhoods. SOMETHING has to be causing those hot spots of asthma. To me it sounds like an environmental health problem in addition to a class problem. If it was ONLY a class issue, one could correlate asthma rates with income levels. Are other equally poor neighborhoods also afflicted by higher than average asthma rates or is this unique to those two neighborhoods. That is an issue that needs to be clarified. There is no question that poverty is a major issue in terms of availability of health care, and that includes asthma. But to me such a geograpgical spike of asthma rates suggests an environmental effect as well. What is it about the air in those neighborhoods that triggers asthma?

The article gives some hints, indicating a correlation with sub-standard housing, but again, it needs to be clarified whether the asthma hot spots correspond to such sub-standard housing citywide or primarily in those two neighborhoods. Regardless, the article continues, showing that neglect by the city of housing codes is a part of the problem:

All of these housing conditions are clear violations of New York City's housing code. Nonetheless, the City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is renowned for failing to get slumlords to fix housing code violations, even the most serious ones.

A study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development showed that tenants have to wait an average of one year before landlords fix housing code violations that the law requires be fixed within 24 hours. Similarly, a recent study by the tenant advocacy coalition, Housing Here and Now, showed that of the 1,533 buildings that were on HPD's Major Problem Building List in 2003, almost a third had even more "immediately hazardous" violations in 2005 than in 2003.

Unfortunately, HPD's failure to enforce the housing code means that tens of thousands of New Yorkers who suffer from asthma, and other respiratory ailments, live in apartments that are riddled with asthma triggers. According to Bushwick resident Veronica Acosta, "We are forced to live in unhealthy homes because irresponsible landlords refuse to fumigate and make necessary repairs to our old buildings. Even after taking our landlord to court four times, he still refuses to repair our apartment."

The inability or unwillingness of the city to enforce housing codes is something that people I know have encountered. It is not restricted only to poor neighborhoods. But it clearly will affect poor neighborhoods the most. Landlord neglect is treated overly leniently and complaints often ignored. One wonders why the city is so unwilling or unable to enforce its own laws. Perhaps better leadership might help?

The article continues, indicating that lack of health information and available preventative care is also an issue for these neighborhoods:

The report also shows that a great majority of asthmatics in Bushwick improperly treat their asthma. An alarming 59% of Bushwick residents do not use any preventative medicine to control their asthma.

In addition, the study shows that 48% of asthmatics treat their asthma attacks in the emergency room, and that one out of four asthmatics does not understand how to use their asthma medications correctly. This confusion can have dreadful consequences.

Treating asthma in the emergency room is the least cost-effective and least reasonable way to do it. Yet our health care systems do not recognize preventative care as desirable. So for the poorest, preventative care is unavailable and hence they are forced to deal with their condition through the emergency room, the least efficient way of treating a chronic condition. The inefficient way our health care system deals with chronic illnesses creates a greater cost to all of us.

This DMI/AM New York article illustrates three things: the effect that poor enforcement of housing codes have on the health of poor New Yorkers, the inefficiency of our health care system, and the fact that hot spots of illness--regions where an unusually high incidence of a disease--are alarms that are frequently ignored in our society. The questions need to be asked: What is causing those hot spots? Why isn't the city enforcing its own laws? And, why do we tolerate a health care system that is neither cost-effective nor effective in maintaining our health?

Mayor Bloomberg has announced plans to shut down the city's largest homeless shelter, the 335 unit Carlton House in South Ozone Park, Queens. The mayor claims that there just aren't enough homeless people to fill the former luxury hotel. The City's Department of Homesless Services' website brags, "This is the first time in DHS history that a facility has been closed solely because the capacity is no longer needed."

Is the homeless population going down? "Oh certainly not," protests Jeff Rabinovici, my good friend and comrade who is an outreach worker for Partnership for the Homeless, "According to the DHS' latest accounting, it's going up." The number of families living in long term shelters is on the decline, due to a number of factors, including strong-arm tactics by the city. But the number of families checking into "drop-in" shelters (the nightly, first come, first serve shelters, where many of those who get a roof for the night don't actually get a bed) is on the rise. And, of course, single homeless men are still the shelter system's last priority, which is why you still see so many of them sleeping on the streets.

The Villager
http://www.thevillager.com/villager_111/organizationalmeetingon.html
Volume 75, Number 4 | June 15- 21, 2005

Organizational meeting on downzoning and landmarking on the Lower East Side
By David Katz

People, politicians and community organizations who have been active in zoning and landmarking issues on the Lower East Side have been invited to an educational forum at the Clayton Gallery, 161 Essex St., on Mon., June 20 at 6 p.m.

"This will not be a rally," emphasized organizer and gallery owner Clayton Patterson. "It is strictly an informational meeting in which groups involved in the struggle to preserve our communities will speak, and in which the politicians who have shown up at their rallies will also be invited to comment, and state what they think can be done about the situation."

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which is spearheading the movement for downzoning the Far West Village to prevent out-of-scale construction from destroying the character of the neighborhood, will speak about the lessons learned there, and how they can be applied to the East Village. Richard Kusack, of The Committee for Zoning Inaction, will address "Trojan horse zoning," the bait-and-switch process by which developers misuse or misrepresent their projects as community facilities and dormitories in order to erect hotels and luxury housing; also invited are representatives from L.O.C.O; the Ludlow-Orchard Community Organization, who have been involved in the fight against the construction of a 24-story luxury hotel directly opposite a proposed 15-story luxury condominium on Orchard St. between Houston and Stanton Sts.; the East Village Community Coalition, involved in the fight to preserve St. Brigid¹s church and annex on Avenue B and the old P.S. 64 on E. Ninth St.; and representatives from 4 E. Third St., 47 East Third St. and 81 E. Third St., sites of recent protests over such issues as overdevelopment and construction not conforming with Buildings Department guidelines.