In happier times, Yolanda Gonzalez (wearing sunglasses) was joined by a galaxy of Bronx politicians at the dedication of a street in honor of her mother, Nos Quedamos founder, Yolanda Garcia.

New director takes reins of pioneering housing organization

Nos Quedamos, the advocacy organization that has served South Bronx residents for nearly two decades on issues ranging from housing to immigration, is on the verge of a comeback, after nearly a year in limbo.

The agency has maintained a low profile since allegations emerged last winter that former executive director, Yolanda Gonzalez, who is also the daughter of the organization’s founder, Yolanda Garcia, had provided Nos Quedamos funds to family members without authorization from the board.

In response, last February, the board locked Gonzalez out of Nos Quedamos’ Melrose Ave. office and laid off about a dozen staff members. It closed entirely for a brief period, then reopened on a shortened schedule as it sought to continue to serve the public without a chief executive.

The State Attorney General’s office is conducting an investigation of Gonzalez. A spokesman for that office, Fernando Aquino, declined to comment on the investigation.

Nos Quedamos’ board has named former board chair Jessica Clemente the agency’s new volunteer executive director, while announcing that about five new staffers will be hired when the agency returns to a regular schedule in January.

Clemente says the organization is poised to put the recent dark chapter in the past and has nothing to hide. She maintains the group is eager to continue serving the community’s housing, public health and social justice needs, and to resume its long legacy in the neighborhood.

“We want to reestablish that same community morale,” said Clemente in an interview while hanging photos on the wall near the office’s entrance highlighting the agency’s past endeavors and its local folk-hero founder, Yolanda Garcia, who died of a stroke in 2005. “We want to connect to the real essence of what community building means.”

For now, Clemente said, the organization is holding project funds in an escrow account while it evaluates internal accounting practices. She added that the Attorney General’s “investigation is of an individual, not of the organization.”

Clemente is a product of the neighborhood. She was raised in the Millbrook Houses on East 137th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue before receiving her Masters in Urban Planning at NYU, and going on to lead a public health project monitoring air quality and asthma problems for South Bronx residents between 2000 and 2006.

While she helped Clemente arrange photos and award plaques on the office wall, long-time board member Sandy Quilico said she is confident Nos Quedamos can quickly return to the status it previously held as an advocate for needy Bronxites, recalling that “under Yolanda Garcia, we were doing phenomenally well.”

Photo by Kamana Shrestha. Sylvia Matos, who has lived in the St. Mary's Park housing projects most of her life, is one of many seniors NYCHA says will have to leave their apartments to make way for bigger families.

Short of apartments for bigger families, NYCHA tells elderly “we need your home”

In late September, 78-year-old Sylvia Matos opened her mailbox only to find an alarming letter from the city’s housing authority, asking her to vacate her apartment of almost half a century. The reason: she lives alone in a three-bedroom apartment that is “too large” and “under occupied.”

“It’s crazy they are asking me to leave,” said Matos. “This is my home, I raised my children here, my grandchildren grew up here too and we are used to the area,” said Matos, who emigrated from Puerto Rico in the 1960s.<!–more–>

Matos is one of many seniors in the St. Mary’s Park housing projects on Westchester Ave. and in the city who have received these letters. There are currently 55,000 people – half of whom are seniors – who the New York City Housing Authority has identified as living in apartments that are “under utilized.” The number of occupants that reside in an apartment determines the number of rooms assigned to them, based on NYCHA occupancy standards.

“To serve more families in need, it is critical that NYCHA utilize this scarce public resource as it was intended: to assist the greatest number of families eligible for affordable and subsidized housing,” said NYCHA Communications Officer Sheila Stainback.

These families make up the 161,000 people currently on NYCHA’s waiting list for public housing, according to a NYCHA statement.

A citywide affordable housing organization, Metropolitan Council on Housing, echoes NYCHA’s dilemma to find scarce public housing that has now brought homelessness to a new high.

“With too few affordable units for the vast numbers of low income people in New York, the homelessness crisis is at its worst with no end in sight,” states the organization’s website.

As of October, there is an all-time record of 41,200 homeless people, including 10,000 homeless families with 17,000 homeless children in the city’s shelter systems. In addition, the number of homeless New Yorkers in shelters increased 37 percent from 2002 to 2010, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

Although the statistics show the need for available space is urgent, the question remains – where do these seniors who need to downsize go?

NYCHA says they are helping seniors move into smaller units by working with Metropolitan Council, which is developing new senior housing in Flushing, Queens. Nineteen of the 78 units in the new development will be designated for NYCHA seniors, according to Stainback.

However, relocating seniors has been met with much resistance from the community.

“If the government is going to downsize the seniors, they should keep them in the same building or in the same area, because this is the place where they’ve lived for so many years,” said Wanda Abeyllez, program director of E. Roberts Moore Senior Center on Jackson Avenue, which Matos frequents. “And this is what they know.”

About 10 others at the center have received similar letters and have come to Abeyllez seeking advice. Like Matos, these seniors are divorced or widowed and still live in the large apartments where they raised their families.

The ordeal has left them frustrated and fearful they will be evicted from their apartments and moved to other boroughs, as NYCHA has not guaranteed them a smaller apartment in the same neighborhood.

“The seniors that have come to me have been panicked and angry,” said Abeyllez. “They are upset because they say they pay their rent on time, never owed any rent and these have been their apartments, some for over 40 years.”

But the administrator says she can also see NYCHA’s point of view: “I understand that NYCHA sounds like the villain but we need to realize other families are raising their children and are in need of these apartments.”

Matos and many other seniors said they won’t go down without a fight. Some are seeking legal action to keep their homes.

In the letter addressed to Matos, NYCHA offered her $350 for moving expenses and wrote, “It is time to give another family who needs a larger apartment the chance to get one.”

“And I said, ‘What? They are throwing me out for $350? That’s all I am worth?’” said Matos.

Desperate to keep her home, Matos included her granddaughter in her new lease to show her apartment was no longer under occupied. However, this action only resulted in a rent increase, from $233 monthly to $644. Matos will have to pay the increased rent starting this month if she wants to stay.

She cannot afford the steep increase; she receives a monthly fixed income of $637 from social security.

Matos has made regular visits to the St. Mary’s housing offices to plead her case, without much luck. She recently went to Congressman José E. Serrano’s office in hopes that he can help.

“I’m going to keep fighting this,” said Matos. “They can’t take away my home.”

Gilberto Rivera

Activist fought to save Hostos and improve housing

Gilberto Rivera, one of the co-founders of the Melrose-based housing organization Nos Quedamos, died on Nov. 25. He was 75.

Rivera, who had been president of Nos Quedamos’ board, suffered a massive stroke shortly after a board meeting at the Nos Quedamos office on Melrose Ave. on Oct. 5. He was rushed to Lincoln Hospital, then later transferred to the Veteran’s Hospital where he died.

Rivera was one of the main grassroots organizers with a group of South Bronx Latinos who helped tenants forgotten by the city’s housing bureaucracies battle for their rights against slumlords and against the city’s own plans to remove the families that remained in Melrose after the fires and abandonment that devastated the area in the 1970s in order to build highrise housing projects.

Rivera was born in 1936 in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. He moved to the South Bronx in the 1960s and began organizing South Bronx residents in a variety of causes soon after his arrival.

Tenant advocate Maximino (Maxi) Rivera of the neighborhood advocacy group Pueblo en Marcha met Gilberto Rivera in 1976 while both men were helping Hostos Community College students and faculty fight the city’s plans to close the institution as part of the city’s belt-tightening during its fiscal crisis.

They organized a takeover of what was then the college’s lone building at East 149th Street and the Grand Concourse, resisting the city’s attempts to get them out and remaining for several months. The school was a crucial resource South Bronx Latinos could not afford to lose, they argued.

Shortly after they succeeded in convincing the city to keep Hostos open, Maxi took a job as a tenant organizer and hired Gilberto as his partner.

“We spent more time together than we spent with our families,” Maxi recalled.

Together, they visited beleaguered tenants in dilapidated buildings, negotiating with landlords and often taking them to court to force improvements.

Gilberto had savvy, not just for skillfully negotiating contracts with greedy landlords, but for understanding the nuts and bolts of how buildings are built: wiring, plumbing, the quality of construction work, Maxi recalled.

“Gilberto knew what he was talking about,” Maxi said, and, as a result, landlords couldn’t fool him.

Over the years, Rivera continued to fight for tenants’ rights on a number of projects. In the early 1990s, Melrose resident and social justice advocate Yolanda Garcia asked her friend to help her form an organization to be christened Nos Quedamos (We Stay), that would help tenants fight against the city’s efforts to displace residents and for the participation of residents in planning the neighborhood’s renewal.

Rivera’s advocacy was not confined to Mott Haven where he lived, or to Melrose where Nos Quedamos has worked for nearly 20 years.

“His door was always open to us,” said Mildred Colon, former president of the Phoenix House Tenants Association on Coster St. in Hunts Point. Colon said Rivera’s dogged advocacy in 2007 and 2008 on behalf of the tenants there helped take the property from the landlord who for years had allowed it to crumble. Under a new owner and management, extensive renovations on the buildings have been underway for two years.

“Gilberto would never say no to anybody,” Colon said.

At the December meeting of the 40th Precinct Community Council, Council President Alex Diaz paid tribute to Rivera and said the council would ask Community Board 1 to support renaming the block of Bergen Avenue where he lived Gilberto Rivera Way.

Rivera is survived by his wife, Raquel, a son in Florida and another who is a detective with NYPD, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

GrowNYC representative Ermin Siljokovic had attendees play the “recycling game” to show them how to separate materials. Photo by Elizabeth Chen

They say they have to because officials aren’t following through

Mott Haven Houses’ resident Brigitte Vincenty doesn’t want to go all the way into Manhattan to make sure her trash gets recycled. So she and her neighbors are taking on the challenge of recycling their community’s trash, which they say the New York City Housing Authority fails to do.

“NYCHA talks a lot about green roofs and retrofitting, things that haven’t been made into law yet,” said Vincenty, organizer for Mott Haven Houses’ Resident Green Committee. “But recycling is the law and they’re not even doing that.”

NYCHA officials did not return calls for comment.

Out of the five boroughs, the Bronx lags behind on recycling, according to a Department of Sanitation’s annual report. The Bronx recycles at a rate of 10.3 percent compared to Manhattan’s 19 percent. Community District 1, where Vincenty lives, has the poorest recycling rate in the Bronx―only 4.8 percent of the total trash in that neighborhood has been diverted for recycling.

The Natural Resources Defense Council observed an 0.6 percent increase in trash collection in the Bronx in the past year, despite a 1.4 percent decrease city-wide, according to a Daily News article in October.

Vincenty and members of her initiative, named the InnerCity Green Team, plan to go door-to-door to collect recyclable materials. They also held an event on November 17 to educate residents about recycling and saving energy at the Mott Haven Community Center.

“This is a little helpful,” said Alfonso Dingwall, a 45-year-old resident. “We could be doing better with recycling.”

They hope their efforts will encourage NYCHA to hire public housing residents to work in maintenance, which they believe will help bring down their community’s high levels of unemployment.

But a week earlier, NYCHA representatives held a closed meeting with the residents  to hear details of their recycling program.

“They were very skeptical,” said Erica Ramos, a Resident Green Committee member. “They sounded like they wanted to help, but you could tell they were really hesitant because of they were worried about costs.”

A statement from NYCHA said that they support the efforts of the Resident Green Committees, which are groups of concerned public housing residents who work on NYCHA’s “Green Agenda” program. However, they refused to comment about the residents’ allegations about recycling in their facilities or about the closed meeting.

GrowNYC, Mothers On the Move and the state’s Public Service Commission also attended the committee’s green awareness event. These organizations distributed compact fluorescent light bulbs and recycling collection bags that colorfully explained how to separate plastic and paper materials.

“NYCHA’s green efforts mostly focus on gardening and planting trees,” said Nova Strachan of Mothers On the Move. “That’s important, but NYCHA also really needs to work on recycling.”

Now, Vincenty’s volunteers look forward to the daunting task ahead of them. Rachel Osorio, a volunteer, felt empowered by the information given at the event.

“Especially in the Bronx, we get forgotten about,” said Osorio. “This is a lot of info I didn’t know before. It makes me want to know more about how I can improve my community.”

Residents say elected officials didn't do their job telling them about this planned development on 144th St. in Mott Haven.

Group battling home for mentally ill says residents were blindsided

The developer of a controversial housing development set to break ground in Mott Haven notified local politicians of the organization’s plans nearly a year ago, according to a document he released this week.

But neighborhood residents fighting the project say they didn’t find out about the plan until early autumn, when they saw action at the construction site on 144^th Street.

Daniel Johansson, CEO of the Association for Rehabilitative Case Management and Housing (ACMH), sent a letter detailing plans to build an affordable housing facility for low-income families and people with mental illness to several local politicians in December 2010, records show.

The letter was addressed to George Rodriguez, chair of Community Board 1, and was also sent to City Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, State Senator Jose Serrano, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo. Copies of FedEx receipts were included, all signed by the officials’ respective offices and dated Dec. 21, 2010.

“We did all that in December of 2010 and we have all the documentation,” said Johansson.

The politicians did not spread the word to their constituents, according to residents, who said that when they contacted their representatives, these officials claimed that they had never heard of the project.

“I called Viverito. I called Ruben Diaz’s office. I called Arroyo’s office. I called Community Board 1,” said Marian Rivas, who lives near the proposed project. “None of them knew anything about it.”

Residents were concerned that time had run out to fight the development. The Padavan law gives residents 75 days from the time of notification to challenge certain types of housing facilities. By this point, more than six months had passed.

In fact, though, the Padavan law, which is intended to strike a balance between the rights of  people with mental illness or developmental disabities and homeowners, doesn’t apply in this case, according to Leesa Rademacher of the Office of Mental Health. But she said communication with local residents is still encouraged.

The law is “for community residences from four to 14 beds. This is a single- room occupancy and more than 14 beds,” she said. “We ask providers, like ACMH, to notify the community anyway.”

If community members didn’t know, Johansson said it wasn’t for lack of effort on his part. In addition to the other documents, he also released a personal log of attempted contact with local politicians.

“It’s important that they be informed of what’s going on in the district so they can inform their constituents,” he said.

Of all the attempted contacts Johansson made, he said only Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz accepted his request to meet. He never heard back from Serrano, Arroyo or Viverito, he said.

At last month’s community board meeting, Serrano Jr. told board members that until they brought the issue to him, he hadn’t heard about it either. He, Viverito, Arroyo and Diaz did not return calls seeking comment.

Many residents and members of Voices of the People, the activist group working to stop the development, blame both Johansson’s group and the local politicians. Asked who was responsible for failing to inform the community, resident Marilyn Ramos didn’t hesitate.

“If anything the developer, because he didn’t let us know anything. And also the politicians in the area- they are doing nothing to stop it. It’s just going through,” she said, “like our opinions don’t matter.”

Photo by Evan Buxbaum Two young fighters sparred at John's Boxing Gym, which is coming to the end of a long run on Westchester Ave.

Urban renewal threatens a gritty Westchester Ave. gym to move…or close

Facing eviction, the owner of an iconic South Bronx boxing gym is vowing to fight on.

Located on the ground floor of a shabby former post office building across the street from an overgrown field, John’s Boxing Gym – known for years as Jerome’s Gym – has been a fixture on Westchester Avenue for the past three decades.

John Gjini, 35, took over the dilapidated “Jerome’s” seven years ago and rechristened it “John’s” after his now 13-year-old son. But even after producing two champion professional fighters in the last five years and serving as a safe sparring space for aspiring amateurs in the community, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development served Gjini notice that he must shutter the gym within 30 days.

“We’re taking it one day at a time,” Gjini said. “It hurts, but I’m going to make it.”

Gjini has appealed to the City Council for help to secure grants to fund the relocation and keep the gym’s programs running. City Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The HPD said the city-owned building needs to go because its location has been “designated an urban renewal site,” according to press officer Juliet Morris. The project, to be called Triangle Plaza, includes two buildings with a planned charter school, supermarket and restaurants.

Morris said the HPD was “working with the boxing gym and have advised them that they may have additional time,” as long as Gjini agrees to leave by a designated date.

“I can’t wait for months,” Gjini said. “It’s time to move on and be thankful the gym has been here for 30 years.”

Stevins Bujaj, 21, has been training at John’s for five or six years and is a two-time New York Golden Gloves winner. He credited the gym and the “beautiful sport of boxing” for keeping him out of trouble in his youth and said John’s has continued to help “take kids off the street.”

“Kids love the sport,” he said. “It’s a great gym and it feels like home.”

Stepping inside John’s is like being transported into a gritty boxing film. Two 500-square-foot rings rise above worn hardwood floors, while punching bags of varying size and disrepair drop from the moulded ceiling tiles high above. On any given evening the thuds and thumps from fighters punctuate quick commands bellowed by their grizzled supervisors. There is a distinct musky odor within the gym that can only stem from generations of sweaty pugilists and their well-used equipment.

John’s is unapologetically old school. Victor Valle, 61, has been working with young fighters for 42 years. He said the gym is a good place to keep an eye out for the next burgeoning boxer with a “burning desire.”

Pictures of past champions and accolades adorn the walls – including large posters of Joseph “King Kong” Agbeko and Joshua “The Hitter” Clottey, former bantamweight and welterweight titleholders respectively. Both men originally hail from Ghana, but both have found a home at John’s for their training.

Another of John’s rising stars to find a home at the gym is 20-year-old Nisa Rodriguez. She lives three blocks away and has been training at John’s Boxing Gym for upwards of three hours per day, five days a week, for the last six years.

“It’s where I get down to practice my profession,” she said with a grin. “The gym has an aura. You want to train and compete here.”

Rodriguez has won three of the last four state Golden Gloves championships and earned the national title in 2011. She took a year off after her second tournament to have a son, Emerson, now two-years-old. Rodriguez said the gym has been “like a family” and nowadays even her son helps with her training, forcing Rodriguez into a sweat as she chased the toddler around.

“I’ve grown up here,” Rodriguez said. “My favorite bag is in the corner. It’d be a little buzz kill if they move, I hope it’s not far.”

Gjini doesn’t pull any punches about the predicament. “It’s like a fight,” he said.

“Even if you lose once and learn, you don’t really lose,” Gjini said as he scanned fighters of all ages, shapes and skill spar throughout the institution he helped maintain. “When I make it, it will all be worth it. Believe me.”

Photo by Elizabeth Chen. Elliott Liu and Rafael Mutis removed plants from the lot the city plans to build on at Union Ave. and Southern Boulevard.

The grassy lot at the corner of Southern Blvd and Union Ave has been a green oasis for some local residents, but as they recently found out, the city has other plans.

For the past two years, residents have planted vegetables and held social gatherings in the lot, referring to  it as the Morning Glory Community Garden. They say the space was abandoned until people like Elliot Liu cleaned it and furnished it with tables and chairs. Teenagers have worked on the impromptu garden, mainly students from nearby Samuel J. Gompers High School.“This should be a public space,” said Aazam Otero, a Gompers graduate.

Earlier in the fall, they planned to expand the garden to provide fresh produce for the neighborhood. But city contractors turned their garden beds into piles of wood in early November.

In response, Liu, 29, and a handful of other gardeners blocked the gate to keep the city out, while holding protest signs.

“The first notice we got was when there was suddenly a gate with a lock on it and ‘no trespassing” signs up,” said Liu. “It wasn’t like we were hard to contact. We had a bulletin board with contact information. And we’re in there many days of the week working so we’re very approachable.”

Contractors arrived and tore down part of the fence to gain entrance and clear the lot, despite the presence of a few protesters. A representative for the city’s department of Housing Preservation  and Development told Liu that if he or the others trespassed they would be arrested.

HPD spokesman Eric Bederman said in an email that had the gardeners been registered with the city’s GreenThumb program, as community garden users are urged to do, they would have had access to information that the the city plans to build approximately 430 apartments for low- to- moderate- income tenants and a school for disabled children on the lot.

“The people who recently unlawfully entered this City-owned site did not seek permission to through the City’s GreenThumb Program,” Bederman wrote in his e-mail, “nor did they inquire whether it was slated for development.”

The gardeners are petitioning for support from Community Board 1, but district manager Cedric Loftin said the residents who have congregated and grown vegetables on it have done so improperly.

“It’s not a community garden because it’s not a GreenThumb garden,” said Loftin, adding that the residents “went somewhere where they have no right to be.”

Residents who have used the space say their battle with the city to create more green areas is not over.

“This neighborhood needs more community gardens,” said Isidro Campus, a superintendent from across the street. “We need to attack these developers.”

Photo by Gwen McClure Local residents have united to oppose development of this site on E. 144th St. into a mental health and social service facility.

A group of Mott Haven residents has organized to protest a proposed housing development for the mentally ill, saying the neighborhood already has far more than its fair share of social service agencies.

The group, called Voices of the People, is frustrated with the influx of social service programs, and adds they were given no advance notice that plans for still another were underway.

“We have so many shelters and programs and they are all crowded. We are hyper-saturated,”said resident Marcelino Sanchez. “I think it is a crime.”

The publicly funded 60-unit doorman facility on E. 144^th Street between Brook and Willis Ave. will include 18 units dedicated to general low-income housing. Another 42 will be for adults and young adults with mental illness. The low-income housing will include studios and one- and two-bedrooms for tenants and will have a minimum income requirement. For those living with mental illness, there will be on-site support including case management and mental-health counselors.

At a community board meeting in October, residents expressed concern that the development would bring back problems their community faced in previous decades.

Dr. Marian Rivas, whose family has owned a home on 144^th St. since 1949, recalled neighborhood safety problems of the 1960s and ’70s. Since then she has seen the area steadily improve, until several years ago when she started to notice increased drug use and loitering, some of which she and other frustrated residents say stems from unsupervised clients from the area’s many social service facilities.

“It looked like Berlin after the war,” Rivas recalled. “We are survivors through the worst. Why should we have to go through it again?”

According to Carlos Garcia, director of residential programs for The Association for Rehabilitative Case Management and Housing, the non-profit that plans to open the site, this isn’t the first time his organization has received resistance from a community based on concerns about the impact.

He said applicants are screened thoroughly for histories of violence and sex offenses and that only graduates of ACMH programs will be housed.

“Typically we are faced with the ‘not-in-my-backyard’ kind of thing,” Garcia said.

He said that stories of people defecating in the streets and exposing themselves were not based in reality. “It’s just like in any neighborhood,” Garcia said. “If you see that kind of stuff, you call the police.”

But homeowners argue that rather than provide housing for deserving low-income residents from the neighborhood, the developments draw people from elsewhere looking for better access to services. Some residents expressed concerns about the safety of their children, fearing the development will draw a dangerous clientele to a neighborhood filled with schools. Others were concerned about decreasing property values.

“Much of their wealth is tied up in their homes,” Rivas said of her neighbors, adding they will urge elected officials to help stymy the project by cutting off the developers’ funding.

State Senator Jose M. Serrano attended the meeting to discuss other matters, but soon found himself fending off criticism from the group directed towards him and other elected officials for not defending residents’ rights.

“When you have an over-concentration of social services in one community, you have to ask why,” Serrano responded, admitting he knew nothing of the project before hearing the group complain at the October meeting.

“So why don’t we have these facilities on 72^nd and Park Avenue?” he said, adding, “these services can be spread out.”

Community Board 1 district manager Cedric Loftin said the number of units for low-income residents is too small to offset changes he believes will occur in the neighborhood such as an increased police presence and an increased feeling of insecurity. He said the community board will work with the governor’s office and other elected officials to try to get funding reallocated to a project elsewhere.

“The location is bad and it needs to be looked at from the perspective of the community that’s going to be impacted,” said Loftin.

The citizens group has met with elected officials who have vowed to help them fight the project, including Assemblywoman Carmen E. Arroyo.

Daniel Johansson, CEO of the site developer, cited a study done by the Furman Center at NYU in 2008, which found that property values actually increased when supportive housing was developed in the area. He said the area was chosen because of a partnership with Lincoln Hospital and a need for supportive and low-income housing in the area.

“There are so many folks that end up being re-hospitalized in the Bronx who have a mental health issue,” he said. “Once you have a roof over your head it’s so much easier to get your life together.”

]]> http://motthavenherald.com/2011/11/03/residents-rail-against-new-social-service-development/feed/ 2 http://motthavenherald.com/2011/11/01/formerly-homeless-face-budget-crunch/ http://motthavenherald.com/2011/11/01/formerly-homeless-face-budget-crunch/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:58:11 +0000 By Kamana Shrestha http://motthavenherald.com/?p=4320  

Photo by Kamana Shrestha Shelters like this one on Jackson Ave. are seeing an influx of new applicants, no thanks to budget cuts to a city program that helped formerly homeless tenants pay rent.

Homeless advocacy organizations are scrambling to find alternative housing options for the thousands who will be displaced because of the termination of a city and state funded housing program due to budget cuts.

The urgency comes at a crucial time because of an anticipated resolution of a lawsuit in the city’s favor, discontinuing the government funded Advantage Program.

In the meantime, distressed families are living on edge without knowing whether their November rent will be paid.

“It’s nerve-racking not knowing month to month whether or not they are going to pay their part,” said Karla Franklin, a single mother of three who fears ending up back in the shelter system.

Franklin entered the Advantage Program in late January and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Morrisania with her family.

About 12,000 households will be affected by the closing of the Advantage Program in March, according to the Legal Aid Society. Half of those households are in the Bronx, which has the highest number of participants in the program with 6,602 active leases signed in March. The program was the only one in the state that helped families transition from the shelter system into permanent housing by providing rent subsidies to landlords.

The one-year program, which began in August 2010, required qualified participants over 18 to work 35 hours a week, earn minimum wage or above, and contribute 30 percent of their gross income towards rent. Participants could opt for second year rental assistance if they met renewal criteria, which included tenant payment of 40 percent of the rent.

“The elimination of the Advantage program leaves a serious void in the City’s homeless policy,” sad City Councilwoman Annabel Palma,, who is also the General Welfare committee chair, adding she hoped the city will help those impacted by the cuts.

In April, the Department of Homeless Services announced it would no longer sign new leases for the program due to withdrawal of state and federal funding. In response, the Legal Aid Society filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the 37,000 individuals in the program to block its demise.

A Manhattan Supreme Court Judge ruled in September that the city could shut the program down, but Legal Aid appealed and DHS was obligated to pay rent for October.

Whether or not rent for November will be paid is still in limbo. If the final appeal is settled before November, tenants will have to pay the full amount of their rent and those who can’t, will find themselves being dragged to housing court by their landlords.

Franklin lived in a family shelter in the Bronx, since June 2009 before they moved into their apartment. She holds two part-time jobs as a custodian and receptionist at a non-profit organization and brings home $550 every two weeks after taxes working for $10 an hour. Her oldest daughter, 23, works at Home Depot part-time while her oldest son, 19, attends Hostos Community College and younger son, 17, attends high school.

The stressful ordeal of relying on a government-funded program has left Franklin, 47, uncertain about the future of her family. Without the subsidy, Franklin said she could not afford the rent and would be evicted, leaving her no choice but to return to the shelters.

“My family has had a peace of mind since we’ve moved to this apartment because you don’t have to worry about little things like you do in the shelters like meeting curfew,” she said. “We tried not to let the system break us and what we have as a family.”

The shelter system is already seeing an increase of calls from others like Franklin who fear being displaced and may have to return to already crowded shelters, according to advocacy groups and city officials.

The Jackson Ave. Family Residence in the Bronx has already taken in two families that were in Advantage, but does not have room to take in anymore.

Wanda Cruz, executive director at Jackson Ave. said her staff is expecting a wave of calls soon from people who need a place to stay.

Officials at other organizations, such as New Destiny Housing, a residence based in the city that deals with domestic violence clients, also said they have experienced an increase in call volumes from Advantage clients.

“They all feel an overwhelming sense of anxiety because they were assured the program would pay for part of their housing and now they are thrown into turmoil,” said HousingLink Director at New Destiny, Catherine Trapani.

Christy Parque, executive director of Homeless Services United, said the solutions need to be as diverse as the population they serve.

“You can’t have a one size fits all when it comes to the needs of homeless,” said Parque. “All federal resources need to come together to develop solutions for families.”

Councilwoman Palma’s office said the city would have to build an additional 70 shelters to accommodate those returning from the program, at a cost of $270 million, more than what the city would have spent on the remaining year of the two-year program.

“The government will continue to pay for shelters, but what is going to be the outcome?” said Franklin. “People looking to get out of the system have nothing to look forward to. Permanent housing needs to be more available.” 

Photo by Giovanny Fausto Pinto Friends from Villa Cuerno on Brook Ave in Melrose.

On a late summer evening a crowd of fifty-and-sixty-something Latinos and Latinas gathered to unwind over drinks, cards, and dominoes.

Nearby, under a tree made to resemble a palm tree, a DJ spun classic salsa with a few reggaeton songs mixed in. A vendor prepared alcapurrias, a Puerto Rican delicacy made from fried smashed yucca or green bananas filled with seasoned meat, along with other cuchefritos, or fried appetizers.

All around, new construction projects were going up, including a towering silver complex with new condos. In their shadows, the 55-and-over crowd had come to relax.

What seemed like a scene out of a flourishing Florida retirement community was in fact the intersection of Brook Avenue between 156^th and 157^th in Melrose.

The men and women who gather here call their sliver of sidewalk Villa Cuerno, translated as “village of horns.”The name harks back to a steamy past, the details of which vary depending whose interpretation you hear.

“I come here every weekend,” said 63-year-old Jose Santoviey as he sat with four friends on a makeshift wooden bench.“In Puerto Rico you go out into the streets to socialize and enjoy. It feels like Puerto Rico here.”

The loose-knit group of friends, which still numbers about 30, has been kicking back at this street corner on spring and summer weekends for decades, but now finds its longevity threatened by the heated local housing boom.

Long before the Melrose Court Condos were built in the mid 1990’s, the space the buildings now occupy was an empty dirt lot, recalled Altagracia Ozuna, 40, the group’s youngest member. Residents had built shacks and stores on the lot in the early ’80′s and dubbed the small shantytown Villa Alegre, or happy village.

Players from local softball teams and other residents started coming to Villa Alegre to drink and listen to live Latin music back then. Even Latin jazz legend Eddie Palmieri once graced a makeshift stage on the field, recalledOzuna.

But the happy village’s reputation soured. Members of the softball teams would get drunk. There were frequent trysts in an outhouse on the grounds. Soon Villa Alegre became Villa Cuerno, cuerno referring to devil’s horns in colloquial Spanish.

The fire department came and condemned Villa Cuerno. The pejorative name stuck. But the group stayed together, moving around frequently before settling back near their original spot.

Many recall the glory days of Villa Cuerno when the party would last until 3 a.m.

While the rendezvous have diminished, there is still plenty of flirting among the group members, many of whom are grandma’s and grandpa’s. Some walk with the aid of canes.

Grandchildren of regulars occasionally come to visit, but young people are not a part of Villa Cuerno.

“There’s no young people because they fight, do drugs, they bullshit. Here we are about family,” said Santoviey angrily. “Here we relax. We talk about family, about Puerto Rico.”

In recent years the group has kept a low profile, but Villa Cuerno regulars worry that tenants from the newly built Via Verde and Procida Houses complexes will want them out.

“This is the last year,” said one woman.

Azuna suggested they could merge with the nearby community garden Rincon Criollo, and use their base as a future hangout but, Rincon’s founder Jose “Chema” Soto worries about clashing objectives.

“We are a garden culture, fruits and plants. Over there they sell beer. That’s a place of business. I just don’t want that in here,” said Soto.

While there is a sense that this my be Villa Cuerno’s last year in its current location, some, like 63-year-old Edwin Ayala, remain defiant.

“While we are still alive we will be here. This was and is my life,” said Ayala. “This is where I left my wife and this is where she left me.”