Episode 2
· 44:42
Avi, what are some of the goals of the Northern Manhattan CLT? What are you guys looking to accomplish?
Avi Garelick:We wanna get tenants to own their own property and to put it into their trust. That's what it comes down to most of all. We wanna keep people in their homes and keep the landlords off their back.
Octavio Blanco:Excited today to have Avi Garilich. He is the treasurer for the Northern Manhattan Community Land Trust. Now if you're like us, you're probably asking yourself, like, what is a community land trust? So we're here, and we're gonna break it down for you. Welcome to Uptown Voices.
Octavio Blanco:From Harlem to The Heights to the Northern tip of Inwood, we're here to celebrate our people and together seek solutions for the difficult issues we're all confronting as neighbors. Regardless of what hood you represent, we share the same goal, creating the best community we can, somewhere to enjoy, where we can build our lives and raise our children. We wanna thank one eighty one Cabrini located on the corner of 180 First Street and Cabrini Boulevard for its generous support for this podcast. It's your neighborhood bistro just steps away from the North Walk of the GWB. Stay tuned for a discount code that you can mention to your bartender or server the next time you visit restaurant.
Octavio Blanco:We also need financial contributions from listeners like you to produce, improve, and expand our content. To contribute, please scan the QR code on the screen or visit vww.Livin'Americana.com. That's Livin' without a g. So, Avi, first of all, let me tell me a little bit about yourself and about what your work is here, in Northern Manhattan.
Avi Garelick:Sure. Well, first of all, you guys, thank you so much for having me on. It's a huge honor to be on Uptown Voices. I'm really glad you're doing this podcast. Yeah.
Avi Garelick:So, as for me, you know, I'm a long time Washington Heights resident. I I mean, it depends how you define it, but, I I got here in 2010. I've been involved in community work of various kinds, in the Jewish community doing education and community building. Then lately, in the past decade or so, politics and community work, I was drawn to the the work of the Northern Manhattan Not For Sale Coalition starting in about 2015, '20 '16. Because I you basically I I had kind of a a personal feeling that I wanted to fight back against gentrification.
Avi Garelick:You know, I was doing all this stuff with this growing Jewish community in the Washington Heights area, and I was aware that, you know, that sort of thing has an impact as sort of the, you know, there's only so much space in the neighborhood. There can be tension between some of the other folks. So, you know, that made me upset. I wanted to sort of look at things in a different way and be, a positive contributor to building bridges and community change. So I got involved there.
Avi Garelick:And the main project of Northern Manhattan Not For Sale, for folks who don't know, is we were fighting this predatory rezoning of Inwood for a few years. It was a knockdown, drag on fight with the established interest in the city. It's a very eye opening process for me. And one of the things that happened with us is we realized, you know, we were we're part of this resistance to these predatory up zoning. We, like so many people in the city, saw what happened in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, whatever, other neighborhoods where they've been rezoning during the Bloomberg era.
Avi Garelick:That was what made it possible to have all of this, like, slips upscale development while people were not getting their building needs met. And so we're afraid of that happening in Inwood. But as we continued the fight, we realized that we needed a message beyond, no. Thank you. We don't want any changes.
Avi Garelick:Right. Right?
Octavio Blanco:In Williamsburg, it was very easy to just tell people to move out and knock down the building and put something back up. But but Uptown, it's different. And, it sounds like what the Community Land Trust is is is is ready to do needs to do is is make sure that tenants are organized. Is that right?
Avi Garelick:Yeah. 10 tenant organizing is the central part of our vision, and we need so much more.
Led Black:Avi, I got a question for you because, I don't even know what a land trust is really like. Octavia gave me a bunch of homework. I'm studying. What let's start from there. What is a community land trust?
Avi Garelick:Yeah. So a community land trust very simply is a is a legal sort of institution that makes it possible for the community to own its own land. What you do with the community land trust is basically you have a nonprofit organization with representative membership, right? So you create a kind of democracy for the organization, so it's not just controlled by donors or whatever. And then that organization owns the land beneath all different kinds of types of development, whether it's housing, outdoor space, whatever you got.
Avi Garelick:So the CLT, as we call them, provides the community control and the security, right? Because in every deed, we write everything that's required to make it for the benefit of the community. If it's housing, it'll have standards for how affordable. If it's outdoor space, we'll have standards for access, etcetera, etcetera. Those that you can't break that.
Avi Garelick:But then also, you can have the building itself owned by the tenants. So then the tenants themselves who are closest to the issues in their building and know each other, they can govern the basic issues in their building. But then they can look to the CLT to protect them from bigger issues and to help with issues that are really like scale problems. So like you're not going to have to worry about like paying for a big capital improvement like a boiler or a roof all by yourself. If you're part of a larger CLT, you can rely on the on the collectivity.
Avi Garelick:You know what I mean?
Octavio Blanco:I guess one of the problems in Upper Manhattan is that a lot of these buildings are run by landlords that aren't really doing their part to to upkeep their buildings. Right?
Avi Garelick:You know, back in 2019, tenants in New York City had this huge victory. They passed a bunch of new legislation that made it much harder for landlords to push you out if you're in a rent stabilized building. Washington Heights in Inwood is the most densely rent stabilized area in New York because we have so many, you know, six story, five story larger buildings. And that was a huge success for us. It made it much, much harder to be displaced.
Avi Garelick:But the flip side is that landlords responded basically by saying, Well, if we can't raise your rents, if we can't double the rents, etcetera, we're just not gonna invest in the building anymore. And so people are experiencing all across uptown, worse and worse conditions. You see more, you see all kinds of problems with sanitation and rodents. Obviously, the rents are out of control. Landlords all have their part to play in that because they just have an eye on the bank.
Avi Garelick:They're looking at the bottom line. And if they can't raise the rents, they're gonna try to keep their profit margins constant by decreasing cost. That's simple, rational interest for the landlord. So we need a new model of ownership that can actually provide safe housing that's cheap and that people can control themselves in their own interest.
Octavio Blanco:I have I have so many questions. When was this land trust, the Northern Manhattan CLT, when was it formed?
Avi Garelick:We started having meetings in 2017. It was like a working group of the Northern Manhattan Not For Sale Coalition. Then after the loss on the rezoning, we basically took a hiatus. The nonprofit dates back to like 2021, and we've really been organizing earnestly starting in the beginning of 'twenty four. We've had intense gentrifying pressures for the entire twenty first century.
Avi Garelick:And currently, as we've discussed, landlords are divesting from their own properties in a way that it's not like we're not really quite at the bad old days yet, but like you saw what happened. You know, if you know New York history in the 70s and 80s, landlords just wholesale would abandon their property, sometimes set it on fire on the way out to collect insurance money, which actually is kind of the origin of the first generation of this kind of work. Community development corporations and some of the earliest community land trust in the city of somewhere around that time. Because tenants looked around and they said, Well, we should take matters into our own hands. Our landlords are completely absentee.
Avi Garelick:We don't want to leave, right? Nos Quelladamus, like they said in The Bronx, we're going to stay and make it work. And so that's a matter of filling in where the landlords are abandoning the scene. Today, things are a little different and it's harder to get property into community hands because landlords don't want to abandon the scene but they also don't want to do their jobs. But yeah, now you see So there's an established community land trust on the Lower East Side called Cooper Square, which if folks want to If you're in the neighborhood, you go check it out, just walk along East Fourth, East Third, and you can see it's a beautiful street.
Avi Garelick:It's got great retail and well maintained housing. That's all because of that CLT. Now, in this new generation, you've got East Harlem. They're off to a good start. East New York is buying properties.
Avi Garelick:So it's an exciting time to be a part of almost a movement of small organizations across the city.
Led Black:And Avi, what are some of the goals of the Neumann CLT? What are you guys looking to accomplish?
Avi Garelick:Well, a couple of things. Most important, we want to get tenants to own their own property and to put it into the trust. That's what it comes down to most of all. Some CLTs are gonna be more focused on new development because there are good opportunities for new development. What we're looking at is we have a really solid building stock, you know, some deterioration across the board, but good buildings that if, you know, you have cooperative management focused on maintaining them well, they'll survive for a long time.
Avi Garelick:So we wanna keep people in their homes and keep the landlords off their back.
Octavio Blanco:Could you explain a little bit why now might be a good time for people to start to get organized?
Avi Garelick:Yeah. That's a great question. So first of all and and excuse me if this is like if this comes off as too wonky. But the overall picture, as I mentioned, landlords are decreasing costs and trying to, you know, maintain their profit margins as they can no longer raise rent so high. The other big issue for landlords, if they bought before 2019, is a lot of them are what's called overleveraged.
Avi Garelick:Overleveraged means they took out big loans from banks or whatever with the idea in mind that they would start to double and triple the rent roll on their building. So they said to the banks, look, we have a bunch of poor tenants, you know, they think they deserve to live in Washington Heights, but we know better, you know, so we're gonna arrest them until they get out of here. And then we're gonna double the rent on that unit. We're gonna do that over and over again so that by the time the mortgage is due, 02/1930, '2 thousand '30 '5, you'll be getting these big payments from us. And the bank said, That sounds good.
Avi Garelick:It's been working so far in New York for the past twenty years. Here's a big loan. Now they're struggling to make the payments on these big loans that they should never have taken out. That's just a structural issue, which is that you'll see landlords trying to unload their buildings. Now, the tenant movement wants to be there to catch them when they fall.
Avi Garelick:I mean, the buildings, you know. They want get in there and buy if the landlords are selling. So that's why there's this legislation which has been discussed at the state level and the city level, TOPA and COPA. So TOPA is the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. COPA is the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.
Avi Garelick:And it's very simple. It's a first right of refusal when the landlord wants to sell. So the landlord puts the property on the market. TOPA would require them to inform the tenants and to give them the first chance to buy at whatever is the market rate. So obviously that law by itself is not a magic spell because we still need to get together the money to buy those buildings.
Avi Garelick:I mean, whatever it is, it's going be pretty expensive. It's New York City. So we want to get the laws across and we want to get funding from state, city. I'm not gonna mention federal. You know, we can't talk about federal.
Avi Garelick:But
Octavio Blanco:yeah. It's good to organize now because these overleveraged landlords, basically, they owe the the banks a lot of money because they thought they were gonna be able to, you know, raise the rent three, four times what the rent was, and then they're not able to. So then they're now they're just ignoring the the building, but they still owe all this money. So they might wanna sell the building, but these laws would say, okay, you who have ignored your tenants and are now trying to sell the building, you need to give the tenants the first opportunity to buy the building. And so tenants need to get organized so they can prove, hey, we're organized enough to take care of the building and community land trusts need to be involved because they gotta be able to say, oh, and we're able to tap into these monies so that we can help the tenants to purchase their buildings, which you may I I would imagine that after ignoring these buildings and letting them become so run down, they've probably decreased in value.
Avi Garelick:Well, yeah, what we need, like you said so well, is for is for tenants to get in the game, to start talking to their neighbors about their issues and start mobilizing to fix them because, number one, that's good no matter what. I mean, you got to get to go to know your neighbors and work together to get your basic needs met. It's always more effective when you work together as a team. And not just in dealing with your landlord, but also dealing with whatever's coming, you know? I mean, we talk about all kinds of stuff that, you know, a few years ago we had COVID and people needed to do mutual aid to help each other get groceries and so on without getting sick.
Avi Garelick:Today you've got ice all up in people's business and you need community networks just to let them know, let people know they're coming and all of that. So tenant organizing is like, it's good for your You can use it. It's good
Led Black:for it's good for a lot of reasons. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.
Led Black:I I remember someone saying community is the answer. Right? So that's definitely true. But what are some of the tactics that that the landlords are doing to push people out? Because in my building, for example, I'm one of the few playing market value, but I know they warehouse a lot of apartments.
Led Black:The the apartment right next to mine, there's no one in there. Hasn't been there forever. It's a bunch of apartments like that. Can you tell us about warehousing and some of the other tactics they're using?
Avi Garelick:Yeah. We don't know how many units across the city are being warehoused like that. There's just there's actually we don't know. And there's there's a huge range of estimates depending on who you are. Wow.
Avi Garelick:The city tries to do an estimate, the state has a separate estimate, the landlord lobby puts out their estimate, and they're just basically, there's no reliable way to know on a large scale how many there are. But anecdotally, there are a ton. And it's sad, you know? I mean, because first of all, you're getting deprived of neighbors, right? Instead of neighbors, you have nothing, best case scenario.
Avi Garelick:Problems can fester in the building, you know, structurally. If people aren't there living there, keep track of it. You get, God forbid, rodents, birds inside the building using it as a home, right? So, it's a big you know, not to mention that it restricts available housing. At a time where there's a huge housing crisis, people can't find apartments.
Avi Garelick:So that's a disaster. Landlords are trying to use that as a political chip, which is why you can't believe their numbers either. They want to say, We can't renovate these apartments and still make ends meet with the rents that we're required to charge. So they're leaving them empty even though in the short term it costs them money, they could be making rent because they are trying to pressure the government to let them raise the rents again as high as they could before. So that's part of So basically, there's a lot of buildings around the city where once people move out, they just don't fill them up again.
Avi Garelick:It makes it harder to organize. That's one thing.
Led Black:Besides warehousing, what else are they? What are the taxes are they doing? Because I'll give you an example. My mom has a rent stabilized apartment. She's been there since '79.
Led Black:And a few years back, they said she hadn't got paid her rent in like six years, which is nonsense. My mom is old school. She got the money order. And one month out of the few years they were questioning, my dad was he had just didn't have access to the money order. He he he didn't have a copy.
Led Black:So they made us still pay that one month. Right? Which is nonsense. But what other tactics are they doing, like, to to try to push us out?
Avi Garelick:Well, that's awful. And it sounds to me typical, because for them, it seems like the best case scenario I mean, you know, even if they even if they can't get you on everything, they'll get you on one little thing and they'll make $600 12 hundred dollars whatever. Yeah, and they could push you out. I mean, they're also super difficult about succession rights. So folks know about that, right?
Avi Garelick:If you know, if your mom or your uncle or your downtown tenants have a rent stabilized apartment, you know, you as their family members should be able to take it over if they want to move or they've got a stock out for bid. They make that, I mean, it is like, you know, legal as long as you establish residency while they still live there. Landlords will be a huge pain. Know what I mean? Even if they don't have a good plan to get that unit out of rent stabilization, they still just hate having multiple generations of a family live in a place because it gives you more power to have stability.
Avi Garelick:And that, as a class, they want tenants to be discombobulated and on their own. And they don't want us to be able to form stable communities.
Octavio Blanco:I think lead you know, you've well, you and I have talked about about the drug issue in in Upper Manhattan and the fact that the only places in The United States where there's safe injection sites is up here. And is that partly how does that affect the the housing stock and the neighborhood and the prices for for buildings? And how does that impact the people that are already living in in those in those?
Avi Garelick:Yeah, well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I would say off the bat, first of all, I fully support OnPoint and Washington Heights, and I'm a huge fan of everything they're doing. I think it's lifesaving work, and I know people on staff there and I know people who have used their services. And it's an incredible thing, like I said, life saving and life changing for a lot of people. That said, I I think we're on the back end of a really serious life threatening crisis.
Avi Garelick:The opium crisis, I don't know off the top of my head, but it's one of the top causes of death nationwide. It has been for a while. So that's a threat, whether you're housed or unhoused, people vulnerable to that, to drug addiction. You know, I mean, it's an issue that can, it can be a curveball issue for tenant organizing. I was in, before COVID, I was in a building on Wadsworth that had an active tenant association and we faced a problem with a guy actually whose grandmother had a lease in the building.
Avi Garelick:We had He was basically causing trouble. You know, he would let his friends in and they would be using out in the hallway and on the stairs because his grandmother didn't want that happening in the apartment. You know, it was disrupted, it was messy and, you know, families with kids were like freaked out. So we came together, we had a very raucous meeting on the subject, where the management was actually present. Someone invited government to come.
Avi Garelick:And so management heard about it. They said, basically they said, well, you can help us by asking us to evict the grandmother. If you guys all sign onto this letter, then we can sue her and that'll help us get her out. And some people thought that was a fine idea since she couldn't control her grandson. But a lot of people said, well, there's no way we're gonna, you know, she's a good woman.
Avi Garelick:I mean, she's a little bit, she's having a little bit of family trouble and she's getting old, but, know, we don't want to see her out on the street. That was boisterous. You know, people went back and forth because a lot of people just saw that as the most obvious solution. There's a lot of resistance. And eventually, we basically ended up calling his uncle Sam.
Avi Garelick:They brought him to like Queens or something to diffuse the situation. So, you know, that's the sort of thing that coming together and building community and looking for ways to keep everybody housed and safe and feeling good in their homes, that's something that only tenant organizing can do.
Led Black:Yeah. And I do want to say one thing, Abi, like, you know, respectfully, I don't know if I agree with you about our own point, right? I mean, I think they have their place. Right? But there's only two safe injection sites in the whole country, and they're both in uptown.
Led Black:Right? Washington Heights and El Barrio. But that's a that's a that's a, I think, a much larger topic that we tackle further. But I I I just wanted just if you could just, you know, like, bear with me. I almost feel like that it's it feels like it's a it's a Trojan horse for gentrification.
Led Black:Right? It feels like it's helping to push us out. Right? Because and it also, I think that it's helping to make people sell drugs. Right?
Led Black:Because heroin people wouldn't buy heroin, they're not gonna go far. They're gonna do it where they cop it. So it's you're actually forcing these young people to sell drugs to to these people. So I don't know if maybe I'm wrong. I'm willing open minded about it, but I don't know if I share the same kind of viewpoint about them as you
Avi Garelick:I think we've got a Yeah, maybe you could do an episode on the subject. You can bring someone from On Point on, and you could do a debate or a roundtable or something. You know, the opiate crisis and the fentanyl crisis is stuff that has global impact, and, you know, is destroying Mexico, not to mention neighborhoods in The US. And it's a little bit beyond what we can settle here.
Led Black:For sure. No, for sure. No, but I just want to say maybe it was something I'm missing, right, that you knew that I was missing about it. Because it it feels like ever since Unpointe came Uptown, Uptown's just gotten worse. Right?
Led Black:I grew up here. I was I lived here through the crack era. Right? I was a kid during the crack era. And I see things here that I've never seen before.
Led Black:Right? And again, it just feels in certain ways that they've become a magnet for just drawing drug addicts appear. Right? But anyway, like I said, this is another topic. I want to ask you, and this is kind of what you were talking about, you know, the Northern Manhattan, not for sale.
Led Black:Like, when you look at Inwood now, you know, being that you fought the good fight. Right? But now what you were fighting against has happened to some degree. Right? What what are your feelings on when when you go to Inwood and you see what it has become?
Led Black:What what do you think about
Avi Garelick:Look, mean, Inwood is staying strong as well as it can. And as we discussed, you know, in the year after we lost the rezoning fight, we won the big statewide fight for for the tenant laws. So that changed the landscape. We were very afraid of the rezoning creating pressures on the building values in the rest of Inwood and exacerbating already really intense displacement pressures. Now those pressures are not as intense as we expected.
Avi Garelick:Instead, again, we've got the problem of deterioration and divestment. Disinvestment, maybe we should call it. So that's different. And, you know, as far as the effects of the upzoning, I mean, it's really too early to tell. But you go to I mean, okay, if you take the subway to 207 Street on the one line right now and just look you stand on a platform and look across towards in the direction of the Bronx, so those new buildings, they just are finishing.
Avi Garelick:They just finished those up. They're going to be leasing those out over the next year or so. So those are big. I mean, are big. What kind of changes to the neighborhood those will affect?
Avi Garelick:We don't know yet. And that's not even that's not even getting into what, you know, the the rest of the neighborhood.
Octavio Blanco:Right. Because those are actually there's still plans for many more buildings to be going up in that previously industrial area. Right? I mean, they're still Indeed. They're not done they're not done with the building.
Octavio Blanco:So it's still too early to tell that how Inwood is gonna be impacted by those large large buildings because they're common. I know for sure if they do get filled up, it's gonna be a lot harder to find a seat at the, at the, at the, at 207 Street than it was when I lived there ten years ago.
Led Black:Or parking or parking. Right? Cause parking is going be even worse. Yeah.
Octavio Blanco:Yeah. I mean, there's some
Avi Garelick:good stuff to- And we don't know what kind of cultural changes to expect either.
Led Black:You wanna tell them a little about donations and how they could help the show?
Octavio Blanco:Absolutely. We can't do this without contributions from our viewers. You're gonna see a QR code in the of the screen here, which you can scan, and that's gonna take you to a contribution site where you can make a contribution towards Uptown Voices. It's gonna be helpful for us to be able to elevate our production. We have dreams and aspirations of doing live shows.
Octavio Blanco:We have dreams and aspirations of being on location at our various, cultural institutions, and we can't do that without without contributions from viewers and listeners like you. And we also can't do that without our sponsors. In this this pilot season, this first episode of our pilot season, we are lucky to have a great sponsor, one eighty one Cabrini. It's our neighborhood bistro. Both Led and I are just steps away from one eighty one Cabrini, and and we love it.
Octavio Blanco:One eighty one Cabrini is located right there on that corner of 181 and Cabrini just steps away.
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Led Black:And, you know, if you wanna sponsor, holler at my boy. You know what I mean? Let's make it happen. You know what I mean?
Octavio Blanco:I just wanna say one thing. We're gonna have a code, a redemption code at the end of this episode, which you can bring to +1 81 for a special treat.
Led Black:But, yeah, without further ado, though, let's get to it. Let's do it.
Octavio Blanco:So can I go back a little bit? We don't know how many of these apartments are being warehoused. Does somebody collecting those statistics? Can tenants reach out to your organization or some other organization and say, Hey, if you're collecting numbers, I live at this address, and I can tell you that this apartment is empty and this one's empty and this one's empty so that you can continue building a list.
Avi Garelick:Yeah. We'll take it. I mean, it's that's something that's been on the back burner for me for a long time. I thought what we really one of the things we really need is a community driven data collection process. And if anybody who's listening wants to wants to take the lead on that, I mean, I think it would be really cool to just go up and down your block.
Avi Garelick:Just go up and down to all the buildings in your block. Right. You knock on every door. It's a lot of you know, fine. It's just one block.
Avi Garelick:So, it's a lot of doors but just one block. You know, a couple hundred. Split it up with some other folks. You just wanna know, is there someone living here? Then you ask also, okay, you're living here, what about the other, you know, I knocked on the door across the hall.
Avi Garelick:Didn't get an answer there. Do you know if there's someone living there? Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah.
Avi Garelick:So and so, you know, they just work nights. Try again, you know, in the morning or whatever or yeah, they live there. That one, I don't know. Haven't seen anyone coming in and out or I know for sure, you know, that one's been vacant since 2022. I think you could make a list.
Avi Garelick:If we get momentum on that, I think it would be a really cool project And it could, you know, I mean, we could prove something cool about about a neighborhood data collection. Mean, go ahead.
Led Black:You know what I find interesting, Avi? Like, you're doing, like, good work, right? And and important work, but it's hard work. Right? It's not easy work.
Led Black:Right? It's work that that that you have to actually convince people that the work needs to be done. Right? Like, so how do you how do you stay motivated? What how what keeps you going?
Led Black:Right?
Avi Garelick:I mean, this is gonna be kind of sappy, I guess, but honestly, I just I'm doing the work with my friends. I mean, you know, Paul, Paloma, and Chris were the core of the CLT project, and we've been working together now for many, many years. And we built deep connections. So I feel accountable to them. Have a good time whenever we're working on stuff together.
Avi Garelick:You know, we have meetings, you know, we cook, we get together. It feels good. I think it's it's really important. It's really important to make to make it happen that way, to build community and friendships and to cook for each other, to help each other with kids or whatever it is. And that's also what I would say, you know, to anyone who feels afraid of tenant organizing, or feels like it'll be a slog or too much work, or there's too much risk, or, you know, you feel like you can live with with whatever situation you're in, you know, at minimum, just the minimum tenant association is you just get to know each other a little bit more.
Avi Garelick:You know, there's so many ways that we're being drawn into our own little cocoons in twenty first century society. We got our little, you know, our demonic screams and we can just stay inside our bedrooms and ignore the world around us. And it's such a shame, you know, because it's destroying society. Like, we need to stick together. So it could just be just as much as knocking on the next door and saying, you know, I've been having this leak.
Avi Garelick:Have you been having something like that? Also, what's your name? You know, where you come from? And, you know, do you want some dinner? And if it doesn't get, you know, you don't need to be having twice a month meetings and going to housing court, know, tying yourself to your landlord's office door in order to be in a tenant association.
Avi Garelick:I mean, just start small and be friendly.
Octavio Blanco:And for those who are inspired by the work that you're doing, because, you know, I reached out to you, Avi, because I really think that the idea of the Northern Manhattan Community Land Trust is important work. And I would personally also like to participate somehow. So I was just gonna put it out there. Like I would love to work with you on some project, some way, and somehow this is one way that I can work with you to get the word out about what you're doing, with me and Led on our, Uptown Voices podcast. How do how can other people become involved with you?
Octavio Blanco:I mean, yeah, there's I think what you said is really good that you don't have to be doing, like, monthly meetings with your neighbors. It's just a question of like, just knocking on your next door neighbor's door and introducing yourself is a great start. But what if somebody is more inspired and wants to wants to work with you or wants to volunteer with you? How can, how can they do it? What are the kinds of people that you're looking for?
Octavio Blanco:Like what roles are you trying to fill things like that?
Avi Garelick:Awesome. Yeah, thanks. So we are, yeah, we're a small and mighty organization. And right now the vast majority of our effort is going into working with this one couple of buildings on 1 Seventieth Street. We're working with them intensively, supporting them and trying to get their buildings out from under their landlord.
Avi Garelick:Know, so we're a small group, so that's like, that's our main project. In the meanwhile, there's so many other buildings that are in such similar situations. So, you know, people want to get involved, get to know the community land trust model. We can train you into it. And you can start knocking on doors and help us expand the project.
Avi Garelick:You can also help us run events. And of course, we take cash donations. Good too. It helps us with our operations. And really, any of your skills are probably gonna be helpful.
Avi Garelick:And so we have a little contact form on our website, northernmanhattanclt.org, and you can email us, team@northernmanhattanclt.org. We get to know you. We'll try to find a project. It's like, we have a new logo as of this year, thanks to Brenda Gonzalez, who's a designer. She said, let me help you out.
Avi Garelick:We'll get a popping logo. That's her skill set. That's great. It's like, oh, somebody if you want to cook for a tenant meeting, you love, you love to cook, you got a good black beans and rice recipe. Let's get you in there.
Avi Garelick:So, you know, it's like the sky's the limit. We need to be bringing our skills to community work. So get in touch with us and we'll we'll get you plugged in.
Led Black:That's awesome. And I wanna ask you about the the two buildings you spoke about at once. The the landlord was arrested. Right? Like, does that give you right?
Led Black:I think he was arrested. Right?
Avi Garelick:Literally. He literally went to Rikers Island, folks.
Led Black:Wow. Wow. Yeah. He I
Avi Garelick:don't know what the plan I don't know what's the plan So
Led Black:but how does that affect what you're doing in those buildings? Is that good or bad or does it, you know, does it push the agenda forward or does it somehow make it go backwards?
Avi Garelick:Surprisingly, it is not as helpful as you might think. I mean, it raises the profile of the buildings, which is good up to a point. People are interested. You get your elected officials coming out to the press conference, which is good. But we live in America and private property is private property.
Avi Garelick:The tenants want to own their own building. The only way to get that to happen is for him to sell it. So we're still working through that ticket. The city might help. The city can sue him, but it's a very challenging process.
Avi Garelick:In the meanwhile, there are court orders for him to fix the violations. There's slow very slow progress on all that stuff. Immediate tension moves on. You know? You get somebody else at the top of the worst landlord list.
Avi Garelick:So it's a boost to see him get arrested. But it's like him spending time in Rikers Island doesn't fix the mold in your bathroom. Right. It might hinder it actually, right? It actually hinge.
Avi Garelick:I mean, obviously there's a management company and stuff, and there's a superintendent that is getting his paycheck from the management company. So it doesn't have to come to a halt while the principal is doing time. But that's just a system that we live in. It's like, well, we have jails, we got to use those. There's no there's no magic spell to, make these buildings that he's neglected for so long suddenly lovely places to live where the tenants can feel good about it.
Avi Garelick:You know, that's a slog.
Octavio Blanco:Yeah. And, and then we haven't even touched on, on what's the issue with commercial properties and, and there's so many commercial properties or blocks or plots of land that, that are in total disrepair. I mean, for God's sake, Coogan's bar, which was like a mainstay of the neighborhood and was somewhere where everybody would gather, lost its lease after COVID. And there's nobody in there still. That was how long ago?
Avi Garelick:Two years ago.
Led Black:2021, I think. Yeah. I think it was 2021.
Octavio Blanco:So is there, like, a land trust, idea that could be applied to things like that. Like, there's there's a few places in the neighborhood where where there were people that were gonna decide were gonna build something, and then they never did or they half built it. And they now there's, like, I think it's on, like, off Broadway. There's, like, a building that's really just, like, a skeleton of a building, and it's been that way for, what, like, ten years now. There's a corner of, 180 Third And Overlook that was gonna be this massive building, and it's and it's and it's just a empty lot that's you can't even look into it.
Octavio Blanco:There's the corner of of 180 First And Broadway that used to be the Coliseum Theater, and now it's just weeds. So, like, is there anything that Kennedy level to address those issues? Because, I mean, we do have many, many issues, like, in our homes, but then we also have these issues. You know, all these places could have been, you know, apartment buildings for for folks to live in.
Avi Garelick:Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. There's a lot there. And, you know, it it all comes down to just the the basic incentive structure of private land ownership.
Avi Garelick:I mean, I'm sort of beating the drum on this one, and, maybe I sound like a crazy radical but like, listen, you own a lot. You own this lot on 180 First In Broadway. Let's say you're the family that's lucky enough to have this lot. You don't have any debt on the property, right? Are you paying property taxes?
Avi Garelick:It's freaking vacant, okay? You're fine there. You can basically If you build an apartment building now but if you had waited another seven years for the neighborhood to gentrify, Okay? You could have built an apartment building that would, like, double your total net operating income over the next two decades. Hello.
Avi Garelick:You're not gonna build it now. Timing is so important for development. You want to get the maximum because once you build it, it's there forever. I mean, it's there for the rest of your life. Landlords want to be very judicious about when they do their big project.
Avi Garelick:Now for us, what does that look like? It looks like overgrown empty lots that are breeding grounds for rats that we can't use for anything. And so the community is suffering while private landlords buy their time. Talking about Coogan's, mean, got to take on Columbia, Columbia Presbyterian, if we're taking that issue seriously. I mean, that's right there, the landlord there, I think.
Avi Garelick:So they've got some other plans. I mean, they don't want a neighborhood hot spot. They want, I don't know what they want, I mean, for their doctors or something. So, you know, I don't think the Community Land Trust is gonna be able to take down Columbia Pres necessarily, but I do think, you know, as we grow and gain momentum, the goal is to be able to take on properties like that and to be able to work on putting them to community use, right? And this is it needs to be a citywide movement, a national movement, and especially a movement of the neighborhood to turn the tide towards community ownership of land that makes it possible to override some of these antisocial impacts of private landlordism.
Avi Garelick:I thought, you know, that's all we can that's all we can hope for.
Led Black:So so it seems like Avi, like the government needs to step in and and and these landlords. Right? It seems like they have a sense of to not do anything. So what what can government do to make things better?
Avi Garelick:Well, you can yeah. The government could put more pressure on owners of vacant properties or underutilized properties. I mean, there is an idea that's been thrown around for a long time called the land value tax that could contribute to a community ownership future. Basically, what you do with the land value taxes, instead of just taxing the improvements on the land, which is the basic property tax that we have, you tax the value itself. This comes from the ideas of a very interesting thinker from earlier in American history named Henry George.
Avi Garelick:And he looked around and he said, well, so much of the value of owning a private piece of property actually comes from the improvements that are kind of generated by society. You know, it's especially true in an urban context. I mean, you know, on a basic level, you have sewage, you have pavements, street lighting, electricity, internet, that's all in there because of public activity. And then you've also got, you know, the intangibles. You've got culture.
Avi Garelick:You've got local economies. All the stuff that makes that makes properties in a place like New York City valuable to have. So the government could tax that value. Right? Since we created it in the first place, we could tax that value.
Avi Garelick:That would be good income for the government. Also would incentivize landlords to use it or lose it. Right. Now it's not always good. Landlords using it is not always good for could get, you know, it could, it could get them moving.
Avi Garelick:They don't want to build. Maybe they'll sell it off to community land trust that can make something happen with it.
Octavio Blanco:I wish we could just solve this, you know, like just snap our fingers and make it happen. It's so frustrating to be in such a great neighborhood with so many great people and be confronted with so many of these, you know, frankly, I mean, I want to say they're complicated, but also at the same time, they're also pretty simple issues. You know, there's land and needs to be Right. So, I mean, yeah, I wish, I wish we could just, you know, snap our fingers, but you know, what I do really like about, what you're doing, Avi, and also what you do, Led, on a daily basis and what I'm trying to get involved with is that you do build community, and I've heard you both say how important community is. And Upper Manhattan, Inwood, Washington Heights, and Harlem, those are three iconic communities where the people really do stick together.
Octavio Blanco:They are true neighborhoods where people do, you know, you know, get to know their neighbors for the most part. And I hope that that's, that that's, going to be the case going forward. Led, do you have any, we're not going to solve this issue and we're not going to, and we're not going to, you know, understand it fully either in this hour that we have together. And I hope that this is not going to be the last time Avi that we get to speak with you. I hope to have you on more frequently as we get the podcast going because it's a complicated issue.
Octavio Blanco:So to listeners who might still be sort of like foggy about what the heck we're talking about, I understand. I do I do want to get, get us get this issue on our table though. And I think that this format, this place, especially being that we're local, right, it gives us the time and space to to talk about it. Led, I'm sorry if I droned on, but let go ahead.
Led Black:No. You're good. I just wanna say, Avi, like, thank you for the work you do. Right? Hearing you talk, the way you talk, and the passion that comes through, and I'm really thankful for that.
Led Black:Right? It's it's inspiring, right? Sometimes, you know, you forget why you do things, and I want to thank you for that. And any final words, like, like, Tavy said, this is not the last time we talked. I think you were so smart, so brilliant, so focused, so passionate.
Led Black:So we definitely could do updates. But for right now, anything you want to leave the community with?
Avi Garelick:Yeah. Thank you, Octavio. I'm really impressed that you're putting this podcast together, and it's what we need uptown just to build consciousness and to help people learn about what's going on in this neighborhood and around the city. I just gotta go back to my old refrain, man. Knock on the doors next Knock on your neighbor's doors.
Avi Garelick:Just say, Hey, what's up? We have this problem. Do you have that problem? You know, get to talking. That's what you have to do.
Avi Garelick:And email us at team@NorthernManhattanclt.
Octavio Blanco:Yeah. Get out of your comfort zone, people. Come on. Get out. Get out there.
Octavio Blanco:Knock on your neighbors. You know, make friends. You know? That's why we live in New York City. Right?
Avi Garelick:That's what it's all about.
Led Black:Exactly. Exactly. Avi, thank you so much, brother. I really appreciate it, and thank you for finding a good fight, brother.
Avi Garelick:Thank you, guys. Be good.
Octavio Blanco:Thanks for joining us in episode of Uptown Voices brought to you by one eighty one Cabrini, your neighborhood bistro just steps away from the north walk of the George Washington Bridge. Use the code Uptown Voices season one for your discount. And to stay up to date on the latest in Uptown, you can follow Uptown Collective on Instagram, Facebook, and X. If you're watching Uptown Voices on YouTube, don't forget to smash the subscribe button and to give us a like. Until next time, this has been Uptown Voices.
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