The challenge

More than 30 percent of households in South Brooklyn, a neighborhood of New York City, exist on incomes below the federally defined poverty level. Many residents are unemployed and receive public assistance. Cases of overcrowding are well above the city average. These statistics aside, the community remains a vibrantly diverse neighborhood with a remarkable mix of housing, small businesses and religious and civic institutions. Its stock of quality housing, however, is increasingly attracting an influx of new residents. This gentrification poses a problem to low income families, many of whom have already been pushed out of affordable housing elsewhere.


Seeds of commitment

Michelle de la Uz grew up in a working-class, racially mixed community in New London, Conn. She experienced discrimination in the first grade, when her teacher put her in a closet for hours because she could only speak Spanish. However, de la Uz was the first in her family to graduate from college. Linda Techell grew up with few resources, but she, too, was the first college graduate in her family. “My life has been shaped by people who helped to give me opportunities that they did not have themselves,” says Techell, who credits her success and her desire to be a social worker to “the intervention of a few individuals.” By contrast, Brad Lander was raised in a middle-class Jewish family in a suburb of St. Louis. “In my life, there was real opportunity: good housing, good jobs that my parents even seemed to enjoy and a good public school.” He adds, “The values in our house implied that these opportunities were everyone’s birthright. My anger at the ways that racism and inequality contradict these values, and the ways that my community too often ignores and benefits from these contradictions, is at the root of my passion for change.”


Accomplishments

The Fifth Avenue Committee aims to advance social and economic justice in South Brooklyn principally through the preservation and construction of affordable housing and the creation of job-training opportunities. The organization has redeveloped 600 units of affordable housing for low and very low-income people, with the majority of these units now collectively owned by residents. FAC’s redevelopment efforts received a 2002 National Award of Excellence from the Fannie Mae Foundation. FAC also organizes residents and workers to combat displacement caused by gentrification and to promote legislative remedies. The organization’s Displacement Free Zone (D.F.Z.) crusade has galvanized more than 150 residents to defend tenants’ rights, preventing a dozen evictions in cases where the law provided no protections and helping reduce South Brooklyn’s overall rate of eviction.

After first focusing on affordable housing solutions, FAC’s leaders realized they could best help their neighborhood by branching into economic development work, including job placement and training. Welfare rights soon became a priority. FAC launched FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality), forming a citywide coalition for new municipal policies guaranteeing all welfare recipients the right to choose education and training programs instead of workfare assignments. This new community voice helped pass a transitional jobs bill, which is expected to create 7,500 jobs for low income New Yorkers.

FAC also sponsors job-training programs for commercial drivers and network cable installers, and develops innovative employment opportunities, including FirstSource Staffing, a temporary service agency that provides an average of $11 an hour in wages. Eighty-six percent of three-month placements lead to permanent employment. In 2000, these programs helped more than 500 people obtain good jobs,. FAC has also launched Developing Justice in South Brooklyn, a program that assists ex offenders. As a result of the program, more than 100 ex-prisoners have successfully reentered the community and have joined a grassroots citizen campaign to repeal unfair drug laws.


Their leadership style

FAC is committed to building local leadership to ensure that the organization remains sustainable. Community members, including ex-prisoners, make up the majority of FAC’s staff and board. De la Uz, Techell and Lander recruit low income residents and others directly affected by social problems to lead efforts to address them. Community members also may join FAC as “FAC Activists” —to become engaged in all areas of FAC’s work. These activists whose number now exceeds 325, are drawn from more than 3,000 South Brooklyn residents who take advantage FAC’s programs annually. Many neighbors use FAC’s storefront as a meeting place and special-purpose community center for everything from organizing for criminal-justice reform to practicing holiday carols to be sung at welfare offices.

In addition, FAC played vital leadership roles in the creation of the N.Y.C. Organizing Support Center, which provides technical assistance in community organizing; Housing First!, a New York City campaign for affordable housing for all; and the Alliance for a Working Economy. Kali Ndoye, a FAC board member, describes FAC’s insistence on inclusiveness — and on approaching problems from multiple directions.


The future

FAC is poised to acquire a new building to house staff and provide additional facilities for the neighborhood. “In five years,” says Techell, “I would like to still be very active with FAC.” Lander hopes “to be able to continue much of the innovative work we are doing — combining community development and grassroots organizing around issues of economic, housing and criminal justice — by supporting, networking and working with other community based organizations (in the U.S. and potentially around the world) who share these same values and tools.” De la Uz expects to continue working actively on progressive political causes and to remain a practicing social worker. At one point, she wrote, “I was open to the idea of running for local elected office, and I may still be.”


More about Linda Techell, Michelle de la Uz and Brad Lander

“I know that Brad and the FAC co-chairs have a strong commitment to shared leadership, developing the leadership of others, maintaining a strategic focus to produce results, and keeping their eyes on the prize.”
— Gara LaMarche, Director, U.S. Programs, Open Society Institute

“A balance between homes and jobs is difficult to maintain, but two things would help: an aggressive program to build affordable housing to ease the overheated market, and a comprehensive planning effort with expanded inclusionary zoning, ‘nontransitional’ mixed-use districts, industrial land trusts and other innovative protections for manufacturing. Working New Yorkers need both affordable housing and jobs. We can do a better job of planning for both.”
— Brad Lander, The New York Times, August 12, 2001