city limits magazine, january 2001 issue

8/3/2019 City Limits Magazine, January 2001 Issue

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Open Season• ust when you thought it was safe to go back in the voting booth, another election sea-l son is upon us. But this year's New York City races should be cause for hope, not

gnashing of eeth and rending of garments. Yes , it takes buckets ofcash to win elected

office here, just as it does almost everywhere in the country. But in most other respects ,

this coming November 's races to run New York couldn '( have less in common with thetrain wreck that Washington just delivered.

The presidential campaign was an astounding exercise in political tautology. The

Bush and Gore campaigns piled on the polls,focus groups and anchovies. And with

almost scientific precision, each got exactly what they wanted: an America split right

down the middle, because virtually any issue that might alienate a substantial bloc of

voters-that had the potential to alter the order ofpower even slightly-was off the table.

True to the city's long history ofexceptionalism in all things, particularly where trou

blemaking is concerned, exactly the opposite is happening in New York. While there are

certain common threads among mayoral candidates-chief among them keeping the

city's financial health strong-the throng of candidates running for a wide-open City

Council and City Hall is counting on oldjashioned political positioning to pull them

through. And that, sometimes cynically and others quite honestly, includes the promise

that producing constructive change is an obligation ofpublic office. In New York, diverseconstituencies are still courted as powerful groups that must be addressed and acknowl

edged, not as irrelevant liabilities to be ignored in favor of a mythical middle.

The emerging blocs form vivid pictures ofmultiple New Yorks. One mayoral candi

date is assembling a coalition ofblack and Latino support, and assailing the current

administration for its failure to show responsibility to needy New Yorkers. Another is

looking to do much the same among outer-borough white and ethnic voters, angling to

win as a kinder; gentler Giuliani. A third hopes to sail in on an unholy alliance ofpro

gressive idealism and new economy money. And the fourth is claiming the current

mayor's winning mantle of echnocrat extraordinoire, proposing a shining future built on

strategic stewardship and leveraging of resources.

In the races for Council and other offices, the range ofplayers and positions is sim

ply remarkable. While Democratic hackhouses will inevitably claim much power; many

other groups are staking claims, including ethnic and neighborhood organizations and

coalitions, the Working Families Party and the Greens, and groups focused by issues toolong mishandled- from trash disposal to police oversight. They are running candidates,

yes, but also demanding to be heard.

It would be naive to think that all of hese players are going to get a seat when the

music stops. But their heavy investment in the process does give them a significant mea

sure ofpower. In New York, differences do matter. We have as many political hacks as the

rest of he country put together; but also a wealth ofbrainpower; idealism and savvy (if

not always enough state andfederal dollars) invested in building a better city.

In the coming year; City Limits will be profiling the issues, power plays and people

looking to tum term limits into neighborhood power. Jf we 're lucky, we'll have the room

and time to give a taste ofall that 's out there.

Cover photo by Joshua Zuckerman

Alyssa Katz

Editor

City Limits relies on the generous support of its readers and advertisers, as well as the following funders: The Adco

Foundation,The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, The Hite Foundation, The Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter

Rock, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation,The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, The Scherman Foundation,The North Star

Fund, J.P. Morgan &Co. ncorporated, The Annie E Casey Foundation,The Booth Ferris Foundation,The New York Community

Trust, The New York Foundation, The Taconic Foundation, Deutsche Bank, M&TBank, Cit ibank, and Chase Manhattan Bank .

(ity Limits

Volume XXVI Number 1

City Limits is published ten imes per year, monthly except

bi·monthly issues in July/August and September/October, by

the City Limits Community Information Service, Inc . anon·

profit organization devoted to disseminating informationconcerning neighborhood revitalization.

Publisher: Kim Nauer

Associate Publish er: Anita Gutierrez

Edito r: Alyssa Katz

Sen ior Editors : Sajan P. Kuriakos, Kathleen McGowan

Associate Editor: Annia Ciezadlo

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Research Director: Jonathan Bowles

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Board of Directors·:Beverly Cheuvront, New York City Coalition Against Hunger

Ken Emerson

Mark Winston Griffith, Central Brooklyn Partnership

Amber Hewins, Granta

Celia Irvine, Manhattan Borough President's Office

Francine Justa, Neighborhood Housing Services

Andrew Reicher, UHAB

Tom Robbins, Journalist

Ira Rubenstein, Emerging Industries Alliance

Makani Themba·Nixon, GRIPP

Pete Williams , National Urban Le ague

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FEATURES

Empty PromisesMore than a year ago, City Limits exposed a federally fundedoutrage: the milking of Harlem real estate for quick cash. Thescheme has left dozens of shoddy buildings in limbo-

and stuck HUD with a disputed $50 million-plus bill. By Kemba Johnson

Hearts of Gold, Tongues of LeadFoundation-speak got your head reeling? Take a peekat In Other Words, a plain-English guide to the lingo that makes thenonprofit world go 'round. By Tony Proscio

The Last ResortAlthough single room occupancy hotels and their residents have longbeen part of the Rockaway Park landscape, local homeowners andrenters have enlisted the city 's help to push them out. By Robert Neuwirth

PROFILE

Class ConsciousnessAsset management classes aren't just for yuppies:Bedford-Stuyvesant residents learn the ropes on investing ,retirement accounts and homeownership.

PIPELINES

Field of QueensThe Metropolitan Oval, a dusty patch of soccer heaven in Maspeth,has brought true fans together for decades.

Where Credit is Due

By Dara Mayers

By Rob MacKay

ABronx credit union partners with a check casher, boostingservices and raising eyebrows. By Kathleen McGowan

Book ReviewAnother World

CityviewRace Against Money

Editorial

Briefs

Vital Stats

COMMENTARY

DEPARTMENTS

2

5

2 3

Job Ads

ProfessionalDirectory

124

By Helene Clark

125

By Sal Albanese

27

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the National Credit Union Administration.

Workshops on Legal Issues for Nonprofits

Lawyers Alliance

for NewYork330 Seventh Avenue

New York, NY 10001www.lany.org

The leading provider of ree and low-costbusiness law services to nonprofits tha t

are working to improve the quality of

life in New York's neighborhoods.

Except as noted, all workshops are

held from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm atRoom 2925, Empire State Building,

350 FifthAvenue, NYC.

Workshops are $40 in advance and

$50 at the door. Seating is limited;reservations are recommE;!nded.

New York Foundation grantees

may attend certain workshopsat no cost.

January 17

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Family Child Care Networks

Legal Issues Relating to Faith-Based Organizations

Incorporation and Tax Exemption (10 a.m. to noon)

Developing Low-Income Housing Using the FederalTax Credit

Fundraising Law and Regulation

Incorporation and Tax Exemption (6 to 8 p.m. at

330 Seventh Avenue, 19th Floor)

Legal Issues Relating to Child Care Facilities

Business Ventures for Nonprofits

Nonprofits and the Internet

Employment Law

Incorporation and Tax Exemption (10 a. m. to noon)

Mergers and Strategic Alliances

To register, or for more information, call 212 219-1800.

CITY LIMITS



Housing

CityTakesB ~ o t I the Block

The exterior of 112 Malcolm X Boulevard is

ornate, but inside it's a different story. Resi

dent Elizabeth Jones wearily recites thebuilding's problems. It's infested with mice and

roaches. The plumbing barely works. The kitchen

sink has been stopped up for a year. The bathroom

sink leaks. When it rains, water pours into the lightfixtures. And the banisters on the stairs are weak, a

serious problem for Jones because acar accident has

made walking extremely painful. "So much needs tobe fixed in this place," says Jones. "It's not safe."

Two years ago, Jones's electricity was shut offbecause her landlord, Edward Winston, didn't pay

the bills. Jones lives on just $587 a month in disability checks, but she and other tenants came up

with $2,357 and took over the utility payments.Jones was not surprised to find out that Win

ston had also failed to pay his city taxes-he owes

$22,782 on a property that's valued at $81,000.The building is now on a list of properties the citywill try to rescue and rehabilitate, by working with

the current owner or finding a more responsibleone to take his place.

But if the Giuliani administration had had itsway this fall, Winston's mismanagement wouldhave been deemed too minor to guarantee his ten

ants the city's help. His unpaid bills would insteadhave been sold to a trust. And if he failed withinsix months to work out a repayment deal with a

collection agency, the building would have beensold at auction to the highest bidder.

Alarmed that buildings like Jones's would bedumped onto the market without any guaranteesthey would be fixed, housing advocates took theircase to the City Council. In October, they got a

precious reprieve.

The tug-of-war centered on the city's 1996 law

governing landlords who fail to pay their taxes.Under the law, buildings whose tax debts exceed15 percent of their value and are in need of seriousrepair are labeled distressed and must be monitored by the city's Department of Housing Preservation & Development. If the owner won't cooperate, the property enters HPD's Third PartyTransfer program, which supplies rundown buildings with new landlords who have establishedtrack records in managing and repairing apart

ments.But this fall, the Department of Finance pro

posed limiting eligibility to buildings whose debtsare greater than 50 percent of their value. The

JANUARY 2001

change would have increased the city's revenuefrom debt sales and decreased HPD's costs. A

building like Jones', with a debt of 28 percent ofits value, just wasn't bad enough to merit help. Atleast 273 other buildings would have likewise beenexcluded from the city program and headedtoward auction.

At a Council hearing, housing advocates arguedthat tenants in the city's most vulnerable buildingsneeded far better protection. The new law "wouldsignificantly raise the number of fmanciallystrapped buildings that may ultimately be fore

closed and auctioned off to new owners, without

their underlying financial problems ever beinaddressed," testified Frank Braconi of the CitizenHousing and Planning Council. By contrast, saiJoe Center of the Urban Homesteading AssistancBoard, "the housing conditions get much better" o

buildings that come under city oversight.The council rejected the proposal and voted t

renew the current law for another year. "It's a program pregnant with danger for tenants," sayHarlem Councilmember Bill Perkins. "How dyou prevent the properties from going from onbad owner to another?"

-Matt Pacenz

w



Briem··.......... - - - - -.......... - - - - - - - - - -

Retail

StoreofKnowledge

It's Saturday afternoon in BedfordStuyvesant's trendy new bookstore, and

the children's reading session finished

hours ago. But Tawna Sells is still playing

with ber lively 9-month-old daughter,

Maya, while chatting with a friend. Why go

home, she asks, when you already feel like

you're there?

Bed-Stuy's residents say there's a growing

sense of community in this neighborhood, andpart of that may be due to Brownstone, the 4-

month-old bookstore on Lewis Avenue between

Decatur and McDonough Streets.

Before launching the bookstore, 30-year-old

Crystal Bobb-Semple, a Bed-Stuy native, was apolicy analyst with the National Community

Building Network. She decided to leave for amore concrete project-founding a business in

the neighborhood that could also function as alocal institution. Using both private funds and aloan from the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration

Corporation, Bobb-Semple and her husband,

Walston, settled on Brownstone, Bed-Stuy's first

black-owned bookstore in more than 15 years.

"We thought of a farmer's market or an

antiques shop, but we thought people might onlybuy things and leave," she says. "We wanted

something where people could express them

selves, feel at home, and exchange ideas too."

With the city full of Barnes & Nobles , some

say the days of the local bookstore are over.Bobb-Semple doesn't agree: "You can't find

poetry from our artists, or Caribbean and

African literature [at chain bookstores]. So I

think that is our niche." Brownstone carries a

wide range of titles--everything from Oprah 'sbook of the month to Marcus Garvey.

Besides the children's book reading group,

the store features regular readings from up-and

coming authors and poets. It also has a bookclub and a regular series of workshops with

notable speakers on a range of economic, political and social issues. .

''There's a personal feeling you can't get

from other bookstores, and that's the edge," says

Sells. ''The focus here is on you as a person."

"I don't want to focus on developing into a

superstore, but in creating a viable resource forpeople in the neighborhood," adds Bobb-Sem

pIe. "Bed-Stuy is a melting pot, and I think

[Brownstone] will be a reflection of that."-CurtisHarris

Landlords

Caviar

Dreams

Te name Beluga Caviar usually brings to

mind the finer things in life, not a rat

infested basement, cigarette-strewn hall

ways, and days on end without electricity, hot water or heat. But these were

the conditions a group of Bronx tenants faced

last month after their building, owned by the real

estate company Beluga Caviar International,

caught fire.

"The boiler blew up. It was smoking up the

whole building, so we had to be evacuated," says

Roxanne Dillon, a tenant who was in the build

ing at the time.

But days after the October 30 fire, the tenantswere still without lights or heat. They were forced

instead to light their apartments with glass-encased

vigil candles and heat water on the stove. "You see

all these pans, here?" says Dillon, pointing to a pile

of oversized aluminum pans on her kitchen stove.

''This is how we wash. In a bird bath ."

The tenants, who have been without a super

intendent for years, repeatedly called building

manager Judy Jacobwitz to remedy the problem.

According to the tenants, she stopped answering

her phone. When the city's Department of Hous

ing Preservation and Development was called in,

"she hung up on them, or told them someone

was down here fixing things, but they weren't,"says Dillon.

HPD's Kim Brown reports that by November

6th all services-with the exception of half of the

building's electricity-had been restored by the

owner and that the city's intervention was not

necessary. "No [emergency repairs] were put in

place," she says. "The management company justwasn't moving as quickly as tenants wanted."

The remainder of the building had its elec

tricity restored on November 10. But tenants say

that services remained sporadic, with heat and

hot water coming and going.

"We worked around the clock to restore the

services," responds Jacobwitz . "They had all oftheir services restored in a short while." Asked

how many days that took, she answered, "A

short while . I don ' t know. A short while is theanswer."

Beluga Caviar International Foods, the well

known fish egg importers, says it has no affilia

tion with the real estate company that shares partof its name but often receives its mail. "Sometimes we get their taxes," says company treasur

er Raya Lembrsky, in a rich Russian accent. "I

think they do it to mislead. Because when people

can't find them, they call us."

-JenniferWarren

CITVLlMITS



- - - - - - -...... --------------Briem

Manufacturing

Low-rent,High-tech

Bttle lines for the new economy are being

drawn in the South Bronx, of all places, as

a Port Morris building that has housed

woodworking shops for years is being

rewired with T-I Internet lines. Nestled among

woodworking, antique, and furniture shops astone's throw from the Third Avenue Bridge, 79

Alexander Avenue has become something of ametaphor for the tug between the old economy,

based in manual labor and small manufacturing,

and the new-digital, wired, and computer savvy.Typical concerns about the displacement of

manufacturers revolve around industrial spacesmorphing into expensive lofts and co-ops. Instead,

the developments at 79 Alexander have the poten

tial to provide jobs-{)f a very different kind.

"We're upgrading it to hopefully accommodate

a new kind of tenant for the Bronx," says Brad

Barr of Bradford N. Swett, the management com

pany that now owns the building. The extensive

renovations to the building include fiber-optic

cables as well as a new boiler, elevator and lobby.

"There's no need for fiber-optics here,"

protests Jeffrey Ventura, manager of the first-floor

JANUARY 2001

Ventura Cabinetmaker Woodwork, a cabinetmak

ing shop. "It's all manual labor." Several other

small manufacturers-mostly in antique restora

tion and woodworking-still make their home in

the graceful waterfront building. ''We know [thenew landlord] doesn't want these kinds of busi

nesses here," sighs Ventura, who says Bradford

tried to buy them out of their lease.

While 79 Alexander is the product of private

developers, the city has pressed for more new

media-friendly buildings. In April, the mayor

announced the creation of "Digital NYC: Wired to

the World," an economic development program

aimed at providing high-tech spaces at affordable

rents in the outer boroughs.

The Bronx component, called the BronxSmart

District, is fast expanding under the administra

tion of the South Bronx Overall Economic Devel-

iii:arn=:'

opment Corporation . SOBRO is responsible fo

four buildings, including an "incubator" that wi

house up to 32 tiny start-ups; a building offerin

5,OOO-square-foot offices; and one offering live

work space. "We want the Bronx to be part of thdigital technology," says Neil Pariser, a SOBR

senior vice-president. ''It creates very good payin

jobs, which we need in this community."

Low-tech businessmen like Ventura worrthey'll be simply be displaced, and question th

wisdom of replacing solid businesses with Interne

startups. "You certainly don't want to make it di

ficult [for business] to come into the Bronx," say

Matthew Lee of the Bronx-based Inner City Pres"But the woodworking stuff? Basically, the

should not be disrupted by this stuff, and thedon't have to be. There's plenty of space."

-Tracie McMilla

Call it redlining, 21st century style: Wealthy black borrowers in BLACKNew York City are now six times more likely to wind up saddled ,with high-Interest "subprime" Ioaa than poor white boITOw-

ers, finds arecent study released by ACORN, the national advo- WHITE ANDcacy organization. And while top-quality loans to African-Amer- REDLINEDiean homebuyers nationwide have actually declined since 1995,

subprime loans to African-Americans have surged by more than

600 percenl Last year, more than 40 percent of the refinance loans made toAfrican-American homeowners in the city-and more than 20 percent of those

made to Latinos-were subprime. - lath_ McIJowan



•

Class ConsciousnessJ A community development group looks to tum central Brooklyn into a wealth machine.

PROFILE i By Dara Mayers___ w...l'

Kim Booth (left)

and LourdesBernard (center)

seek upwardmobility through acourse in financialliteracy.

:M

, 'H oW many of you know thedollar amount you'll need to

retire?" Greg Jones Sr. asks a

group gathered at the Bridge Street Devel

opment Corporation's Bedford-Stuyvesantoffices. Averted eyes are the only response.People in here are artists, teachers, lawyersand administrators. Afew are unemployed,

but most have comfortable incomes. What

they don't have, however, are what Jones is

here to help them acquire: assets."You can't save in 15 years what you

could have saved in 30," he says. "You'll

never get the interest back." His example:One person starts at age 22, investing $166

every month until he's 34. Then he stops

putting money in and just lets the gains

accumulate until retirement. The otherdoesn't start until he's 34, and invests until

he retires at 65. Even though he puts in

money for more than twice as many years,the late investor will never gain as much as

the early one.Hearing this, student Monifa Reel

laughs and shakes her head. "In college,why didn't they tell us to start putting $166a month into an IRA rather than offering

us all those credit cards?" she marvels.The l2-week class teaches financial lit

eracy: the skills to manage money. On the

surface, it's much like courses commonlytaught at credit unions and communityorganizations. But the Bridge Street classhas an unusual agenda-one that weds

community revitalization with the currentcraze for personal investing.

"We call it financial literacy, but we'rereally about wealth creation," says Sydney

Wayman, director of economic develop

ment for Bridge Street. To that end, the

course teaches asset protection, debt management and financial planning, all of it

setting students up for intensive sessionsfocusing on investment stra tegies andhomebuying.

Chief Executive Officer Colvin

Grannum hopes that the class will helpchange Bed-Stuy by allowing residents to

buy homes, start businesses and end the

cycles of debt that have kept them-andthe neighborhood-from moving forward.

Good jobs alone can't do the job,

Grannum points out. "We have lots ofyoung people who are making $60,000 or

$70,000, but they already have blemisheson their credit." Many start taking on cred

it card debt in college. Others have no sav

ings, making them ineligible for loans. "A

loan is key to the acquisition of assets," he

says. "And assets, in our country, are the

key to economic well-being."

Assets are also central to BridgeStreet's own success. The group plans to

build 24 apartments for sale in the nextthree years. Each will require a down

payment of $20,000. Many Bed-Stuy

residents have nothing close to theseresources, which is why fewer than 30

percent of residents are homeownersless than half the national average. Theproblem is not a lack of income as muchas a lack of wealth. "Unfortunately,

when you control along racial lines,when you control for income and education, many African-American people

have a much lower net worth than comparably situated non-African Americans," observes Grannum. In 1990, blackAmericans owned only I percent of thenation's wealth.

Grannum also believes that absenteeownership destabilizes the community-a

problem that is becoming worse as property values shoot up. "I f you don 't own, you

may be asked to leave. We want to helppeople who live here now to stay here," he

says. Wayman points out that a neighbor

hood of renters loses out on the benefits ofrapidly rising real estate values: ''All the

wealth," he says, "is being exported out of

the community."

But there are pitfalls to getting out from

behind, and Bridge Street itself hasbrushed with one of them. Jones is a free

lance financial advisor for Citigroup's

Primerica division, which has come underfire from economic justice activists for

aggressively marketing inferior financial

products to moderate-income people. During the class, Wayman called time-outswhen Jones came uncomfortably close to

making sales pitches, but Jones urged stu

dents to consult with him later. (Wayman

says he brought Jones in as a fellow con

gregant from Bridge Street AME Church,where Jones helped members developdebt-management plans.)

Grannum is keenly aware that his

community is a desirable market for

companies like Primerica. "In the past,one of the barriers to educating people in

financial literacy was that the only peo

ple talking to them about it were peoplewho had something to sell them," he

says. "That is something that we are trying to get away from."

Students say they're desperate to getinformation anywhere they can. Kim

Booth, a 28-year-old Brooklyn native,

works full time but has struggled with

chronic debt. "Growing up, the school sys

tem did not teach us this, college did not

teach us this," she says. "Even when you

get a job, you don't learn this." She saysthat her only financial education has come

from magazines and television. When she

was growing up, her mother was focusedon providing for four children as a singleparent. Now, Booth is particularly excitedto learn about investing. "I want to be ableto retire at 50, or travel. To be able to putmy kids through college. I want the American dream."

Dara Mayers is an editor at StreetrrUlil.

com.Additional reporting by Amanda

Bruscino.

CITY LIMITS



Field ofOueensA patch ofMaspeth dirt thrives as an international soccer Mecca.

By Rob MacKay

When Joseph Misso first amved inQueens in 1961, something was

missing. Exiled from his native

Tunisia for political reasons, he was

abruptly forced to deal with a language, a

culture and a climate that he didn't under

stand. But within two weeks he had found

a place where he could be himself, a place

full of people with a common interest: the

Metropolitan Oval, a soccer field in an

industrial part of Maspeth, Queens.

Since then, he 's spent just about every

free moment at the Metropolitan. And now

he's starting to feel patriotic about the

place. "I consider the Oval to be my coun

try," he says. "And why not? It's culture,

it's community, and it's pride."

Most Manhattanites have no idea that it

even exists, but for soccer fans, the Oval is

something close to sacred ground.

Respectfully referred to as the Mecca, the

Oval is the oldest soccer field in the nation,

a perennial launching point for Olympic

and World Cup stars ever since the 1930s.

It's also an unmatched hotbed of young

talent, attracting coaches and scouts from

all over the globe.

But the players, coaches, and fans who

attend games here participate in a lot more

than high-level competitions. For these

contests help form a loosely organized,

multiethnlc social club with only one

admission criterion: an exuberant interest

in the world's most popular sport.

Sandwiched between factories, an

LIRR freight -train line and a string of

attached row houses, the Oval-actually

shaped more like a poorly drawn rhom

bus-is the scene of countless practices

and more than 500 organized youth soccer

matches a year. It is also the bridge that

connects immigrants from soccer-crazy

countries with their New York-born chil

dren and other native enthusiasts.

"Soccer means life," says Haitian

native Herve Bertrand , as he rakes behind

the eastern goal before his 13-year-old

son, Herve Vmar, plays a game. Bertrand,

like most of the parents at the Oval , volun

teers his time to keep the place running.

"This field is a breath of fresh air," he says.

'To have a place like this and a communi

ty this tight is very special. It 's unfortunate

there aren't more."

"Soccer is our daily passion," agrees

14-year-old Woodside resident Ariel

JA.NUA.RY 2001

Castellanos, whose parents hail fromArgentina. "It's really a way of life. My

father and I always watch it in the house,

and we always talk about it during meals.

I love to come down here and do my best

because I know I make him so proud."

Weekends at the Oval are for

match play. Listening to the lan

guages spoken then, an observer

might think the Tower of Babel was near

by instead of the skyscrapers of midtown

Manhattan. Adults yell words of encour

agement in their native tongues to their

kids---Spanish predominates, along with

Italian and Eastern European languages.

Small groups ofmothers invent pidgin lan

guages in order to compare notes and chat

about the games. Teams travel in from

Long Island or New Jersey, bringing play

ers and parents who speak English with

their own regional accents.

This is the way it's always been, ever

since the Oval was founded in 1925 by acoalition of200 Germans and Hungarians.

Despite their contentious relationship in

Europe at the time, the immigrants came

together in Queens to save their cherished

athletic space from encroaching real

estate developers. They bought the four

acre lot in 1,500 shares and turned it into

a soccer co-op.

The founders also created a club, GH

Metros, to field different teams in differentage groups. Other immigrants followed

suit, and soon BW Gottschee , founded by

descendants of people who lived in the

German-speaking district of Gottschee in

modern-day Slovenia, sent uniformed

squads out to compete .

Overuse quickly turned the Oval into an

uneven dirt field that was called "the Sand

pit" for many years. (In the rainy months, it

became more like a mudpit, with big pud

dles scattered across the field.) It was no

frills all the way-no bleachers, no water

fountains, no grass, and no standing room

on two sides of the field. But there was soc

cer, and that was enough.

Residents of the surrounding neighbor

hoods still describe the epic battles in the

1960s between Gottschee and a refugee

squad called the New York Hungarians.

More than 4,000 fans squeezed their way

into each game, and the scene compared in

passion and pride to the rivalry between

the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn

Dodgers.

Gottschee and GH Metros still survive

today, but the players wearing their jerseys

tend to reflect more recent immigration

waves. The two superstars on last year's

Gottschee under-14 squad, for example,

were Jorge Peiia, whose parents are

Ecuadoran , and Mohammed Mashriqi, aMuslim Arab. Other teams that call the

•

PIPEliNE

For years, the

Oval's scruff y

fields haveproduced Olympic

and World Cupstars.

«



•

leM

Oval home include GJOA, which is namedafter a professional Norwegian team, and

the Incas, whose founders were from Peru.

The Oval may be a natural draw fornew arrivals, but many natives are

lured there as well-including thefield's savior. If it hadn't been for Queensnative James Vogt, a self-described "Oval

rat," the space would have been turned intoa housing development two years ago.

In February 1998, Vogt found out thatthe field's owners, mostly absentee

descendants of the founders, owed the city$476,000 in back taxes. The property was

about to go on the auction block, anddevelopers were already interested.

"How do you let people take away your

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Your Neighborhood Housing Insurance Specialist

life?" asks Vogt, who grew up within walking distance of the field. "I just couldn't letit go. Saving it was an obsession."

Contacting Oval alumni, he convened a

bevy of pro bono lawyers to set up theMetropolitan Oval Foundation, a nonprofit youth group that would serve as thefield's managing agent. Then he trackeddown every shareholder of the site andconvinced him or her to donate the plots to

the foundation .As it turns out, the Oval also had some

friends in high places-like Peter Lempin,the deputy commissioner of the city's

Department of Finance. Growing up in

nearby Astoria, Lempin had fond memo

ries of playing at the Oval. He also hadgloomy recollections of watching Asto

ria's Eintracht Oval, where his father hadbeen a legendary goalie, get converted intoa strip mall.

So Vogt quickly recruited him to helpin the fight to save the field. While Vogt

concentrated on raising money, Lempinmanaged to keep the site out of the handsof the tax collectors.

Then Hank Steinbrecher, secretarygeneral of the United States Soccer Federation, got involved. He, too, had learnedthe game at the Oval and couldn't bear to

see it lost. The USSF donated $250,000 ofits profits from the 1994 World Cup to

Vogt's foundation. Nike matched the gift,and nearby Maspeth Federal Savings Bank

followed suit with a low-interest $300,000loan .

Now, the foundation has paid offalmost all of its debt. There was evenenough money to install FieldThrf, a stateof-the-art blend of sand and recycled rub

ber. For the first time in anyone 's memory,the field is soft and even-and green.Under the foundation's management, theOval triumphantly inaugurated the new

field on the last Saturday in October,including teams fielded by Gotschee and

GH Metros.Even though it will be subjected to

constant wear and tear, Vogt says the fieldwill last for 20 years. By then, his Oval

obsession may well have caught on. ''I

guarantee that soon we're going to produce some absolutely top-notch worldclass talent-Pele-style," says Vogt. "People around here breathe soccer. You .canfeel the passion in the air."

Rob MacKay is a reporter/editor at the

Times Newsweekly of Queens.

CITY LIMITS



Where Credit Is DueOnetime enemies unite to bring banking back to the Bronx.

By Kathleen McGowan

Parasites of the poor. Loan sharksarmed with a license and a tradeassociation. Check cashing places

have some serious p.r. problems. A lot ofvery vocal people consider a check casherto be one small step up from a pawn shop

and only a hairsbreadth away from aswindler.

Community development creditunions, on the other hand, are exalted as

the saints of the urban financial servicesworld, noble nonprofits devoted to servingpoor and working-class customers. Frequently based out of churches or neighborhood organizations, they are founded onthe principles of good works and goodmorals, helping people of meager meansinto sensible thrift.

Come February, though , it's going tobe much harder to tell the black hats fromthe white hats. The Bronx's 30-year-oldBethex Community Development CreditUnion is joining forces with two Bronxcheck cashing chains, Rite Check andKimball Check Cashing. Once their controversial plan is in place, the check cashers will begin offering low-cost services toBethex members throughout the Bronx.

Instead of traveling all the way to the credit union 's main branch on Jerome Avenuein order to cash or deposit checks, members will be able to drop by anyone ofeight check cashing stores. They getinstant account access, shorter travelingtimes, and better hours, and the creditunion picks up the tab.

For Bethex, it's a way to provide moreservices to more members without theexpense of building new branches. And forthe check casher, it's simply more business-more customers, and a chance to

offer new services that might provide an

edge against the competition.But in the world of low-cost banking,

the project sounds like Greenpeace forming a new joint venture with a whale meatcannery. Although it has yet to beapproved by the two regulators that over

see these industries, the project has alreadyraised some eyebrows. "It's the kind ofthing that runs into high praise and highcondemnation ," admits Bethex treasurer/manager Joy Cousminer. After all, it

proposes a controversial idea: that thesetwo industries, working in tandem, can

solve some of the monetary problems that

JANUARY 2001

have plagued the Bronx ever since thebanks backed out.

"There are both check cashers andcredit union people that will be extremelyhostile to it," says Joseph Coleman, RiteCheck's president. "When enemiesbecome friends, people start wondering . Itshakes them up. It will force them to

rearrange their mental furniture."

Among advocates for the poor,check cashers have an unparalleledreputation for Villainy. They are

denounced as thieves , opportunistic fungithat sprout up when legitimate banks closedown branches and disappear-a processthat New York's outer-borough residentshave endured for decades.

The critics do have a point. Check

cashers don't help you save money, buildcredit or buy a house. In New York, almostall they do is give fast cash-for a 1.4 percent fee-and let you pay your bills. In

some states , they are also downrightsleazy, tangled up in fraud and handing outshort-term "payday" loans that ensnareunwitting borrowers in a cycle of crushingdebt.

''I'm very skeptical about the motivations of check cashers," says Sarah Ludwig of the Neighborhood Economic

Development Advocacy Project, a groupthat works to improve access to credit in

poor neighborhoods. "They are notrenowned for serving low-income peoplein the interest of the consumer."

That's why this Bronx project is extraordinary. Even though they generally sharethe same turf, check cashers and creditunions generally glare at each other fromacross lines drawn in the sand.

But that didn 't stop Cousminer and

Coleman .When they met at a South BronxOverall Economic Development Corporation breakfast a few years ago, they got to

talking about their respective businesses .

She's a credit union trailblazer, with morethan a quarter-century in the industry. He 's

an ex-banker and former president of theCheck Cashers Association of New York

who married into a 50-year-old family-run

business. Both are very convincing talkers ,

and they began to realize that a partnershipcould benefit them both. (She now callshim a "charmer." and he refers to her as a"pioneer." )

In the deal they cooked up, the checkcasher operates like a light version of acredit union branch. The outlets rely on a

technology called Point of Banking terminals, little machines hooked in to NYCE,

the major electronic inter-bank network.Once the program gets underway, Bethex

members will be able to walk into any of

eight check cashing branches, go to ateBer, type in their password on themachine-which looks sort of like a debitcard terminal at a retail store-and handthe check over to the cashier. For paychecks, the money is immediately accessible. The credit union member can get cashback right away, or write checks that drawon the account, all without paying anyfees. (Bethex covers transaction fees, ranging from 70 cents for a deposit to upwardsof $4.50 for cashing paychecks. ) The

check cashers' branches will also carrybrochures and membership applicationsfor the credit union.

For the credit union, it's a chance toattract new members and offer more convenient services without building newbranches or extending hours. "We want toserve all the people who could use our service," explains Cousminer. "It 's so difficultfor lots of people to get to us, and we havea hard time getting the word out." She fig

ures that, even though the credit union isresponsible for fees , increased membership will make the deal worthwhile.

•

PIPEliNE

In a controversialpartnership. checcashers will actlike retail outletsfor credit unionservices in theBronx.

-,



•

Coleman says it makes sense for him, too,because the arrangement allows Rite Check to

expand services and attract new customers. "Fromour perspective, a credit union is the logical part

ner," he says. "They are experts at serving lowincome customers, but they lack the retail infra

structure. We have that, and we have the productsthey lack. For them , it's cheaper to pay us to handle transactions than to build branches all over theborough .They are outsourcing transactions to us."

Coleman is a passionate and articulate defender of the morality of check-cashing, and it's appar

ent that for him this is not just a business deal. Heardently denies that check cashers are predators,pointing out that his businesses offers services thatbanks won't provide, in neighborhoods banks

won't go to, at modest, state-regulated rates. In hisview, it's the advocates who are missing the point:that check cashers offer convenience, long hours,personal attention and access to the service thatpeople want most: fast cash.

Like Cousminer, Coleman also sees the pilot as

a test of what could become an entirely new wayof delivering financial services in poor neighborhoods, where credit unions and check cashers pairup in a retail-wholesale relationship to give customers good prices, convenience and a much widerrange of financial services.

"The only thing that makes [the partnership]controversial is this unexamined prejudice we'vebeen living with-that we are these greedy guys in

the poor neighborhoods gouging the poor," he saysheatedly. "What it is, is a successful businessmodel for delivering financial services in lowincome communities."

Cearly, the concept makes a lot of people

uneasy. "One the one hand, it sounds like agood thing for the people who use them,"

says Tracy Shelton, a staff attorney for the New York

Public Interest Research Group who focuses on

banking issues. "On the other hand, I'd hate to legit

imize check cashing establishments, which traditionally have preyed upon consumers, especially in low

income communities." But, in part because of Cous

miner's stellar reputation, even the most vehementcritics of check cashing admit that the partnership

may succeed at making the best of a bad situation.The project also has its supporters. "It's a dou

ble-edged sword the check cas hers want to

improve their image, and it allows credit unions,who can't offer the conveniences of banks, to havea presence in the neighborhood ," says Jose De laCruz, treasurer/manager of the Homesteaders Federal Credit Union. "I think it's a good initiative."De la Cruz has been preparing to open a branchoffice for more than a year, which he says will costmore than $400,000 to launch, and he says the plan

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CITVLlMITS



Empty PromisesAHarlem real estate scheme collapses, leaving behind derelictbrownstones and a multimillion-dollar bill for the federal government.

Part 1 of 2

Wen contractor Joseph D' Alozo first started working on 550 West

156th Street two summers ago, it was still a crack den, wheresquatters stole gas and electricity from other buildings. "Theyhad every Rube Goldberg thing that could be done in there," he

remembers. He had no idea that this wreck was actually a gold mine for agroup of real estate speculators.

D' Alozo initially estimated it would cost about $80,000 to rehabilitate thebuilding. But he soon noticed serious structural damage: The floor joists needed

replacing. His clients, the nonprofit Word of Life Ministries, disagreed. "Theytold me to just put plywood over it," recalls D' AlolO, "and don't worry about it."

But D' Alozo was worried. He soon quit a project that increasingly lookedlike a fool's enterprise. (He was also never paid.) The building, he came to

believe, "needed another $150,000 of work" just to be habitable.This rowhouse's troubles, though, went far deeper. Financially, it was

perched atop a tower of speculative financing, burdened with hundreds ofthousands of dollars in debt.

In May 1998, Long Island-based Diploma Realty had bought the buildingfor $100,000 (this figure, and other purchase prices in this story, were calculated based on taxes on the sales). Shortly after, Diploma sold the property for

$285,000 to Word of Life, which paid for the building with a loan backed bythe Federal Housing Administration. The loan included $42,000 to rehab thebuilding. It also came with a guarantee that the federal goverrunent would

reimburse the bank if Word of Life didn't pay its bills . It was all part of a U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development program intended to turn

decrepit buildings into affordable housing.But Harlem never got new apartments in the deal. Word of Life stopped

paying its mortgage last February, leaving its bank, Firstar, with a $324,000bill, and West 156th Street with an abandoned building blanketed in graffiti.

Last summer, Firstar put the building on the market, in an attempt to makeback its substantial investment. Its asking price: half a million dollars.

This sagging building is just one of more than 150 rowhouses in Harlemthat have fallen prey to a high-stakes profit-making scheme that has shamelessly exploited a federal affordable housing loan program and left decayingand gutted buildings-and a hotly disputed $50 million-plus bill-in its wake.

A City Limits reported last fall in "The Harlem Shuffle" [November

1999], the effort was set up to produce quick cash, and virtuallyguaranteed that the federal government would be responsible forpaying back a flood of bad loans.

Most of the transactions relied on the speculator'S trick known as flipping.Diploma and other realtors purchased large numbers of properties cheap, then

quickly resold them, at much higher prices, to nonprofit organizations eligible for special federally insured loans.

For example: In April 1998 Cazzo Realty purchased 336 West 145th Streetfrom an estate for $20,000. Seven days later, it sold the building to Word ofLife for $225,000. (Cazzo, Diploma and the other real estate companiesinvolved in the deals are all registered for business at the same Mineola law

firm.) The nonprofit was able to swing the deal and 16 others like it courtesyof the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's 203(k) loan

JANUARY 2001

By Kemba Johnson

program, which encourages banks to lend to nonprofit organizations lookingto purchase and rehabilitate run-down housing.

ALong Island financial institution, M ortgage Lending of America, issuedWord of Life a $316,000 mortgage on the building, part of which was to pay

for repairs. MLA could lend generously and confidently because all 203(k)loans are insured by FHA, a subsidiary of HUD. If the deal went bad, an

insurance fund would pay the company back in full.The loan did not remain MLA's for long, anyway; the lender soon sold it

to Firstar, which routinely purchases mortgages from other financial institutions in order to profit from interest payments. MLA got instant cash. And

Firstar inherited the guarantee that HUD would pay loans back in full shouldanything go wrong.

Each deal was structured much the same way. Nonprofits purchased rundown Harlem buildings from the real estate companies, for prices much steeper than the realtors had paid for them. The majority were bought with loans



from MLA, which quickly resold them to other banks .And most of the build

ings were managed on behalf of the nonprofits by Cobb Management, another company registered with the Mineola law firm . A developer familiar with

the arrangement says the law firm lured nonprofits with promises of $5,000

fees for each property they bought, and the prospect of having rehabilitationand management handled for them.

Now, Cobb has stopped paying the mortgage bills, and virtually all the

properties it ran are heading toward foreclosure. The last mortgage paymenton Word of Life's l45th Street building, for example, was made last February. The nonprofit still owes Firstar $312,000. Cobb itself went out of business last summer. And MLA closed up shop last July, leaving the banks thathad bought its bad loans with nowhere to return them to.

Firstar isn't the only bank that took on millions in bad loans. M&T Bank

bought at least $27.6 million of them from MLA and other lenders. Another non

profit that had bought 46 buildings from the realtors, St. Stephen 's CommunityDevelopment Corp. , only made one small payment on one of its properties, 108

West 119th Street. On that property alone-where tenants have had to pick up a

$2,700 Con Ed bill left behind by Cobb--M&T is looking to collect $400,000.

Bcause of the vast extent of the collapse, it is difficult to determine

exactly how much money was generated from the dozens of flips.

Full transaction records obtained for 31 of the buildings shed light on

the extent of the gains. The realty companies paid a total of about $4million to buy those buildings in 1998 and 1999 .The nonprofits, in turn, tookout $10 .7 million in mortgages to buy them from the realtors. Today, those

nonprofits still owe $10.2 million in mortgage payments .

Counting the outstanding bills on 167 buildings, Firstar and another bank,

M&T, are now owed more than $50 million, and those bills are coming due. Theresponsibility of paying back those bad loans has fallen on HUD .

The banks tried to make back the full amounts of these bad mortgages byattempting to sell the decrepit buildings. But the realtors' scheme , which

relied on pumped-up appraisals, had inflated prices far beyond what the market would bear. One Harlem realtor, who tried futilely last summer and fall tosell dozens of these properties, commented at the time that "we're floodingthe market with overpriced buildings that can 't be sold ."

M&T spokesperson Michael Zabel agrees that the situation is extraordinary. "We've never seen anything like this before," he says, emphasizing that

the bank trusted HUD to properly screen the developers who take out 203(k)loans. HUD did not return repeated calls for comment.

Asserting that the banks should have subjected the loans to greater scrutiny, HUD initially refused to pay them back. But it has now agreed to allowthe banks to revalue and sell the properties at lower market prices. HUD willmake up the difference from FHA's insurance pool, which is funded by small

annual charges to mortgage borrowers. "We 're going to try to put the properties back out with realistic market value," says Zabel. "Many of the prices areinflated. We are going to try to rectify that."

Zabel would not comment on why M&T decided to purchase the loansfrom MLA, or what process it uses to evaluate such loan deals. But aside fromthe money that the bank can make servicing the loan, it also receives creditunder the Community Reinvestment Act for buying the mortgages .

Even before surrendering its license, MLA had been in trouble with HUD,which last year barred the lender from making any more 203(k) loans . HUD

data shows that the lender 's default rate was a staggering 99.04 percent in

Manhattan and 58.7 percent in Brooklyn during the last two years .

Now, the lender is a defendant in a suit by the New York State Attorney Gen

eral, which alleges that it collaborated with a Brooklyn nonprofit and anotherrealtor to profit heavily from 203(k) loans. The U.S. Attorney, Manhattan Dis

trict Attorney and Federal Bureau of Investigation are all now investigating theHarlem deals. HUD has reportedly taken action or is recommending action

against more than 150 individuals and organizations, including MLA.

Te numbers may be frightening, but the most spectacular wreckage is

visible in the streets of Harlem. Under HUD rules, work on many ofthese buildings was supposed to be finished by the summer of 1999,

but most were still far from habitable. Some were outright disasters,with sheared-off floors or mere gestures for roofs. Others were hollowed out,then abandoned.

Little has improved since. In 34 buildings surveyed by City Limits, 15 have

been gutted or half-renovated , and another 15 don 't appear to have beenworked on at all. Just four are finished . On 123rd Street, three 203(k) build

ings in a row are essentially junkyards.

The Harlem realtor who tried to sell the buildings couldn 't believe the condition she found them in. "I'm walking into shells and all the rehab money is

gone," she marvels. "Who signed off on this stuff?"

All told, suppliers and workers are owed about $115 ,000. Philip GlickSupply Co . suffered some of the biggest losses. "We cut them more slack than

we probably should have," says company owner Adam Glick. With Cobb outof business , Glick and other vendors have put liens on the buildings in thehope of eventually seeing some money. But in the process of foreclosure,smaller claims like Glick 's often get swept aside.

D' Alozo realizes there 's little hope of a HUD bailout for him. "WIll I seemy money? Probably not," he laments. "I've written it off." •

Research assistance by Amanda Bruscino and Kevin Fleming.

CITY LIMITS



Hearts ofCold,

Tongues of LeadIf nonprofits and foundations

want to make a better world,

why do they clog their writing

with impenetrable jargon?

Writer Tony Proscio deciphers thedeadly dialect of social change.

I he land of nonprofits, the big word is king. Here's why: Nonprofits wont to oduohze revenue potential (get money),

ahen from foundations. Foundations, for their part, wont to know their money is mission-uitic:oI (not being wasted).

To impress their funders, the nonprofits talk up how many hnkages they hove, brag about how o g g r e s s i v e ~ they're

partnering, and whip out same programmotlc initiatives, the more (Omprehensive the better. In the end, bath sides

puff up their vocabularies until nothing but hot air is leh.

Now there's on e ~ p o s e of this ueeping word inflation, a ~ i m booklet from the Edna M<Connell dark Foundation

called "In Other Words." It's the first offldol field guide to the jargon of the do-gooder set. With etymologies of thefoundation world's most bloated verbiage, h eads like a w i c k e d ~ pedantic little didionary-Strunk and Whhe os told

to George Orwell.

But author Tony PrOS(io is more than agrammar geek. He knows what he's talking about, having penned count·

less annual reports, strategic plans and policy papers for both nanprofits and foundations. He's best-known for abook

!hot's marvelously free of foundotionese-the elegant Comebock Cities, written with Paul Grogan. But he's also done

policy work for everyone from the Ford Foundation to the (uomo administration ("My personal version of (amelot"),

including brief stints in the Giuliani administrotlon and at the Miami Herald

As a ormer policy wonk, PrOS(io understands wh y well-meaning people gum up their words with bewildering lingo.

In short, it selk. 'lbe foundation impulse is always to make things more ted!nical, mare sanitized, because they're

afraid of controversy,· he said in an interview with Dty Umits. And nanprofits, when they speak to foundations, "have

an interest in saying things the wo y the foundation would wont them said. Because you're trying to get money.· Byrelying on language that obh&ates, both

sidescan exaggerate, mislead, and sugar-coot

thetruth, withaut ever actu

a l ~ lying.

All this tangled language has a erious side effect, PrOS(io points out. It disguises one of the noblest, most basicaims of nonprofit work: to make the world a ittle bit better. "Kindness and humilhy-the classical virtues-ore civi-lizing," says PrOS(io. "And when we insist that our work is not r e a l ~ motlvoted by charhy, that it's really motivated byacareful calculation of the interests of the bigger society, that's dehumanizing and unovilizing, to me:

Oearly, "In Other Words" is poised to become a lassic seH-help text. (Here at City Umils, we all keep copies of itat our desks, right next to our Green Books and aur Hagstrom mops.) The dark foundation will be puffing out anoth

er version in the spring, but in the meantime we've decided to shore this edition with you. What follows are some of

our favorhe entries, excerpted and edhed into acondensed version.

-ADnia Ciezadlo

JANUARY 2001

at-risk: Headed tor

trouble tor reasons we'd

rather not mention

This mystifying expression owes

popularity to one embarrassinfact: The phrase almost alwa

designates a category of people of who

it is awkward to speak honestly. Almoevery branch of charity or human serviuses AT-RISK to describe the peopwhom its practitioners are ...well, wo

ried about.

AT-RISK becomes simply the poli

euphemism for "headed into trouble." B

in today's etiquette of upbeat and respec

ful neutrality , it would be considere

grotesquely prejudicial , not to say hostil

to describe people that way. AT-RISK, how

ever, is regarded as abstract enough to

polite, even in mixed company.Yet if those who use this word a

honest, they must admit to being perfecly comfortable classifying peopaccording to a vast realm of unspecifieproblems that those people do not eve

have yet.

In some cases, of course, the writgenuinely may not know what a personreal risk is. That is a sad fact-not abo

writers, or about jargon, but about lifOften, people really are simply heade

into trouble, and we can't say exact

what that trouble might be. Would that

were different. But when it's not, pe

haps AT-RISK truly is the best we can d



11

THE CtMM UNITY

community: A co rral

for keep;ng people together

;n your own m;nd

Few words irritate careful writers and editors

more than this one, which has become a

catchall term for any group of people with

practically anything in common. Its etymology

(literally "unity together," with the original Latin

meaning of "fellowship") would seem to make thisword apply only to a deeply close-knit group that

shares some fundamental, spiritual connection.

But there is no justification for insisting on such anarrow definition. In English, COMMUNITY has

applied for centuries to practically any association

among people, whether profound or superficial.

The almost boundless vagueness of this word is

therefore not a new invention, an affectation, or a

SUbterfuge. Jargon it's not. But vague it is, and

therefore an invitation to mental sloppiness.

In some recent expressions like "community

development" or "community organizing," the

word started off as real jargon-trendy and

obscure, with multiple meanings-but it hasgained a certain practiced precision, built up over

time. COMMUNITY now means, in these contexts, a

group of people living near one another who share,

by reason of their common residence, some polit

ical interests. In this sense, the word can actually

be preferable over more precise words like "neighborhood," because some such communities aren'turban enough to be clustered into neighborhoods.

But more often, in phrases like "the intelli

gence community," "the arts community," or "the

child-welfare community," the word drops adelib

erate scrim in front of a bunch of shadowy people

whom no one is expected to identify. Most of the

'M

time, those who use such phrases really mean to

say "people in these fields whom I consider impor

tant, but can't or won't name." Used that way, the

word falsely pretends to give information, while

actually blotting out important details .

Worse, that use of COMMUNITY is sometimes

deliberately misleading. It implies a unanimity

among members that rarely occurs in reality.

These COMMUNITIES that speak so conveniently in

unison may suit the polemical purposes of some

writers, but not without seeming a little fraudulent.

When "the Harlem community" supports or

opposes a new shopping center, it is a near cer

tainty that a group of individuals, and not all the

residents of Harlem, share one view of the devel

opment. Used this way, the word may be just the

result of careless diction, but it exposes the writer

to suspicions of dishonesty.

III

E M P ' W f ~ M E " T empowerment: Used

Hberally, j t shows you care

Here is an example of that most pernicious

of all forms of jargon: the ideological shibboleth. To establish one's bona fides as a

person concerned about the poor, the disenfran

chised, or even ordinary people in general, it is

essential in every setting to use EMPOWERMENT-

as early (and, in some cases, as often) as possible.

The coiners of EMPOWERMENT invested it with

only the broadest meaning, perhaps to make it

usable in nearly every context-or anyway, that

has been the effect. Foundations now must be

careful to empower grantees, communities, volun

tary and civic associations, the poor, those who

help the poor, and even those who do not help the

poor, but who would if they were empowered.

Scarcely a grant is made anymore without some

one or something being solemnly empowered,

normal ly with a timely infusion of money.

The word is a synonym, says the American

Heritage Dictionary, for "authorize," but you

wouldn't guess it from the way EMPOWER is used.

People are not "authorized" by community devel

opment organizations, but they are apparently

"empowered" in the hundreds of thousands. No

one is "authorized" by public opinion poLIs, the

Internet, charter schools, community policing, aPatient's Bill of Rights, civilian review boards, tax

cuts, after-school programs, competition in the

telecommunications industry, or community col

leges. Yet every one of these things, and many

more besides, has been described in recent public

policy or foundation writing as "empowering"

people.

Try this exercise, which we might call an

EMPOWER-outage: Find five or six instances of

EMPOWER among recent memos and papers, and

mentally blot them out. Then re-read the paper,with the EMPOWER switched off. Most times, the

meaning won't have changed awhit. But the paper

may grow shorter.

IV

funding: A lo t more tastefu l

than cold, hard cash

Ak any "development" consultant (itself a

genteelism for "fundraising") and not one

of them will tell you that she or he does

anything so crass as raise money. They SEEK FUND-

ING. Nonprofit organizations, because they pursue

only the loftiest ideals, do not spend money. They

APPLY FUNDING, or they FUND. One good exercise

for any foundation writer would be to pick up

some paper at random from the shelf, strike out

CITY LIMITS



every instance of FUNDING, and substitute the

phrase "worldly lucre." This would do no service

to either clarity or good taste, but it would be a

profoundly therapeutic exercise. It would illus

trate, by contrast, that the word "money" is actual

ly a perfectly neutral way to describe what makes

the philanthropic world go around. Avoiding it,

especially in favor of the puffed-up FUNDING, is

evasive and unnecessary.

TARCETING

targeting: Sounds long

and military, Uke a

guided missile

T o those who nowadays consider the verb TO

TARGET indispensable in all contexts, it will

come as some surprise that the current

sense of the verb did not exist until the 1970s, the

decade that also gave us Debbie Boone and the

energy crisis. The 1969 edition of the American

Heritage DictioTUlry lists "target" 'solely as a noun.

The Oxford English DictiOTUlry'S 1971 edition lists

only the antiquated meanings of "shielded" or

"marked for execution." Then sometime in theNixon and Carter years, TARGETING blasted out of

the Pentagon like a runaway rocket and landed

smack in the fad-making salons of MadisonAvenue. It's been ubiquitous ever since.

TARGETING illustrates a kind of Gresham's

Law l of jargon: Bad words drive good words out

of circulation. The popularity of TARGETING has all

but obliterated the nice old-fashioned Saxon word

"aiming," largely because the newer word sounds

more complicated (and, not incidentally, more

1Sir Thomas Gresham. a 16th Century financier,

observed that bad currencies drive good

currencies out of circulation .

JANUARY 2001

"If you believe, as a foundation

person or as a nonprofit, that

you operate in aworld where all

consequences are definite and all

achievements measurable-

such as engineering and finance

and the military-

then you're going to take a very

different approach to a pregnant

teenager from the one taken by

the folks we used to call

charitable. You cannot, with a

pregnant teenager, 'leverage'

anything. You are not going to

have 'targeted impact.' There's

not going to be a 'paradigm

shift.' When you're dealing with

human lives and attempting to

help people to altust to

circumstances you can't fully pre-

dict, you don't have those kinds

of precise effects. But if youadmit that, then the people who

want precise effects won't give

you money. Hence all this stuff,

these words. "

-Tony Proscio

military) . Those who like their writing to seem

tough and imposing will always prefer three belli

cose syllables over two quiet ones. Thus the cum

bersome neologism nudges out the plain, easyword every time.

Yet apart from its pseudo-military cachet, TAR-

GETING offers hardly any improvement over "aim ing." It does, admittedly, lend itself to the adjective

TARGETED-as in the many "targeted populations"

who have become metaphorical bull's-eyes for the

guided missiles of modem philanthropy. But tar

geted is an inherently ambiguous word:When you

aim a sharp projectile at someone (your "target

population," you might say), which one has been

TARGETED? The projectile or the intended victim?

The fact is, the word is sloppy enough to mean

both things at once.

VI

CAJlAC'TY

capacity: An empty word

with a comfortably

wide girth

Foundations, to their great credit, have late

taken a more deliberate interest in the ma

agement, staffing, structure, and operatin

methods of the organizations they support. Th

unassailable premise of this interest is that goo

works do not accomplish themselves, but are caried out by organizations that may be manage

well or ill, may perform their tasks efficiently

wastefully, and may need to change their method

as circumstances dictate. Making grants and pro

viding expert advice to help these organization

run better is a profoundly philanthropic missio

and smart besides.

The problem is that CAPACITY is not content

halt demurely at the border between generalitie

and specifics. Even when a writer is trying

describe specific characteristics of organization

CAPACITY often shows up as if it were denotin

something in particular.

Often, the writer who uses CAPACITY genuineldoesn't know what an organization's problem rea

ly is. In a proposal to examine the problems an

make recommendations, for example, it is mo

th.an reasonable to admit that fact. But when

appears to imply something specific (an act o

imposture of which the word is constantly guilty

it ought to be deleted and replaced with hones

old-fashioned terms like "staffing," "record-keep

ing," "management" or something on that order

"In Other Words" is available from the Edn

McConnell Clark Foundation. One copy per pe

son, please.



The Last Re ort

In the face

of fervent

position,

SROs andtheir residents

hold on at the

edge of Queens.

ByRobert NeuwirthII T

ree tenants, threetales of ordinary horror, three roads toRockaway Park. Six

years ago, Milton Torres lostthe apartment he shared withhis mother in a housing project. Now, relying on a $230welfare rent allowance andsome money he earns

reselling loose cigarettes, helives in a down-at-the-heelsrooming house at 154 Beach114th Street. MadalineAggerup lost her Brooklynapartment four years agowhen a new landlord purchased the building. Today,she lives with her 15-yearold and 3-year-old daughtersin adecaying rooming houseat 149 Beach 118th Street. In1998, Ernest Joiner and his

daughter Juanita lost the

CITYLIHITS



home they owned for almost 30 years. Today, they share one nar

row room just down the hall from Torres.Here at the southern edge of Queens, scores of desperate ten

ants have found homes in single room occupancy hotels (SROs)

on well-tended beachfront blocks.The tenants don't pretend theirrooms are perfect, but they're not looking for luxury; they simplywant an affordable, stable place to live. "I can't go out workingfull-time because of my kids," says Aggerup. "I've looked at realapartments, but I couldn't afford them."

Now their security is being threatened-by their own neighbors. Homeowners in this close-knit, old-fashioned neighborhood, just 10 miles from midtown Manhattan, have spent yearstrying to shut down the decaying hotels, arguing that they are

unsafe and unsavory. In the last two years, they have been gettingresults. More than a dozen SROs have been fully or partiallyvacated, pushing dozens of tenants out of their homes .Four of thebuildings have been demolished. In one case, tenants were given

less than an hour to collect their belongings before the city Buildings Department ordered tenants out of their rooms, and a tenantwho barricaded himself in his room was hauled off to jail.

City inspectors have already hit the hotel where Torres and theJoiners live, and the word on the street is that Aggerup's SRO willbe the next target. "Rumors are flying and it's really nerve-racking," says Aggerup. "Supposedly, this house is up for sale. I'm sit

ting here just scratching my head about what I'm going to do ."

'But as homeowners and city inspectors zero in on the remain

ing SROs, one landlord has decided that Rockaway Park's decaying hotels are a growth industry, one that doesn't have to be synonymous with squalor. In 1998, Matthew Safos bought an SRO onBeach 115th Street. Now he has expanded his holdings in Rockaway Park with two other old hotels. He says that run right, these

old hotels can be good for everyone-for tenants, the community,and, to be sure, for himself. ''More and more and more, peopleneed rooms," says Safos. "Even here, a studio is $650. How arepoor people going to pay?"

A year ago, when city inspectors swooped down and vacatedone of his buildings , Safos was taken by surprise. So this September, when he got wind that inspectors were preparing toinvade 147 Beach I13th Street, a cavernous 26-room SRO that he

bought in August and is now renovating, Safos got organized. At

his request, about two dozen tenants from his hotel at 187 Beach115th Street did something almost unheard of in the annals ofhousing activism: They rallied to support their landlord. They

formed a ragged picket line and confronted a group of Rockawayresidents and city officials.

Ronnie Kaye, who lives in the 44-unit Beach 115th Streetbuilding, urges officials to consider the human cost of vacating theSROs. "We're not crazy or junkies or alcoholics," he says. "We'rejust people trying to live. This is our home ."

Fr as long as anyone can remember, the rooming houses

and their residents have been part of the beachy landscapein Rockaway Park. Seventy or so years ago or so, thesewere resorts for the working class. Vacationers shared hall-

way bathrooms and showers, a small price to pay for an affordable refuge on the shore. But as the vacation trade moved outsidecity lines, the hotels-bulky wood frame buildings that are too bigto be private homes, too small to be apartment houses-became

year-round residences.

JANUARY 2001

Here, single adults and small families can rent rooms forbetween $300 and $550 a month. That money buys a smallroom-some barely wide enough for a single bed-and includesheat, hot water and electricity. Most of the rooms have a sink and

a stove. A few of the more expensive rooms have private bathrooms.

Many SRO tenants complain about their landlords. "I shouldbe able to find something better than this rathole," says EddieGonzalez, agarrulous ex-con whose $500 a month rent for one ofthe larger rooms in 154 Beach 114th Street is paid by the city'sDivision of AIDS Services. He complains that he has to spend his

own money to clean the hallway toilet and shower, and that thebuilding lacks fire extinguishers.

"The landlord don 't do nothing," adds Milton Torres, who

points out that with 21 rooms, his building provides his landlordearnings of $8,000 every month. Still, Torres is a realist. Askedwhy he stays in the SRO, he shrugs. "You have to survive in thisworld here," he says.

Jonathan Gaska knows the recent history of every old hotel inthe Rockaways, including the building where Torres and Gonzalez live. Riding around the neighborhood with him is like takinga course in urban pathology. Gaska is district manager of Community Board 14, which covers the Rockaways, and he is a oneman storehouse of SRO horror stories-tales of buildings con

trolled by prison gangs or drug dealers or deranged outpatientsfrom psychiatric hospitals. "We were on the verge oflosing Rockaway Park," he declares as he slides his sport utility vehicle to astop in front of two boarded-up buildings on Beach 115th Street."Here, we had people shitting in buckets, kids playing in shit,rooms with thousands of roaches ."

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Gaska asserts, speculatorsacquired dozens of SROs, lured by the promise of guaranteed

Above: Jonathan

Gaska. Jo AnnShapiro andAssembly membAudrey Pheffer.

members ofCommunity Boar14's SRO/UnsafeBuildings Task

Force. pointproudly to theirsuccess shutteridilapidated hote

Opposite: Mosttenants living inRockaway Park'sresidential hotelarrive with few

other options.



In May 1999. theSRO Task Force

shut three hotels.including thisone-"a disasterareau-onRockaway BeachBoulevard.

rents from people on public assistance, people with AIDS and

outpatients from mental hospitals. This agitated the local home

owners, who have long argued that the Rockaways are the secret

dumping ground for the entire borough.

It is true that this narrow spit of land-a peninsula connected

to the rest of the city only by a train trestle and a bridge-shoulders many of the burdens the rest of Queens won't take. The

Rockaways have half the subsidized housing in the borough,including the Edgemere and Hammel housing projects. Agenera

tion back, the city leveled 300 acres-almost the entire Arverne

neighborhood-for an urban renewal plan that failed.

Today, miles of crumbling asphalt, rubble-strewn sidewalks

and weed-filled lots are all that remain where pleasant bungalows

and private homes once stood near Rockaway Park. To the home

owners, the SROs and their often troubled residents were justanother part of that encroaching blight.

Before the SRO shutdowns, Gaska says, they were filled with

"people with problems, people who won't work or can't work, who

spend their time hanging out on the porch all day." The homeown

ers' biggest beefs: drug dealing, drinking and loud living.

"It was like a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,"

says Palmer Doyle, a community board member and civic leader

who lives with his wife and two kids in a cheerful and bright

house on Beach 122nd Street. Life at the SROs was especially

threatening to neighboring families with young kids, he says, and

he blames absentee landlords for the problems. "You can't juststick people in a place and say 'Que Sera.'"

Doyle, a city firefighter, adds that the problems were com

pounded by overcrowding. With a few exceptions, most of the

SROs in Rockaway Park are wood-frame buildings. They would

be illegal under current building codes but are allowed to remainoccupied because they were built many decades ago, before strict

building codes outlawed wood-frame rooming houses. "These

houses were not set up for 40 people," Doyle says. "They were

accidents waiting to happen."

But, Gaska and Doyle charge, the city was profoundly unin-

terested in the problems at the SROs. Gaska recalls almost com

ing to blows with one city inspector who refused to write a viola

tion on a building where the back porch was propped up by abroomstick and a cinder block. Through the community board and

several civic associations, the homeowners agitated for action.

They demonstrated and petitioned and, ultimately, brought two

lawsuits against the city to force inspectors to issue violations.Community leaders also got ameeting with Peter Powers, who at

the time was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's top deputy. After that,

Gaska says, the board got total cooperation from city inspectors.

Now, once amonth, the board gets to bring a building inspec

tor to examine the most troubled properties. Under this

system, officials have shut down eight SROs and partial

ly vacated many others. Though they still retain title to

their properties, several slumlords were essentially put

out of business. About 100 tenants lost their homes.

Gaska and local homeowners also took a legislative

tack. Last summer, Governor George Pataki signed intolaw a bill proposed by Rockaway Assemblywoman

Audrey Pheffer that will allow the city to foreclose on

landlords of wood-frame SROs or small rental buildings

who don't pay fines for building code violations. "It'staken agood six years and a lot of work by the board and

by community groups, but the SRO victory is in sight,"

Gaska declares.

Though local homeowners would like to see young

families buy the vacant SROs, Gaska acknowledges that

these buildings are a tough sell because they're often too

big and too deteriorated for a family to take on. He points

at the two buildings just beyond his car window-l70

and 172 Beach 115th Street-and vows he will not let

them reopen as rooming houses. "The last thing we needin Rockaway is another vacant lot," Gaska says. "But

we'd rather have a vacant lot than these hotels."

SO residents are not all outsiders. Some longtime Rock

away residents call rooming houses their permanent

homes. Charles Peyton 's Wting brogue makes him sound

like he just stepped off the boat from Ireland, but he has

actually lived in the Rockaways for 41 years, many of them in

SROs. A carpenter who is recovering from a hip operation, Pey

ton still keeps on his dresser a series of neatly written ledgers dat

ing back to 1973, showing all the homes he helped build or reno

vate in the neighborhood.Still, most of the residents come from outside the neighbor

hood, looking for any alternative to homelessness. Two years ago,

Ernest and Frances Joiner and their daughter Juanita owned their

own home. Today, Frances is in a nursing home in Rockaway

Park, while Ernest and Juanita share a single room in a shabby

hotel across the street at 154 Beach 114th Street.In 1969, after 19 years in aBrooklyn housing project, the Join

er family was able to buy a house in Laurelton, Queens. Ernestwas a shipping clerk, Frances a nurse's aide; Juanita worked as a

typist. In 1993, the Joiners finally paid off the mortgage and

owned the house free and clear.

But over the next couple of years, Juanita ran up amountain ofcredit card debt. As the card companies became more threatening,Ernest got a call that seemed to offer salvation. Amortgage bro

ker from Delta Funding Corporation offered them a home equity

CITVLlMITS



loan of $95,000 that would allow them to stave off financial meltdown. As Ernest Joiner recalls it, the broker's message also contained a clear threat: If they allowed the bills to remain unpaid,Juanita would go to jail.

So the Joiners took Delta's money and paid off the credit cardcompanies. But buried in the fine print was adetail that would costthem dearly: If hey didn't make their loan payments on time, theinterest rate would jump to almost 25 percent. (Delta has sincebeen sued by state and federal regulators for its excessive interestrates and other practices targeting low-income borrowers; withoutadmitting fault, the company settled for $12 million.)

When one of their tenants moved andanother was late on the rent, the Joiners fellbehind in .their payments. Just 20 months afterthey secured the loan, the Joiners faced foreclosure. They decided to sell, figuring they

might come out with a few dollars and the hope

of starting over. But after all the creditors andfees were paid, the Joiners didn't make apennyon the house they had lived in for 31 years.They spent the next few months living in adank, windowless basement in Jamaica beforean aide at the nursing home where Frances now

resides told them about the $550-a-month roomin the old hotel across the street.

The Joiners prefer to accentuate the positive in their situation. They say they are betteroff than they were in Jamaica, where theirapartment didn't have any windows. Andthey're happy to be able to visit Frances everyday.

Still, having to share a toilet and showerwith other residents of the SRO makes it very

different from the home they used to own. "It 'svery noisy and the people are very uncouth," Juanita says. Sheadds that they have to kick the refrigerator to get the door to closeand sometimes have to tum on the oven to keep the room warm

when the nights get cold . Still, she says with a shrug, "You justhave to adjust."

She and her father hold onto the hope that they will get backinto the housing projects they fled. "We moved from the projects31 years ago," Juanita Joiner says. "Now we want to go back-

and we 'll be glad to get in."

Te man homeowners fear is becoming the Rockaways'

new rooming house mogul usually shows up to work inrumpled track suits and worn-out sneakers, a chameleon

among his own tenants. AGreek immigrant who ran theTowers Diner in Flushing for 29 years, Matthew Safos went intoreal estate when his legs got bad and he couldn't take the longhours behind the grill .

Safos now owns and operates three Rockaway Park SROs, in

partnership with his son Jack and daughter Dia. He used to own

another rooming house in Elmhurst, and acknowledges that hehad to sell it after several run-ins with the city Buildings Depart

ment. He also freely admits that what attracted him to the Rockaways was that the SROs were a good deal. ''The prices are

cheap," he says matter-of-factly.

Still, Safos didn 't quite know what he was in for. In 1998, he

JANUARY 2001

made his first purchase in the Rockaways-a 28-room SRO at 175Beach 115th Street. He made repairs, painted and put in new windows. But the city wasn't satisfied with his renovations. In February 1999, at the urging of neighborhood residents, city inspectorsordered tenants out of the SRO. They cited two violations . One

was a lopsided porch. The other was the lack of a certificate ofoccupancy. Officials gave the tenants just 45 minutes to gathertheir belongings before being hauled off to $100-a-night emer

gency housing at aManhattan hotel.Later, Jack Safos researched the building. He discovered that

the hotel was erected before certificates of occupancy were

required and therefore didn 't need one-and he found severaldecades-old registration forms declaring that the hotel had 28

rooms. The city then produced a new form-undated andunsigned-purporting to show that the building was allowed tohave only 14 tenants.

Safos insisted on clarification from the city. Three weekslater, he received a letter from William Pagano, chief Queens

Code Enforcement inspector for the Department of HousingPreservation and Development, acknowledging that "Departmentrecords of this building are incomplete and sketchy" and notingthat "the records that do exist show indications of having been

tampered with ." A spokesperson now says HPD has no record ofthis letter in its files. The city has since allowed 14 tenants back

into the building, and Safos has gone to court to get the hotelback to full occupancy.

While these troubles were playing out, Safos bought anotherSRO two doors away. This new building-187 Beach 115thStreet-contained 44 rooms and had a legal certificate of occupancy.Local officials admit that Safos made awelcome change inthe building. He pushed out two dozen problem tenants, includingseveral drug dealers, began renovations and installed his family'soffice on the ground floor. The results were dramatic. In the threeyears before the Safos family took over, police made 48 arrests atthe hotel. In the past year, the cops have been by only once. ''This

was a pretty bad SRO," Jack Safos says. ''The landlady was in her

Last summer. theSHO tenantsstruck back. piceting an official

inspection tour.



Matthew Safos(here with hisgrandson ) makesmoney from his

Rockaway hotels ,but insists thathe's also

provid ing avaluablepublic service .

eighties, and her manager was selling drugs. The only thing thatbenefited us is we got it for half price."

All three members of the Safos family are on good terms withthe residents. "I f it weren't for Matthew," says resident RonnieKaye, "I don't know where the hell I'd be." As Matthew stands inthe bustling office at 187, tenants shuttle in and out to ask questions, gossip or use the phone. He clowns around with some of theresidents. Dia, who staffs a computer, answers phones and coordi

nates operations, has a crib next to her desk where her 5-month-oldbaby-little Matthew-is sleeping.

The Safos family clearly feels at home with the tenants; it's thecommunity leaders they fear. Matthew and Jack Safos complainthat Gaska and the others on the Community Board 's task force areharassing them. As evidence, they cite their latest purchase, 147

Beach 113th Street, which they bought last August. As with Beach115th Street, they quickly moved to repair the building, installing

new windows and putting stucco on the exterior.

Again, instead of being happy that they were improving the

building, neighbors called the cops. The police ordered Jack tocease his repairs, arguing that he was doing the work without aper

mit. Work is proceeding again-the Buildings Department eventu

ally confirmed that owners do not need permits to install new windows or apply a new stucco farrade-but Safos expects another dis

pute because he is attempting to change the building's certificate ooccupancy to allow year-round use, rather than the summer-onlyoccupancy that it now permits.

Even with the inspection nightmares, Safos admits that owningan SRO can be a profitable business. In Rockaway Park, severaSROs have recently changed hands for between $100,000 and

$200,OOO--far below the price of a comparable two- or three-family house. And, though rents are low, the income from all the roomsquickly adds up. Take the 44-unit SRO at 187 Beach 115th StreetAt an average rate of $300 per month per room, the building bringsin as much as $158,400 in rent every year. Even allowing a 15 percent vacancy rate, that's still almost $135,000 in annual revenue.

Matthew Safos is quick to point out that costs can be great. Heestimates he spends $45,000 annually on his mortgage, $13,000 ininsurance, $9,500 in real estate taxes, $18,000 for electricity

$6,000 for heat and hot water. Factoring in miscellaneous expenses, Safos says it's safe to estimate that the building producesincome of $21,000 a year. Hardly a fortune-but a decent amount"I make a couple of dollars," he acknowledges.

SfOS isn't the only one who thinks his SROs can be a win

win proposition. Though she won't comment on the Safos

es as landlords, April Newbauer, who heads the Rockawayneighborhood office of the Queens Legal Aid Society

believes the city was wrong to pull residents out of the Safosbuilding at 175 Beach 115th Street. Though her office represents

tenants against negligent landlords, Newbauer believes that tenantsneed the rooming houses. ''There is aplace for SRO housing in thicity," she says. "It provides a home for people who can't affordanything else."

Yet SRO housing is disappearing at an alarming rate. In 1960a census survey found that New York City had at least 129,000

SRO units. In 1986, more than 63,000 units remained, according to

reports prepared for the city Department of Housing PreservationBy 1996, the most recent year for which figures were availablethere were only about 47,000 SRO units remaining.

In a city where rents have gone haywire, each affordable SRObuilding is a precious resource. Tenants understand that reality al

too well. 'They close down a rooming house and they act likethey've done something," says Joe Thrower, a disabled Vietnam ve

and former long-haul truck driver who has lived at 187 Beach115th Street for five years. "But they put 15 or 20 people in th

street. Where are they supposed to go?"A block away, on Beach 114th Street, a man who asked to be

identified as Kenny K. has his own thoughts about the buildingwhere he has lived for the last 18 months, paying $370 a month foa tiny room. "It's true that all these old buildings are ugly and a nuisance," he says. "But if you don't have places like this, where arethe homeless going to stay? Where are the people on Social Security going to stay? Basically, this is a dump. But it sure beats sleeping on the boardwalk." •

Robert Neuwirth is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. Additiona

reporting by Kevin Fleming.

CITY LIMITS



Parks Clean UpIt's no secret that to keep the city's parks clean and fun, the

city's Department ofParks and Recreation relies on amix of union

ized, full-time salaried employees and laborers from the Work

Experience Program (WEP), the city's public works system for welfare recipients.But a new report from the Independent Budget Office confirms

that the parks would crumble without WEP workers' minimally com

pensated efforts. Not only is the proportion of WEP to city employees the highest its ever been; it's also saving the Parks Department asizable chunk of change. Each WEP worker takes home no more than

$577-and often far less-for the 80-plus hours put in each month.

From 1991 to 1999, the headcount of staff workers at the ParksDepartment plunged from 4,285 to 2,101, a drop of 51 percent.

During the same period, the use ofWEP workers skyrocketed-fromthe equivalent of 170 full time workers to 2,389 of them, more than atenfold increase. Even after adjusting for the employees Parks brings

in for the peak season, the Parks Department now employs barely one

Parks employee for every WEP job.Besides arming welfare recipients with rakes and shovels, WEP

is fast improving the quality of New York City's parks. The rnofound that Parks acceptability ratings-DPR's internal measure ofhow clean and functional its facilities are-have risen along with the

proportion ofWEP laborers in its workforce. In 1992, the acceptability rating hovered at a mediocre 57 percent; by 2000, it had shot up

to a respectable 89 percent. Indeed, the Department's "Eight Seasons

1996-1997" report acknowledged that ''the biggest contributor to the

improved cleanliness of New York City's parks has been the workfare

program."

These workers have done far more, though, than keep the parksclean; they have also kept the agency's budget healthy, providing mil-lions of dollars of labor at no cost to Parks' budget. Instead, the city's

welfare department picks up the tab, mostly paid for by state and fed

eral funds.

Each WEP worker costs the city $1.80 an hour. Annualized for

full-time work, their pay comes to $4,380, according to a reportreleased by advocates at Community Voices Heard (CVH) earlier thisyear. Meanwhile, the annual wage for a comparable parks worker

comes in at $21,000. The 1999 Parks WEP workforce of 2,389 costthe city almost $10.5 million. If it had hired the same number of

salaried parks workers, the bill would have been $47 million. ''Ifyou

take what WEP costs away from what regular parks employees would

cost, you could say that's the amount that the city owes WEP work

ers:' John Krinsky of CVH says wryly.

Indeed, WEP has allowed the Parks Department to stretch its

shrinking salary budget. As headcount has declined, so has the bud

get allocation for labor, known in budget-speak as "personal ser

vices." In 1991, DPR spent $158.7 million on personal services. By

1999, that budget had dropped to $137.2 million.

From 1991 to 2000, the number of city park workers and maintenance employees dropped from 2,025 to 726. Over the same time

period WEP increased by 1,952 positions, effectively covering for thelost DPR maintenance workers and adding 655 more. The steepest

drop in paid maintenance staff - a decline of 15.2 percent--carnefrom 1994 to 1995. The same year, the number of full-time-equiva

lent WEP workers more than quadrupled from 421 to 1,809.

Displacement is evident in more than just headcount. Nearly 90

percent of Parks Department WEP workers reported doing the samework as regular parks employees, according to CVH's report, and

even Parks admits that about 95 percent of WEP workers performroutine maintenance and clean-up. 'There's nothing here that's sur

prising," says Krinsky. ''It shows, effectively, that the work of the

city's being done on the backs of the poor. -TracieMcMillan

As parks rely more and more on workfare to stay maintained,

they have also become cleaner.6,500

6,00090.0%

5,500 80.0%

5,00070.0%

1: 4,500::I

60.0%8 4,000't l

8l 3,500l:

50.0%

t 3,000

40.0%S 2,500

2,000 30.0%

1,500 20.0%

1,00010.0%

500

0.0%

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

_Full Time DPR Headcount t::=:I Peak Seasonal FTE t::=:I WEP FTE __ _ Parks Acceptability Ratings

SOURCE: lBO, based on New York City RMS data and DPR data.

JANUARY 2001

VITAL

STATS



REVIEW

AnotherWorldBy Helene Clark

"American Project: The Rise and Fall ofan

American Ghetto," by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh,

Harvard University Press, $29.95.

Imagine being sent with hundreds of other families to start asettlement on a new planet. Upon arrival, you learn that you

will have to develop your own law enforcement and your

own commerce. You soon suffer from severe shortages of basic

necessities. Your living facilities and life support deteriorate over

the years, as the powers back on Earth decide that the space-set

tlement program was probably a mistake and cut their losses by

refusing to send new materials. The physical environment crum

bles, and powerful lawless elements take over the settlement. But

the settlers never cease to try both to maintain contact with Earth

and to resolve their problems themselves. Eventually, though,

Earth declares that the settlers have failed, and the settlement pro

gram is recalled.

This science-fiction scenario wouldn't seem farfetched to theformer residents of Robert Taylor Homes, a 4,500-family public

housing development in Chicago. Those buildings are now being

tom down under a federal mandate for all local authorities to

assess the "viability" of their public-housing stock. Washington is

encouraging cities to demolish high-rise projects in the hopes of

eliminating the social and economic problems of their residents

or at least removing those problems from view.

Columbia sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh spent several

years during the 1990s at Robert Taylor Homes researching his

dissertation. The resulting book, American Project, documents the

lives of the people who lived at Robert Taylor, understanding them

not as passive victims of poverty, nor as a socially disorganized

community, but rather as a group of people who navigated serious

adversity by turning to acomplex network of mostly internal insti

tutions--everything from tenant groups to social-service providers

to gangs. Where public housing critics usually see communities of

victims or dysfunction, Venkatesh compellingly testifies to a rich

and complex society whose members had very good, if painful,

reasons for the choices and alliances they made every day.

American Project lacks the narrative power of a good ethnog

raphy, but it does go far beyond most studies of its kind in con

necting the community it surveys to the social forces that so great

ly determine its fate. We are left in DO doubt that Robert Taylor

Homes was inextricably linked to-and abandoned by-largersocial forces and institutions, and that those had a defining impact

on residents' lives. Local service providers refused to enter the

political minefield of gang problems.

The Chicago Housing Authority

never kept up with maintenance and

turned its back on gang problems.

And the Chicago police often

refused to enter the development

because the wide open spaces

made them sitting ducks for

gang shootings.Ultimately, gangs

emerged as the most power

ful institution at the Taylor

Homes. They had the eco

nomic power to dominate

the residents, and unlike

tenants who struggled to

.. " , ~ solve problems by working

within the system, gangs gained control by

not hesitating to break rules and laws and resort to vio

lence. The vibrant underground economy of the projects, which

provided essential services to residents in the absence of legitimate

businesses, was at the mercy of the gangs, who demanded money

to allow the sellers to stay in business. Since any tenants engagingin these illicit commercial enterprises would face eviction, they

were in no position to complain. Moreover, the relationship of res

idents to gang members was complex and contradictory, since the

latter were often the boyfriends, sons and relatives of residents and

frequently paid the rent or bought the groceries.

Venkatesh portrays the dilemma community leaders faced.

They tried to win concessions from gang leaders, so some sem

blance of safety could return. Yet in working with gangs, the ten

ants were actually helping them ensure a stable environment for

drug trafficking. Venkatesh shows his disagreements with tenant

leaders most clearly when he condemns those who did not

demand an end to drug trafficking as a basis for negotiations with

gangs. The book is at its weakest in showing that such a demand

was even remotely possible; it seems clear that citywide drugentrepreneurs would have laughed at such a concession. And

while the impact of gangs on the development can't be overstated,

Venkatesh documents only the intricate relationships and pacts

between gang and tenant leaders, without ever giving a clear sense

of how the vast majority of residents coexisted with the gangs.

Still, in the vacuum created through the abandonment of the

development by all but its residents, it is astonishing how persis

tently those tenant-activists worked to control the environment.

From the beginning, Robert Taylor tenants organized to get

repairs, provide each other with services, maintain safety and sup

port local entrepreneurship. The tragedy of Robert Taylor Homes

and other abandoned communities is that the tenants ultimately

failed in managing problems not of their own making, and were

forced to leave after years of trying to build a viable community.

Venkatesh points out that the tenants themselves were deeply

divided about demolition-about half opposed it, while the other

half couldn't wait to get out.

As cities tear down public housing, in a sense we are trying to

eliminate more than structures. The razing of the buildings serves

to erase the problems as well as the creative human struggles of the

communities from our collective memory-an eclipse that

Venkatesh has managed to prevent for one community •

Helene Clark is director ofActKnowledge, a community develop-

ment research organization at the City University of New York

Graduate Center.

CITY LIMITS



A i5-yearmember of he

New York City

Council

representing

Bay Ridge, Sal

Albanese is now

in private law

practice.

JANUARY 2001

.Race

Against

MoneyBy Sal Albanese

I got involved in politics to stand up for regular New

Yorkers. To pass living-wage legislation so they can makeenough to get by. To make sure we have housing thatworking people can actually afford, and police walking

neighborhood beats again. Last year, I launched my secondcampaign to run for mayor of New York City, to be a leader for

hard-working New Yorkers whom city governmenthas mostly forgotten.

In November, however, I had to put those planson hold. Though I had held countless fundraising

events and collected close to $300,000 in contributions from more than 2,000 city residents , itbecame impossible to keep the campaign going.I dropped out of the race.

The reason I'm not running for mayorcomes down to one detail-money. In NewYork City, it takes at least amillion dollars tocompete in a mayoral race. Without raisingthat much, you can't hire staff: a press secretary, a campaign manager, political consultants, people you need to get your mes

sage out and let voters know who you are.And forget about buying ads on TV.

It's not at all impossible to get thatkind of money; there's plenty of it out there. In

New York, a group of insiders funds campaigns. These are

people who want something from the city: real-estate developers, big contractors, industry groups. They have a cadre of lobbyists and p.r. people that they hire, and they set the parametersfor whom they consider acceptable as a mayor. And when theygive you campaign contributions-large ones-they expectsomething in return .

I'm not anti-business . But I do have a record of 15 years in

the City Council, advocating for the interests of city residentsand to do that, I've had to stay independent. One lobbyistdescribed me as "unreliable." What does that mean? It meansthat the big contributors know that their money won't affect my

decisions in public office-and thatthere 's no reason for them to back my

campaign. If your base is rank-and-fileNew Yorkers-contributions to mycampaign averaged $60 to $70 each-

it's simply impossible to raise the mil-lions you need. The other four candi-

CITYVIEW

dates have already raised between $2.5 and $4.8 million.Two years ago, I helped pass a law that was supposed to

level the playing field. New York City's new campaign financeprogram provides candidates with $4 in matching funds forevery dollar they raise. The only conditions are that only $250of any contribution is matchable, and that a campaign mustraise enough money to qualify. Though it's never been put tothe test before, I believe the law will allow candidates for CityCouncil to amass enough money to get their message out. Butmy experience shows that the law just doesn't work in a mayoral race.

For one thing, the eligibility threshold is too high: Beforethey can get matching money, mayoral candidates have to raise

at least $250,000 in qualified funds. (The maximum individualcontribution-$4,500--is also too high.) And those matchingdollars don't arrive until a candidate is officially on the ballotthat's not until August, amonth before the primary. Waiting forthat money wastes precious time, while opponents are able to

air TV ads, buy computers and hire staff. And waiting also

makes it difficult for a campaign to do its own fundraising,because until you have a significant amount of money, contributors are cautious.

It doesn't help that the media also judge candidates by theircoffers. It's a vicious circle: If you can't raise enough money,

reporters will not write about you, and you don't get invited toevents; if you 're not in the articles or on TV talk shows, contributors aren't going to take you seriously. I have actually

called reporters to ask why they left me out of stories about themayoral race, and they'll tell me, sympathetically, "Sal, youjust don't have enough to win."

The whole experience is a debilitating process. Instead ofthinking about improving schools, or creating living-wage jobs,you're spending all your energy raising money. Thinking abouthow to raise more. Asking your friends for money. And finally,asking yourself: Why am I doing this?

The campaign finance reform law I originally proposed in

the City Council would have allowed candidates with strongpublic support to be viable contenders , by lowering the amount

of money they would need to raise to be eligible for publicfunding . Based on "clean elections" laws already in effect in

Maine, Massachusetts , and Vermont, it would have providedgrants to candidates who collected a small sum of money froma large number of contributors. In Vermont, for example, candidates for governor get a clean-elections grant if hey raise $10from each of 5,000 residents.

Iwanted to come into City Hall the way I came into the CityCouncil in 1982: with amandate to make government work forthe people of the city. Instead, I've left the race because we areso caught up in the mindset that money equals political powerthat we can't see our way outside of it.

I come from a working-class background. 1 have friendswho are doing very well now, but they can 't bundle $50,000contributions for me. My constituents don't have thoseresources. It would be great if they did. •



Where Credit Is Due(continued from page 12)

seems to present a reasonable way for acredit union to reach more customers

at a bargain price. For the check cashers, he adds, "it may not be more than a

p.r. initiative, but if members can benefit, I don 't care."

Coleman and Cousminer hope to get the system up and running in

February, and Cousminer estimates that it will take about a year in order to

tell if this pilot is really going to be a success. In any case, both Cousminer

and Coleman are completely confident that this bold bipartisan experiment is

worth trying out.

"If it wasn't Joy Cousminer, I'd be very worried," says Errol Louis, a

cofounder of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union. "But he might find

himself changing more than she will. He might want to change his charter and

tum into a depository institution that helps poor people. She's a very persua-

sive lady." •

St. Joseph Services for Children and Families is seeking dedicated profes sionals to provide services to our clients in the following programs: SUPER-

VISORIPREVENTATIVE SERVlCESlBUSHWICK. Assist Program Director andsupervise group work and caseworkers in the provision of services to families and children. Reqs. MSW, 2 years post master's experience, bilingual

(Spanish/English). SOCIAL WORKERIPREVENT1V SERVICES, WlWAMSBURGFAMILY REHABILITATIVE PROGRAM. Identify and provide services to childrenand families addressing parenting issues; provide casework, group work,advocacy, referral and crisis intervention to families with substance abuseissues. MSW, preventive and/or substance abuse services experience preferred. Bilingual (English/Spanish) required. RECRUI1IRICENTRAI.. INTAKE

AND PlACEMENT SERVICES. Excellent opportunity to recruit foster parentsand prospective adoptive parents to the agency. Conduct trainings and orientations. Reqs. a BA degree, bilingual (English/Spanish). Foster care experience desirable. SOCIAL WORKERIGROUP HOMES. Work with adolescentfemales in a group home setting. Provide casework, group work, individualcounseling, crisis intervention and ed/voc and discharge planning. MSW,valid NYS Driver's License required. For immediate consideration please fax

resume and cover letter to: Brenda Wilks at 718-797-6208 or email:[email protected].

Prep for Prep , an educationally based not·for·profit organization, is seekingcandidates to fill the following positions: DIRECTOR OF lHE NEW YORK MEI'RO

REGION l£ADERSHIP ACADEMY. This new program will identify talented students from minority group backgrounds from the New York City suburban area,prepare them for entrance into rigorous courses of study (especially Honorsand AP classes) in thei r local public high schools, and provide a sense of com

munity, peer support, additional critical services and a range of leadershipdevelopment activities throughout high school. Prep is seeking a mick:areerprofessional who is ready to assume a leadership role managing an educational program with high achieving students; s/he must demonstrate the a b i ~ity to understand and work with adolescents, develop and implement curricula , and supervise staff. The Director will have the day-tO<lay responsibility foroperating the program, and as the fi rst Director, will have a major role in shaping it. DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC POLICY PROJECTS. The Director will assume primary day-tO<lay responsibility for existing projects that introduce our students topublic policy issues and the political process. Responsibilities will includeplanning and implementing the Leadership Development Summer Institutethe Local Government Summer Internships Project, and developing aSpeakers Series. Strong academic credentials, background in government,public policy or politics required. Minimum 3 years related experience. ASSlS-TANT DIRECTOR OF ALUMNVAE PROFESSIONAl. ADVANCEMENT. The r e s p o n s i b i l ~ties for this newly-created position include assisting the Director in generatingand disseminating information about internships and job opportunities for

top-tier college undergraduates and recent college graduates, developing andimplementing career planning programs, recruiting potential employers, anddeveloping and maintaining a mentors program. Corporate experience, exceptional interpersonal and communication skills required. Salary for all threepositions is highly competitive and based on experience. Excellent benefitsPlease mail or fax resume and cover letter to: Prep for Prep, attn. Director oPersonnel, 328 West 71st St. NYC 10023. Fax: 212-579-1443.

DIRECTOR, DEMOCRACY PROGRAM. Demos is a new research and advocacyorganization focused on strengthening democracy and creating more broadlyshared economic prosperity. Democracy Program will highlight and promoteinnovative approaches to enhancing the quality of state-level democracy

T o m o r r o ~ starts today

Commitment is

leading to results M

Deutsche Bank's commitment to

global corporate citizenship recognizes a

responsibility to improve and enrich the

communities throughout the world in

which we conduct business.

With a focused strategy of support for

community development, the arts and the

environment, Deutsche Bank partners with

local organizations to build a brighter future .

Our commitment to a better tomorrow

starts today.

Deutsche Bank IZICITY LIMITS



Responsibilities: provide intellectual and management direction to DemocracyProgram; supervise and conduct research; help develop an advocacy strategy; manage to completion several major publications and development of

website; help raise funds for Program. Qualifications: broad understanding of

democracy issues; strong command of scholarty research methodologies;some direct experience in policymaking, applied policy analysis, advocacy.Women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply. Send two copies of

C.v. (with salary requirements) and writing sample to Demos, 155 Avenue of

the Americas, Fourth Roor, New York, NY, 10013, Attention: DemocracyOpening; or via email toJobsAtDemos@ao l.com

11IERAPlSTlSUPDMSOR. The August Aichhom Residential Treatment Fac ility isseeking an experienced mental health professional to act as a primary therapist and staff supervisor in our residential program for very diff icul t adolescents. We operate a 32 bed JCAHCO-accred ited comprehensive long-terminpatient psychiatric program on the Upper West Side for teenage rs who havebeen unable to adjust to any other living situation outside of a StatePsychiatric Center or juvenile justice facility. This position requires at least aMaster's degree and five years of experience with severely disturbed and/ orantisocial adolescents or young adults . Previous supervisory experiencewould also be helpful. The exact scope and schedule of this position is somewhat flexible and may be mod ified based on the qualifications, needs andinterests of the successful candidate. Please send or fax CV to : CarmenTorres, Administrative Director, August Aichhorn Center, 23 West 106th

Street, New York, NY 10025. Fax: (212) 662-2755.

FOSTERCARE

EDUCATlONALPOLICY ATTORNEY/ANALYST.

Advocates for Childrenan educational advocacy organization (www.advocatesforchildren.org) seeks aFoster Care Educational Policy Attorney or Analyst. The position requiressuperb writing, analytical and advocacy skills, possible work on impact litigation, and coalition building. Salary dependent on experience, excellent benefi t plan. EOE. Send resume to Jill Chaifetz, Advocates for Children, 151 West30th St. 5th Roor NY NY 10001 Fax: 212-947-9790.

SMALL BUSINESS SERVICES COORDINATOR. The Brooklyn Navy Yard DevelopmentCorporation (BNYDC) is seeking a Small Business Services Coordinator. TheCoordinator is responsible for interacting with tenants of the Brooklyn NavyYard Development Corporation in an effort to apprise them of public and plivate sector programs that will assist them in developing and expanding theirbusinesses and workforce. The successful applicant should be familiar withthe broad array of public and private sector business development programsand the entities that implement these programs. The applicant must also befamiliar with the needs of high-tech businesses so as to maximize the ability

of the Navy Yard to attract such businesses and enable them to grow. Essentialrequirements are a Bachelor's Degree and at least two years experience in aposition working with the business community. Candidates must forward aresume along with salary requirements to: Alice Lunsford, Director of HumanResources, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, 63 Rushing Avenue,Brooklyn, NY, 11205 or fax responses to 71SB43-9296.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Miami-Dade Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc. TheNeighborhood Housing Services of Miami-Dade County, Rorida (MDNHS), 21-year old non-profit organization , seeks an Executive Director to lead and growits affordable housing development, ownership, rehabilitation programs andeconomic development initiatives. The Executive Director will report to a community-based board of directors and supervise a professional staff, wh ichincludes loan officers to deliver housing development programs, includingnew construction, first and second mortgage financing, and loans for rehabilitation. Additionally, the Executive Director will represent MDNHS to an arrayof constituencies such as elected officials; city, county, and state officers;

and community residents. The successful candidate must possess aBachelor'S degree with a Master's degree, demonstrated experience in housing development/construction and real estate finance, effective administrative and supervisory experience, and a commitment to community-based service organizations. To apply contact Donna Cramer at Isaacson, Miller, 334

Boylston Street. Su ite 500, Boston , MA 02116. Telephone: 617-262-B500;fax: 617-262-B509; email: [email protected].

DIRECTOR Of JUVEHILI JUSTICE PROJECT. The Correctional Association seeks acommitted activist to lead its Juvenile Justice Project. Duties include deve l

oping and initiating advocacy strategies ; organizing a coalition of organizations and individuals concemed with juvenile justice issues; and preparingpublic education materials. The successful candidate must be able to doresearch and policy analysis and write clearly and concisely. Compensationincluding salary commensurate with experience plus excellent benefits .Interested persons should send writing samples and a resume to: RobertGangi, Correctional Association 135 East 15th Street New York , NY 10003

JANUARY 2001

Tel. 212-254-5700, Fax 212473-2807

EDUCA110N PROGRAM OfFICER. AED seeks team-oriented indiv to assistmanaging a middle-grades educ reform program in three regions of U.S. This a NYCbased position. Duties incl: refining the school improvement modeidentify regional partners, represent the initiatives at natl/regional forumsReqs: MS w/6+ yrs in educ reform & nat'l prog mgmt, w/focus in mid-gradefor socio-econ disadvantaged; school reform; cmptr skills. Sal $45-BOk. Ffull desc, see: www .aed.org. Send resume w/cover ref #CS311CL toAED / HR , 1825 Connecticut Ave, NW, WDC, 20009; fax: (202) 884-8709 oAED-NY/HR 100 Rfth Ave, 2nd R, NYC 10011; fax: (212) 627'()407. [email protected]. EEO/AA/M/F/D jV.

R£SfARCH ASSOCIATE. (Part or Full-Time ) Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugand Community Health. DUTIES: The Research Associate will work collaboratively with community.based programs in the implementation of evaluatioactivities. He/she will be primarily responsible for conducting site visits anreporting field observations, ccrfacilitating focus groups and training of CB

staff on evaluation procedures, and observing and reporting intervention worshops and trainings. In addition, the research associate will assist in researcdesign and implementation , will conduct literature searches and reviews, anwill assist in the gathering, selection and development of research instruments. The research associate will also develop data entry structures, traiand supervise data entry staff, and generate related statistical analyses anreports. The research associate will report to the Director of Research anEvaluation. QUALIRCATIONS: MA/MPH strongly recommended but no

required , prior experience in health or human services field, strong computeized database and writing skills required. Proficiency in Spanish highly desiredSALARY : $34,QOO.$40,OOO (or $15-$20 per hour for part-time appointmentdepending on qualifications and experience, with comprehensive benefits. T

APPLY : Send resume, cover letter, and three professional references (no phoncalls) to: Unda Glickman, PhD ., Director of Research and Evaluation, HunteCollege Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health, 425 East 25th StreeNew York, NY 10010. EOE

ADMINISTRATlVE ASSISTANT. Perform data entry, requisition supplies, coordnate travel & meeting arrangements, conduct telephone outreach anresearch, provide clerical and administrative support. Requires attention tdetail, excellent computer and organizational skills with ability to handle mutiple projects in fast paced NFP. Must have two years relevant office expeence, knowledge of Windows, Word, Excel and the Intemet. Send resume toC. McElroy, Medicare Rights Center, 1460 Broadway, 11th Roor, New YorNY 10036, fax 212-869-3532.

Medicare Rights Center seeks HOTUNE COORDINATOR. Recruit , train ansupervise volunteer hotline counselors; draft newsletter distributed to counselors stateWide; manage case intake and client database . Requires excelent oral/writing skills, team player with supervisory skills, interesthealth/senior issues. Facility with computer databases a plus. Send resumand writing sample to: Suzanne Levin , 1460 Broadway, 11th Roor, New YorkNY 10036; fax: 212-869-3532 ; email : [email protected].

SENIOR EDUCA110N ASSOCIATL Develop and conduct training programs for prcfessionals and consumers. Other duties: managing grant-funded projectswriting educational materials; researching Medicare/ health topiCS. Requirecollege degree (Master's preferred), excellent writing, communication, presentation, computer skills. Ideal candidate is mature, flexible, self-starter witability to manage multiple projects and interest in health issues . Senresume and writing sample to: S. Edelstein, Medicare Rights Center, 146

Broadway, 11th Roor, New York, NY 10036, fax 212-869-3532.

COMMUNICAllONS ASSISTANT. Pitch stories; handle press inquiries ; write presreleases ; update media databases; maintain website; and other public relations activities. Must have excellent oral and writing skills, ability to uggle mutiple projects and interest in working for nonprofit dedicated to health/aginissues. Knowledge of html a plus. Send resume and writing sample to DeanBeebe, MRC , 1460 Broadway, 11th Roor, NY, NY, 10036; fax: 212-8693532 ; email : [email protected].

Medicare Rights Center seeks PUBLICA110NS MANAGER.. PartiC ipate in thplanning, budgeting, scheduling, production, and dissemination of all extenally produced MRC publications. Requires knowledge of print productionability to work closely with designers and printers, outstanding organizationaskills, and extraordinary attention to detail. Send resume to: S. EdelsteinMedicare Rights Center, 1460 Broadway, 11th Roor, New York, NY 10036

fax (212) 39&5414.(continued on page 28



laiads •(continued/rom page 27)

SlTI COORDINATOR. Duties include, but not limited to: function as a daily"point person" with one or more sponsoring child care agencies; insure excellent information flow from and to program; provide support and technicalassistance to sponsoring organizations; monitor sponsoring organization performance and home development; conduct initial home inspection and preenrollment interviews; other duties as assigned by supervisors. Experience:Excellent Interpersonal, communication and organizational skills; experience

in facilitating workshops and support groups; experience in working withPublic Assistance recipients; knowledge of NYC's childcare delivery system.Education Level: BA required. Salary: $32-35,000. Hours: 35 hours per week.Contact: N. Lifton, Director SCCP Resumes can be faxed to N. Lifton at 212-414-4125 or to the Human Resources Department at 212-647-9486.Satellite Child Care, 275 Seventh Avenue, New York 10001 Please specifyposition applying for.

Innovative Brooklyn-based CBO seeks TWO FULL-TIME VOCATlONAl. COlIN-

SRORS. Work with individuals with substance abuse and/or psych disabilities.BA with two years experience. Knowledge of vocational rehabilitation , groupand individual counseling skills, with good computer and writing skills preferred. Also seeking PT (20 HrsjWeek) JO B DEVELOPER. BA, experience work

ing with employers on behalf of persons with substance abuse and / or psychdisabilities. Expanded hours possible in the Mure. Please fax/ mail resumeindicating position interested in to: Mr. Paul Shumsker 718-625--0635; BCHS,105 Carlton Avenue , Brooklyn, NY 11205.

PROGRAM DIRECTOR. Leading advocacy and social service organization forhomeless people seeks a creative and talented Director for its innovative24/7 multi-service center that provides a continuum of comprehensive careto the homeless elderly. The Director will oversee a multidisciplinary staff of

30+ and must have experience in program design and implementation , advocacy, staff training and supervision, and coalition building. Applicants shouldhave at least 8 years relevant experience, a graduate degree in a clinical discipline, and a commitment to serving the homeless elderly. Salary to$60 ,000, excellent benefits. Resume and cover letter to: The Partnership forthe Homeless, Inc. Director of Human Resources, 305 Seventh Avenue, 13thfloor, BOX P[)'lNY, NY 10001

Social Venture group seeks TRAINING AND CASE MANAGEMENT SPECIALIST. Joindynamic team charged with creating a workforce development department.Experience in soft skills training and curriculum development required.Rexibility and humor essential. Master's preferred. Fax letter and resume to

B. Wood, Greyston Foundation, 914-376-1333.

Legal Information For Families Today, a small nonprofit, seeks an EXECUTlVE

DIRECTOR. Oversee all operational aspects of the organization. Reporting toLIFT 's Board of Directors, the ED must be an energetic professional withstrong leadership and consensus building skills. The qualified candidate willpossess a JD or master's in non profit management, or related discipline orhave equivalent experience. Demonstrated knowledge of family court andexperience in multi-site program management is a must. Send cover letterand resume with salary history to Search Committee, LIFT 226 Fifth Avenue ,5th Roor, NY NY 10001

DIRECTOR OF RNANCIAl. SERVICES. Experienced financial management professional needed to direct the financial operations of a nonprofit and provide consulting services and workshops to help other nonprofit organizations improveaccounting and financial management. Minimum five years experience in non

profit management with at least three years in a senior accounting or financial position. Expertise in budget control , govemment contracting andvouchering. Understanding of organizational structure and governance.Familiarity with fund accounting software, preferably FundEZ . Bachelor's ormaster's degree or CPA. Excellent analytical, writing and presentation skills;computer competency; ability to work in a team-oriented, multicultural e n v ~ ronment. Second language desirable. Extensive travel within New York City'sfive boroughs. Starting salary mid-upper 50 's. Send resume with cover letteroutlining your consulting approach to : Donna Panton, Executive Director, TheNonprofit Connection, 1 Hanson Place, Suite 2504, Brooklyn, NY 11243, Fax:

718-399-3428. An equal opportunity employer. www.nonprofitconnection.org .

CASE MANAGER. Pos itions available Catholic Big Brothers for Boys & GirlsExperienced Case Manager needed to supervise existing case oad of childrenand volunteers. Must have good assessment and writing skills and must beself-motivated to manage and build own caseload. Ruent in Spanish pre

ferred. FIT and PIT pOSitions available. Salary: low - mid $30s for FIT If inter

ested please send resume to: Jo Anne Keller, Program Director, Catholic Big

Brothers, 45 East 20th Street, 9th R. New York, New York 10002 212-4772250. [email protected]

SPECIAl. ASSISTANT. Assist with correspondence/ dissemination of informatioto program partners; develop forms, program literature, and publ ic relationmaterials; work on special projects as assigned by Director and AssistanDirector; assist with data collection and analysis; write policies and procedures related to program expansion; evaluate program components and recommend enhancements; develop and implement consumer satisfaction q u aity control mechanisms; work with development department on proposal wriing; identify and research policy issues which present barriers to programgrowth; provide some administrative support. Qualifications: At least twoyears related work experience and / or relevant education ; excellent verbal andwritten skills; computer skills (spreadsheets, Internet, data systems) ; k n o wedge of welfare to work and child service delivery systems helpful; comforwith public speaking and occasional travel. Salary: $35 ,000. EducationUndergraduate Degree. Contact: N. Lifton, Director. Contact Method: Fa

resumes to 212-414-4125. Consortium for Worker Education. Address: 275Seventh Avenue-18th Roor, NYC 10001

HELP USA , a homeless housing provider, has the following opportunitiesable: CASE MANAGER. We seek a committed professional to play an essentiarole in helping families achieve permanent housing and self-sufficiency. Musbe able to handle quick pace & multi -task. BA required. Case Manager experience deSirable, computer literacy required. TEAM LEADER. High energy, pos

itive person to lead interdisciplinary team , able to handle fast pace & multi

task. Supervisory, case management and clinical experience required. MSWor related degree, computer literacy required. SOCIAL WORK CUNICIAN

Challenging opportunity for creative dedicated professional to grow throughhands on practice with individuals and groups. MSW a must, bilingual A+(Spanish/ English). New graduates welcome. Computer literacy requiredHOUSING SPECIALIST. Prior experience assisting families in securing permanent housing. Real estate &/ or government low income housing lease negotiation in DSS expo Valid drivers license & bilingual (Spanish/ English) preferred. Computer literacy required. Please fax your resume to: Tabitha N

Gaffney, Director of Social Service, 718-485-5916. EOE. A drug free workplace.

PROGRAM ASSISTANT. Not-for-profit organization serving mentally ill homelesspopulation seeks FIT Program Assistant. Duties include: compiling reportscontact with service providers in 5 boros, providing clinical assistance, helping with research projects and program development. Position requires adetail-<>riented individual with excellent mathematical, organ izational and com

munication skills. Computer experience with word processing, spreadsheetsand Access databases is essential. Knowledge of SPSS a + . Salary is com

mensurate with experience. Send cover letter and resume to: PPOH, 120

Riverside Drive, New York , NY 10024.

PROGRAM DIRECTOR. S c h o o ~ a s e d Youth Development Center. The ForesHills Community House, a progressive settlement house located in Queenshas an opening for a program director of a TASC-funded youth developmencenter at a junior high school in Briarwood (northern Jamaica). The positionrequires strong management and communication skills , youth developmenknowledge and experience, and ability to work effectively with teens, parentsstaff and the school environment. This is a full-time year-round positionsalary: mid-30s with good benefits. Resume to: Susan Matloff, The ForesHills Community House, 108-25 62nd Drive, Forest Hills, NY 11375.

Senior Health Partners is both a health plan and care prov ider developing oneof

the most effective innovative care modelsof

comprehensive all-inclusivecare for the elderly. We are seeking professionals with leadership skills in

long-term and/ or home care. DAY CENTER DlRECTOR_ Team leader, responsible for day-to-day operations of the center and the coordination of all caredelivered to participants - both in the center and in other settings. Requiresclinical degree and management experience. HOME CARE COORDINATOR IRNJ

Conducts assessments and case manager for home care. Requires NYS nursing license. Highly competitive compensation and benefits . Bilingual preferred . Resume to: [email protected] or fax 212-870-4731. EOE.

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. Employment research and training center seeksexperienced person with outstanding skills in EXCEL, ACCESS , PowerPoinand word processing appl ications. $30-35K+ benefits package . Fax resumeto 212-742-21320r mail to New York Work Exchange, 90 Broad Street, 8thRoor, NY, NY 10004

DATABASEIWEBPAGE SPECIALIST. Employment research and training cente

seeks highly organized individual profiCient in ACCESS, EXCEL, FRONTPAGE

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PROJECT MANAGER. The St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corporationa neighborhood-based not-for-profit, serving the WiliiamsburgjGreenpointcommunities in Housing, Economic Development, Health Care and Youth andFamily Services, as a part of a comprehensive neighborhood revitalizationstrategy. The organization seeks to fill the position of Project Manager for itsNeighborhood Homes and Neighborhood Redevelopment Program. TheProject Manager will be responsible for overseeing all phases of development

from project inception to rent-up and sales. Duties include acting as liaison togovernmental and private funding sources, administration of developmentbudgets, tracking of architects, contractors and relocation process to ensuretimely achievement of project milestones. This position requires an energeticself-starter who is well organized and assertive. Those interested in this p o s ~ tion should possess a BA/BS degree plus two or more years of experience inUrban Planning or Project Developrnent. Send resume to: Zully E. Rolan,Director, Housing Department, 11 Catherine Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211 oremail: [email protected].

DEVElOPMENT ASSOCIATE. Center for Constitutional Rights seeks full-timecoordinator to plan/manage special events calendar. Demonstrated record of

successful event planning, strong written/verbal/organizational skills a must.Send resume, cover letter to Vivian Lindermayer, Development Director, CCR,666 Broadway, 7th Aoor, NYC, 10012. No phone calls. CCR is an EOE.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZERIHOMEOWNERSHIP. The Cypress Hills Local

Development Corporation (CHLDC), a multifaceted nonprofit communitydevelopment corporation serving 8,000 residents annually, seeks aCommunity Organizer/Homeownership Counselor to lead its efforts in combating predatory lending practices in Cypress Hills , City Line and East NewYork. Working cooperatively with the U.S. Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment (HUD) and other community-based organizations, the staff person will be responsible for: Educate prospective homebuyers and homeowners about predatory lending practices, including exorbitant rates and hiddenfees, high pressured sales tactics, and discriminatory and unfair loan terms;Conduct outreach about predatory lending to churches, block associations,realtors , attorneys, social service groups and other civic associations andentities involved in the homeownership process; Prepare outreach and othereducational materials; Organize seminars; Analyze lending data for neighborhood, identify lenders and review their practices and foreclosure rates ;Refer documented cases of predatory lending practices to HUD and otherregulatory agencies for enforcement; counsel victims of predatory lendersand assist them in negotiating forbearance and other agreements to avoidforeclosure, with budgeting help and credit repair, securing entitlements andlegal representation and providing information on loss mitigation options;and establish and maintain open communication and strong work relationships with HUD, regulators and other groups funded by HUD to battle predatory lending. Qualifications: Bachelor of Science degree in Social Work,Business or related field + two years organizing or homeownership counseling experience. Bilingual Spanish/English required and excellent communication skills. Salary: $26,000 to $31,000 depending on experience + benefits. To apply fax resume to: Carmen Ayala-Otero , Housing Director, 718-647-2104.

FINANCIAl. LlTIRACY OFFICER. Bushwick Cooperative FCU, a community development credit union, seeks a person to lead its Rnancial Literacy Program .Responsibilities include research and development of a Rnancial LiteracyCurriculum, promotion ofthe program, and teaching. Experience in the field isdesired. Training is available. Spanish is a must. Contact Jack Lawson:

718.418.8232 (t) or 718.418.8252 (f).

PSYCHOTMERAPIST. Dynamic Bronx-based harm reduction agency seeksPsychotherapist, preferably QHP, to provide evaluation & counseling to homeless & substance-using people living with AIDS in community-based environment. Will also provide staff clinical supervision, 15% of time. Full-time p o s ~ tion. Prefer PhD Psychologist, experience with target population. Must be flexible team player. Competitive salary & benefits. Resume and cover letter toAttn: Exec. Director, Fax : 718-292-0500.

EMPlOYEE RETINTIONIBUSINESS RESOURCE CONSULTANT. National non-profrtorganization seeks business-savvy individual with experience in job placementand trouble-shooting job retention issues. Must have local knowledge of com-

munity/human services resources and labor markets, as well as experiencemarketing welfare/job training participants. Responsibilities include developing and maintaining strategic alliances with businesses and community partners in New York metropolitan areas. Must be customer service focused,

results .oriented and knowledgeable of welfare to work programs and work-

force development. Must be able to m u l t ~ t a s k , manage projects, foster reltionships and speak in small and large group settings. Bilingual a plus. Coveletter must include salary requirements. Fax to Ms. Joseph at 212-577-140or email: [email protected].

NUCLEAR WEAPONS EDUCATION & ACTION PROJECT COORDINATOR . Educators fSocial Responsibility Metropolitan Area, a nonprofit organization workinthrough education to create a just, peaceful, and truly democratic societseeks an activist to coordinate our Nuclear Weapons Education and Actio

Project with high school teachers and students. Requires working knowledgof international history and politics of nuclear weapons, strong communiction, presentation and organizational skills, experienced organizer or educator, ability to relate well to people, flexible, self-motivated. 2 days/weesalary prorated on $38-42,000 annually, depending on experience and knowedge. Fax resume and letter to Tom Roderick, Executive Director, 212/870

2464, or mail to ESR Metro, 475 Riverside Drive #554, NY NY 10115.EOEStart immediately.

Brooklyn CDC seeks OCCUPANCY CERTIFICATION MANAGER for AssManagement Division, Manager will have responsibility for occupancy, c e r t ication-leases, security depoSits, voucher processing, submissions to HUDREAC Report for HUD, vacancy reports and special claims. Applicant must bCertified Assisted Housing Manager, and have knowledge and familiarity wifederally s u b s i d ~ z e d property management. Excellent communication aninterpersonal skills required. Knowledge of computerized accounting systemand software applications necessary. Qualified candidates should subm

cover letter and resume to Ms. J. Anglin , c/o BSRC , 1368 Fulton StreeBrooklyn, NY 11216 or fax: 718-857-5984.

RESEARCH ANALYST. Good Jobs New York (www.goodjobsny.org) promotes coporate and government accountability in economic development subsidieApplicants should have strong writing and communication skills, demonstraed commitment to social and economic justice, research experience, andbachelor 's degree. Master's, equivalent experience preferred. Salary DO

plus healthcare, retirement, and vacation. Women and people of color encouaged. Fax resume to Alice Meaker 212-414-9002, or send to [email protected] 275 7th Ave. , 6th A, NYC 10001.

BUILDING CASE MANAGER. Work on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as paof a dynamic on-site social service team in permanent housing. Provide casmanagement to a diverse mix of tenants including formerly homeless peoplpeople with mental illness, people with addictions , elderly, people on welfarthe working poor, and others. Coordinate psych & medical care, entitlement

assessment & treatment planning, linkage to various programs, clubhouseemployment, & sobriety. Relevant experience, good writing skills a pluSalary mid $20s, excellent benefits. Please send letter and resume to CareEzratty, The Senate/Goddard Riverside Community Center, 206 West 92nNY, NY 10025 or fax to 212-721-5406.

Innovative Community Building Alliance in Morningside Heights/Harlemseeks 2 positions: CHILDCARE PROGRAM DlRECTORITEACHER. Teacher/dire

tor for innovative childcare enterprise. Candidate will implement model providing quality, affordable childcare to diverse population through netwoof worker-owned centers and family daycare providers . RequirementMasters Early Childhood Education, min. 3 years classroom experiencsupervisory preferred, knowledge of daycare system. JOB CONNECTION

PROGRAM D!RECTOR. Manage program by identifying employment opportnities for Harlem residents at Morningside Area institutions. BA requireadvanced degree desirable and 4+ years in program management. Stron

communication, interpersonal and organizational skills required, knowedge of community-based job training programs ideal. Candidates shoufax resumes to MAA 212-749-0842.

Technical Assistance Foundation, PROJECT MANAGER. Job Description: Do yowant to make a difference? Do you want to feel good about going to workAre you a motivated person who works well alone & can meet goals and objetives in a fast paced environment? Our mission at Technical AssistancFoundation is to provide non-profit organizations with a resource for operatintheir facilities in a cost-efficient basis. The candidate will be responsible fimplementing and managing various costs-saving projects for ou r clients. Yo

will also be responsible for assisting other Team members handling multipprojects. As Project Manager you will develop, manage and cultivate relatioships within the Client organization. Multitasking and communications aremust. Solid experience in the successful completion of projects with varyinsize and complexity (from start-to-finish). Candidate should have the ability handle multiple assignments simultaneously and be able to resolve problem

quickly. Candidate should have the ability to achieve results against proje

CITY LIMIT



plans and deadlines. Exposure to Project Management, Accounting is a plus .Exposure to Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, Internet is desirable. JobSalary Maximum: $45K (there is also a bonus program). Please sendResume w/cover Letter to : Technical Assistance Foundation, 99 Main St.Nyack, NY 10960 Fax : 914 845 348-0102

Hudson Guild, a not-for-profit social service agency located in the Chelseasection of Manhattan is seeking qualified ambitious and dedicated c a n d ~ dates for a great opportunity to learn and provide essential direct support to

Chelsea area residents . The following positions are available: INDIVIDUAL

GIFTS COORDINATOR-EX1tRNAl. R£lA11ONS. Responsibilities: Maintain annualfund/donor program; interface with trustees to obtain updated and expandedlists; run direct mail solicitation program; coordinate major gifts tracking andupdating database system. Write related materials for newsletters, annualreports and generate giving reports for external and internal use .Qualifications: Excellent writing & verbal skills with 3-5 years experience infundraising. Proficient in MS Word, Excel, Access; knowledge of Donor Perfectdatabase system A+. Position: Full time; salary low-to mid- $30K. TIACHER·

EARLY HEAD START DEPARTMENT. Responsibilities : Lead play groups for children from birth to three years of age . Qualifications: New York State certifiedor certificate teacher with prior experience with age group and/or bilingual(English/Spanish or English/Cantonese) helpful. PART·11ME EDUCATION SPE·

CIAl.IST-CENTER FOR YOUTH DEVD..OPMENT & EMPLOYMENT. Responsibilities:Assist in the development and implementation of homework, SAT, GED , andRegents preparation. Chaperone various field trips and monitor other afterschool activities. Qualifications: Working towards college degree in SecondaryEducation or college graduate. Experience working with adolescent and bilingual Spanish A+. Positions: Part-Time, $10/hour, 19 hrs/week. TIACHER·

C11llDREHS CEHTIR. Responsibilities : Develop daily classroom plans, over

sees supervision of children (pre-school), and assistant teacher, interact withparents and other related duties as assigned . Qualifications: BA degree, andmust be actively pu rsuing permanent New York State Certificate, N-6 ,

Bilingual Spanish/English/Chinese A+ . Salary commensurate with experience, comprehensive benefits package, Union Scale, DC 1707. Positions FT.PART·11ME ASSISTANT TEACHER-CHILDREN'S CENTER·SCHOOL AGE.

Responsibilities : Develop daily classroom plans, oversees supervision of children ages 6-12 years old, and assistant teacher, interact with parents andother related duties as assigned. Qualifications: A.A. degree, or workingtowards college degree in Elementary Education. Spanish/English/ChineseA+ . Salary commensurate with experience, comprehensive benefits packageUnion Scale, DC 1707. Positions Full-TIme . We are an equal opportunityemployer, If you meet the above qualifications then please send us your

resume with cover letter in confidence specifying position(s) desired . Mailresume to: Human Resources, Hudson Guild, 441 W. 26th Street, New York,NY 10001. Fax resume to: Human Resources Department: 212-268-9983.No phone calls please.

Catholic Charities in Hollis seeks a FIT SOCIAL WORKER with an MSW degree.Duties: Group Work, Employment Readiness, Parish Outreach, Oversee foodpantries , Community Work . Fax resume to: 718464-1317 or mail: 90-39189th Street, Hollis, New York 11423-2543, Attn. Maria Passadino.

POLICY ANALYST. Coalition of NYC job training programs seeks policy analystto analyze current workforce development policies, and develop and presentorganization positions to legislators and agency administrators. Position willalso oversee ongoing projects, manage relationships with funders , and workwith coalition committees on policy issues. Qualifications: excellent research ,writing and communication skills , knowledge of policy and practice in theareas of employment, training and welfare, ability to write grant proposals.

Salary commensurate with experience. Fax or e-mail resume and cover letterto Bonnie Potter, 212-255-8021; [email protected]

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANTIMEMBERSHIP COORDINATOR. Coalition of NYC jobtraining programs seeks Admin. Asst to work with Coalition staff and memberorganizations . Schedule b o ~ r d committee and membership meetings; provide general support to Coalition committees ; work with Coalition staff, chairand Board on special projects . College grad, good verbal, written and computer skills. Prior work experience with nonprofit a plus . Competitive salaryand great benefits. Fax or e-mail cover letter and resume to Bonnie Potter,(212)255-8021 or [email protected]

WRfTtRS. Write and edit full range of written materials including articles ,reports, consumer publications, scripts, newsletters, web copy, letters andgrants for nonprofit dedicated to health/aging issues. Requires attention to

detail; grace under pressure; ability to juggle multiple projects and produce ondeadline. Send resume and writing sample to S. Edelstein, MRC,1460

Broadway, 11th Roor, NY, NY, 10036; fax: 212-869-3532.

JANUARY 2001

HOUSING SPECIALIST. Residential building management and developmenexperience needed in northwest Bronx organization. Responsibilities wiinclude outreach and assistance to residential building owners, includinhomeowners , and development of neighborhood homeowners associationsKnowledge of loan programs and basic financing necessary for assessinpotential development projects. Requirements include bachelor's degree anhousing experience, computer literacy, and proficiency in spoken and writtenEnglish and ability to communicate in Spanish. Competitive salary. Fa

resume and cover letterto Gerri, 718-543-3474.

DIRECTOR OF DEVD..OPMENT & COMMUNICATIONS. Founded in 1985, theMomentum AIDS Project is one of New York's oldest and largest AIDS service organizations, and the only agency in the city providing men, women andchildren living with HIV AIDS with hot meals, pantry bags and supportive services in a communal setting in their own neighborhoods. Responsibilitieinclude design, development and implementation of an aggressive broadbased development program to include private, corporate , foundation, angovernment support. Also responsible for enhancing the organization 's visbility, image, and base of philanthropic support. BA in communications, public relations, marketing, or related field . Min 6 years development experienceincluding foundation/corporate fund-raising in New York City. Marketing anpublic relations relations experience. Familiarity with HIV/AIDS, homelessness, and hunger issues a plus. NSFRE membership preferred. Computer lieracy including WP 6.0, DonorPerfect, Microsoft Office Suite, and InterneVisit our website at www.MomentumAIDSProject.org. Cover letter, resume

and salary requirements to : Human Resources Director, Fax : 212-691-296

or [email protected]. Equal Opportunity Employer.

DEVD..OPMENTIGRANT WRrnR. Progressive advocacy and direct service not-foprofits seek experienced grant writer to write and track proposals, researcnew prospects. Stellar written and verbal communication skill required. Musbe extremely organized, proactive, able to handle multiple projects and deadlines, work effectively as part of the development team. Competitive salarw/excellent benefits. EOE. Women and people of color encouraged to applyNo faxes or phone calls, please. Send resume with cover letter, salary requirements and writing sample to: Development Search, Coalition for thHomeless, 89 Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007.

INTERFAITlI ORGANIZER. The New York Coalition Against Hunger seeks an organizer for a religious economic justice campaign focusing on government anfaith-based action to combat hunger in the world 's richest City. The Organ ize

reaches out, educates and mobilizes a diverse citywide constituency of congregations and grassroots food programs to fight for better policies, jobs an

services for hungry New Yorkers. Background should include organizing anproject-planning; policy and advocacy work; experience and interest in fa ithbased work; excellent writing skills; ability to use technology to facility organizing; Spanish desirable. Job available January 1. Salary $30 ,000 + baseon experience. 4<lay work week, 4 weeks vacation, benefits. Send resume [email protected] . EOE.

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGER. Earn Fair LLC is a staffing services business wita mission of helping people make the transition to better jobs. EamFair hirepeople referred from job placement programs and places them to work witour business clients. We are recruiting a Human Resource Manager, to provide direct supervision for our employees, serve as liaison with our businesclients on employment issues, assist with benefits administration anemployee screening. This position requires computer proficiency, at least years HR-related experience and a bachelor'S degree; Spanish is a plus. Sen

resume and cover note to [email protected].

GRANT WRrnR. Innovative non-profit organization seeks an organized anenergetic individual with solid writing, analytiC , research, and interpersonaskills who can work autonomously and as part of a fast-paced developmenteam. Salary commensurate with experience in government grant writingreporting, and social service programs. Send resume , cover letter, and salarhistory to: The Partnership for the Homeless, Director of Human ResourcesBox GW, 305 Seventh Avenue . 13th Roor New York NY 10001 M/EOE

M/F/D/V/SO

Briarwood Family Residence, Salvation Army Tier II for homeless familiesseeks a DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL SERVICES . Experience with similar populationAssumes responsibility for social service, child care and recreation. Masterdegree required. Send resume and cover letter to : V. Farrante, BriarwooFamily Residence, 8()'20 134 Street, Jamaica, NY 11435 or Fax: 718-2689235.

(continued on page 32



(continued from page 31 )

COMPOST PROJECT MANAGER. Community Green-Up Program seeks Managerto oversee outreach efforts focused on promoting recycling organic materialsthrough composting initiatives. Will manage staff; teach composting classes;manage program budget; and oversee Master Composter Course. Bachelor'sdegree in Biology, Horticulture, Environmental Science or related field; supervisory experience; strong communication and presentation skills; valid driver's license required. Minimum of 2 years experience in composting, solid

waste issues, and/or environmental issues; and Bilingual (Spanish/English)skills preferred. Must be able to work some weekends and evenings.Competitive salary with excellent benefits, including 4 wks vacation. Sendresume with salary requirements to: Recruiter - CPM, The New York BotanicalGarden, 200th Street and Kazimiroff Blvd. Bronx, New York 10458-5126Email: [email protected] AA/EOE/M/F/D/V

The Osborne Association Inc., a non-profit criminal justice organization thatprovides services to prisoners and their families is seeking a DIRECTOR OF

SOUTH FOm who will work under the supervision of the Director of

Programs, direct, administer, and coordinate the employment and trainingactivities of the Osborne Association. Supervises project directors who areresponsible for the delivery of employment and training services.Evaluates and reports the results of project operations regularly and sys tematically to the Director of Programs. Ensures that all organization training and employment activities and operations are carried out in compliance with local, state, and federal regulations and laws governing non-prof

it operations. Requirements: MA Degree from an accredited college withspecialization in public or business administration, social work, psychology, or related field . A minimum of 8 years of satisfactory full-time, paid

Committed to the development of affordable housing

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experience in a vocational training, educational or career counseling program providing services to the economically disadvantaged, and thosinvolved in the criminal justice system. Three years relevant work experence must be in a supervisory capacity, preferably managing performancebased contracts. Knowledge of employment and training funding sourceat the local, state and federal levels. Working knowledge of the WorkforcInvestment Act, Welfare Reform Act, and related legislation . EOE. Fax212-979-7652.

Seeking ORGANIZERIACTMST with ties to the disabled community. Must havexcellent communication skills, be organized and be computer literate. Muspossess strong knowledge of laws protecting people with disabilities. Fulltimonly, salary is $28,000. Please send resume and cover letter to: AssistanDirector, Bronx Independent Living Services, 3525 Decatur Avenue, BronxNY, 10467 or fax: (718) 515-2844.

AFTER-SCHOOL SITI COORDINATOR_ The Brooklyn College CommunitPartnership for Research and Learning seeks a Site Coordinator for a newafter-school program at New Utrecht High School. The program is designeto provide a range of engaging, coordinated activities that are connected tobut distinctly different from the school day. Responsibilities include: management of program operations, program development, ongoing communcation with high school principal and staff; staff hiring and supervisiondevelopment of policies and procedures; outreach; and preparation oreports. Position requires a BA/BS degree; minimum four years administrative experience, preferably in a school or other organization working wit

adolescents; and strong program development, organizational, writing aninterpersonal skills. Salary: $40,OO(}.$42,OOO plus benefits. Pleasmail/fax resume and cover letter (no calls please) to: Deborah Kaplan

SPECIALIZING IN REAL ESTATEJ-51 Tax Abatement/Exemption. 421A and 421B

Applications. 501 (c) (3) Federal Tax Exemptions. All formsof government-assisted hOUSing, including LISC/Enterprise,

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foster care teensLeanne Jaffe (718) 399-0739 [email protected]

CITY LIMIT



Brooklyn College Community Partnership for Research and Learning, 2900

Bedford Avenue , Brooklyn, NY 11210. Fax (718) 951-5927.

ASST. EXECUT1VE DIRECTOR. For Foster Boarding Homes and Adoption. Largeprogram in Brooklyn, Queens & Long Island FBH , TherapeutiC FBH, andEmergency FBH . Experience with ACS & Neighborhood Based Services ; MSW;proven administrative skills. Send resume to Robert J. McMahon, ExecutiveDirector, St. Christopher-Ottilie, PO Box 68, Sea Cliff, NY 11579 or fax resumeto 516-671-2899 .

EMPlOYMENT SPECIAUSfS. Two openings in Harlem based PlacementServices for welfare recipients in drug treatment: job development.Employment verifications, follow-up, retention groups, some evenings orSaturdays. Requirements: verifiable job bank, strong communication skills.Relevant work experience in substance abuse treatment and computer literacy A+. Salary $30-$40K with benefits. Fax resume to: 212-280-6812 .

The Citizen's Advice Bureau (CAB) is a large, multi-service non-profit serv-

ing the Bronx for over 25 years. The agency provides a broad range of individual and group services, including but not limited to walk-in information,referral, assistance and counseling, services to special-need populations,such as immigrants, children, adolescents, seniors, homeless families andSingles, individuals infected with and families affected by HIV/AIDS. CAB

provides excellent benefits and offers opportunities for advancement. Thefollowing openings are available: The Caring Families program has an opening for a SOCIAl. WORKER. The Social Worker will provide family counseling

around permanency planning and HIV/AIDS issues. The position requires aCSW and experience working with children and adolescents. Bilingual

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JANUARY 2001

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Spanish is a plus. Salary is up to $38,000. Fax your resume to Mindy Nasat 718-293-9767. The Positive Living program has an opening for a HOU

ING SPECIALIST. The Housing Specialist will develop housing resources foHIV + clients, inspect apartments and negotiate with landlords. The postion requires a bachelors degree. Bilingual Spanish is a plus . Salary is uto $27,000 . Fax resume and cover letter to Richard Larson at 718-2939767. The Positive Living program has an opening for a PROGRAM ASSlSTANT. The Program Assistant will assist with the daily operation of a buscase management program. Some work with clients required. A high schoo

diploma or GED is required . Excellent organizational skills a must. BilinguSpanish is a plus. Salary is up to $20,500. Fax your resume and cover leter to Richard Larson at 718-293-9767. Resumes and cover letters, specfying the position, can also be mailed to CAB , 2054 Morris Avenue, BronNY 10453.

CASES , a major non -profit agency dedicated to assuring bette

futures for court involved defendants , seeks a SITE SUPERVISOR

Responsible for managing the worksites and supervising work don

by clients during the completion of their sentences ; preparing th

work to be done by the clients; handling conflicts between clients o

between clients and staff, following the procedures se t forth in th

Site Supervisor Manual ; and adhering to the rules and regulations o

the Fleet Manual. Strong interpersonal and communication skill

required; familiarity with the offender population; background in construction is helpful ; and a valid New York State driver ' s license

Salary: $25K, plus excellent benefits. Please fax cover letter an

resume to: 212-533-6379.(continued on page 34

NesoH Associates

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DEVD.OPMENT COORDINATOR. Libraries for the Future is a national nonprofit that works with libraries and other public and private sector organizations to achieve equal access to information and knowledge essentialfor a democratic society. Libraries for the Future advances this work byassessing community information needs; building coalitions with other

nonprofits; running parent/child workshops and after-school programs inthe local libraries and providing consulting services. The main office is

located in New York City. LFF seeks a FULL·TlME DEVELOPMENT COORDINA·TOR for the following rj!sponsibilities: Communications- Maintain web site,assist in the preparation of the newsletter and press materials; SpecialEvents-Coordinate development department events; Board Relations-Helpmaintain relationship with the Board: Coordinate the twice-yearly boardmeetings; Funder relations-Research foundations and corporations andassist in the preparation of proposals; General record keeping and database maintenance. Qualifications: Happy in a fast paced environment,ability to work independently, excellent communication sk ills, a bachelorsdegree, a desire to learn about the theory and practice of development,a cheery disposition and a sense of fun. Reports to the Director of

Development. Libraries for the Future is an Equal Opportunity Employer.Please fax resume and cover letter to the attention of Susan Love, 212-

352-2342. Email: [email protected]. No phone calls please.

Bushwick Family Residence, a Salvation Army Tier II for homeless families,seeks a CASE MANAGER. Experience with similar population. BA degreerequired. Send resume and cover letter to: L. Weiss, Bushwick FamilyResidence, 1675 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11207 or Fax: 718-574-2713.

DIRECTOR. Citywide nonprofit housing organization seeks individuals to manage programs. Degree with 3 or more years experience in affordable housinglending in a senior position in a non-profit environment. Strong presentation,computer skills. Excellent benefits including 404(b) plan. Send cover letterwith resume and salary requirements to: Search NO, NHSNYC, 12 1 W. 27th

Street, 4th Roor, New York, NY 10001. Attn. E. McLawrence or fax to: 212-242-6680 or email: [email protected].

PROGRAM DIRECTOR. Will manage the various school based conflict resolution, mediation and victim assistance programs; and ensure that servicesmeet the contractual and internal quality standards of the agency. MSW orrelated fields, 3 years experience. Salary $45-50K. Excellent benefits package. Please send resume and cover letter to V. Interrante, Vice President,

Youth Division, Safe Horizon, 189 Montague Street, 6th Roor, Brooklyn, NY11201 or Fax to 718-624-8111.

Bushwick Family Residence, a Salvation Army Tier II for homeless families,seeks a PROGRAM DIRECTOR to assume full responsibility for the operationof the Shelter. Must have a Master's degree and Shelter management experience. Salary: $50,000 + DOE. Send resume to Kathy D'Angelo, Director of

Family Shelters or fax: 718-574-2713.

Bushwick Family Residence, a Salvation Army Tier II for homeless familiesseeks a HOUSE MANAGER. Experience with similar population . BA degreerequired. Send resume and cover letter to: J. Felder, Bushwick FamilyResidence, 1675 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11207 or Fax 718-574-2713.

PART·TlME NURSE(LPN or PN). Work 8-16 hours per week on Manhattan'sUpper West Side as part of a dynamic team serving homeless and formerlyhomeless people with mental illness. Responsibilities include preparing and

dispensing medications, adrninistering injectable medications, picking updoctors' orders, coordinating access to pharmacy services, ordering andstocking medical supplies. Provide coverage for program nurses during vacations. Hourly rate commensurate with experience. Send resume to JohnBischof, MD, Clinical Director, Project ReachoutjGRCC, 593 ColumbusAvenue, New York, NY 10024 or fax: 212-721-7389.

Single Parent Resource Center seeks: FAMILY REUNIF1CATION-PARENTlNG

SPECIAUSTIPROGRAM COORDINATOR (FjT). Provide family reunification skillsbuilding parenting and support services to single mothers who have beenseparated from their children. Conduct support groups on site and organizepositive family interaction days; conduct outreach and recruitment for program participants; provide individual counseling. Family Court & Foster Careadvocacy and document group and individual contact statistics and recordings. Some evenings and Saturday. Requirements: Experience in Foster Caresystem; experience facilitating groups preferred; knowledge of parentingskills & substance abuse; good writing skills. Salary: Competitive with excel-

lent benefits. Resume to: P. Hanson/Single Parent Resource Center, 31 Eas28th Street, 2nd Roor, NYC 10016 or Fax : 212-951-7037.

DIRECTOR. Westchester People's Action Coalition. Organizing and advocacexperience-social and economic justice, human rights , environment andfundraising. Full time, $25K, benefits. Apply: WESPAC Search Committee, 44

West Street, White Plains, New York 10605. Telephone: 914-997-1882, fax914-683-1648 email: [email protected].

CASE MANAGERITIAM LEADER. For traditional housing for homeless womenwith children, in recovery, affected by domestic violence. MSW. Fax resumto 201-309-1380.

Community-based nonprofit that implements violence prevention programfor women and youth seeks DEPUTY DIRECTOR to manage developmen(including grant writing, donor cClmpaigns, and events) and office administration; supervise suppor t staff. Qualifications: minimum 3 years experiencein all development areas; excellent writing and speaking skills; fiscal management background; computer and internet proficiency; commitment to

social justice. Send or fax letter (including salary requirement), writing sample, and resume to: Executive Director, Center for Anti-Violence Education421 Rfth Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215; fax: 718-499-2284.

Center for Urban Community Services' (CUCS) Uptown supportive housinprogram, a national model for housing formerly homeless and low-incomeindividuals, many with special needs, has the following positions availableworking in the Washington Heights and Harlem communities. COMMUNITY

ORGANIZER. Responsibilities: coordinating on and off-site recreational, educational, and cultural activities and outings; facilitating and coordinating on

going tenant leadership training and development activities; and coordinating tenant involvement in volunteer service projects in the community. ReqsBA and at least 3 years related experience with homeless, mentally ill or lowincome individuals. Strong organizational, writing and interpersonal skillrequired. Bilingual Spanish/English preferred. Salary: $34K + comp benefitincluding $65/month in transit checks. ENTmEMENTS SPECIALIST

Responsibilities: Consulting with direct service staff on different entitlements cases; acting as liaison and advocate with government and community entitlements-related agencies; maintaining an overview of patterns tha

emerge regarding particular entitlements related issues and keeping sta

informed of issues. Additionally, this position will be responsible for individual case management services and crisis intervention for a small case oaat a supportive housing residence. Reqs: BSW and 1 year related experienc

(including field work); BA and 2 years relevant experience; or HS diploma (oGED) and 6 yrs. related experience. Additionally, for applicants without college degrees, every 30 credits can be substituted for 1 year of experienceBilingual Spanish/English preferred. Extensive knowledge of governmenbenefits systems and requirements necessary. Salary $30K + comp benefits including $65/month in transit checks. SUBSTANCE ABUSE SPECIALIST

Responsibilities: Case management, individual and group services and crsis intervention; working with tenants who have histories of homelessnessmental illness and substance abuse. Reqs : BSW and 1 year related experience (excluding field work); BA and 2 years related experience; or HS diploma (or GED) and 6 years related experience. Additionally, for applicantwithout college degrees, every 30 credits can be substituted for 1 year o

experience. Bilingual Spanish/English required . Extensive knowledge anexperience working in substance abuse treatment and/or with individualwho have histories of abusing substances a must. Salary: $30K + combenefits including $65/month in transit checks. Send cover letter anresume to Michelle de la Uz , CUCSjThe Rio, 10 Fort Washington Avenue

New York, NY 10032. CUCS is committed to workforce diversity.

Alianza Dominicana, Inc., is a comprehensive social service agencbased in Washington Heights/Inwood serving Latino/Dominican community. We are looking for candidates to fill positions in our programsAlianza is firmly committed to affirmative action and invites candidateto apply for our vacant positions regardless of race, gender, sexual orentation, age or disability. Positions available : QUALITY ASSURANC

ASSISTANT·FOSTER CARE PROGRAM. To establish and maintain trackinsystem for children in foster care and adoption. BA/BS degree, knowedge of foster care and adoption. Familiarity with state and city child wefare regulations, strong writing and interpersonal skills and compute

knowledge. SOCIAL WORKERS-FOSJER CARE PROGRAM. Provide case management services to children placed in homes exclusively in UppeManhattan. Facilitate mentor relationships between biological familie

and foster families. Complete UCR's, progress notes, and all other relevant documentation. BSW or SA in related field, strong oral and writte

CITY LIMIT



communication skills , computer literate, Spanish speaking necessary.CHILD CARE DIRECTOR·SATELLITE CHILD CARE PROGRAM. Responsible foroverall operation, administration , and the educational oversight of theSatellite Child Care providers linked to the sponsoring organization.Supervise the work of the staff in developing and maintaining a total program in education, health, nutrition, and social services to meet theneeds of chi ldren served. Masters Degree in Early Education preferred,with at least 3 years experience as a child care center director or family day care network director. Must be able to speak Spanish, community outreach and organizing skills are necessary. To apply: Please send

your resume by mail or fax to Gilsia Pujadas, H.R. Director, 2410

Amsterdam Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10033, Fax : 212-740-1967.

FOSTER CARE/ADOPTION SUPERVISOR. Full-Time, MSW, strong writing,assessment and interpersonal skills . Supervise caseworkers providingcase management services to children and teens in foster care.Oversight of all mandated reporting requirements and reviewing monthly statistics. CLINICIANS . Full-time , MSW/CSW with three years of experience with children 'S mental health experience is an advantage.Familiar with Dominican/Latino community. To apply, please sendresume by mail or fax to Gilsia Pujadas, H.R. Director, 2410 AmsterdamAvenue, 2nd Floor, New York , NY 20033 . Fax: 212-740-1960.

ASSISTANT TEAM LEADER. The Center for Urban Community Services Inc., anational leader in the development of effective housing and service initiatives for homeless people, seeks an Assistant Team Leader for its 350

Lafayette Transitional Program located in SoHo. A nationally recognizedmodel for helping mentally ill homeless people acquire housing, programservices include: transitional housing for 40 women, comprehensive casemanagement , group treatment, on-site psychiatric and medical services,and housing placement. Responsibilities: Case management for 6-8 clients,crisis intervention, program development, and group services.Requirements: MSW, Bilingual Spanish/ English preferred. Salary: Mid-30'sdepending on experience, plus $65/month in transit checks; extensive inservice training program. Cover letter and resume to Melody Hartmann,CUCS-TLC, 350 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012. CUCS is committedto workforce diversity. EEO.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. St . Nicholas Neighborhood PreservationCorporation seeks a Community Organizer to work with OUTRAGE, a coalitionof residents and organizations in East Williamsburg and Greenpoint, to organize an effective campaign to reduce the volume of garbage processed inour community. He/she will help to maintain and strengthen the existingcoalition, work with coal ition members to deve lop and implement politicaland practical strategies to achieve its goals, and facil itate linkages withother groups working to change the City 's garbage policies. Requires BA/BSor equivalent; excellent communications and organizing skills, and ability tounderstand complex technical material and explain it to community resi-

dents. Knowledge of WiliiamsburgjGreenpoint community, waste disposaand environmental justice issues a plus. Salary commensurate with experience and excellent benefits package. Fax resume to Alison Cordero at 718486-5982 or e-mail [email protected].

The Partnership for the Homeless seeks TWO HIV HEALTH ADVOCATES to joinits expanding HIV/AIDS program. The Health Advocates will focus on creatinga supportive care and early intervention system for homeless individuals andfamilies. Advocates will assess client needs , develop service plans, advocatefor clients and ensure coordination of medical , psychiatric and social ser

vices, educate clients about the need for early medical intervention, and conduct support groups. Applicants should have experience working with individuals and families affected by HIV/AIDS. MSW preferred, BA/ BS requiredSpanish speaking desirable. Resume and cover letter with salary requirements to: The Partnership for the Homeless, Inc . Human Resources Rep .305Seventh Avenue, Box HA New York , NY 10001 AA/ EOE M/F/ D/V/SO

New job openings for UNION CAMPAIGN RESEARCHERS in locations acrossthe country, including (but not only) Atlanta, Cleveland, Las Vegas, LosAngeles, Madison, Miami, Orlando, Philadelphia, Providence , Seattle, andWashington DC . Want new and seasoned activist-researchers: people withbackgrounds in organizing, community activism, or political campaignsrecent college grads, grad students, or professionals with skills in economic analysis, industry research , employment law, or investigative journalism; and people with a strong commitment to working in the labomovement. People of color and women are encouraged to apply. Emaicover letter, resume, and 1-10 page writing sample in TEXT ONLY formato : [email protected]. No deadline to apply. Indicate any geographicpreferences. Competitive pay and good benefits.

The Homeless Services Department of The Salvation Army of Greater NewYork is seeking a qualified professional as PROGRAM COORDINATOR for a CityWide Work Experience Program designed for public assistance recipientsResponsibilities include supervision of three staff and interns, overseeingintake and assessment, work preparedness workshops, job development andplacement, statistics, job fairs and budget management. Successful c a n d ~dates will have a BA, Master's preferred, supervisory experience and provensuccess in the employment field. Salary is $36,000, with full benefits. Fax

resumes and cover letters to Patricia DeLousia, Assistant Director HomelessService Department-212-337-7279. Telephone calls will not be accepted .

FINANCIAL ANALYST. Locker Associates is a NYC consulting firm that advisesunion and joint union-management clients on industry trends, corporaterestructuring and business improvement strategies. Requirements include:(1) strong analytical and quantitative skills, including knowledge of financiaaccounting and economic analysis and (2) good writing and communicationskills. Familiarity with labor unions and economic development a plusInterested candidates should IMMEDIATELY forward resume to LockeAssociates bye-mail : [email protected] or fax : 212-608-3077 .

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city limits magazine, january 2001 issue

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