2016: GAINING GROUND: FROM PROBLEMS TO SOLUTIONS

Ryan Hickey: GainingGround came out of a lot of formal and impromptu conversations with housing leaders where we were organizing in cluster sites and seeing just the really shitty conditions that people were living in.

The three main things, were permanent subsidies, we have to do something about these cluster sites, and all that is going towards a solution which is land trusts where people own and control the land and then somehow manage the properties on top of it. We’d been having these conversations for a long time, and I guess I was struggling to figure out what to do with them because we were doing all these things kind of separately rather than as part of just one cohesive framework.

I started writing GainingGround as just bullet points on paper. I remember having these meetings with Valerio Orselli from Cooper Square, Ken Wray from CATCH [Community Assisted Tenant Controlled Housing], and Harry from Banana Kelly, who are all developers and had gotten properties from the government, who knew the motions of how to do this, and also had a lot of experience with dealing and tracking down subsidies and most importantly, housingpoorpeople .

At the same time we were obviously talking back and forth with members, and members were in all these meetings and were adamant in that these cluster site buildings, these privately owned buildings owned by slumlords, they had to be owned by somebody else and the government can subsidize it through LINC or Section 8 or whatever.

Ryan Hickey: The finished product was GainingGround. We specifically looked at five, six, seven cluster site buildings and we did value assessments on them, and we said the government should take this over through eminent domain. And a lot of people who we asked to sign on to Gaining Ground did not like that. They specifically said, ‘no they weren’t going to sign on to it because it said eminent domain.’

Some of the smaller, more radical groups signed on to it because they had no problems with eminent domain, and they knew and understood the political ramifications of asking for eminent domain for this stuff.

Charmel Lucas: I mean, to me, it was just normal, normal conversation, “What is going on here? What do you need? How do you need it?” That's really all it takes! What do you need? How can I get you there? And I enjoyed it.

No, I did not enjoy walking up all them damn steps. Ryan and I paired off, we’re like absorbing all this shit… People are telling us, showing us… Roaches I mean the roach stuff boom, boom, boom, boom.

The issue was the landlord was playing the shelter issue people against the paying tenants. That wasabigthing. Don't tell me that you're not gonna pick up my trash because we got shelter people here! You got shelter people. Okay. Don't tell me you're not going to fix my door because you got shelter people here for six and five thousand dollars and you know the ones with the kids, ain’t no telling. They had to make close to ten thousand. It still has to be close to ten thousand a month! Ten thousand dollars a damn month—so, that was the most impactful. Just because you money hungry. Oh. So that was the last door knocking of the clusters.

That's when the mayor said, “If you get eighty percent of the clients to say they will stay here in this apartment if it will be rehabbed.” And they said, “Yes.” So, I got eighty percent. I just broke it down to them, “Look, if you’re willing to stay here, they’re going to rehab it. Is this a suitable size? And most of them, people with children, “And is the school good enough for your child?” And a lot of them said they was comfortable. They was comfortable with their area, they was comfortable with their stores.

Ryan Hickey: Then fast forward whatever, a year and a half, two years later after GainingGround. That’s when Mayor [Bill] de Blasio announced that actually they were going to implement eminent domain on the Podolsky portfolio. I remember that day being like, “What the fuck is this?” You know, nobody else was pushing this except us. We were the only ones knocking on doors in cluster sites.

Charmel [Lucas] was really the one member who was knocking on doors, I mean consistently, and building relationships with people. I just said to the mayor, “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these two people, Lisa [Milhouse], and Charmel. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us but we’re the ones who put this plan in motion. We’re the ones who gave you the statistics. We’re the ones who gave you the facts. We’re the ones who gave you the framework to work with and then you’re just ignoring homeless peoples’ work.” And then, turns out eminent domain wasn’t such a bad idea after all, and the city really liked it and that was because of us. For the record that was because of us.