By: Emily Talen

The following is adapted from “City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form,” a new book from Island Press.

We live in a world in which the physical character of cities is a largely a product of rules. Mostly these rules are not helping us create better cities. In fact, they are making it much more difficult.

Analyzing the effect of rules is a form of social history, and much is revealed: what do these rules say about how American society values place – as well as neighborhood functionality, community organization, and social integration?

Rules are a reflection of values, but now, given the disconnect between rule and effect, it’s hard to imagine that what people really want is sprawl, bad urban form, and monotony. This is certainly not what early city planners thought they were creating.

If there is any hope of changing the rules that have disfigured the American landscape – sprawled-out and often disorienting, while at the same time, almost paradoxically, hyper-segregated – a keen understanding of the source, historical evolution, and effect of these rules is essential. Through their manipulation of pattern, use and form, rules have a strong impact on quality of life, affecting everything from patterns of daily life, to the demographic makeup of schools, or who lives next to whom.

Are good urban places the result of a conscious coding effort? What specific rules do we have to thank for the great places we have, or to blame for the other, dispiriting ones? When we experience a great city, neighborhood, street or place, how much of it can be attributed to rules?

Understanding this connection can help to avoid the types of rules that have resulted in bad places, and embrace and build on those that have created good ones.

Zoning dominates this story – it’s the mother-lode of city rules. Other kinds of rules – utility regulations, deed restrictions, neighborhood review panels, impact fees, federal laws – can affect urban form, sometimes dramatically, but zoning has had the broadest effect.

New York was of course the first U.S. city to adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance, in 1916. The code is a great example of how early regulations thought much more about the link between rules and their effect on place. New York’s code was trying to solve four very specific physical conditions: factories bringing pollution into retail and residential areas, skyscrapers blocking light, overly congested streets and sidewalks, and overcrowding in residential areas.

There were sometimes perverse motives involved (trying to keep out a certain class of people via building rules), but there is evidence that New York’s code was a reflection of deeply held civic values. Evidence of this is in the rich record of public input prior to the code’s adoption. A broad swath of society became involved – schoolteachers, children, ambassadors and heads of major institutions like the New York Zoological Society and the Municipal Art Society weighed in on issues of “value”, “beauty”, and “human scale” and how zoning was intricately tied to those ideals.

Now, however, the view of zoning by planners, real estate developers, environmentalists, and citizens is largely negative, and in the decades since its adoption in the early 20th century, zoning has taken on a significant amount of baggage.

But there is nothing intrinsic about zoning that should elicit such a negative response: zoning is simply a set of rules tied to a specific location. Curiously, rules by any other name, such as deed restrictions, often escape a more negative judgment. Deed restrictions did significantly impact the public realm, but in many areas, their control of built form was subsumed by zoning and subdivision regulation in the early 20th century (with the notable exception of Houston, which never embraced zoning, but which continues to control urban form via restrictive deeds and covenants).

Despite the mythology of rugged individualism, rules have always been an integral part of the American experience, and in the early 20th century, it seemed natural to have all kinds of rules guiding our behavior. Rules are essential to city-building – even Adam Smith knew that. The question is what kinds of cities do rules create?

The answer is something of a mystery. Though rules often function as the default urban policy position – perceived as a way of getting something for nothing, without having to spend public dollars – it is a policy position we promote recklessly. Rules guide what gets built where, often without a clear objective. The character of place that results, de facto, is usually not pre-conceived, let alone desired. With no one and nothing in charge of maintaining an overall idea about what cities should be like, rules become the default overseers of urban form.

While there are many other forces to blame for the disfigured American urban landscape, city rules are not helping. Over the course of the last century, American urban development has been characterized by inner-city disinvestment, sprawl, segregation, and a general lack of quality when it comes to urbanism. Rules not only contribute to this, they actively block better ambitions. The places we love and flock to – places like Nantucket or Annapolis – can be built in very few places without a team of lawyers enlisted to get the rules changed or circumvented.

Without a clear connection between rule and objective – or better yet, between rule and physical outcome – city planners are left holding the bag on rules they probably care little about, trying to defend them in the face of a public that is apathetic at best about regulations. Planners can only dream of a world in which a clear connection between helping to create good cities is linked to the rules they are required to enforce. And rules, once put into law, are not easy to get rid of. Plans and politicians can be ignored or voted out, but rules last. Case in point: two years after New York became the first U.S. city to adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, the Planning Committee and its staff were fired. The basic outlines of the code endured for decades.

Rules affect urban pattern and form in a myriad of large and small ways. A seemingly simple rule, such as the requirement that apartments must have a second means of egress, can affect building size and configuration, and ultimately how cities are experienced. A bay window may require approval from a public commission, with the result being that bay windows become a rarity. Maybe a certain density level triggers design review, resulting in lower densities. Rules about minimum distance between stairs may determine how many units front a street. Laws might be used to stimulate the consumption of certain materials, like brick and steel, which in turn impacts the character of urban form. The number of parking spaces required for each housing unit can have a profound effect on building configuration. Chicago’s anti-betting law of 1905 had the effect of converting race tracks to housing. Consider the federal tax code and its effect on urban form via rules about loan guarantee. Federally-backed mortgages of single-family detached housing has been one of the biggest generators of suburbia.

Many planners in the U.S. have now entered a phase in which they are trying to turn the rules of city building around. The effort is monumental, and results have been gradual and mixed. Most urban advocates are convinced that different kinds of rules – more adaptive, more form-based – are needed to produce better places.

By: Arturo Conde

Thirty-two days after they had been evicted from their Zuccotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan, approximately 1,000 Occupy Wall Street activists rallied together to take over another public space for their movement. They hoped to occupy Juan Pablo Duarte Square and the adjoining lot at the juncture of Canal Street and Sixth Avenue, which is owned by Trinity Episcopal Church. Protesters were soon detained by police after trespassing onto the fenced-in section next to the park. Trinity clergy quickly labeled the movement’s action excessive. “In a country where all people can vote, and Trinity’s door to dialogue is open, it is not necessary to forcibly break into property,” the church said in a statement.

The would-be occupiers disagreed.

“If you have a church, and you build a moat around it so that the community cannot penetrate it,” Juan Carlos Ruiz explained later, “it becomes a medieval castle that looks at the outside world as the enemy. Many church leaders build their walls high enough to isolate their congregation from the outside world.”

Ruiz knows a few things about churches. He is a non-active Catholic priest who now assists a Lutheran parish as a spiritual leader in Sunset Park. And he is part of a growing group of religious activists within the larger Occupy movement.

If the popular image of an Occupy Wall Street believer is of a secular, native-born, white activist, Ruiz challenges the stereotype. But he and other religious leaders who’ve embraced OWS face their own challenge: getting their flocks to see the connection between faith and action.

A conversion on the road

While the Occupy movement is an important influence for interfaith activists, much of Ruiz’s political action is inspired by Liberation theology, which views Jesus as a model for social justice, and uses his teachings to protest unjust economic, political, and social conditions.

“It is the responsibility of religious people to make sure that the spirit of Jesus lives as a social movement within the church,” said Ruiz. “There is an assumption that disconnects religious figures from political activism that is based on the idea that Jesus was not a political person. But in fact, if you examine why he was killed, every reason was political.”

Growing up in Mexico, Ruiz’s parents were progressive activists in a Catholic movement, and encouraged him to commit to social justice through the Church. Ruiz entered a seminar at the age of 13, where he studied the life and work of progressive priests like Fr. Miguel Hidalgo—who led a peasant revolt in 1810 against Spanish colonialists under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe—and the Spanish Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos, who was one of the first Catholic leaders to publicly denounce the injustices of Spanish colonialism. “Tell me, by what right or by what interpretation of justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude?” Montesinos asked a packed congregation of Spanish elite on the island of Hispaniola (modern day Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1511. “By what authority have you waged such detestable wars against people who were once living so quietly and peacefully in their own land?”

Ruiz became disillusioned by the dichotomy between faith and action that he encountered in many classmates at his seminary in Chicago, and then later with colleagues in the priesthood. This led him to embrace other churches, like the Lutheran parish he assists in, where he has found more flexibility to reconnect with God through his social activism.

A broader movement

Many interfaith activists who are veterans of civil rights, immigration justice, women’s, labor, and other movements, found in Occupy Wall Street a new generation willing to fight for social justice and democracy. For them, the Occupy movement is a major breakthrough in organizing because it showed young activists that without face-to-face contact there can be no change.

“1960s activism was about building a physical connection,” recalled Sally Bermanzohn, 64, a veteran of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movement who now participates in projects with Occupy Faith. “It was before the Internet, before the cellphone, and Xerox machines had just become available, so communication was all done through word of mouth… Occupy Wall Street is similar because the work group that physically meets is the basic unit that gets things done, and in my experience of civil rights, we organized in groups to take action.”

While the Internet is an effective tool for bringing people together, some religious leaders argue that it cannot replicate the spontaneity and energy of sharing an experience with others in public. This sentiment is particularly relevant for interfaith organizers who have made the Occupy movement’s communal spirit and the emphasis on human networks focal points of their ministries. “The church needs to be a place that makes you feel human,” says Ruiz.

Throughout American history, from the abolitionist movement to today’s immigration activism, churches have provided a platform for people to address social injustices. Today, however, the political profile of organized religion is more closely associated with moral advocacy, like opposition to abortion rights, contraception or same-sex marriage. For Ruiz, like many interfaith Occupiers, this perception is a tremendous setback.

The chain-link fence

On the overcast Saturday when Occupiers gathered to take over Duarte Park, livestream video showed George Packard, a former Episcopal bishop, dressed in a purple robe, climbing a wooden ladder that protesters had raised over the fence and dropping to the ground inside Trinity’s lot. Other interfaith protestors, including Ruiz, followed.

The group of religious activists had tried to mediate an agreement with Trinity for a new encampment in the lot. But when that effort broke down, the OWS supporters saw an opportunity to raise public consciousness by trespassing onto the property. Tearing down the chain-link fence that encloses Trinity’s lot was, in their view, a symbolic action that could encourage other religious believers and the church itself to tear down the walls that separate them from society.   

OWS supporters also pointed out that Trinity’s connection to power justified the occupation of its fenced-in lot. The church is the third-largest landowner in New York City, holding 6 million feet of real estate, and its board members include leaders from large finance companies like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.

While refusing to provide access to the lot, Trinity maintained its support for OWS by continuing to offer other facilities as workspaces. The church also emphasized that even while it is against breaking the law, it still shares the same objectives as the Occupy movement: “OWS protestors call out for social and economic justice,” it said in a statement, “Trinity has been supporting these goals for more than 300 years. The protestors say they want to improve housing and economic development; Trinity is actively engaged in such efforts in the poorest neighborhoods in New York City and indeed around the world. We do not, however, believe that erecting a tent city at Duarte Square enhances their mission or ours.”

The critical tension

Ruiz sees the disagreement between Occupy and Trinity as part of a larger tension between the spirit of religion, which seeks a radical reordering of society according to moral teachings, and the operation of religion, which defends the church as an institution, and therefore has a stake in the status quo.

That tension between law and spirit set the theme of the fifth service on the third Sunday of Lent at St. Jacobi Church. “The ten commandments were implemented in the churches to outline a path that will reconnect us with the spirit of God,” Ruiz said in his sermon. “But if Jesus were present today, he would drive us out of the temples. And up to a certain point encourage us to reoccupy them, take them over as a community, because they are vastly empty.”

Located on Fourth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets in Sunset Park, St. Jacobi looks like a large overturned ship that has been landlocked and abandoned. But the scaffolding outside of its entrance is a clear sign that the spark of a community still lives inside. It was originally founded by German immigrants in 1889, when they started holding services at a storefront by the ferry terminal. The parish eventually relocated into the larger space of the current church, and continued to grow until the 1950s when its more established members began moving out to the suburbs. After failed initiatives to attract other immigrant believers, St. Jacobi successfully embraced the growing population of Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking immigrants in the 1990s. But these parishioners soon followed in the footsteps of their German predecessors to the suburbs, and now the church hopes to re-launch another initiative to attract new believers.

For Rosalia Siu, 62, a member of St. Jacobi Church’s senior council and its financial secretary, the motivation for joining the parish was her family. An immigrant from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Siu moved to the United States with her husband and daughters in 1980 against her father’s wishes. In an effort to reconcile with him, she promised her father that her children would maintain their Chinese culture and language. And like many Chinese immigrants at that time, she found in religion a place that helped her protect her family’s heritage and develop her spirituality.

“The church had Chinese language classes,” she said. “I also joined bible study classes and learned how to pray. At first it was difficult, but after two years, it started to make sense to me, and the church became like a family.”

Weekly obligation

As part of his ongoing mission to put faith into action, Ruiz has also cofounded the New Sanctuary Movement nationwide, and its chapter in New York, to advocate for undocumented immigrants. Members of the interfaith network gather every Thursday at 11 a.m. in front of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza to demonstrate their solidarity with families and communities that are resisting detention and deportation.

Protestors, dressed in white robes as a symbol of that unity, march in silence around the immigration building seven times, evoking the Jericho walk that the people of Israel made around the walled-city until its fortifications crumbled with the blow of a horn. “Similarly,” said Ravi Ragbir, the director of the Sanctuary chapter, “Immigration and all policies seem like they are impenetrable. We are walking around the building, which represents an unjust policy, to change it.”

Ruiz hopes that as the new sanctuary movement’s protests grow larger, people will begin to visualize the pain and suffering of others who are victimized by unfair policies—students who are unable to learn, workers who face exploitation, and families that are being divided.

The success of Ruiz’s work at St. Jacobi’s, and the future of OWS in communities of faith, will depend largely on whether organizers and ministers can inspire the congregation to see beyond the church walls. And for that, he explained, the parishioners have to understand that the temple is not a destination where they can be closer to God, but a place that facilitates a relationship with God’s spirit in the community. To this end, he posed a question in his Lenten sermon: “How can we make this temple more meaningful for our community?”

By: Ken Inadomi

Homeowners in New York City accrue over $100 million in unpaid property taxes and water charges each year. A legal claim against the real property for these unpaid taxes and charges is called a lien.  It is common practice for local governments to bundle and sell liens at deep discount to third party investors.

Lien sales make sense: Every dollar that governments do not collect from taxpayers is another dollar that has to be made up through future rate increases for everyone else, or by issuing more debt.  Lien sales maximize tax revenue without tying up the limited resources of city government. But there is a dark side to the tactic.

Under current law, New York can sell a lien on a property if there is property tax debt of at least $1,000 that is three or more years overdue, or if there is water or sewer debt of at least $2,000 that is one year overdue.   For the most part the current system works, due in large part to  legislative reform last year championed by Brooklyn City Councilman Al Vann, along with the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP), the Legal Aid Society and Legal Services NYC. 

The city recently collected over $80 million in back taxes after 90-day pre-lien sale notices were mailed citywide to over 22,000 homeowners.  The city issues multiple warning notices imploring owners in arrears to make payment arrangements before liens are sold.  Notice is given in multiple languages (e.g. Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish) where appropriate. 

Payment plans for property taxes are made with the City’s Department of Finance (DOF); payment plans for water and sewer charges are made with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).  This year an owner must make a payment plan on or before May 17th.  The revised payment guidelines are generous, allowing for zero down-payment and terms of up to 10 years.  Further, the new law provides clear guidelines that qualify our most vulnerable residents, particularly the elderly (65 and older) and the low-income (total combined family income below $37,400) for exemption.  Veterans and military personnel on active duty are also exempt.

However, thousands of New York homeowners, many of whom no longer even carry a mortgage, could still lose their homes to foreclosure for unpaid taxes of a few thousand dollars – if they somehow failed to follow the guidelines described above. 

Consider the case of Lana, an 82-year-old Latina resident of the Bronx who paid off her mortgage in 1977. She receives $710 per month in Social Security and rental income from a commercial unit on the ground floor of her 2-unit home.  Lana fell behind on her water and property taxes after her tenant ran up a huge water bill and then moved out, leaving the commercial space in severe disrepair.  Though she made a payment plan for property taxes, the city placed a lien on her home for water charges.  By the time she learned of the water lien the city had already sold it to a private trust that buys liens in bulk, Xspand, a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase.  Though the original water charges were $15,193, within 15 months Xspand demanded total payment of $29,453, including add-on surcharges, interest and fees.  As a senior citizen with limited income Lana should have been exempted from the lien sale.  It is unclear how such cases deserving retroactive exemption will be treated. 

The case of Lana is but one example of how a system with good intentions can too easily self-implode.  A homeowner’s viable options are greatly reduced once the tax lien is sold, since surcharges, fees and higher interest rates can be levied by the lien purchaser. There are countless similar situations throughout the five boroughs. Simply legislating protection for the vulnerable and the underserved unfortunately doesn’t result in the protection they need.  We must therefore increase the awareness level in our neighborhoods by spreading the word block by block and home by home to inform property owners that they must be proactive in controlling their financial destiny – and that they must take action before May 17th or forfeit their right to avoid a lien sale.

Toward this end the New York Mortgage Coalition recently awarded a $15,000 grant to the Coalition for the Improvement of Bedford Stuyvesant (CIBS ), a Brooklyn-based coalition of neighborhood nonprofits collaborating to address quality of life issues in Bed-Stuy.  Through a systematic door-to-door campaign, directed and staffed by volunteers, CIBS is determined to reach every Bed-Stuy property owner potentially facing a tax lien.  The CIBS campaign culminates with a Help Night on Wednesday May 2nd, when representatives from the city’s Departments of Finance, Environmental Protection, and Housing Preservation and Development will be on hand to answer questions and make payment arrangements.  Help Night will take place from 5 pm to 8 pm at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, at 1368 Fulton Street in Brooklyn.

Legislation, regardless of how strong and well-conceived, is never the complete answer.  We endorse the CIBS strategy of mobilizing community action through strategic, neighborhood-based activism. 

By: Michelle Holder

Every few years the public discourse once again turns its attention to the issue of raising the minimum wage. This is not surprising, because every few years it becomes clear that the federal minimum wage has not gone up, while costs for everything else have. The recession helped make this painfully aware, when stagnant wages became the norm not only for minimum-wage earners but also for millions of other workers. Exacerbating matters is that during the recovery the industrial sectors responsible for creating jobs have tended to be lower paying.

For those earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour there is a sobering fact. The federal poverty threshold for a family of three is approximately $18,000. So if this family has only one earner making minimum wage, household income would be about $15,000, placing that family below the poverty line. Indeed, in the Community Service Society’s recent annual survey of low-income New Yorkers, the “Unheard Third,” our research showed that 78 percent of the full-time working poor experienced at least one hardship such as skipping meals, falling behind in rent or going without health insurance coverage, while 37 percent experienced at least two hardships.

There is something very wrong when someone works full-time year-round and his/her family could still live in poverty.

However, roughly half of the 3.5 million jobs that have been created across the nation during the recovery are in industries that offer lower wages, including retail trade, leisure and hospitality (especially food services), health services and temporary help services. The minimum wage is often the starting point for jobs in retail as well as leisure and hospitality, and the latter sector has the highest percentage of workers of any industrial sector who earn at or below the minimum wage—just over one in five employees in the leisure and hospitality sector earn at or below the minimum wage. These would include “tipped” workers whose employers are only required to pay $2.13 per hour if tips at least bring hourly earnings to $7.25 per hour. In addition, the percent of workers in the U.S. earning $7.25 per hour has nearly tripled since the start of the recession.

Several states have gotten the point and raised their state’s minimum wage (which cannot be lower than the federal minimum wage, with workers entitled to the higher of the two) including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. An estimated 1 million workers will be directly affected by these increases.

Speaker Sheldon Silver of the New York State Assembly has been pushing a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $8.50 per hour. However, he faces opposition from Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who in a recent interview invoked the myth that such an increase would displace teen workers.

In fact, research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that 80 percent of the workers who will benefit from higher wages in eight states that have recently increased their minimum wage are 20 years of age or older. Additional analysis by the Center for Economic Policy Research shows that today’s low-wage worker tends to be older, not younger. Yet New York City mayoral candidate Tom Allon proposes a two-tiered minimum wage structure, with the lower minimum for teenagers. Again, such an approach is based on a flawed perception that most minimum wage earners are teens.

Then there’s the age-old critique that a minimum wage increase results in employment losses and therefore hurts the very people—low-wage, low-skilled workers—it was intended to help. However, research comparing cross-county areas along state borders with differing minimum wages conducted by economist Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) along with T. William Lester and Michael Reich showed that overall employment in these areas did not decrease with an increase in the minimum wage.

There’s also the charge that only a small fraction of workers earn the minimum wage, so—relatively speaking—not that many people would be affected by a hike. Therefore, why bother? It’s true that in 2006, before the recession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics just over 2 percent of workers in the U.S. had hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage, but that proportion has now increased to six percent, or 4.4 million people. In New York State alone roughly 100,000 people earn the minimum wage, and at least another 100,000 earn below it.

The minimum wage in New York should not only be raised but also indexed to inflation so that every few years we’re not right back in the same boat. Speaker Silver smartly backs this idea. “Fix it and Forget It” is what Heidi Schierholz of the Economic Policy Institute titled her piece in 2009 about raising and indexing the minimum wage. Let’s not forget those making minimum wage by ensuring that their earnings aren’t “poverty wages” not just this year, but next year and the year after that.