Apoorva Tadepalli
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/apoorva-tadepalli>/New Republic
September 14, 2020
The Rhetorical Weapons of Liberal Nimbyism
How a group of Manhattan liberals used the language of “community”
to evict people living in temporary housing from their neighborhood.
An unhoused person sitting on the sidewalk in Manhattan as pedestrians
pass.
CINDY ORD/GETTY IMAGES
The West Side Community Organization describes itsmission
<https://www.westsideco.org/>as twofold: to “advocate for a restored
quality of life for residents, visitors, and the small business
community” and “advance safer and more compassionate policies regarding
New Yorkers who are struggling with homelessness, mental illness, and
drug addiction.” As its first official order of business, the hastily
assembled 501(c)4 launched a slick campaign to vilify 300 unhoused men
in its Upper West Side neighborhood as dangerous criminals, then
succeeded inevicting them
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/nyregion/nyc-homeless-hotels-covid.html>from
the hotel the city had converted to temporary housing in response to the
pandemic. Apparently it was the $123,000-median-income families
<https://furmancenter.org/neighborhoods/view/upper-west-side#:~:text=Upper%20West%20Side%20MN07&text=Median%20household%20income%20in%202018,2018%20compared%20to%2017.3%25%20citywide.>of
the liberal Manhattan neighborhood who were the real New Yorkers
struggling with (the sight of) homelessness.
Now the men will be going somewhere else.According to
<https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/manhattan/ny-harmonia-hotel-lucerne-hotel-legal-aid-society-20200910-lcpadfzpb5hevggasebsaarfzu-story.html>/The
New York Daily News,/the city is in the process of relocating other
unhoused people, many with disabilities, from a Midtown shelter in order
to make room for the newly placeless former residents of the Upper West
Side.In astatement
<https://ilovetheupperwestside.com/material/media/2020/09/Mastro-Statement.pdf>on
the city’s relocation decision, the organization’s attorney Randy Mastro
called it “a testament to community organizing.” The group that came
together under the banner of WSCO had started out as strangers, he
continued, but came together as a stronger whole “dedicated to saving
their neighborhood.”
The inviolable power of private property defines the actions and
attitudes that can create and destroy communities; in liberal enclaves
like New York, this is done with language. Slippery terms
like/neighborhood/and/community/are quietly and expertly carved out to
exclude the people—nonwhite or ill or poor—who reduce property values.
Evictions driven by wealthy residents and property owners become actions
taken for the community, and for neighbors, rather than against them.
The community “came together” rather than was torn apart. By cloaking
the language of profit in the language of safety, these efforts are able
to write out the poor and unhoused—those for whom the city is the most
hostile and unsafe—from these most basic human identities.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
One member of the neighborhood Facebook group that became WSCOtold
<https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/hundreds-of-new-homeless-bring-drugs-loitering-harassment-to-uws/>/The
New York Post/that “our community is terrified, angry and frightened.”
Theirfear
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/nyregion/uws-homeless-hotels-nyc.html>was
“palpable.” Another resident who opposed sharing her neighborhood with
unhoused othersasserted
<https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/nyc-illegally-housing-pedophiles-near-upper-west-side-playground/>that
“we’re a progressive-minded community and we tend to be sympathetic to
the homeless, but with sex offenders, draw the line.”
Elsewhere in New York, a woman whose neighborhood also saw an influx of
unhoused people during the pandemicclaimed
<https://abc7ny.com/homeless-nyc-hotels-now-shelters-hells-kitchen-shelter-hotel/6306791/>that
she never left her house without pepper spray.The founder of a civilian
patrol groupcomplained
<https://www.foxnews.com/us/homeless-sex-offender-debacle-dividing-new-york-citys-upper-west-side>of
“all kinds of chaos … assaults, vandalism, breaking and entering and
lewd behavior.”**More than 160 business executiveswrote
<https://pfnyc.org/news/letter-to-mayor-bill-de-blasio-from-nyc-business-leaders/>to
the mayor that “there is widespread anxiety over public safety,
cleanliness, and quality-of-life issues that are contributing to
deteriorating conditions in commercial districts,” demanding a
restoration of the “security and the livability of our communities.” An
Upper West Side petitiondeclared
<https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/fight-for-safety-and-clean-streets-on-the-upper>,
“This situation is making life uncomfortable for residents and putting
families, children, and the elderly in harm’s way.”
Those words and identities are not literal or geographical. A resident
of a neighborhood in these tellings is not—can’t be—someone who lives in
a shelter in that neighborhood.
The language that this nonprofit, and Nimbyism generally, uses is so
smooth that reading their literature sometimes makes it sincerely
difficult to tell whose side they’re on. Not only did WSCO express
concern over the safety of the wealthy residents apparently threatened
by the sight of poverty and addiction, but it also insisted that the
hotel was not a safe place for these men themselves, who needed the
professional services offered by the shelter system.Its language of
danger—and concern—was expert.“These individuals are not receiving the
critical social and mental health services they so desperately require,”
it writes in its fundraising appeal.
This is a laughably paternalistic claim; the well-being and basic needs
of unhoused people is clearly not the real concern of these wealthy
Upper West Siders who so blatantly attempted to criminalize them.
WSCO’sGoFundMe
<https://www.gofundme.com/f/gofundmecomfwest-side-community-organization>raised
over $50,000 in its first two days. It now has over $137,000. It will
use these funds,it has informed its donors
<https://www.westsideco.org/>, to retain lawyers and press people, cover
administrative costs, and explore options around private security.
It is typical of respectable liberal discourse that any talk of
homelessness is really talk of those affected by others’ homelessness.
(Earlier this summer, the/Times/published a 1,769-wordreport
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/minneapolis-george-floyd-police.html>on
the homeless encampment at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, out of which
71 words were dedicated to an actual resident of the encampment and the
rest to the housed people around it who were coping with this struggle
with varying shades of gallantry or concern.) The bullshit liberal
politics of decency dictate that to believe in a mechanized and fully
functioning system is to acknowledge that homelessness does exist—and we
care about it!—but that it has to be dealt with somewhere else where we
don’t have to look at it. Then a global pandemic happens and suddenly we
are forced to look at poverty, and it appears there is a malfunction in
this system, so we start short-circuiting as well, and demand to speak
to the manager.
Luc Sante, author of/Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,/lived
on the Upper West Side in the 1970s and remembers a significant enough
class difference within the neighborhood then—rotating Columbia
students, residents of welfare hotels, cult groups—but never felt a
sense of threat. “They spent their days on the benches in the traffic
islands on Broadway drinking, perfectly benign,” he told me. (And then,
as now, there are many housed residents of the Upper West Side who
haveorganized against the eviction
<https://ny.curbed.com/2020/9/4/21422921/upper-west-side-hotels-goat-squad-stuy-cove>and
in support of the unhoused residents.)
Property ownership in such an expensive city changes a relationship to a
home, forcing questions about a return on investment and what money is
meant to secure you. “It’s not about threat,” Sante said of what’s
changed in the ensuing years, “it’s about property values. In those
days, it wasn’t that expensive to live on the Upper West Side.”
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