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NYU COVID COALITION

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Your Anti-Racism Books Are a Means, Not an End

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Your Anti-Racism Books Are a Means, Not an End

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SAIDA GRUNDY

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Texts that seek to raise the collective American consciousness are rendered futile without concrete systemic changes.

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ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

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INCITE!

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HAYMARKET WEBINAR

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MARIAME KABA

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TransformHarm.org | A Resource Hub For Ending Violence

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TransformHarm.org is a resource hub for ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. You can use what is here, and submit recommendations.

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Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

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Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

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CAMP & HEATHERTON

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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EQUALITY FOR FLATBUSH

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DC Alternatives to 911 Resource Doc/Template

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DC Alternatives to 911 Resource Doc/Template

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 DC Alternatives to Calling the Police - Resource Guide & Flow Chart

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CHANA JOFFE-WALT

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If you enjoyed this episode, you may like these A locksmith tells the story of an act of kindness he committed, hoping for a small reward. That, and other stories of kindness in New York City. We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions!

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Read Chapter 1 ! ALEX S. VITALE

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Whose ancestral lands are you on & more about the current indigenous community

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Mapping

We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.

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Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life. We welcome you to our site.

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NYC Tenant Movement History - Media History Timeline

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DIRECT REDISTRIBUTION TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN NEW YORK

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The Manna-hatta Fund presents an opportunity for all settlers to support the Indigenous peoples, such as the Lenni Lenape, who were forcefully displaced by European settlers and their descendants to create New York City and the United States. Millions of Native people have been surviving attempted genocide and the loss of their land, families, and resources for centuries; the violence of colonization is ongoing.

Native survival in the face of such violence and loss requires community, and for 50 years the American Indian Community House has been a lifeline for the estimated 110,000 Indigenous people living in New York City. Acting as the intertribal hub for our region, AICH provides health and wellness services, community, cultural events, and a voice for Indigenous peoples. 100% of all Manna-hatta Fund donations go directly to American Indian Community House.

If you live in the five boroughs, or anywhere else in North America, you live on Native land. You can help break the legacy of theft and violence.

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The Manna-hatta Fund presents an opportunity for all settlers to support the Indigenous peoples, such as the Lenni Lenape, who were forcefully displaced by European settlers and their descendants to create New York City and the United States.

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EVE TUCK & K. WAYNE YANG

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LENAPEHOKING BEFORE AND AFTER 1609

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Welcome to New York City, 1609

Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out here, by navigating through the map of the city in 1609. You can find your block, explore the native landscape of today's famous landmarks, research the flora and fauna block by block, and help our team continue to rediscover 1609. Launch the application below.

"The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future.... But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?"
- from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Why 'Welikia'? And Where's Mannahatta?

We're going beyond Mannahatta, launching the Welikia Project to encompass all of New York City, including the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and surrounding waters. Welikia means "my good home" in Lenape, the original Native American language of the region. But Mannahatta hasn't gone anywhere. For all who have come to love Mannahatta, the same block-by-block data is available above by clicking anywhere on Manhattan Island after pressing the "Launch the Map Explorer" button above. For those who want to know more about Welikia , press the button, then click on any block in the other four boroughs on the map, where you can support Welikia.

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Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out here, by navigating through the map of the city in 1609. You can find your block, explore the native landscape of today's famous landmarks, research the flora and fauna block by block, and help our team continue to rediscover 1609.

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RESEARCH TOOL TO IDENTIFY LANDLORDS

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Who are the biggest landowners in New York City?

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Who are the biggest landowners in New York City?

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ALEKSEY BILOGUR

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Who are the biggest landowners in New York City?

An important and oftentimes conscientious aspect of a city's social fabric is the way in which it houses its residents; you can learn a lot about a city from its real estate, and nowhere is this more true than it is in New York City.

In this post I use data from a combination of New York City Department of Planning and Department of Finance datasets ( PLUTO and RPAD) to try to answer a question popular in the media: who are the biggest landowners in New York City?

Counting Addresses

If by "largest" you mean "owner of the most unique addresses", here are the top ten raw winners:

Somewhat unsurprisingly the single largest property-holder in New York City is city government, with various agencies taking all but one of the top 10 and most of the top 50 slots. The sole exception is sixth biggest property-owner OWNER / AGENT-a mildly alarming instance of indeterminate ownership in the public record. There is also an option for the 33 properties in the city for whom an owner is apparently simply UNKNOWN.

However, public asset ownership is a little haphazard. In additional to dedicated names for each of the individual city agenices there are several variations on "the City of New York" ( CITY OF NEW YORK, THE CITY OF NEW YORK, etc.), and a similar situation exists for federal and state agencies, which are listed either individually or as part of the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, NEW YORK STATE, or even THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

It's easier for us to examine private entity data. A Q&A published in The New York Times in 1994 fingers Columbia University, NYU, Trinity Church, and a handful of developers as the biggest in terms of private addresses held. What does the picture look like today? Filtering out public services, here is what the public record has to say about the 20 private owners with the largest number of buildings:

Columbia University easily owns more addresses than any other private entity in New York City.

In fact, the university's 206 properties easily trump both second-place finisher NYU, which owns 95 addresses, and for the purposes of comparison, the New York Public Library, which has 72-almost a third as many.

The following visualization lets you explore this in more detail:

Almost four-fifths of addresses in New York City are owned by organizations or individuals who own no other property.

To explore the raw data yourself, check out this Gist.

Summing Land Ownership

How does the picture change we look at square footage? That is, according to public record, who is the largest landowner in New York City?

The average single-bedroom apartment in New York City is 750 square feet ( source). Dividing our raw data building area totals by this metric, here are the twenty largest private entities in New York City by their single-bedroom index, if you will:

The New York City public housing system serves around 400,000 residents, so if every public housing project in New York City consisted solely of averagely-sized one-bedrooms, according to our figures that would mean two residents per apartment exactly. Public schools meanwhile would have approximately an 280,000-person footprint-meaning that approximately 30% more real estate is allotted to public housing than schools in New York City.

If we combine "United States Of America" with all of the federal entities in the dataset-the postal service and so on- the federal government at large is probably the third largest landowner in the city.

The National Park Service on its own is fourth largest.

Focusing on private entities once more:

Once again we have a single outstanding result: Riverbay Corporation, which owns Co-Op City in the Bronx, is easily the largest landowner in New York City. Co-Op City's footprint is absolutely colossal. Approximately 43,000 people live there, a number large enough that, were it its own municipality, it would be the tenth largest in New York State.

Columbia and NYU at second and third are close competitors in terms of total space utilization, each using up around 15,000 single bedroom apartment's worth of space. St. John's University and Fordham University, two smaller schools with large outer-borough campuses, also make an appearance.

Housing cooperatives is general rate well here, though BPP ST Owner LLC, owner of Stuyvesant Town on the East Side of Manhattan and second-largest co-op on the list, is still less than half a Co-Op City in size.

Some of the largest skyscrapers in New York City make an appearance too: RCPI Holdo LLC (wonderfully descriptive name) owns the cumulative grandeur of Rockefeller Center, for example, while the Newton Street Corporation owns 55 Water Street, competitive with One World Trade Center (owned by the Port Authority and thus not on this list) in size.

Finally, two of New York City's largest hospital campuses-Mount Sinai and New York-Presbyterian-also make an appearance.

You can drill into more details below.

To explore the raw data yourself check out this Gist.

Measuring Wealth

Finally we arrive at what is perhaps the most telling metric of them all. Who's invested more in New York City real estate than anyone else?

Once again here is the raw top ten:

According to city government records, the richest landowner in New York City is the Department of Education -logical enough, it's the largest school system in the country. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey follows closly, which seems strange: are bridges and tunnels really worth all that much? That is, until you realize that 99.99% of this valuation consists of just two properties: 154-68 BROOKVILLE BOULEVARD in Queens, better known as John F. Kennedy International Airport, worth 15 billion (ever try to sell an airport? me neither!); and 185 GREENWICH STREET in Manhattan, better known as One World Trade Center, worth 1.15 billion. Well, after hideous cost overruns, One World Trade Center famously cost 3.9 billion to build, so that fact alone is sobering.

The trouble with numbers this big is that after a certain point they lose meaning. It's easy to imagine what 100 thousand is, maybe you can stretch it to 1 million, but 10 billion? No way.

The building with the lowest signal-to-noise ratio of any building ever constructed in the history of humanity, ever, is the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, better known as the Oculus, a gleaming 4 billion dollar...train station...located right next to (the marginally less expensive) One World Trade Center. To hammer the point home, let's re-index the chart above by Oculuses built (or World Trade Centers completed, if you prefer):

So if you liquidated every single public housing project in New York City (which, again, houses 400,000 people) you would earn yourself...just over 2 Oculi.

But on to the private count:

According to the public record, NYU is the wealthiest private landowner in New York City. Although Columbia University owns more units and more land than NYU, it does so in a quiet upper Manhattan location, while NYU's position in Washington Square Park puts it into one of the most expensive real estate markets in the city, and thereof, the world. This hands NYU the victory, with a small margin, in expense.

Perhaps this lends credence to concerns, oft-cited amongst disenchanted students, that NYU is a real estate business in disguise.

Trinity Church's holding company, TRINITY HUDSON HOLDING, weighs in at 1.02 billion dollars: a lot, certainly, but well short of the 2 billion figure cited as "wealthiest in New York City" in reports from a few years ago.

Aside from that, given that almost four-fifths of landowners in New York City only own a single property, it doesn't come as a surprise that owning a skyscraper in Manhattan is enough to make you one of the wealthiest real estate barons in New York City. Most of the rest of this list consists of holding companies, some eponymous, some not, for various skyscrapers and skyscraper complexes in New York City.

You can explore the full data below:

If you prefer to see the raw data for yourself, once again here's the link.

If you'd like to explore all of the visualizations above in one handy chart, go here.

Thus concludes my spiel on real estate wealth in New York City. In my next post I'll use PLUTO to explore the city's addressing system, so stay tuned for more!

- Aleksey

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An important and oftentimes conscientious aspect of a city's social fabric is the way in which it houses its residents; you can learn a lot about a city from its real estate, and nowhere is this more true than it is in New York City.

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BRENDEN BECK

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A lawsuit alleges Breonna Taylor died because Louisville was trying to arrest its way toward economic redevelopment. Research shows this is common.
This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeal's collection of opinion and analysis.
The circumstances surrounding Breonna Taylor's killing by police in Louisville, Kentucky, are by now well known. When plainclothes officers executed a no-knock warrant at the medical technician's apartment in March, her boyfriend fired at the police, thinking they were intruders, and three officers returned fire, killing Taylor.

The Taylor family's lawyers accuse the city of targeting Glover-who was arrested in April-so it could repossess the home he rented. Indeed, in June, the city and a land bank purchased the house for $1.

Whatever the truth in this case, academic research and historical scholarship show that policing can be particularly intense during the process of gentrification. This research suggests that the continued use of police to pursue economic development will most likely result in more needless stops, arrests, and deaths like Breonna Taylor's. Recent protests have demanded that police no longer be used as the first response to social problems like mental health crises and drug addiction. That demand might also extend to excluding police from urban "renewal."

We need non-police responses to housing policy that create affordable housing and keep long-term residents in their homes. Cities should move funding away from police and toward housing, community development, and poverty alleviation-the kinds of efforts that can prevent crime.

The connection between real estate development and policing would not have come as a surprise to long-term residents of New York City's Lower East Side or Times Square neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. Those communities witnessed high-profile urban renewal projects, which brought intense law enforcement with them.

In 1984, the NYPD made more than 1,300 arrests- mostly for drug possession -in just 18 days on the Lower East Side. They called the military-style enforcement action Operation Pressure Point. The neighborhood's gentrification was encouraged by the police and city media; a New York Times article in 1985 described Operation Pressure Point as a harbinger of "rising" fortunes during which "art galleries [were] replacing shooting galleries."

In two studies, Elaine Sharp found that cities with larger shares of professionals living in them made more order-maintenance arrests; Adam Goldstein and I found that cities relying on housing market growth in the lead-up to the Great Recession in 2008 spent more on police.

Baltimore's police commissioner also emphasized the centrality of police in urban redevelopment when he said in 1998 that police "have a huge impact on property values, [and] the commercial viability of the community." Denver's current mayor said in 2007 that crime statistics can affect home values. Minneapolis's police chief said his officers should take pride in the city's rising home prices. And the Topeka, Kansas, police department touted its ability to raise property values and grow the city's tax base when they solicited public donations to a 2013 stolen property tracking initiative.

Researchers studying , San Francisco , New Orleans , , and Washington, D.C. have all cited long-term residents who say police make more stops and arrests during gentrification, with homeless people and sex workers experiencing especially harsh police contact. Manissa Maharawal found that the 2014-15 wave of Black Lives Matter protests in San Francisco were motivated in part by opposition to this policing of gentrification.

Gentrification is hardly the only force restructuring American cities. Neighborhoods are more likely to experience durable poverty, white flight, or persistent segregation than reinvestment and new middle-class neighbors. Each of these metropolitan contexts will influence policing in a different way. What the academic research summarized here reveals is that gentrification seems to coincide with a particular intensification in policing.

Sadly, Breonna Taylor is only the latest example of a Black or Latinx person killed by police against the backdrop of gentrification. Eric Garner by an NYPD officer near recently renovated apartment buildings on Victory Boulevard in Staten Island. Saheed Vassell by the NYPD just seconds after they confronted him in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. Alex Nieto, a lifelong resident of San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood, there by four officers after two white people called 911. These deaths are reminders that the struggles for affordable housing and against hyper-policing are intertwined.
Brenden Beck is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver who studies policing, city budgeting, housing markets, and suburbanization. He is on Twitter @BrendenBeck.

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This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeal's collection of opinion and analysis. The circumstances surrounding Breonna Taylor's killing by police in Louisville, Kentucky, are by now well known. When plainclothes officers executed a no-knock warrant at the medical technician's apartment in March, her boyfriend fired at the police, thinking they were intruders, and three officers returned fire, killing Taylor.

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ASSOCIATION FOR NEIGHBORHOOD & HOUSING DEVELOPMENT

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This layer shows the change in the percentage of rent stabilized units between 2007 and 2018. Properties appearing green gained stabilized units and properties appearing yellow, orange, or red lost units. Please note that properties can incorrectly appear to have lost or gained all of their stabilized units in that time due to an owner's failure to register. You can examine the year-by-year breakdown of stabilized units using the DAP Portal link in a property's pop-up window. Visit the tutorial page to learn more.

This layer shows the number of unique construction permits approved by the Department of Buildings (DOB) since 1/1/07, divided by the number of units in a building. Darker red indicates more total permits per unit. You can see detailed permit records he DAP Portal link in a property's pop-up window. Visit the tutorial page to learn more.

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This layer shows the change in the percentage of rent stabilized units between 2007 and 2018. Properties appearing green gained stabilized units and properties appearing yellow, orange, or red lost units. Please note that properties can incorrectly appear to have lost or gained all of their stabilized units in that time due to an owner's failure to register.

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NYU's Disorientation Guide is a document put together by radical activists and groups to help demystify the systems of power behind our Univ... See More

NYU's Disorientation Guide is a document put together by radical activists and groups to help demystify the systems of power behind our Univ... See More

Connecting content to people.

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NYU's Disorientation Guide is a document put together by radical activists and groups to help demystify the systems of power behind our University and act as a guide to activism on campus.

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Renter Nation Housing Justice Training Folder

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Renter Nation Housing Justice Training Folder

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Twitter Thread on Student Divestment Campaigns

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Twitter Thread on Student Divestment Campaigns

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MICAH HERSKIND

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thread on student divestment campaigns: 

I really respect student organizers who work on divestment campaigns. They are grueling battles. I was part of one for four years. But the reality is, it's near-impossible to force a school to divest. They nearly always outlast you. 1/

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thread on student divestment campaigns: 

I really respect student organizers who work on divestment campaigns. They are grueling battles. I was part of one for four years. But the reality is, it's near-impossible to force a school to divest. They nearly always outlast you. 1/

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Don’t miss what’s happening

People on Twitter are the first to know.

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thread on student divestment campaigns:

I really respect student organizers who work on divestment campaigns. They are grueling battles. I was part of one for four years. But the reality is, it's near-impossible to force a school to divest. They nearly always outlast you. 1/
— micah (@micahinATL) February 11, 2020

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thread on student divestment campaigns: 

I really respect student organizers who work on divestment campaigns. They are grueling battles. I was part of one for four years. But the reality is, it's near-impossible to force a school to divest. They nearly always outlast you. 1/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
thread on student divestment campaigns: 

I really respect student organizers who work on divestment campaigns. They are grueling battles. I was part of one for four years. But the reality is, it's near-impossible to force a school to divest. They nearly always outlast you. 1/

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thread on student divestment campaigns: 

I really respect student organizers who work on divestment campaigns. They are grueling battles. I was part of one for four years. But the reality is, it's near-impossible to force a school to divest. They nearly always outlast you. 1/

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Please take this exit poll !

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Thank you for attending Disorientation! Please fill out this quick survey so we know what's on your mind and so we can stay in touch!

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Takeaways:

Grounded in abolition

The culture of policing in NYU’s Office of Public Safety, retains this anti-Blackness & violence, finding new ways to be violent by having ties with NYPD, making sure there’s someone armed they can call who comes no questions asked
Organizing beyond divestment campaigns and being in the university and not of the university

The expansion of NYU's private property unhouses people, then NYU calls the police on unhoused people. NYU's expansion of private property is the expansion of policing.
Consciousness raising is useful but collective struggle corrects justice

The school is always going to fall back on "safety" but as students we need to build some program to make sure all people are safe around NYU buildings. We are creating active alternatives!

Current movement against COVID deathmaking and uprisings against anti-black racism are the backbones of our movement here

There has to be an alternative, student groups can start doing things differently, thinking creatively

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STUDENT LABOR ACTION MOVEMENT

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BLACK STUDENT UNION

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BLACK STUDENT UNION

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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INCARECERATION TO EDUCATION COALITION

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ZOE VONGTAU