I was born and raised on the North Shore of Staten Island. My two children and I currently live on the first floor of a private home, after having lived as a domestic violence survivor in a shelter for 17 months. Although I currently have a home and a city voucher helps me with my rent, I fear that I could go back to a shelter once my one-year lease is up.
I am not against the mayor’s stated goal of building affordable housing. But, affordable housing has to be truly affordable, and I am against any irresponsible rezoning that ignores low income tenants on the North Shore. On the North Shore, 43 percent of tenants earn less than $50,000 a year. Of these tenants, 78 percent are rent burdened, paying more than 30 percent of their incomes towards rent, according to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. Making this problem worse, 90 percent of North Shore renters have no access to basic tenant protections.
This leaves renters like me vulnerable to unjust evictions. My landlord does not have to grant me a new lease, and my rent can go up by any amount when my current lease expires. I worry that if this rezoning passes, my landlord will choose to raise my rent as the North Shore becomes more “desirable.” If the rent goes up, I won’t be able to afford it. Like most tenants here, I am one rent increase away from losing my home.
The housing landscape here is already changing. Based on a 2018 Human Resources Administration (HRA) report on Legal Services for tenants, 33 percent of tenants who access free legal services were still displaced from their homes. The report finds this is because of the lack of basic tenant protections that renters have in smaller non-rent-regulated homes. Even the city, in its own draft environmental impact statement, acknowledges that this rezoning will make many tenants, like me, more vulnerable to displacement. However, while the city highlights this vulnerability, it does not put forward a mitigation plan to help those families who will get displaced. The rezoning proposal moving forward does not feel like responsible community based planning.
Rather, it will very likely displace more working families than it will house in new apartments. I can’t support such a plan, and our elected officials -- especially Council Member Debi Rose, who has a lot of power in this process -- shouldn’t either. We have a real opportunity to build real affordable housing on the North Shore, but we deserve a holistic plan that benefits all families, especially the working poor.
As a longtime tenant leader, I urge Council Member Rose to hear the voices of low-income tenants like me and reject any plan that does not put working families first.
(Tyneequa Steed is a tenant leader with the Housing Dignity Coalition.)