Jared Watson

Shivani: Tell me about yourself. Where were you born? Where is your family from?

Jared: Yeah, my, my name's Jared Watson. I am a tenant organizer here at Fifth Avenue Committee in Neighbors Helping Neighbors. I've lived in Sunset Park for about a decade, but I was born in Syracuse, New York, and both of my parents and, and their parents are going back quite a ways. My family's from rural upstate New York.

Shivani: Tell me about your childhood and if you have a childhood memory that shaped what's around you these days.

Jared: Yeah, I was, I was gonna pick it over… that question…trying to figure out how to answer it. I grew up in a pretty different environment than Brooklyn.

I had like cows across the road and the fields next door, and kind of grew up near the woods more so than in an inner city or suburban environment. But, you know, my parents were both working class people.

Jared: They're supposedly reasonably well off anymore, but we didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid. And the community broadly that I grew up in, is historically a little bit poorer than the national average. So issues like repairs to people's housing and just bread and butter — working class issues have always been at the forefront of my mind because these are things that we dealt with when I was a kid.

Shivani: Would you say that is what has led you here today?

Jared: I, yeah. A bit to that and I suppose just the continued state of, of what it is to rent an apartment in New York.

I think that it's more of an issue for, for poorer people, for working class people. People who, you know, don't have a lot of money left over at the end of the month, but just broadly you don't, you don't get what you pay for when it comes to renting housing in New York City. And everybody, rich or poor, has some kind of story where they've butted heads with their landlord over, over something that seemed like it ought to have been easy.

Shivani: And when you settled in this neighborhood, what is it that attracted you here? Because you mentioned being here just for a decade.

Jared: Yeah, happenstance. I received a job offer somewhere down in Bay Ridge. I used to work as a construction estimator and I didn't end up taking that job, but I don't.

I didn't wanna move past the end of an express line. I didn't wanna live all the way down in Bay Ridge and have to rely on the R train all the time. So I moved to an apartment on 56th Street in Sunset Park where I stayed for a couple years. And yeah, throughout that ended up commuting to a different part of the city than just to Bay Ridge. But in that time I got situated and met a bunch of people and got to know and appreciate the neighborhood and I've been here since then.

Shivani: Okay. Can you also describe what the neighborhood was back then, either through descriptions of the buildings and surroundings or through an anecdote that comes to mind?

Jared: Yeah, I mean, what I think of a lot is that the… when I first moved here, the bar that you went to was the bowling alley. And there's still a bar at the bowling alley. But since then, there's a —at a been more, I suppose— what people would call gentrifier bars have opened up in the

neighborhood and the, obviously, the cost of living in this neighborhood has gone up really, really dramatically in the 10 years or so that I've been here. I think that's true across the city, but I think in Sunset Park it's particularly bad because we don't have the quantity of rent regulated apartments that they do in like, like Flatbush or Crown Heights where the, the impacts of, of gentrification are like stabilized a little bit by housing costs not being driven up in the same way that they are in this neighborhood where, you know, a lot of people live in private homes, live in row houses and don't have any kind of tenant protection. So it's gotten a lot more expensive. It's gotten…they're more like younger people in the neighborhood than there were when I first lived here. Yeah.

Shivani: You mentioned that your immediate and extended family is in Syracuse still?

Jared: Around there. Yeah, I mean, my generation, people are kind of scattered across the country because it's just not a lot of work there. I think the main reason I'm in New York is 'cause I went to college on the west coast, moved back east after that and you know, tried to find work, tried to make ends meet in Syracuse, but there's not as much to go around and this is the closest like, major city to, to where I grew up. But yeah, besides my younger brother, I don't think anybody from my generation is still, I guess my, I still have a cousin there, but broadly all my like cousins and aunts and uncles are for the most part in Texas, Colorado, New England—not, not Syracuse.

Shivani: Yeah. You did touch upon this in a previous answer, but can you also describe the housing conditions when you moved here?

Either you can maybe talk about your specific apartment and the journey you have had or if you have an idea of the general housing conditions that also you can probably add some.

Jared: Yeah, I mean my first apartment in Sunset Park was a bedroom in a townhouse that somebody had converted into a studio apartment where I had— I didn't have a real stove. I had a hot plate and convinced myself that was just as good, but it's not. Yeah. And since then I've had, it was like my fourth apartment in the neighborhood. It's my first rent stabilized apartment, so I don't really have a lot to compare it to besides that and hopefully will be the last place I live for a little while, although it is pretty old and could, you know, stand to have the tiles and the bathroom floor repaired and things like that.

Jared: But I'm also paying quite a bit less to rent my apartment than anybody who didn't move in like 2020 when there was a spike in housing vacancy in the city would be paying now.

Shivani:  Are you looking to move out of your current situation to one with better conditions or…?

Jared: So I mean, someday God willing, but it's, it is crazy. I'm sure, you know, having to look around and, and you know, find accommodation. It's so much more expensive to rent anything these days that I'm, you know, more, more fixated on getting things in my apartment fixed and, you know, making sure that this little space is as comfortable for me as possible for the time being because, you know, I'm, I'm not getting out of this apartment without spending another five, 600 bucks a month just about anywhere.

Shivani: Right. Would you, if you were to relocate, do you still want to continue staying in Sunset Park? Since this is close to where you work and now you have a sense of community as well.

Jared: Yeah, exactly. I live super close. I live like a five minute walk from here, which is just impossible to replicate if you're looking for it. But yeah, I think any more, most of my friends and the people I see and talk to every day are people who, if they don't live in Sunset Park, they live in Park Slope or Bay Ridge or somewhere, you know, right next to here, yeah. Besides the house I grew up in, that my parents owned, I haven't lived anywhere as long as I've lived in Sunset Park.

Shivani: Okay. And in your housing experience here, have you experienced landlord harassment—poor housing conditions you've touched upon already—rent increases recently?

No, because you are in a rent stabilized apartment now, but landlord harassment to you or any of your friends and neighbors?

Jared: Yeah, I mean there's definitely a lot of, certainly a lot of neighbors, you know. I work in the community and a lot of people come to us with some specific harassment issues and we could talk all afternoon about that. There's a lot, there's a lot of that to discuss. But yeah, I mean, a lot of my friends have had repair issues that they haven't been able to get fixed prior to living in Sunset Park. I think like a lot of middle class transplants to New York City.

My first apartment was in Bushwick and from there I moved like a mile up the road to an apartment in Ridgewood in what must have—and I didn't know anything about this at the time—but must have previously been a rent regulated apartment.

It was like a six or eight unit, six unit walk up building in Ridgewood. Yeah. And I lived on the top floor and I had a persistent leak problem that I couldn't get them to, couldn't get them to fix. And I suppose that gets you starting to think why I'm paying for this and I'm like sleeping next to a bucket and they know that there's repairs that need to be made and they're not making the repairs. Why can't we do this? Why can't we get it fixed?

Jared: So through that, yeah, I don't know if that counts as harassment so much as maybe like gaslighting I suppose is telling me that, you know, we're trying to fix it, telling, you know, going to court and telling a judge that they're, you know, trying to fix it and just knowing that they're, they're not being honest with the judge. They're not being honest with me about what they're trying to do. Yeah. So this is what I mean by, you know, regardless of who you are,

your income level, I think it would— it's like a 25-year-old kid and I was making maybe $30,000 a year at the time, which is hardly like, well off specifically. But it was as opposed to like a gentrified building, right? where they had gone through and got renovated everything and made it look nice and made it look new, but it leaked.

Shivani: So what brought you into, into housing and community organizing in Sunset Park?

Jared: Yeah, I think that, well specifically I work here because I had a friend, Jenna Goldsobel, who worked here previously and is no longer here, but she got me this job and I think, I guess I'd always been like  a lefty teenager.

I read Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich books from the school library when I was a teenager. And I've always, you know,  I was like a punk kid. I was sympathetic to, I don't know, left-wing socialist adjacent values and projects broadly, but it was just a kind of an aesthetic level as a teenager. But you know, around 2016/2017, there was an enormous groundswell in this country and in New York City, in particular, largely reacting to Donald Trump being elected president. But also this coincided with Black Lives Matter, which rolled into pandemic response. And yeah, there's about a—I don't know at this point what we're like six, seven year period—

where there was a lot of, there was a lot of upheaval and I got pulled into some neighborhood organizing through that, and met my former colleague and current Assembly Member Marcela [Mitaynes] through this stuff.

Shivani: Okay. Did these experiences, like through these experiences, did you initiate any organization or groups that are working closely with Sunset Park?

Jared: I organized a number of like different tenant associations on the building level. How successful we've been in terms of keeping those folks involved once their problems got fixed or people got tired of butting heads over their problems is squishy, and depends on which building and which individual we're talking about. But more than that I worked a bit with—

this is not something that I helped get off the ground specifically—but got more plugged into Sunset Park, my friends with the Chinatown language justice group who began cutting their teeth, canvassing around an assembly race downtown.

And through that, I learned that what they really like to talk about were like community issues. And I think part of what makes is maybe a roundabout way of answering your previous question here, what I like about tenant stuff or what's like, I think broadly appealing about tenant stuff that pulls a lot of people in is that it's a, a site of conflict where we all have some level of direct stake, right?

If, or I guess, you know, in particular if you're lower income, middle income, and you're not likely to buy a,

you know, $10-12 million building and have to make your money back somehow by extorting the people who live in the building. It's something that we all deal with, right? And so these folks I think found through talking with their neighbors that, you know, there's a million issues on the street in the neighborhood, but what they really care more about than anything else is why it's so expensive to live here and why their apartment's so nasty.

Shivani: I think you did answer this, you did touch upon it a little, but can you also talk about the process of forming these groups once you have tenants that are on the same page, about their issues. What are some of the next steps that you took to form these groups or associations?

Jared: Yeah, I mean I think that in, in my case, you have the benefit of having really specific immediate issues that people wanna, wanna organize around or want to want to work to resolve, right?

So, for instance, a building in Bay Ridge I organized maybe like three years ago, something like that. Now folks came together initially because their gas went out and they couldn't get an answer from the landlord about repairing the gas. They often, in these cases, try to not restore the gas as it's cheaper to give people not very good electric stoves. A good electric stove is expensive, but a cheap one's a lot cheaper than, you know, fixing the gas plumbing and, you know, getting permits for all of these things. So there's always a risk that, you know, people aren't gonna be able to cook the way that they wanted to. And so we organized this building initially around a gas outage, put together what's called a Housing Part Action, which is a way that tenants can sue their landlord for repairs in civil court.

Jared: That ended up, I think, just the pressure from the threat of the HPA case got them to fix the gas lines before we actually went to court. But, when a fire happened in the building six months later, something like that, we already  had our list, right? We had everybody who had signed a retainer with the law firm to go to court over these things. And through that we were able to mobilize around this other issue, and where typically a fire could take a really long time to get people back in.

Jared: I've a building  on Seventh Avenue I've been working with for the past couple years and a pretty minor fire that the landlord could, could just fix, but they're using it as an excuse to, to not rehome people and, you know, peel people off so that they can knock down the building and put up a market rate building because the, the plot of land is

worth a lot more than a rent stabilized building on it, because the rent rolls can be whatever you want if you're not subject to rent stabilization, right.

So, short answer to this is having a— I'm lucky in that—I have tight and precise things that people want to rally around. And the challenge has historically been once we fix this specific thing, because that specific thing is of course like rarely the only problem. By the time an issue gets so bad that people wanna go to court over it, there are probably a thousand other things that are, have not quite reached that level but are, but that people are unhappy about and continuing that momentum not just to, you know, continue to fight for repairs in the building, but also to, you know, get more of these folks to come to Albany with us.

Jared: And, you know, push for stronger legislation has been, has been a little bit tougher I think [00:19:00] 
in large part because the people we work with tend to be, you know, working class folks who, you know, they work full-time jobs and they come home and they gotta look after their kids and things. And just another thing is not always something they want to do forever.

Shivani: Yeah, it is, it is an extra task to take out time from their day and it is money not being made essentially if you're going to do these things. Yeah, that's right. What has been the most memorable campaign, project or organization that you've been a part of and why? Or anything?

Jared: There've been a lot. I think that big picture, the big piece of legislation that we've been trying to pass through the Housing Justice for All coalition of which the Avenue Committees is a member of—

there’s like a million different member organizations** **within it—is the Good Cause Eviction Bill, where in 2018 there was this as a part of broader groundswell of like progressive activism in New York.

There was a state senate election in north Brooklyn where a scrappy group of activists managed to oust a long term, very established state senator named Martin Dilan and replace him with a young woman—like brand new to like running for elected office. And in the following year after successfully electing Julia Salazar, she introduced the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which fixed a bunch of the stuff that we'd been butting heads with over on rent regulated housing.

Like, for instance, it became a lot harder to pass what are the so called “major capital improvements.” So, improvements they would make to the building, they would make to rent regulated buildings, and were able to pass the cost of those onto the tenants, which have, as you might figure is, is full of fraud, right? It was very likely that a lot of these things, they either weren't done or they were done much cheaper than they were claiming they were done so they could pass the cost on it.

And in particular, it did away with what were called “individual apartment improvements,” which were the same thing on an individual apartment level that were almost entirely fraudulent. So they were very successful in passing a package of bills that made conditions for rent regulated housing better than they had been.

The narrative or the trend had been, for the previous like 40 years, is that they passed the Emergency Tenant Protection Act in I think 1974, and it created our rent stabilization system and since then, just like every year in Albany, they would chip away at it a little bit and make it weaker and weaker. And this was like the one time that we pushed back hard in the other direction, but what we didn't get—one of the marquee items within this package of bills that she was trying to pass—was this good cause eviction bill. And in April this year, we finally got a very weakened, not at all what we wanted version of that, but we got some version of it. Like it was supposed to be a, intended to be a, universal statewide applies to everybody thing, outside of people who

rent an apartment upstairs from an old lady at a townhouse, but they weakened it to the point where municipalities out of New York have to opt into it and run like local campaigns to be subject to some level of regulation and some restrictions on what sorts of landlords this would apply to.

So that was the biggest thing. On the state level is just watching all and participating in, you know, from an idea to a compromise version of what we wanted passed. And yeah. And besides that, I think that on an individual building level, my experience with these Seventh Avenue tenants has been like fascinating and harrowing and just like a, as solid an illustration as you're gonna find just like the,

depths of like evil shit that people are able to do to make a couple extra bucks.

Shivani: Right. I have a follow up question on the bills, the package of bills that was passed, are they subject to amendment? Can you contest them? Is there any forum available for you to… for some back and forth to happen? For potentially in the future make it better?

Jared: You mean to strengthen what we've already asked? Yes. Yeah, I mean potentially I think that that's sort of the, the thought and the hope with this good cause bail in particular is that the, you know, the Albany for instance needs to run a local opt-in campaign and do a vacancy study to, you know, show that they're subject to some other law and it's, it's 1,000,001 legal hoops to jump through. And I forget exactly where, Kingston I think, somewhere in the Hudson Valley,

a court recently overturned their good cause law that they've gone through the process.

So part of the effort is to do these things, the, the legitimate way and to do things the way that the law is written as a way of showing that the law is kind of written to fail, right? And that's a way of showing that these are, these are too many hurdles to go through that courts could overturn it. And hopefully five years from now, 10 years from now, who knows how long from now, we're able to show that it doesn't work on an individual municipality level and we need to pass a stronger state or nationwide rec regulation program.

So a lot of it is, you know, pushing for your most ambitious, most like squares with your —I want say politically correct— but that means something different, like squares with your politics and what you're trying to do,

like the most ambitious version of the law. But when you can't do that initially, you want to be able to create a narrative and show that there's a reason that we're doing it this way. That we're not just you utopian, it's that when you try to do these things piecemeal, that it gets picked apart and it doesn't work.

Shivani: And what kind of impacts do you think these bills have had on the community? Positive or negative?

Jared: Yeah, so it's made a huge positive impact—in terms of the H-S-T-P-A has made a huge positive impact—in terms of the regulated tenants that we have here in Sunset Park. You know, folks like me, folks like Fabian who rent a rent regulated apartment, we're not seeing the massive rent spikes and level of fraud that we were seeing previous to the H-S-T-P-A passing.

There's other schemes that people come up with. I think that…sorry, can you restate your question?

Shivani: What was, what was the impact of these bills in this community? Positive or negative?

Jared: Yeah. And as far as Good Cause goes, we're still figuring that out. I think that I…they want me to be doing more outreach and work in  Park Slope. And Park Slope is interesting in that a lot of those buildings are some mix of rent regulated and unregulated apartments because it's, of course, the unit and not the building that's subject to rent regulation. And historically it's been really difficult to pull the market rate folks in because they don't like, have any skin in the game.

And in particular, I've heard from some market rate folks in a building that's largely rent stabilized, that they're concerned about people fighting major capital improvements

in the building because they know that the landlord's gonna try to make as much money as they can from somebody somewhere. And if they're not getting it from the regulated tenants, the market rate tenants are gonna see their rent go up by all that much more. So it's a big outreach effort at this point.

Jared: I don't know when we're gonna know how, how effective it's been around that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Shivani: So through, through either these, this project of passing the bills or your experience currently in the Seventh Avenue building, do you have a personal moment or anecdote that made you feel proud about the project itself?

Jared: Yeah, I mean I think that anytime I've been to court with my Seventh Avenue tenants and seeing a bunch of people who—a dozen or more people —

turn out to a court hearing and in a language that half of  'em can't even understand in, in the middle of the day, just to show that the, just to show the judge that you know, this is important enough that we're here, that we took off work to be here so that you could see us and see how important this is. That's always really impactful. I think not just on me, but just like on the judge. I am…and, and we, we want our HPK so I was really proud of that. It hasn't forced them to actually rebuild the building just yet, but very rarely do these things actually go to trial. And when you go to trial, there's always a chance that you can't win. And we, and we went to trial and we won. So that was cool. That was good. That was big. And I think, you know, a little bit outside of this work, specifically seeing Marcela [Mitaynes] get elected to the assembly was huge.

And you know, my friend, my colleague, you know, a working class indigenous woman who grew up in the neighborhood here taking out a, a horribly corrupt old machine politician. Yeah, I remember on election day going to Sunset Park with her, and a handful of volunteers, as we're like looking at our phones to see results roll in and we, we didn't think we would, it was tight enough that there were a lot of insurgent campaigns that that summer  and a lot of them won a lot of long time electeds lost their jobs and got replaced with younger, younger folks with more progressive politics. And we didn't think we were going to be one of them, but you know, over time she just becomes the assembly member right.

And is able to like, throw her weight around in a way that we wouldn't have been able to a few years ago. And we're able to make things happen. Because you have that, you have that pulpit now.

Shivani: Can you also elaborate on some of your personal learnings in, through the years in this process?

Jared: My what learnings?

Shivani: Your personal learnings.

Jared: My personal learnings… I have… I think my Spanish has gotten a little bit better. My Spanish gets better and then it gets worse. And I think it is just really context specific to what kinds of Spanish? Yeah, I think that, I mean just any of the mechanical stuff around like working through city and state agencies and, and the courts and I just, I know so much more than anybody ought to have to learn about these things.

And yeah, I suppose just being aware of how this is just like a piece of living in a major city. I know the extent to which the people who make the city work, the people who like cook your food, the people who like work for, I dunno, even people who like, you know, like decent paying like government jobs, your like working class, make the city run people how, how squeezed they are by the housing market and by the cost of living in New York. And that there are a lot of solutions that we could be using. Some that we're trying to employ and some that are, you know, I don't know, exciting ideas that we can try to implement in the future here, but how, how much work we have to do around that.

Shivani: How would you describe the situation of this neighborhood in the last five to 10 years in terms of housing development? Gentrification, you have touched on it a little bit, but yeah, if you get that…

Jared: Yeah, there's not a lot of new development in the neighborhood. There's…I live on Fourth Avenue, right here as well,  and you can definitely—from the Park Slope side— see bigger, taller, market rate buildings  kind of creeping down Fifth Avenue. And I think for the most part, those aren't going to meet the needs of the people who already live in the neighborhood, right? 'Cause I think there's one, like across Fourth Avenue, a new construction building.

So, these apartments are $5,000 a month, which is expensive anywhere. This is a, I mean even as it gentrifies, even if it changes, I believe still a like, yeah low, low-ish income neighborhood and I suppose on some level it's okay that stuff is there because people

are going to move to the neighborhood, whether or not there is new housing. And you don't want them to be displacing the people who've been here for a long…I mean people are already getting displaced. This is why  Bensonhurst has seen such a spike in—it's like Chinese and Mexican population. 'Cause these are a lot of people who used to live right here in the neighborhood and the neighborhood got too expensive, right? But what's being constructed is great for newcomers, maybe, if they could afford it. But it doesn't do anything to alleviate our immediate housing costs here. So as you know, some things in the neighborhood get nicer and some things certainly get more expensive.

It's very plain to us in particular. People call us every day and say: “Hey, I live in a market rate apartment, I live in a private home, and my landlord is raising my rent by 700 bucks a month. Can you help us?”

And we can't. I'm sorry. The solutions to that are big and long and take forever to do and by the time somebody's leaving us a voicemail, we have long since missed an opportunity to preempt that.

Shivani: Hmm. What are some of the biggest challenges you faced in terms of working with the community and community organizing?

Jared: Yeah, I think that, I mean for us in particular, we really need to hire an organizer who speaks Chinese. I'm doing my best to work through interpreters and things like that. But I know that not everything's coming across. Yeah, language barriers are a  really big one, I think. Getting this is, I think broadly just a tenant organizing problem, but breaking through the apathy that people have in particular. You, you have a couple kinds. You have your like, like newer residents who are like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that there are bad things in this building, but when my lease is up I'm just gonna move. I don't really care to butt heads over this.” And there's the longer term tenants who will tell you:

“Well I've lived here for 10 million years, they've never fixed it.” What's to make me think that, you know, they're about to fix it now. And, and getting folks to understand that, that they, I mean maybe right, it, it might never change.But it's definitely never gonna change if you don't flex in some way and, you know, work together to try to get the things fixed that they don't want to fix without you pressuring them.

Shivani: And how do you think the relationship between the cooperation amongst different groups that are working here has changed in Sunset Park over these last few years?

Jared: Yeah, I mean I think this maybe gets back to electing one of our own people as the assembly members. That people need to come to you a little bit more than they might have previously. Yeah. And in terms people…can, can you say that again?

Shivani: How, how has the relationship between the cooperation amongst different groups in Sunset Park, how has that changed over the last few years?

Jared: Yeah, I mean again, I think specifically both on the assembly, me both on the assembly level and, and on the council member level, this was also true of the previous council member, but the neighborhood politics had for many years been locked down by the Brooklyn Democratic Party machinery. First Carlos Menchaca and then Marcela [Mitaynes] and later Alexa [Aviles]. The alleged did a lot to disrupt that and we have a lot more access to our, to our local government, than we previously have been. But there's also, you know, a lot more money being spent by real estate groups and opposition to some of the work that we do here in particular on the, in particular on the state level.

You know, we have a whole shopping mall on the other side of the expressway now that was, that hasn't always been there. It's, yeah, it's different in a lot of ways.

Shivani: I think just following up on that question, how has the support from the city public agencies and election officials been in the Sunset Park community specifically in the last five to 10 years?

Jared: Yeah, our elected are pretty good in the neighborhood recently. City agencies or the city agencies and they don't have the money to hire the right people with the people in charge of the agencies if they have the money, who knows whether or not they want to do it correctly anyway. Yeah, I think that it's, it's always a pain in the neck getting HPD [Housing Preservation and Development] or  the DOB [Department of Buildings] to respond to things and it's definitely helpful to have a council member's office.

For instance, that you could go to and get them to put a little heat on the city agency to respond to you a little bit better where they might not otherwise.

Shivani: Considering the struggles and fights for housing justice in Sunset Park, what, according to you, would be one of the most impactful strategies or actions that have already been implemented or in, in the community or can be implemented in the community?

Jared: Yeah, I think that, I mean this is some, it's not just Sunset Park or this is kind of something that we're broadly working through on like the state coalition level is like where do we, how, how do we keep people engaged? How do we keep people involved? Because I think that's the answer to that question—is just broader community organizing and being able to scale up from

the fights you're able to successfully have on the building level and for repairs and things like that. And get people to focus on these further upstream things. And, and it seems like right now for good or bad, what people seem to really care about and what we're, what we've been good at turning people out for in, you know, the past several years is the red guidelines board fight where the, you're both, you're both nodding, but since we're recording I I'll say what it is—there's a board that the mayor appoints that votes on rent increases for, or rent increases rent changes, right?

'Cause they could freeze it or they couldn't roll 'em back for rent regulated for, for, for rent-stabilized housing in the city and being able to make use of these folks who are clearly interested and easily mobilized around this issue.

How do we use that, and how do we use their presence and that amount of energy towards things that are maybe bigger than just yelling at a board that we have like no say over who gets to sit on it?

And it's very nice to give those people a bad night and to frustrate them when they have to speak in public. But how do we, how do we weaponize that? How do we continue to build off of what people are, you know, legibly really plainly interested in? Because I think that, you know, community stuff can go all kinds of different ways, right? It's like people will, they care a lot about their, their housing and rent increases, but you know, you also see that people will like rally against homeless shelters and things like that. And how do we emphasize the self-interested, like community building aspects of people,  feeling really strongly about their neighborhood.

And, you know, get build off of that so that people aren't drifting towards, I don't know, pointing fingers at their neighbors for their problems.

Shivani: Speaking of building off of community, community organizing, do you think this also includes things like community land trust and housing cooperatives, housing associations, et cetera to be established in this community? Maybe that helps in, in this, in the housing justice argument?

Jared: Yeah, I, I think that, you know, anything we can do to de-commodify our housing stocks so that we're not seeing quite such an incentive to force out long-term residents to make room for people who can pay more money is, is very good for that. I think people feel more of a stake in the neighborhood when they know that it's theirs and they know that they can stay here and raise their families here and all of that stuff. What was the other part of your question?

Shivani: I can go to the next question actually because it is to do with the future generation. So what would you say to the future generations of the community or of housing cooperatives here?

Jared: Yeah. I would like to see folks more interested in building community land trust and, you know, de-commodifying our housing stock. Keep referencing my old coworker here, but she's lead sponsor on TOPA [Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act] in the State Assembly, which would allow for our tenants to, if not outright buy the building, then to organize—in an anticipation of a sale—and hopefully get repairs made and things like that. Because typically, historically, where we've seen things really go downhill is, a landlord can't afford to maintain a building so they will sell it.

And whoever is selling it is, or sorry, whoever's buying it is buying it so they can take out too big a mortgage for the building and put money into other things and continue reinvesting and kind of like rolling along that, right?

So, I would like to see future generations develop longer term strategies, develop ways of building something permanent because as important as the building organizing work we do here is, often it does feel like we are being called in to fix a specific problem. And either we're effective in fixing the problem and, and people move on after that, or we're not effective in fixing the problem and people get frustrated and they don't want to fight anymore. They don't wanna work towards anything.

So if we could continue to work towards ways to pull people out of just responding and to and toward bigger picture solutions that are more sustainable, long time—I'd like to see more of that.

Shivani: Okay. So we are done with the official list of questions, but if there is anything that you would like to add… I did want to ask you a follow up, just because we are having this conversation. What, what do some of those solutions look like? Because, to realistically implement them, you have to go through due process, which is establishing say a cooperative or a community land trust and then formally establishing it, probably even going to court to fight with other agencies that don't want you to establish them. So what are some of these solutions?

Jared: That's…that's a big question. I  think that's, well.. I think one of the big things that's happening on the state level and on the, I mean I also keep referencing the state level because I think relative to other major American cities, just an enormous amount of what happens here is decided not in the city but in, in Albany by the state government. But I think a bunch of directions for that. I think a  big piece of it is that we just, we haven't had a big movement towards developing more public housing or developing more like Mitchell-Lama housing in quite a long time, right? It’s the programs that we have currently, right? That I mean even down to rent stabilization. These are old programs that have lost units, that have lost like enforcement and you know, political urgency over time and over the years, right?

And I think that Emily Gallagher is an assembly member in like Greenpoint, I forget who the senate co-sponsor is, but introduced this social housing development authority bill with the hope of either funding community land trust, funding community development corporations like Fifth Avenue committee to redevelop housing where we don't have it currently. I think that one of the issues here is that we have a million small landlords, a million like big landlords, big corporate landlords, but what we don't have as much and what's been like shifting away from over the years with, you know, across political lines.

Both parties aren’t allergic to this stuff anymore, [there] is a desire to develop more public housing or some semblance of like publicly funded housing. Not just for like the poorest of people because they'll like to renew Section 8 funding. But you know, historically in the first half of the 20th century, and in a lot of places in Europe, public housing isn't just for poor people specifically, right? It's if we could have one landlord and have the landlord be the government that removes, or even not have the landlord be the government specifically for some of these, but have like the money coming from the government we have, it removes some of the profit incentive.

Whereas currently, you know, whether it's for market rate buildings or rent stabilized buildings, the incentive for the developer is always to squeeze as much money out of it as possible.

And I don't, and I think  that's maybe not necessarily going away, but if you could make the money come from like taxes or from like all of us rather than just like whoever is stuck in this apartment and wants their stove fixed.

Shivani: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Okay, I am going to stop the recording, because I did…that question was not part of this thing, but yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for talking to us .

Jared: Yeah, of course.