Four Narratives of Anti-Poverty Community Mobilization:

Housing Works, FIERCE, Human Rights Watch, and the More Gardens Coalition

by Benjamin Shepard

benshepard@mindspring.com

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Contents

Introduction
    The Fleming Center
    Fighting Starbucks, Supporting Charas
    Gentrification, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Fear
    Giuliani’s New York and an Attack on Difference     
    A History of Opposition    
    The Lower East Side Collective  
    A Revitalization of Activism  
    Community Gardens and Healthy Neighborhoods
    Conclusion
Part I -- Notes on Housing Works: From Welfare Rights to Welfare Reform, and a Poor People with AIDS Movement
    An Overview
    From Welfare Rights to Welfare Reform
    From Welfare Reform to Ryan White
    A Different Approach
    Housing Works as a New Type of Anti-Poverty Organization
    Housing Works and the History of AIDS Advocacy
    Initial Phases of AIDS Activism
    From ACT UP to Housing Works
    Housing Works as an Alternative to ACT UP, GMHC, and AIDS, Inc.
Part II -- Fences and Pier: An Investigation of a Disappearing Queer Public Space in Manhattan
    Why Snip a Fence
    Fences and Boundaries
    Methods 
    Social Movements and Narrative Perspectives
    Street Youth  
    A Short History of Piers
    Arriving
    Public Space
    Family
    Violence
    Death of an Autonomous Zone                                            
    Fences, Barriers, and Lost Networks
    Different Identities      
Part III -- Human Rights Watch: An Oral History                                   
    Bridges and Tunnels
    Sustaining a Campaign                                                         
    More Than Anecdotal Problems
    Credit Cards                        
    A Human Rights Movement
    Success
Part IV -- Community Gardens, Creativity, and Seeds of Green Possibility: The More Gardens Coalition  
    Community Gardens
    Gardens as Representational Spaces
    Conclusion
Text Notes
Citation Notes
About the Author

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Introduction

In a global economy, the welfare state has become a warfare state. Within the post-welfare, neo liberal city, threats of displacement, the global war on drugs, the revolving door of incarceration and parole, repression, and low wages play out first in urban neighborhoods. Yet the ways in which community organizations respond to these threats suggest a future global city that is open, egalitarian, safe, just, and joyous. Despite the many threats, neighborhoods sometimes manage to thrive, as community organizers fight displacement, build syringe exchanges, plant gardens, and ride through their streets in a pulsing cavalcade and example of what healthy neighborhood life can be. The following reports consider how four distinct anti-poverty organizations --Housing Works, FIERCE, the New York City AIDS Housing Network, and the More Gardens Coalition-- struggled against a series of social and economic threats to build caring, healing communities and effective coalitions.

The notion of the welfare state’s transformation into a warfare state was first identified by Frankfurt School social theorist Herbert Marcuse. In 1964, Marcuse eluded to a merging of mass media, corporate power, and the blurring of social welfare into social controls and militarization. “The society of total mobilization, which takes shape in the most advanced areas of industrial civilization, combines in productive union the features of the Welfare State and the Warfare State.”[1] He continues, “The main trends are familiar: concentration of the national economy on the needs of big corporations, with the government as a stimulating, supporting, and sometimes even controlling force; hitching of this economy to a world-wide system of alliances, monetary arrangements…”[2] Along the road, elements of mass media, public opinion, and market pressure creative a coercive context which blurs opposites and opposition, further eroding the line between welfare and military operations. Over the final decades of the 20^th century, the policy landscape in the U.S. shifted from an emphasis on public welfare toward policing.[3]  The prioritization of ‘law and order’ over human needs during the recent New Orleans Katrina non-response is only the most recent example of this long term trend.  If the journey from the welfare state to the warfare state has a theme, it’s the use of distraction to support the re-appropriations that allow this military-entertainment-corporate-real estate industrial complex to expand and thrive at the expense of social policies aimed at aiding urban areas or poor people.

The foundations for this shift in social policy can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1978, Stuart Hall and colleagues’ Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order detailed the workings of an elite-engineered model of moral panic, which closely resembled the emerging politics the American New Right.[4] By 1968, years of race riots had created fertile ground for a political shift; the anti-crime strategy succeeded with Richard Nixon’s election. By linking crime and race, this coalition justified an ongoing expansion of federal authority under the guise of the War on Drugs, which thrived at the expense of other public services.[5] Fulfilling a Marxist “mass-manipulative” role, Hall argued that panic over urban public spaces diverted attention away from the real problems of capitalist society, which if solved could shift power arrangements out of the elite’s control. Thus, elites utilize institutions of the state to promote campaigns that generate and sustain public anxiety over perceived threats from specific, targeted population groups--often youth, immigrants, people of color, and “sexual deviants.”  From here the media serves as a de facto sounding board for the process.   In an effort to legitimize greater social control, urban spaces became battlegrounds. By the 1990s, waves of “three strikes,” “get tough,” and “broken windows” policing strategies found favor across the country, making it seem that Hall’s prophesy had come to complete fruition. By 2000, well over six million American citizens found themselves subject to incarceration, parole, probation, or other forms of police supervision.[6]As incarceration rates rose, displacement followed, social controls increased, income inequalities widened, and the concentration of wealth among the affluent congealed.[7]

Marx described this sort of crude concentration of wealth as “primitive accumulation.” “The basis of the whole process,” Marx explains, is a violent, coercive use of force by the state to displace the peasantry from lands where they have worked, followed by ‘bloody legislation’ used to regulate the consequences of jarring separations from traditional ways of life. Social outsiders, beggars, vagrants, drug users, and poor people generally endure the most immediate consequences.[8]

Skipping ahead from feudalism to mercantilism to the present era’s transition into cross-border economic integration, social welfare scholar William Sites borrows from this idea to frame his theory of “primitive globalization.” For Sites, today’s primitive globalization follows a similar pattern of reactive politics. As before, today’s ad hoc pro-business coalitions support policies that displace the urban poor as the state dismantles safeguards such as welfare programs. And regular people are displaced yet again without a safety net to soften the impact of the economic dislocation. Inequality increases, instability grows, and communities fragment.[9]

The “Four Narratives of Community Mobilization” presented herein acknowledges that neighborhoods and community groups face immense problems in the era of primitive globalization. The story of late 20^th century New York City and its Lower East Side (LES) neighborhood can be viewed as less of a narrative of globalist transformation or resurgence than a story of community fragmentation. Yet this very process of impoverishment and dislocation has simultaneously inspired a series of solutions and modes of activist engagement. While recent treatments of this phenomena  effectively describe the transformation of New York City through the process of globalization,[10] many lack of attention to the many urban actors in the housing, labor, or community organizing fields who have successfully bucked these trends. And this is a problem. It is all too easy to ignore the possibilities and innovative modes of urban struggle while giving into cynicism. Otto Rank has suggested, "Pessimism is the absence of creativity. "Rather than throw one’s hands in the air, it is useful to consider some of the imaginative organizing responses to the era of corporate globalization.

This introduction and the “Four Narratives of Community Mobilization” detail a few such examples. These stories present a number of neglected “best practice” efforts--such as community-labor alliances, theatrical neighborhood defenses, activist struggles with harm reduction housing, carnivalesque public space activism, as well as traditional welfare rights activism--that represent effective forms of community organizing and mobilization in the era of corporate globalization. If these essays, interviews, and reports suggest anything, they offer the premise that thoughtful activist engagement in urban areas is as essential and often as effective as ever.  In his famous treatment, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, Robert Fisher suggests that while contemporary activism may not be as glamorous as the ‘golden era’ of US activism, it is perhaps smarter and in many cases more effective.[11]  The “Four Narratives” are presented from a similar vantage point. 

Situated in New York City, many of these struggles--such as the birth of Housing Works, and the group’s struggle to pass Local Law 49 in New York, and the continued effort to see it fully implemented--serve as practical examples of campaigns which set out to identify a goal and succeeded. The four narratives are stories of mobilizations to create and preserve neighborhood spaces for regular people. Each essay speaks to different perspectives of community life and organizing.

The first narrative--“Notes on Housing Works”--tells the story of a struggle against historic forces and trends to create a radical housing agency for low-income people with HIV/AIDS, which bridges a divide between direct services and direct action. While provision of individual services historically has been a major dilemma for social movement organizations, Housing Works is part of a trend that suggests political advocacy is consistent with, and even a necessary component of, service provision.[12]

The second narrative--“Fences and Piers”--involves fights against displacement and eviction in the context of a global economy. This story details the painful plight of those struggling to find a place to call home, as public space has moved from the province of the welfare state to the police state.

The third narrative--“Human Rights Watch: An Oral History”--considers the efforts of a small group of homeless advocates to ensure the New York City Human Resources Administration actually followed the letter of the law and housed homeless people with HIV/AIDS. In order to achieve this, activists would have to stand outside the welfare center for well over a year, through hot summers and snowy winters, before the city came into compliance with the law. If ever there was a successful anti-poverty campaign, the New York City AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN) Human Rights Watch campaign is it.

The forth narrative--“The More Gardens Coalition”-- builds on the same public space activist ethos as FIERCE.  Like Housing Works, NYCAHN, and FIERCE, the More Gardens coalition fights to preserve public space for those at the margins.  The Coalition does this by creating actual physical spaces – community gardens – in urban spaces where land space is dense, green space is rare, and asthma rates are high.  By preserving space for both low income housing and gardens, More Gardens makes urban space livable and vibrant.   Garden activists recognize that gardens create oxygen, which helps create oxygen and reduce asthma.  Thus, community gardens are vital parts of a public health strategy for a healthy neighborhood.  In the interview featured below, Aresh Javadi, of the More Gardens Coalition, explains: “Almost everywhere if you charted the community gardens, it would be in areas of poor neighborhoods, highest asthma, highest density of housing, lowest income, and, of course, people of color who are directly affected by these things.  And if you went to this area (the South Bronx) you would noticeably feel strangulated.  You could feel the toxins that are around you.  You’d know the cancer rates are high.  In Harlem and the South Bronx, they call this asthma alley – 14 times the rate of other parts of the city.  And so all of these factors compound to suggest this is the most obvious space for more green spaces.”  Yet, this is also why gardens are politicized.  Once gardens beautify neighborhood, the forces of gentrification are quick to follow.  This was the case in New York City in the late 1990’s as the community gardens first become sites for urban redevelopment.  By 1998, some 400 community gardens on what were vacant lots were slated for development by the Giuliani administration, which planed to sell off the plots, which had been turned to community gardens after the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970’s. “What they all have in common is that they’re located in low-income neighborhoods and they’re being sold for middle-income projects,” explained L.A. Kauffman, a garden activist with the Lower East Side Collective public space group. “They’re selling it at bargain-basement prices to cronies of Giuliani.”[13]  The More Gardens history in part four situates the successful campaign to beat this auction and create a deal to save the urban gardens.

These four community narratives offer images of how regular people can stake a claim and successfully build the components necessary to create healthy communities--with Critical Mass bike rides, neighborhood meeting spaces, affordable housing, community gardens, harm reduction programs, and community centers. Before the ’Four Narratives,” it is useful to situate their struggle by briefly highlighting a few examples of emblematic campaigns, coalition efforts, and dilemmas facing those struggling to preserve public spaces in the global era. Before moving back to New York City, we detour to Washington, D.C.

The Flemming Center

While countless spaces have been lost to local gentrification and primitive globalization, the story is not all bleak. Countless other spaces and struggles have emerged to counteract this blandification. Take the Flemming Center in Washington, D.C., a community space created by a group of cultural activists, musicians, and punks who successfully collaborated with a senior citizens group to develop a 13,000-square foot complex of rehabbed row houses. The driving approach to the project was a cultural ethos of creating music and building community with whatever resources are available, using the “do it yourself” ethos of anarchism. Mark Anderson, who helped spearheaded the project, describes how the space will be used:

Positive Force will be there, we’ll have a gallery and an archive and a creative space, we’ll have direct service stuff, the Peace Center will be there, Catholic Worker bookstore will be there. Also the Brian Mackenzie Infoshop. You’ll have the Catholic anarchists on one side of the wall and the secular on another side of the wall (laughs). And an office space, at night, will be a performance space where you can show movies, have concerts, have political meetings, have poetry readings, all sorts of stuff. A building with a lot of powerful possibilities. I think there is a common spirit between all of these groups and we need all of these elements, we need the arts, the creative element, we need the direct service stuff, because as much as we want the revolution, the revolution is not going to be here tomorrow. To ensure a long-term vision of transformation, you need to make sure people are being fed, clothed, and housed in the short term. Hopefully the Flemming Center will bring a lot of people together across cultural and racial and faith lines and will create in a small way precisely what we need on a larger level.[14]

The resourceful creativity that brought the Flemming Center to life deserves to be recognized as much as the familiar downsides of gentrification.  Yet it’s no wonder activists and scholars sometimes fret about the prospects for community sovereignty in the era of globalization. The four narratives that follow suggest gentrification is a formidable problem that is not going away. If the attacks on public spaces, services, and the people who use them represent anything, they must be understood as politically motivated struggles to turn urban space into a mere commodity. Thus, activists have a choice. They can either disengage or they can fight the notion of urban space as growth machine.[15] Attacks on public spaces where gay men cruise, neighbors build gardens, and citizens gather for community meetings, are attacks on the idea of community and democracy itself. And this is quite intentional. After all, without community, there is very little chance for democracy to thrive.[16]

In few places does public space represent a commodity as much as in New York City. The following two examples discuss complex and creative approaches to fighting this trend.

Fighting Starbucks, Supporting Charas

“God is the absence of gentrification,” the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping has frequently proclaimed.[17] And it is hard to argue with him on this. Through his joyous, self-deprecating street persona--a preacher guilty of the sin of shopping too much--Bill Talen has created a playful messaging device effectively used in campaigns addressing sweatshop work conditions, protecting community gardens, preserving historic sites, and defending the First Amendment. In response to the diversity-crushing gentrification steamroller, the Reverend has organized neighborhood defense actions to prevent the corporate big boxes, such Wal-Mart, and mega-stores, such as Starbucks, from planting their “sea of identical details” where citizens once conversed and difference was acknowledged.

The problem with Starbucks is that “they seek out community,” the Reverend explains. Starbucks’ encroachment into small neighborhoods has been efficient and startling. There were no Starbucks in New York City in 1994. As of 2002, some 124 outlets have popped up on the island of Manhattan alone.[18] At the same time, the city has bulldozed countless community gardens and locked up countless sex clubs, both unique places where community members meet and share space. As New York becomes more welcoming to tourists, it becomes more like the shopping malls in the hometowns from which the tourists came. In response, the Rev. Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir have engaged in “retail interventions” in neighborhoods where the predatory Starbucks plans to open a new outlets.

Shortly before the Republican National Convention protests in New York City in August 2004, the Reverend even traveled to Barcelona to defend a small community there. He reflected on the trip:

God in heaven, we need a place like Barcelona on the earth…We were met at the airport by 60 laughing radicals who wanted to go straight to a Starbucks. We had to shake-and-bake a sermon just to get to baggage claim. “Our neighborhood is our body. And when our heart is cut out and a new heart is cut in, then our body accepts the new love muscle or throws a fit. CHILDREN, STARBUCKS HAS COME TO BARCELONA!! That is pre-emptively preposterous, we are outraged --but let us give the Green Mermaid With No Nipples the chance we would give a cut-in heart. Let’s find out if our neighborhood, our body, will accept this foreign object. What does the immune system think? Let’s have a test. LET US NOW EAT THE FAKE CAFÉ!! LET US TAKE IT INTO OUR BODY! LET US LICK IT!!”…And so we did. It was a breakthrough moment in our comic theology advancing toward us through a jet-lag fog; we knelt before the transnational corporate mermaid in the public square, as the mildly interested tourists and Bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians) watched us go native. We shouted LICK A LULIAH! LICK A LULIAH! LAM ER LULIAH (Espanola)--and rushed the stage [the store itself]. We licked everything, really everything, including the cappuccino spouts and latte sippers’ computers.[19]

While this playful spirit may seem irrelevant to social activism, it has inspired many actors to stay engaged.[20] Thus, the approach is worth briefly examining. The Rev. Billy project finds its inspiration in a number of sources, including an Emma Goldman, “if I can’t dance” type of ethos.[21] "I would believe only in a god who could dance,” Talen preaches, borrowing from Nietzsche.[22] This muse inspires his work. After all, Nietzsche writes, “I do not want to be pushed before moving along. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.”[23] The struggle is all about threats to neighborhood, the Reverend explains:

We are witnessing now the suburbanizing of New York City, in which America finally swallows it. Ascendant "developers" and transnational chain stores accomplished this, in their relentless destruction of our neighborhoods. But realize that New York City equals its neighborhoods....The deluded believe New York City is actually a gathering of elites: Wall Street, the Fashion District, Madison Avenue. We have co-existed with those elites for some time, but now they want 40-story condos in Williamsburg, gated communities along the East River, bulldozed community gardens in the Bronx, a 19-story corporate dorm where Charas Community Center once stood--if the elites assimilate our neighborhoods into an endless monoculture, then New York City will no longer be a voice of peace, a voice of tolerance, a voice of imagination. New York City cannot converse with the culture of the world if we allow its neighborhoods to die... New Yorkers yell at each other in the doorways of diners along 10th Avenue, the gossip makes them laugh in barbershops in Fort Greene. We live in the gardens and stoops and bars (with unlicensed dancing, even) and eccentric little shops and farmers' markets and basketball courts and the F Train on Saturday night--that scathing music is the real city...In that music, I see the flight Nietzsche wrote of. Public space hijackers oppose our flight...[24]

Emerging from this passion for authentic community democracy, opposition abounds. Recent successes cited by the Rev. and his Church of Stop Shopping include the victory by the citizens of Inglewood, 113,000 of whom recently voted to ban Wal-Mart from their neighborhood. Talen himself used his theatrical microphone to organize with neighborhood activists to successfully prevent the destruction of a New York landmark, the Poe House in Washington Square.[25] Yet for every step forward, there is a step backward.

In recent years, the Rev. has preached about the fate of the old PS 64, longtime home of Charas/El Bohio Community Center, which was sold off to a developer in 1996. Charas/El Bohio was a former public school building which functioned as a community center on 9th Street between Avenues B and C. Between its founding in 1979 and its takeover by the city of New York in January 2002, Charas offered affordable classes, studio space, tutoring services, after-school activities, a recycle-a-bike program, and meeting space for community groups.[26]

Charas’ origins can be found in the squatter movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Charas/El Bohio began when directors Armando Perez and Chino Garcia moved their group, Charas, into the then-abandoned school building in 1979. At the time, the building was in disrepair and functioning as a "shooting gallery" for heroin users. Charas rechristened the building "El Bohio" (the hut) and renovated the building with sweat equity. By 1982, their efforts were so successful that Community Board 3 recommended Charas be given a lease on the property. The New York Department of City Planning, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council all upheld this request. But in 1996, the building was sold to real estate developer Greg Singer for $1.71 million.[27] Resistance to the sale among community members continued over the ensuing years, until legal appeals finally ran out and the building was taken over by the city in January 2002.

In the years between the building’s sale and its final occupation by the developer, the space became a symbol of the hazards of neighborhood gentrification. In the days right before the city evicted community members from the space, the New York Reclaim the Streets (RTS) group passed out flyers asking: “DO YOU EVER WALK AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD AND NOT RECOGNIZE A Fxxxxxxx THING?”[28] Their broadsides continued:

It’s funny. There has been so much progress in the last decade that there is almost nowhere to go to organize a meeting, put on a play, or sit down without paying an entrance fee. In the days since September 11th, people all over the world have commented on the sense of common purpose, their appreciation for community of New Yorkers. So why is the city fighting to take away one of the bedrocks of the East Village community?[29]

In response to the eviction threat, RTS threw a street party to defend the space and called for activists to contact the mayor to push for help. Yet more than anything, the street party was a final moment to enjoy what Charas has meant to the community. The broadside described the coalition supporting Charas:

This rag-tag group of vagabonds, dot-comers, anarchists, newcomers, and old-school neighborhood hang-abouts is here to call for something simple: that we SAVE CHARAS. We’re here to dance, make noise, and create a bit of the carnival of community Charas has always inspired. RECLAIM THE STREETS AND SAVE OUR COMMUNITY CENTER![30]

A number of advocates suggested that the loss of Charas/El Bohio presented a useful example from which to learn. In order to succeed, the space might have benefited from an innovative community development partnership, which could have helped the project generate enough income pay for itself. Other groups, such as New York’s Housing Works (discussed in the first narrative below), have used such strategies to build spaces for regular people in their communities. (Still as of today, some four years after its eviction no new group has moved into Charas because of the continued community mobilization and the owner may be forced to sell the space.)

Still, while Charas is gone, many of the squats and community gardens that were also born of its spirit of community engagement remain.[31] They still exist, despite threats to the neighborhood, because organizers fought for them. A core theme runs throughout the four narratives that follow: When activists fight for something, they don’t always win. But if they do not fight, they do not stand a chance of winning. And quite often they do win if they put up a fight.

Gentrification, Neo liberalism and the Politics of Fear

Charas was a central part of the East Village of Manhattan, which stretches north from East Houston Street and eastward from Broadway toward 14^th Street. Since the late 1970s, this area has also been referred to as “Alphabet City,” due to its lettered avenues.[32] One description of the neighborhood always seems to remain constant: the East Village has become a model case of urban gentrification. The literature on the area’s history and gentrification is extensive.[33] While many of these studies concentrate on the loss of community sovereignty to market forces, corporate globalization, and gentrification, a few consider how competing groups of urban actors have successfully brokered compromises that allowed them to survive despite immense pressure from the corporate globalization. Take, for example, the Lower East Side Collective, a community coalition comprised of neighborhood gardeners, trade unionists, public space advocates, and a “Ministry of Love” to handle process issues and help people get involved, which successfully worked to thwart these trends. Before presenting their case, it is useful to situate the context of their struggle within the neo liberal, post-welfare urban landscape.

There is no denying that countless community spaces in New York’s East Village have been displaced by real estate pressures. Blackout Books on Avenue A was forced to move out of its storefront and relocate in the less accessible lobby of the Theater for a New City. The Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center on Avenue C was forced out of the East Village and into Chinatown when it could no longer afford the rents in the increasingly popular neighborhood. Further, queer sex spaces have been shut down and replaced. Writer and queer activist Jim Eigo explains: “I live in the East Village, an arty, mixed-race neighborhood with a large gay population. At the start of the campaign to sanitize the city, in 1995, the East Village boasted six commercial, explicitly sexual, gay male meeting places. By early 1999, none of these six sex spaces remained.”[34] The Crowbar, formerly located on East 10^th Street between Avenues A and B, was replaced by a hip, upscale bar. In many ways, the neighborhood’s sense of difference and “otherness” has been repackaged as a highly marketable and sanitized neighborhood, without many of its previous rough edges.[35]

Still, in many ways, the East Village has thrived as a somewhat anachronistic--perhaps even utopian--experience in community building in the midst of hostile market forces. The neighborhood continues to occasionally produce social relations and representational spaces of opposition, despite market pressures from corporate globalization, gentrification, the increase of hip cultural capital, and official dismay. While use values have found themselves at odds with the exchange values that can be realized in real estate throughout the East Village, the rules of community and collective consumption have occasionally sustained themselves despite the pressures of the rules of individual consumption, which turn urban spaces into commodities.[36],[37],[38],[39] Such a politics of community occasionally thwarts the politics of fear and panic propelling the logic of primitive globalization and the “Revanchist City.”[40]

“This is a free market economy: welcome to the era after communism,” Mayor Rudy Giuliani taunted after announcing plans to sell off dozens of Lower East Side community gardens in 1999.[41] In response, community members cried foul, noting that there was a cost to the mayor’s policies. With his election as mayor of New York in 1993, Giuliani initiated a series of efforts to “improve the city” and enforce “quality of life” policies that facilitated middle-class renewal of mixed-income neighborhoods such as the East Village.

The mayor’s efforts were largely a response to the politics of fear, which had overwhelmed the ways New Yorkers viewed public space during the early 1990s.[42]Within this context, the mayor skillfully played on this feeling to deploy a classic series of narratives of moral panic related to mugging, race, and sex to justify hitherto unacceptable encroachments into public space in the name of redevelopment.[43]^,[44]^,[45]^,[46] Giuliani’s tactical manipulation of social anxieties was consistent with a dominant theme of urban political thinking. As geographer Neil Smith explains: “In the 1990s an unabated litany of crime and violence, drugs and unemployment, immigration and depravity--all laced through with terror--now scripts an unabashed revanchism of the city.”[47] In regards to “revanchism,” Smith explains:

More than anything the revanchist city expresses a race/class/gender terror felt by middle- and ruling-class whites who are suddenly stuck in place by a ravaged property market, the threat and reality of unemployment, the decimation of social services, and the emergence of minority and immigrant groups, as well as women as powerful urban actors. It portends a vicious reaction against minorities, the working class, homeless people, the unemployed, women, gays and lesbians, immigrants.[48]

Giuliani’s New York and an Attack on Difference

This politics of fear found its genesis in New York City’s fiscal crisis of the mid 1970s. Narratives of decline were easily manipulated into a politics of blame and resentment of those who utilized public assistance.[49] As Sites explains: “[B]lame tended to resurrect time-honored themes in U.S. politics--the unworthy and dependent poor, the misguided generosity of social reformers, the unreasonable demands of racial minorities, the irresponsibility of free-spending politicians.”[50] These themes would become the cornerstone of the Reagan Revolution. By 1993, Mayor Giuliani skillfully played on the politics of “revenge as an antidote to insecure identities.”[51] He rode this resentment of the homeless, those on public assistance, and social outsiders to victory. Over the next eight years, he played on a “prurience” of decay of public spaces, stirring anxieties about urban decline to justify shifting public resources away from services for the socially vulnerable and toward urban policing.[52]

Giuliani's New York is one of disrespect for those groups mediating between his new authoritarian state and civil society. Housing Works, an ACT UP-NY affinity group that evolved into an organization which provides housing for low-income people with HIV/AIDS, had to sue the city for the right to hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall. The group planned to protest the city's neglect of a local law (Local Law 49) that provided services to people with HIV/AIDS. Housing Works won the right to exercise a basic principle of Madisonian democracy only after a long legal battle. Mayor Giuliani, who had no problems with Yankee World Series victory rallies at City Hall, appeared to favor the space being available for less controversial groups than those who advocated for services for poor people.[53] Rather than acknowledge these different perspectives, the mayor advanced a narrative of decline.[54]

Discourses of decline resulted in calls for criminalization rather than service provision and public welfare. And a profound shift unfolded. The welfare state shrank while policing increased. This is not to say the need for welfare services decreased. Instead of health care or welfare reform bills supported by social service advocates, 1994 witnessed the passage of a federal crime bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, followed by the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. As Clinton-era budgetary surpluses were spent and the War on Terror took hold, the journey from welfare state to warfare state found its fruition. Along the road, social policies increasingly favored renewed government control of public spaces in an effort to generate support for their redevelopment.[55]

 At the same time, services for poor people fell out of favor. Giuliani asserted that he would like to end welfare by the year 2000.[56] He argued that it would take about 150,000 new jobs to clear the welfare rolls of their 763,000 recipients. Yet state-wide data on welfare reform suggested that only 29 percent of those who had left the welfare rolls in New York state had found work. Other data was withheld from the public by the mayor. The New York Times had to sue the city to get further evaluation data, and they still do not have all of this material.[57]

In Urban Fortunes: the Political Economy of Place, James Logan and Harvey Molotch note, “The nature of the growth machine, including its tactics, organization, and effects on local populations, has been little investigated by students of community power.”[58] Under the conditions of a neo liberal, neoclassical approach to growth, Logan and Molotch argue, “The only actors who matter, if any actors matter at all, are the corporate capitalists, whose control of the means of production appears to make them, for all practical purposes, invincible.”[59] While proponents such as Giuliani suggest that a pro-growth regime should not be augmented or inhibited, others counter that such a strategy actually “organizes inequalities among jurisdictions and their residents.”[60]

Mayor Giuliani adopted a pro-growth approach, running New York in a way that improved the city’s image as well as its property values. He proposed wiping signs of “decline”--including squats and community gardens--off the streets and out of the neighborhoods.[61] The underside of the “quality of life” campaign was increased police brutality, social control, and the “blandification” of urban space. Recent histories of police violence in New York City devote considerable attention to Giuliani’s aggressive policing approach aimed at countless elements of urban life.[62] The litany of complaints is not short, yet the mayor’s pro-growth and social control model of urban governance is being emulated across the country--most recently in Los Angeles--and even in Mexico City.[63]

A History of Opposition

Nevertheless, there remained significant opposition to these forces. As Logan and Molotch note, “Much of our work tries to show how much activism is a force in cities.”[64] A subtext of this essay is the competing narratives involved in the struggle over urban public space in New York City during the “quality of life” years. Despite its inherent contradictions and inequities, the city remains a place of countless possibilities. When Mayor Giuliani’s draconian policy toward broken windows and zero tolerance policing resulted in 99 bullets in the body of unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, the incident united New Yorkers in protests opposing this aggressive approach.[65]

On a neighborhood level, the East Village remains a place where numerous  actors have successfully thwarted elements of the growth machine, even when they have been cloaked within the politics of fear. Despite increasing rents and social inequality, community activists have created counter narratives to the “quality of life” crusade. To do this, they worked to established compelling and workable alternative strategies which preserved public spaces, livable working conditions, and even a few squats among other models of affordable housing in the East Village.

In The New Urban Frontier, Smith points out that cities as diverse as Hamburg, Amsterdam, and New York have all had contemporary squatting movements. Squatters maintain a distinct image in the popular imagination, both in New York and internationally. The East Village squatters have been the subject of a number of academic treatments.[66] Although different writers date them back to different times, it is generally accepted that New York City’s squats began in the 1960s. To introduce his subject, Andrew Van Kleunen quotes from a 1990-1991 statement from the Lower East Side squatter community, of which the East Village is a significant enclave. “We are young and old, black and white, Latino and Asian…We are people of the Lower East Side. The majority of us are low-income people. We can no longer afford the skyrocketing rents in our own neighborhood.”[67]

There is a philosophical point inherent in the East Village squatter scene: for this movement, housing is an essential human right. Additionally, squatters are associated with the counterculture, youth subculture, punk rock, deep ecology, anarchism, and the philosophical approach to praxis understood as do –it –yourself (or DIY) culture. For the squatters, the gentrification of the East Village was about more than real estate, it was about a state-sponsored strategy to establish forms of social control over poor people and people of color and counterculture youth.[68] Thus, the Lower East Side squatter statement elaborates, “[W]e have taken charge of an this important area of our lives: housing.” To this end, squatters moved into vacant, unused buildings. “Through our resources and creativity we are rebuilding structures left abandoned by the city for years.”[69] In one battle with the police, the city actually brought in a tank to evict the determined squatters, who were willing to be arrested to defend their homes and their ideal of a human right to housing. In 1994, some 500 people lived in 20 squats in the Lower East Side.[70] After years of highly publicized battles with the city, the remaining squat in the East Village were finally granted permanent status in 2002 after the Bloomberg administration brokered a deal with the squatters.[71]

Despite such successes, critics such as Sites contend that activism in the Lower East Side basically ended after 1989. “The dramatic confrontations in Tompkins Square Park also reemerge in a new light: no longer the culmination of a movement, they are symptoms of its endgame.”[72] As this introductory essay suggests, this assertion is suspect. The squatter struggle--which set the stage for these activists to get to the table to cut a deal with Bloomberg Administration some 14 years later[73]--must be viewed as a success for community mobilization. This was not the only success during these years. The David Dinkins and Giuliani years witnessed the emergence of Housing Works.. This, too, was not an isolated example. For many, the Giuliani years presented community members with a compelling imperative to act.

The Lower East Side Collective

A primary example of activist engagement that found its inspiration in the regressive policies of the Giuliani years was the Lower East Side Collective (LESC). LESC was born in 1997. An advertisement for one of the group’s "Radical Love" benefit dance party in 1999 describes the group, “LESC is an activist group based on the Lower East Side. We have been fighting for community gardens, defending community arts centers, disrupting City auctions, organizing immigrant workers, unfurling guerrilla billboards, jamming phones and faxes, demanding affordable housing, sponsoring poetry readings, holding fabulous parties, working for real "quality of life" in the Lower East Side, and generally making life miserable for landlords, bureaucrats and developers since 1997.”  The flyer ends with an invitation to a new sort of political ethos, “Come celebrate the neighborhood's vibrant political culture with some of its most unruly elements.’  For years since the legendary Tompkins Square Park police riot in 1989, people had suggested that the battle against gentrification in the Lower East Side was lost. Yet for others, the long history and culture of activism in the Lower East Side presented an opportunity. Many--including the daughter of one of the organizers from the Motherfuckers, the Lower East Side chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--borrowed from this history, carefully picking and choosing elements to embrace and others to reject.

One observer described the Motherfuckers as “a street gang with an analysis.”[74] Allen Ginsberg considered them as pleasure advocates, activists, and “’[p]rofessional revolutionaries’ totally dedicated to social activity and community work.”[75] LESC worked from a similar ethos. The group was a convergence of students, teachers, organizers, and newcomers who came to activism with a new, pragmatic approach, carefully picking and choosing their battles. It aspired to be an effective, playful collective of multiple affinity groups with both a strategy and an analysis. While many of the issues the group addressed had a long history of struggle on the Lower East Side--fair wages, critiques of consumerism, police accountability, etc.--the group embraced a new ethos of activism, rejecting the dourness and culture of competing oppressions that characterized the declining old-style activism. Radical street performance, block parties, barbeques, and picnics were as much a part of the group’s attitude toward community building as demonstrations. LESC projects included a community and labor coalition, a police and prisons project, a public space/gardens/housing group, an environmental justice group, and Reclaim the Streets.

A number of activists came to LESC after years of work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)--or groups, like WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) and the Lesbian Avengers, that were heavily influenced by ACT UP--and a desire to translate those skills into neighborhood organizing. LESC members consciously sought to emphasize activist work and praxis over long discussions about philosophy or ideology. Every three weeks, the project groups would meet to present their work in five minutes or less. As result LESC--and by extension Lower East Side activism in general--was infused with an immediacy that focused attention on projects, not personalities. Ideas, tactics, strategies, and themes intermingled at each meeting, forcing activists to grapple with how their issues overlapped and how they could share resources. Along the road, the group was able to articulate what protest and community building were for as much as what they were against: green space, affordable housing, a dynamic mix of cultures, living wages, and public space.

A cornerstone of LESC’s work was the linkage of apparently unrelated issues, such as labor and public space. Project members from the LESC Community Labor Coalition worked successfully with members of its public space groups to defend community gardens, successfully winning concessions from Mayor Giuliani in the spring of 1999. The public space activists, in turn, supported the Community Labor Coalition’s work on behalf immigrant greengrocer workers, who labored in the delis found throughout the neighborhood, their pay often far below the minimum wage. In many ways, these immigrant workers were the product of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had pushed laborers and farmers out of heir historic workplaces and farms in Mexico and into the dire conditions of New York City sweatshops. Pro-labor and pro-environmental chants--“no more green sweatshops” and “no justice no peas”--rang out through the air during the 1999 May Day immigrant’s rights march, in which both laborers and community gardeners participated. Over the next two years, the Community Labor Coalition only increased in strength, derived from its close association with other elements of community activism.

By May Day 2001, members of a number of LESC project groups, including RTS, community gardeners, and other activists within the still burgeoning global justice movement, converged with members of the Community Labor Coalition and other workers and immigrants demanding higher wages and dignity on the job. Street performers from RTS and the Community Labor Coalition staged street theater performances of wrestling matches between Super Barrio Man, a cartoon character based on a Mexican folk hero, versus Union Busters Large and Small. Super Barrio Man was played by the campaign’s lead organizer. The groups took the matches and the May Day march to the front of a number of the greengrocery stores where workers were being paid sweatshop wages, thus highlighting the plight of the workers and the campaign in a unique, edgy fashion. In doing so, the organizers brought the case to the attention of the state attorney general.

The day after the May 2001 protests and the wrestling matches, New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer filed claims against four grocers for all back wages due to employees, who were being paid an average of $2.60 an hour. The win was a direct result of the work of union organizers, workers, and community residents who had waged a tireless campaign, which included organizing new workers, community pickets, and street battles against employers willing to oppress workers. As a result, the working conditions at a majority of the New York greengrocers vastly improved. The greengrocer campaign was an example of a politics that successfully embodied the demands of the global justice movement for citizens to think about the local implications of neo liberal global trade polices.[76]

A Revitalization of Activism

While it is certainly possible to suggest that displacement has robbed the Lower East Side of its character and that all that was unique about the neighborhood is lost, globalization has also spawned a revitalized mode of activist engagement. The second of the four narratives below details the struggles of activists to make sense of this process, despite the many wrenching losses. Globalization, like modernity itself, is pregnant with contradictions and new approaches to activism. As some activists have been priced out of the physical area of the Lower East Side, the culturally engaged activist community has created the notion of a “Greater Lower East Side” that stretches frrm Chinatown to Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City, and anywhere activists can take trains to make community meetings.

Sites theorizes that, “cities no longer produce successful movements because, in today’s globalized “space of flows,” places no longer serve as a basis for social power.”[77] Here, the author fails to acknowledge the expanding and complex literature on Lower East Side activism, which addresses the challenges of globalization head on while advancing models of successful campaigns which make use of culture and unique coalitions to create wins in areas ranging from green space to labor rights for immigrant workers.[78] Indeed, what has emerged in the last decade is a Lower East Side activism that has successfully linked its demands within those of the global justice movement.[79]^,[80] While Sites suggests that “the community mobilization in the Lower East Side represents an unsurprising failure,” others would counter that the community organizing propelled by the Coalition for a District Alternative, the Margarita Lopez Campaign, LESC, the Community Labor Coalition, and harm reduction programs spawned by ACT UP)--which substantially decreased the rate of HIV infection among injection drug users substantially--represent real victories. In recent years, the literature on the theoretical, aesthetic, and practical contributions of urban activism, much of it propelled by New York activists, has only increased.[81],[82],[83],[84] As the Narratives which follow suggest, this literature presents best practice case studies on fighting neo liberal social and economic policies manifest on the local level. A major recent example is the successful campaigns to preserve the community gardens in New York City addressed in Part Four.

Community Gardens and Healthy Neighborhoods

Community gardens are sites that once were vacant lots, often full of litter, that have been transformed into green spaces for plants, vegetables, and safe open urban space.  The final narrative, the More Gardens Coalition, offers an expanded discussion of this best practice approach to activism against gentrification.  Having lost the element of surprise that propelled the global justice movement’s early convergence actions, neighborhood struggles over spaces such as urban gardens, waterfronts, and big-box stores represent a primary target for fruitful activist engagement. As the “Four Narratives” suggests, when neighborhoods are threatened, citizens have successfully responded.[85]

The notion of being able to imagine a better world and then strive to create it has been a cornerstone of this organizing approach.  Ron Hayduk, a member of the Lower East Side Collective from the beginning, explains:

The interconnections of the inside outside strategy is where the action is at.  If you want the Utopian ends, you gotta find the means that works and that's the inside outside.  You gotta start here, where the people are at.  That's where the play comes in.... Its where you can engage people.  You got 'em in...  You gotta be willing to see where they are at. Its an experience of learning how do you play.  Part of the fun is the dance.  You aren’t going to go anywhere unless you try to imagine it....You gotta have a positive vision of a utopian future so we can try to create it.” 

Of course, there are downsides and limits to such thinking.[86]  Yet, Hayduck continues,

If the Civil Rights folks had listened to those who said, ‘you can’t overthrow Jim Crow,’ history would be far different.  Same thing with Apartheid.  If they didn’t imagine another world, they would have given up to the nay sayers.... If they hadn’t imagined a positive alternative vision and believed it and worked for it and made trouble for it, the world would be a different place.  Its the bridging of the inside/outside strategy. If you hadn’t heard of Ella Baker you wouldn’t have heard of MLK.  All those local activists made it happen, bridging the local to the global. 

Janet Abu-Lughod said globalization is the big problem and the Lower East Side is lost and we’re defeated.  LESC started from a perspective  that globalization exists.  And low and behold, they won some things – the gardens, the community labor coalition, the squats – despite the nay sayers.  If people had believed the naysayers – Sites and Abu-Lughod, you couldn’t have had those wins. 

In the months after September 11th--as conservatives and liberals alike heralded its death--a number of activists suggested that neighborhood activism could be most effective next wave for the “movement of movements” described as the global justice movement.[87]  In 2002, activists held a book release party for The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization. One of the volume’s editors, movement theorist and bard Eddie Yuen, argued that local community organizing--not the Seattle-style mass protests--remained the most effective approach towards reaching the movement’s aims.[88] Translating the goals of the global justice movement into local struggles, such as the community-labor alliances described above or the fight for housing discussed below, thus becomes a central challenge for those involved in this movement of movements.

Conclusion

In June 1872, Frederick Engels published the first in a series of essays he titled, “The Housing Question.” In these essays, Engels suggested that short-term reforms aimed at providing immediate relief were no substitute for a radical revolutionary class politics. He summed up this argument in his final segment published in February 1873 "[I]t is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible."[89] For many, the purist argument presented in “The Housing Question” was a low point for Engels’ work.

Unfortunately, many contemporary critics of corporate globalization make a similar argument.[90] So do those who rehash the “Golden Era” narrative of U.S. activism, which suggests that everything happened in the 1930s and the 1960s, after which activism effectively ended. “Following the 1960s, when mobilizations in cities had successful impacts on social perception and public policy,” Sites explains, “urban-based activism seemed to become more attenuated and diffuse.”[91] Yet reading accounts of the urban activism of the 1960s, it is difficult to suggest that the Mobilization for Youth projects--on the Lower East Side or nationally--represented any sort of halcyon days.[92]^,[93] On the contrary, one could argue that these programs’ use of federal funds to protest against funders created a backlash that prevented future generations from enjoying federal support for local community organizing. In the years since, organizers have worked without such funds. And despite facing a better-funded opposition and numerous setbacks, these activists have continued to broker deals and compromises that continue to make cities livable.

Today, local community organizers continue to compile research, provide data, preach, scream, pressure targets, and use direct action to communicate their messages to the multiple policy bodies necessary to create change. Without this community involvement, globalization from above will only become more pronounced.[94] If future studies of the social and economic impacts of corporate globalization are to do more than identify a problem with which most are already familiar, they must consider the “best practices” of opposition to this growth machine. Perhaps “Four Narratives” amounts to a small snapshot of just what effective urban-based activism can look and feel like.

Part I -- Notes on Housing Works: From Welfare Rights to Welfare Reform, and a Poor People with AIDS Movement

An Overview

Through the 1960s and 1970s, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) pushed for a different kind of public welfare system, one that no longer stigmatized people receiving public assistance. They did this through a strategy that began with fierce legal advocacy and ended with a wide range of disruptive tactics, including direct action. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Housing Works--the nation’s most militant AIDS service organization--again pushed for a different kind of public welfare, and for a consciousness about the lives of homeless people with HIV/AIDS whose diagnoses were complicated by histories of chemical dependence and mental illness.

Like NWRO, Housing Works utilized a strategy that began with fierce legal advocacy and ended with a wide range of disruptive tactics. Both organizations struggled with a dwindling welfare state, a conservative backlash, and questions about the difficulties of reconciling service provision with advocacy. Eight years after its formation, the NWRO met its demise. Fifteen years after its formation, Housing Works reached a budget of over $41 million dollars. The following case study considers the life, times, and survival strategy of Housing Works, and its relationship to a reluctant welfare state.

From Welfare Rights to Welfare Reform

Some words about the course of NWRO and the backlash it engendered are useful to situate the study of Housing Works. The final chapter of Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s (1977) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How they Fail offers a narrative history of the Welfare Rights Movement and the National Welfare Rights Organization.[95] The movement advanced a number of goals: to challenge the stigma of public assistance, to force governments to implement laws, and to increase the number of public assistance recipients to the point where the old public assistance system would collapse and be replaced with a guaranteed income for all citizens. Within the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the national War on Poverty, organizers demanded services and pushed for legal relief for poor people, even if they offended political leaders.[96]

The roots of the NWRO in New York City can be located in the Mobilization for Youth (MFY), an unconventional program run by organizers with Henry Street Settlement. Rather than focusing on delinquency or other aspects of social “pathology,” MFY organizers suggested that major issues facing their clients included poverty and the lack of benefits.[97] Thus, like many in the New Left, MFY recognized a patter of oppression overlapping from to poverty to race to American public policy.[98] For the leadership involved with MFY, the aim was to create a different, less punitive type of public assistance and a form of organizing based on democratic principles.

For Cloward, Piven, and the leadership in the NWRO, the aim was to expose a gap between welfare law and practice, which would stimulate a crisis in the current welfare system. Many in NWRO hoped this crisis would bring about an end to the current stigmatizing system that defined clients as “worthy” or “unworthy,” and replace it with a model designed around guaranteed income. To do this, NWRO organizers informed the poor of their right to public assistance, encouraged them to apply for services they were entitled to, and urged them to use legal means to sue if the system failed them. The overarching aim was to overwhelm the current system and replace it with something more humane.[99]

By building on the social unrest of the era, the organization ushered in a new chapter of aggressive community organizing among social workers and people on public assistance. Rather than shy away from confrontation, NRWO organizers used every tool at their disposal--from legal tactics to organizing the poor to protest the policies and practices of local public assistance centers. Organizing efforts challenged social inequality, economic injustice, and the stigma of poverty with direct action by advocates and public assistant recipients themselves.[100] For example, NWRO organizers in Boston arranged sit-ins at the Welfare Department offices in 1967. When the police beat the demonstrators, rather than quiet down they screamed even louder. Their cries could be heard through the streets of the surrounding neighborhood. Riots followed the demonstration. The attitude of those on public assistance shifted as well. No longer humble or apologetic, those applying for benefits became angrier and more confident. Inhibitions against applying for relief ended as the NWRO pushed to flood the system. And with each new riot, seeds of a movement aimed at economic justice came to fruition. By engaging in defiant acts of disruptive action, public assistance recipients became keenly aware that they could create a fiscal and political crisis. For many recipients, just being able to assert themselves was an amazingly appealing feeling.[101] As Piven and Cloward recall: “The early meetings were like rallies, full of indignation and full of joy that the occasion had finally come for the people to rise up against the source of their indignation.”[102]

While the Civil Rights Movement had achieved administrative remedies for segregation with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, relief for deeply entrenched forms of poverty was not as forthcoming. Thus, in late 1968 and 1969, NWRO members launched a campaign for a “right to welfare.” To kick off the campaign, members organized a Poor People’s March on Washington. Coming shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and Richard Nixon had been elected president, few recall the campaign as a success.[103] While many progressives appreciated the goals advanced by NWRO, they worried about the tactics. Others were uncomfortable with the leadership of low-income people, especially minority women. While self-determination was fine in theory, the practice of community action programs in the 1960s felt very different. Mismanagement of funds, the approach to challenging those who funded their programs, and most of all a new sense of welfare entitlement, fueled resentment of the movement among conservatives.[104] The very idea of “welfare rights” would enrage conservatives of a future generation.[105] The result was a broad backlash and a hard line on controlling benefits.[106]

Nixon’s election in 1969 was followed by the first rounds of a discussion about controlling welfare and welfare reform. By 1973, the NWRO collapsed. Welfare benefits began to lose their value with inflation. The subsequent Reagan/Bush era produced a more punitive approach to benefits and a 50% drop in purchasing power from 1970 to 1997. The welfare protests helped cultivate a feeling of antipathy toward social programs among conservatives and a frustration with the limitations of the system among liberals. This combination ultimately produced the racialized anti-welfare climate that helped bring about the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which gutted the system without producing any of the safeguards or the safety net Piven and Cloward had hoped would emerge with a guaranteed income in the 1960s.[107]

From Welfare Reform to Ryan White

While the backlash against welfare was reaching its culmination in the mid-1990s, a different set of policy approaches emerged in response to the growing AIDS epidemic. From the earliest days of the pandemic in the U.S., the AIDS crisis has interwoven itself in the troubled web of poverty in America. Throughout these years, the AIDS epidemic threatened many of the same socially vulnerable populations that had organized with and benefited from the work of the NWRO. By the mid 1980s, for example, some 25 percent of people with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. were African American, and an estimated 57 percent of all children with HIV/AIDS were black.[108] The responses to this policy landscape were equally complex.[109] But the struggles and challenges were not unlike those faced by the NWRO.

Yet while the politics were similar, the results were strikingly different. HIV/AIDS policy and the politics of AIDS have always been loaded with double meanings. While many features of HIV/AIDS policy in the U.S. are unique, public policy created to address the epidemic cannot be understood without considering larger social and economic trends as they influence the allocation of resources, budgets, and public administration. Much of U.S. HIV/AIDS policy has been guided by the notion that people with AIDS face “exceptional” circumstances and should be treated outside the traditional public health approach to the outbreak of disease.[110] Even in the most politically conservative of times, AIDS activists made headway while other interest groups experienced cuts. For example, the budget for the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, which provides funds for AIDS-related services in the U.S., has expanded almost tenfold—from $220 million to $1.9 billion—through three presidential administrations and despite power shifts in Congress over a decade and a half.[111] By 1996--the year Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was “reformed” (meaning guarantees of assistance for poor families were reduced), thereby radically transforming the American social safety net--the Ryan White CARE Act was reauthorized with increased funding.

Still, HIV/AIDS policy in the U.S. has never been beyond the influence of larger policy trends involving the privatization of social welfare services, expanding income inequality, the lack of nationalized health care, dwindling Social Security provisions, an affordable housing crisis, and the disproportionate incarceration of people of color and poor people. Not unlike the old “poor law” approach to charity work and social welfare provision, HIV/AIDS policy is still enacted with a moralizing approach aimed at social control rather than addressing or alleviating conditions of poverty--such as lack of housing and inadequate health care--experienced by low-income people.[112]

A Different Approach

A prime mover for much of the safety net for people with HIV/AIDS in New York City was Keith Cylar, the co-founder of Housing Works, a New York-based AIDS service organization. As an AIDS activist, Cylar effectively pushed for the development of federal legislation to create and fund HIV/AIDS service programs, including the Ryan White CARE Act, Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA), and HIV-related chemical dependence and mental health services within a framework described as harm reduction. With Housing Works, Cylar pushed for advances in state and local HIV/AIDS policies and funding.[113]

In an interview before his death in 2004, Cylar described the Housing Works approach to advocacy around public welfare services in light of the shifting contours of a shrinking welfare state.

Well, I actually hate the words ‘welfare reform,’ because when you say welfare reform, again you are talking about individuals’ process of reclaiming their lives,” he said. “They didn’t want to be on welfare, they wanted the same things people like you want. They wanted a roof over their heads. They wanted to take care of their children. They wanted to be happy. I mean, we all want that. I hate the term ‘welfare reform.’ It isn’t about reforming welfare--its about creating opportunities for people to reclaim their lives. And welfare reform is baggage. It has such connotations about welfare recipients that people then lose who they are.[114]

Cylar also described his approach to doing antipoverty work:

First of all, the number one rule is that an individual has to have a stable place to live. And if you have a stable place to live and you have food and you have safety--the basics of Maslow’s theory--if you have those components first, then you can start working on issues of education; you can start working on employment; you can start working on spirituality; you can start working on all those other issues that may lead to a decrease in negative behaviors that those people may manifest. Self-destructive behaviors--you can start labeling them all sorts of things, right? But we’re talking about creating a safe space for people to change and to grow. And every opportunity is a chance to grow either towards the light or towards the dark. That’s kind of the classic way that people like to look at life in this world.

So when you’re talking about welfare reform or you’re talking about poverty, or whatever you want to call it, then you are talking about creating opportunities for people to enter into mainstream society and become employed and be able to manage an apartment and to be able to have the life skills to function. But the deck is stacked against them because they are black, they are poor, they may not know how to read. They may have come out of abusive family backgrounds with sexual abuse going on; they may never have had an opportunity to sit at a dinner table and eat in what most people would consider a normal fashion. And so when you talk about reform, you are talking about having to start off at very basic levels and move up over a long period of time to allow those people to gain skills that they may never have had or never have had a chance to get. But hey, that’s where we started. We started, literally, in terms of a psychotherapeutic process, at square one--which was to give people a house.

Housing Works as a New Type of Anti-Poverty Organization

Building on the legacy of aggressive HIV/AIDS advocacy advanced by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash (ACT UP), the community-building spirit of the Settlement Houses, and the community economic development movement, Housing Works imagined itself as a different type of anti-poverty organization.[115] The organization’s mission is to reach the most vulnerable and underserved among those affected by the AIDS epidemic in New York City—homeless people of color whose HIV diagnoses are complicated by a history of chronic mental illness and/or chemical dependence. In the years since it was founded in 1990, Housing Works has had to balance between being a social service organization and a social movement organization. Through programs such as the Second Life Job Training Program, Social Ventures Development Program, and primary care clinics, Housing Works utilizes the tools of community economic development to open up spaces for an often-invisible population. As the group’s literature notes, “The Social Ventures Development Program includes several entrepreneurial ventures which were created to meet two critical challenges facing most AIDS service and anti-poverty organizations: the need to generate unrestricted income for our social service programs and the need to create employment opportunities for clients who wish to enter or re-enter the workforce.”[116]Still despite its development role, the agency was founded within the tradition of activism.[117]

In The Trend of Social Movements in America (1973), John McCarthy and Mayer Zald suggested that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, professional advocates had become effective agents for translating the political claims of ordinary people into political advances. Their challenge was to serve as mediators between movements and elites, constituents and resources, policy targets and policy-makers.[118] The task was no different for the combination of professional and grassroots advocates involved in organizing with Housing Works. In asserting that social movements and movement organizations are rational, goal-oriented, and organized rather than impulsive and merely spontaneous, theorists have come to describe McCarthy and Zald’s framework as part of the “resource rationalist” school of thought. This line of thinking asserts that organizing succeeds or fails depending on connections to resources and political opportunities.

It is easy to describe Housing Works’ organizing within a resource rationalist framework, yet there is much more to its work. By addressing the group solidarity of mostly homeless low-income people of color and linking their needs with those of other stigmatized groups, such as injection drug users, transgender people, and promiscuous queers, Housing Works also advanced a cultural agenda with their often colorful, flamboyant actions and view that everyone – regardless of their lifestyle – still deserves a place for shelter, a place to call their own. Thus, Housing Works also recognized the importance of a messy, queer sort of collective identity among its clients and the movements in which they operated. [119]  By acknowledging the emotional and expressive needs of social actors, Housing Works helped those it organized create meaning in their lives through community building, creative direct action, housing, work, and other often joyous pursuit of happiness and democratic political engagement. Housing works did this by recognizing the importance of play, pleasure, and culture, as well as the need to advance a political agenda through the calculated mobilization of resources. In this respect, the group fails to fit completely into either a resource rationalist or a cultural approach to social movement organization.[120]

In contrast to Piven and Cloward’s view that professionalization and organizational development undermine acts of group solidarity and advocacy, Housing Works strived to maintain its position as a radical advocacy organization that combines activism and services--despite the conventional view that this combination is not sustainable.[121] Piven and Cloward argue that, “it is not possible to compel concessions from elites that can be used as resources to sustain oppositional organizations over time.”[122] Yet Housing Works bucked this belief, aggressively and successfully attacking government, bureaucracies, and even agencies that provided funds for the organization. And it survived and thrived despite these attacks.[123] Notwithstanding these pressures, Housing Works “stayed the course,” an approach which is known to provide advantages for the organizational survival of women’s and ethnically-based social movement organizations.[124] By focusing on organizing and advocacy while using tools of community economic development to take control of its own resources, Housing Works provided support for a newer trend in social movement research, which suggests that radical beliefts are often quite consistent with professionalization in activism and service provision.[125] The group made use of a wide range of tools, including research, aggressive legal and service advocacy, direct action, street theatrics, and media savvy to successfully demand services for the most socially vulnerable populations.  Thus the group made use of a wide array of both professional and street based  ‘tools’ to steak a very, very radical claim that active drug users, sex workers, and unglamorous homeless people all deserved a place to sleep and eat, as well as the right to earn a paycheck. 

Perhaps the most useful means of assessing an organization’s existence over its life course is through the case study.[126] Thus, the following report functions as a case study of the life, struggles and survival strategies of Housing Works.

Housing Works and the History of AIDS Advocacy

To fully situate Housing Works’ place in the history of public welfare policy, it is useful to briefly consider the evolution of HIV/AIDS policy and advocacy. This evolution can be divided into three phases: (1) community organizing and mobilization during the late 1980s; (2) treatment and legislative breakthroughs through the mid 1990s; and (3) the imposition of social control following the treatment advances of the late 1990s. Yet, these phases overlap with varying degrees in differing places.

Social control is imposed in differing manners with differing ranges of severity in different municipalities.  Stillas the mobilization of the late 1980s and early 1990s shifted with legislative and treatment breakthroughs--due to the advent of protease inhibitors and highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART)--both the issues and the methods of fighting the epidemic changed.[127] Throughout the years strategies toward appropriate HIV prevention have included tensions between social control and harm reduction approaches which incorporate the complexity of people’s lives and needs, rather than simple slogans.[128]  Yet, over and over again panic has accompanied the sexual presence of people with HIV/AIDS, in much the same way that panic is a part of the history of lynching and race relations in the US.[129] Activists have attempted to fight these panics over public sex and queer sexuality with differing degrees of success.[130]  Since the turn of century, many AIDS activists have focused on global instead of domestic AIDS (as the face of HIV in the US. becomes increasingly poor, of color, and female.  Housing Works’ national leadership is a notable exception).   Instead, global AIDS is where the most aggressive advocacy (as well as the liberal ‘feel good’ activism is now directed).[131]  Yet, with the differing demographics of HIV in the US, consensus about the exceptional nature of AIDS has dwindled, much of HIV/AIDS policy has shifted from tolerance to coercive approaches.[132]  The following discussion helps situate Housing Works within the larger trajectory of HIV/AIDS public policy and service provision.

Initial Phases of AIDS Activism

The first phase of the response to HIV/AIDS involved community organizing, mobilization, and the establishment of a network of service providers to help those getting sick—primarily gay men in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Along with gay men, those at highest risk for HIV/AIDS included socially vulnerable populations such as Haitian immigrants, injection drug users, sex workers, and low-income people of color. Because of the marginalization of these populations, organizing around the epidemic took on an inherently ideological character. This organizing emerged in part as a response to the ongoing backlash against the gains of the gay liberation years of the 1970s, which AIDS threatened to wipe out. Just three years before the first reports of the disease appeared in 1981, queers had effectively beaten back antigay campaigns by Anita Bryant and John Briggs, as well as a national movement by the Christian Right to repeal recently passed gay rights laws. Throughout the early to mid-1980’s gay groups fought what they recognized was revitalization by the Christian Right and their conservative view of homosexuality.  The Christian Right sought a discursive link between HIV/AIDS and punishment for queer sexuality.  In response, gay activists started to create the first programs and services for people with HIV/AIDS as well as flight the Reagan/Jesse Helms right wing onslaught.[133]

Service Provision as AIDS Activism

The first AIDS service organizations (ASOs)—the San Francisco Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation (later renamed the San Francisco AIDS Foundation) and Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York City—were born of this grassroots organizing and the concurrent contraction of the gay liberation movement. Gay liberationists had struggled throughout the 1960s and 1970s to end homophobia, not to build organizations to fight it. Both impulses can be seen in the dual missions of the early ASOs: to end the AIDS epidemic and to build organizations to better serve those infected and affected by the disease. Many ASOs struggled to function as quasi-social movement organizations, pursing the broader goal of social change through the delivery of services. ASOs, like all social movement organizations, had to contend with inherent competing ideological pressures. Their social-movement orientation was sustained by values and an emphasis on social change, while their agency orientation focused on caring for those in need of services with minimal resources. All the while, those involved fought to gain increased government funding on the local, state, and national levels.[134]As such, ASOs had to contend with the challenge of blending their movement emphasis with their agency orientation, which depended on a detente with the powers that be.[135]

Not only did the early AIDS movement have to demand resources, but it also had to contend with the stigma and fear of HIV/AIDS.  Thus, AIDS activists had to fend off repressive social control measures, such as quarantines and mandatory testing and names reporting.  AIDS activists succeeded in creating policies based on notions of AIDS exceptionalism, which assumed that HIV must not be treated like other communicable diseases.[136]  Thus, community organizing and advocacy have always been essential components in the struggle to define, make sense of, and create appropriate responses for HIV/AIDS.

The Settlement House model proved to be an effective approach for movement-oriented ASOs such as Housing Works. The framework of placing people in housing, providing services, and getting service participants involved in neighborhood activities has become a standard model for housing providers and community organizers around the country. For Settlement House tenants, advocacy would be an expectation of residency, but only after they had been housed and their primary needs addressed. The wisdom of the Housing Works movement was that it understood this principle.[137] 

These early years of AIDS were characterized by neglect and on the federal policy level (and hostility on a local and state level. Ronald Reagan, the American president under whose watch the epidemic first exploded, failed to utter the word “AIDS” for the first six years of his two terms in office. This neglect translated into countless difficulties on the clinical level. The first HIV clinical trial, testing AZT, took place in 1985 and 1986. Nineteen members of the placebo group died within the first six months of this placebo-controlled, double-blind trial—designed to produce the “cleanest” data—before the study was halted. The blunt reality was that the early AIDS clinical trials were designed with “a particularly nasty way of determining whether a drug worked: whether the patient died.”[138]Yet, there seemed to be no other way of collect data.[139]  Yet, while HIV/AIDS was neglected on a federal level, it got a great deal of attention from the far right in terms of terms for quarantine and mandatory testing, as well as increased fear and stigma generative toward homosexuality in general and HIV in particular.[140]

Policies Driven by Consumers, Not Professionals

The treatment of people with AIDS as a stigmatized group spurred the emergence of a radical advocacy movement propelled by the passionate involvement by people with AIDS (PWAs) fighting the image of themselves as docile "victims." In an indicator of trends to come, Michael Callen, who had helped invent the notion of safer sex, and other PWAs disrupted the orderly meeting of the Second National AIDS Forum held in Denver in 1983. Their action was similar to the way Science for the People had disrupted the smug confines of scientific conferences during the Vietnam War. While in Denver, Callen, Bobbi Campbell, and others drafted a statement—which became known as the Denver Principles—on the rights of PWAs to enjoy civil rights, healthy sex lives, and self determination, just like everyone else.In so doing, they laid the groundwork for a PWA advocacy movement that successfully challenged the prevailing hierarchical medical model of a passive patient/god-like doctor relationship. The roots of ACT UP, born in 1987 under the rubric “ACTION=LIFE,” can be located within this work.

Throughout the 1980s, the social and economic repercussions of the epidemic escalated. The years 1985 and 1986 were marked by bathhouse closures from coast to coast, a Supreme Court decision (Bowers vs. Hardwick) upholding state sodomy laws, and increased pressure from the resurgent Christian Right. In July 1986, Lyndon LaRouche introduced a California ballot initiative, Proposition 64, which aimed to quarantine PWAs while barring them and those at risk from a range of jobs. Proposition 64 lost by a wide margin that November, but the attack it represented was very real.[141]

Recognizing that no one else would do the work, queer activists pushed back.[142] The initial service-oriented mobilization around the epidemic was followed by a second, angrier wave in the late 1980s that gave birth to ACT UP, the Names Project, World AIDS Day, and a wide range of grassroots political action groups.[143] ACT UP helped create a sense that the AIDS crisis required action by policy-makers. In doing this, the group’s work was marked by a theatrical flair. Building on the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement, ACT UP cultivated a creative tension that stimulated action. When faced with a policy impasse, the group made use of effective disruptions--such as interruptions of formal policy bodies--that broke down barriers to proactive policy formation. These disruptions created a climate in which policy-makers felt compelled to move.[144]

To be successful in dealing with the health crisis, activists realized that they needed to challenge a medical model that sought to control people by forcing them to wait for the bureaucracy to work. While some died waiting, others created a new approach to HIV/AIDS prevention that sought to engage gay men, drug users, prostitutes, and others at risk where they had sex, shot up, and made a living. Syringe exchange policy was born within this milieu. The case of syringe exchange incorporates ACT UP's use of street theatrics, sense of urgency, and political savvy to achieve a desired policy outcome. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP successfully redeployed the Ghandian/Civil Rights era repertoire of nonviolent civil disobedience techniques to fight for effective therapies for people with HIV/AIDS. With the mantra “drugs into bodies,” the group successfully fought for treatment, services, and expedited approval of HIV drugs. What emerged was a practical approach to service provision. "Our services were informed by the theory of ‘harm reduction,’ the belief that change is not all-or-nothing, and that even incremental changes could be valuable in helping people save their own lives," ACT UP member Richard Ellovich recalled.[145] Having established a community-based strategy to prevent the spread of the disease, the group pushed for widespread use of this intervention.

From 1987 through 1994, ACT UP led the second wave of AIDS activism. The group’s victories resulted in more responsive public policies involving expedited Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of lifesaving HIV drugs, a successful drive to push the first Bush administration to expand the definition of AIDS to reflect the different ways the disease affects women, the recognition that housing is an AIDS issue, and the adoption of harm reduction rather than moralistic approaches to HIV prevention.

The push for a more humane policy strategy for containing the disease was a core component of ACT UP’s work. When the AIDS epidemic first began, traditional public health approaches to address the outbreak of communicable diseases called for contact tracing, names reporting, and other policies that compromised the civil liberties of those with disease. Conservative commentator William F. Buckley even proposed that people with HIV/AIDS should be tattooed.[146] But AIDS activists suggested that circumstances surrounding the AIDS epidemic were unique, and thus required exceptional approaches. The term “AIDS exceptionalism” was born from this idea. Within this policy framework, anonymous HIV testing, rather than contact tracing, became the standard practice across the country.

Legislation, Treatment, and the Birth of AIDS, Inc.

The late 1980s through the mid-1990s witnessed the advancement of a number of policies, laws, and services, followed by new, more successful treatments for people living with HIV/AIDS who could afford the drugs. Among these were the passage of the Ryan White CARE Act in 1990, the passage of the Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA) Act in 1992, the approval of city and state syringe exchange laws across the country, and the consolidation of the Department of AIDS Services in New York City in 1996. The Ryan White CARE Act distributes federal monies to community-based AIDS service organizations, following the “San Francisco model” of AIDS service delivery.[147] The act includes the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), which pays for medications for people with HIV/AIDS. HOPWA is a program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) designed to provide federal funding for housing and supportive services for people living with HIV/AIDS. HOPWA was a response to organizing by groups including Housing Works, then an ACT UP affinity group, which insisted that adequate housing was an AIDS issue.[148]

While the Ryan White CARE Act was perhaps the most sustained expansion of the U.S. social safety net in the past two decades, many viewed it as a short-term solution to the AIDS crisis. As advocates translated their gains into funding, many groups became not-for-profit organizations, while grassroots activists bemoaned their movement’s co-optation. With the advent of funding--and especially with the election of a potentially sympathetic new Democratic presidential administration in 1992--social services supplanted advocacy as many organizers shifted from critique to coexistence with the establishment.

This pattern is not unfamiliar.[149] Funding often has the effect of creating a means/ends inversion as policy-makers focus on securing continued funding rather than alleviating the issue or problem—AIDS, poverty, lack of housing—for which they sought money in the first place. As Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld note, “[T]he welfare bureaucracy itself becomes a powerful interest group aimed to preserve and enhance itself.”[150] As the AIDS epidemic progressed, many ASOs began orienting themselves toward perpetuating their existence over the long term rather than calling for a cure. This shift necessitated building stronger infrastructures to support increased funding.[151]   

A definitive battle of the second decade of AIDS activism involved the institutionalization of the epidemic. To receive funding, organizations had to present themselves in a professional fashion. While government subcontracting can sometimes offer non-profits fair and manageable means with which to provide services, in other cases these contracts can function as tools of demobilization. To build infrastructure and accommodate funding requirements, many organizations look to the insights of professionals rather than to their grassroots bases. Daniel Patrick Moynihan describes this phenomenon as the “professionalism of reform.”[152]  The process unfolds as advocacy groups come to favor administrative remedies over grassroots mobilization and direct action. Countless movements—including the civil rights, environmental, and consumer movements—witnessed this pattern in their organizations in the 1970s, as lobbying and legal strategies supplanted community organizing. The result is an approach that favors the work of elite professionals instead of the rank-and-file.[153] It is no different with HIV/AIDS organizations.

 New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the first AIDS organization on the East Coast, provides a case in point. Originally formed to fight for people with AIDS, as funding increased, the organization's grassroots character was overshadowed by public policy advocacy and service delivery. By the end of the decade, GHMC had become an arm of local and state governments seeking to enhance their legitimacy among the economically powerful gay community in Manhattan.[154] By the early 1990s, GMHC had become caught up in contradictions of the welfare state that dated back to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Then, War on Poverty programs encouraged community participation in handling local problems. Successful groups were funded. In turn, many used the money to lobby for more funds. By the early 1970s, a backlash emerged (as illustrated above in the discussion of the NWRO). Future grants were provided with stipulations regulating political speech and lobbying. This limited the message of cash-strapped groups who accepted federal monies--a pattern that was later repeated with GMHC.

The rapid growth of GMHC easily falls into Moynihan’s pattern of “professionalization of reform.” Although a new class of professional reformers was employed, there is little evidence that these professionals were able to achieve the stated goals of reducing poverty or ending the AIDS crisis.[155] With increased funding, GMHC shifted from critique to coexistence. Participation of community members dwindled as they were replaced with professional staff. In the process, a community organization was supplanted by a social service agency. GMHC had undergone a mission slip.[156]

Funding also has the effect on an organization of separating the management from its membership base. The base loses influence on the leadership as staff is hired and policy decisions are made based on criteria other than the needs of the affected community.[157] The result is that those lobbying for community programs are not the affected community members themselves, but rather professionals confident that they know what community members need.[158] All too often, groups such as GMHC, in undergoing institutionalization, ignore their membership base.[159] The evolution of GMHC as an organization embodies a phenomenon that would divide the loyalties of gay community groups for the next decade.

From ACT UP to Housing Works

 "Do you want to start a new organization devoted solely to political action?" GMHC founder Larry Kramer screamed in front of a crowd at New York City’s Gay Community Center the night of March 10, 1987. Kramer had grown increasingly frustrated with GMHC's reticence to engage in direct action or to use its influence to aggressively fight for new HIV drugs.[160] A generation earlier, labor organizer Saul Alinsky had bid good riddance to similar grassroots groups for leaving his methods behind: "Not only is pressure necessary to compel the establishment to make its initial concession, but the pressure must be maintained to make the establishment deliver. The second factor seemed to be lost on [The Woodlawn Organization].”[161]

ACT UP was born in Alinsky's spirit. While GMHC represented mainstream interests and courted grant monies, ACT UP members racked up arrests. To the extent that AIDS activism had been defined by service provision, ACT UP redefined the crisis in terms of sexual politics.[162] By the mid-1990s, the group could boast a list accomplishments that included forcing expedited FDA approval of new HIV medications, pressuring Burroughs Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) to reduce the price of its antiretroviral AZT, highlighting the need for health-care reform, and pressuring the National Institutes of Health to increase spending on HIV research.

One of the group's more difficult tasks involved implementing harm reduction principles in the area of HIV prevention. When New York City Health Commissioner Woodrow Myers took the moralistic position that drug users need to face the consequences of their behavior, ACT UP/New York organized an illicit needle exchange program on the city's Lower East Side. Ten ACT UP members were arrested for distributing clean needles. They later successfully challenged the case in court, arguing that needle exchange was "a medical necessity" required to stem the spread of HIV.[163] Housing Works would build on this work to be part of the second generation of syringe exchange programs advanced in New York City.  From its pragmatic approach to drug use to its unapologetic queer identity, ACT UP taught America that the country had better face its demons and get over its biases.

Housing Works as an Alternative to ACT UP, GMHC, and AIDS, Inc.

Housing Works was born of this milieu. Its founders, Keith Cylar, Charles King, and Eric Sawyer, had all been active members of ACT UP from its formation. Throughout the 1990s, ACT UP evolved with the ever-elusive nature of the virus, staying together longer than anyone could have expected. Leadership changed, activists died, and Monday night meetings continued. With each new level of carnage, the task of halting the epidemic's progress become more daunting. AIDS was fully entwined within the mosaic of poverty. Within this context, the group struggled to maintain its focus.[164] Dealing with AIDS involved addressing endemic social problems of racism, income inequality, and discrimination faced by the truly disadvantaged in America.[165] Housing Works--which began as an ACT UP working group--assumed a leadership role, recognizing that the demographics of the AIDS pandemic would continue to shift toward underserved high-risk groups such as low-income women and people of color.

Housing Works’ founders--veterans of homeless services, housing, social, and legal services--noted that there was another epidemic facing people with HIV/AIDS.  Sawyer recalled seeing a different picture of AIDS in Harlem, where he worked: “I knew a couple of people in the neighborhood who were homeless, who didn’t have housing....I just started reading a lot about it and, because of the connection with drug use, started learning that there’s this whole other AIDS plague, tied to drug use, that is very prevalent in homeless communities, and it’s a whole area where there are no services.” Sawyer described the floor debate over creating a different organization, outside of ACT UP, to address these needs: “ACT UP didn’t want to do housing. They didn’t want paid staff. They wanted to do activism. They didn’t want to do housing or provide services. We would come to the floor and tell people about our search for buildings or whatever, and there was a huge outcry of, ‘You can’t have paid staff, you can’t get governmental contracts. That’s going to limit what we can say. It’s going to compromise our voice.’ And we were like, ‘Hell--that’s bullshit. We’ll not only bite the hand that feeds us, we’ll chew it off, if it’s trying to slap us. And we kind of took that motto to Housing Works.”[166]

“The strategy was to push, push, push,” Cylar said in describing the approach of the early Housing Works years. “It wasn’t different than the general ACT UP strategy about inclusion. But it was always to get those populations also included. It was easy for the world to deal with gay white men. People of color were so far off the Richter scale, and it was also to hold people-of-color organizations accountable.” This meant creating an organization in which aggressive advocacy for unpopular causes coincided with the group’s unique institutional needs. “Housing Works started when, after demonstrating, fighting, and working in the AIDS community, the people that I cared the most about were the people least likely to get served,” Keith Cylar elaborated.

“And so we decided we had to do it ourselves. All of a sudden, we got this arrogant streak. Fuck it--nobody else can do this. We’re gonna do it. So we started writing about it and talking about it. And we started a process that involved actually twenty to thirty people. And we talked about what kind of bylaws and organization it would be that was a shared responsibility and would empower clients. Then we recruited a whole lot of people who were in this group, AIDA--AIDS into Direct Action. It was made up of homeless and formerly homeless people, many people of color who did direct action around these issues. We included them in all of the discussions because it was important to design something that they had insight into. It was important for their voices to be heard throughout. We got a lot of them on the board so that if push came to shove, they could stop it [the growth of Housing Works if necessary]. We wanted to be different than AIDS, Inc.”[167]

The creation of Housing Works was not a comfortable situation for many advocates who had come of age with ACT UP (or even Student for a Democratic Society years earlier). Many in ACT UP were familiar with social theorist Herbert Marcuse’s idea of “pure refusal,” a position which held that participation in a problematic system is tantamount to complicity.[168] ACT UP would follow this mantra. While few social movements are able to remain entirely outside of the policy framework of service provision, ACT UP maintained this position and the group persevered, yet not without difficulties. While some members of the group found a way to the policy table, others continued to scream from the street.

Over the next fifteen years, Housing Works would remain true its founding ethos, even as the organization grew, and straddled between direct action and direct services.  The organization would both create spaces for socially vulnerable populations to call home while fighting the industry which would grow and profit the epidemic.  Walking through the Lincoln Tunnel during the first day of Housing Work’s 2005 Campaign to End AIDS,[169] Eric Sawyer reflected on the effort to fight AIDS Inc and actually end this, not profit from its chronic nature.  He explained, “That’s parts of what’s so infuriating about the approach to any sort of problem like AIDS.  It becomes something to fuel the economy because drug companies are making so much money producing medications to keep people with AIDS alive.  They have no interest in actually curing AIDS. And therefore neither do any of our politicians, whose election to office is paid for by those very same drug companies.’  Ivan Illych always said hospitals make people sicker.  Schools make people dumber. 

Sawyer reflected on Housing Work’s fifteen years. “When we founded Housing Works, our whole mission was to speak truth to power and to help those people who were getting no help from anyone else.  And I think as long as Housing Works continues to fight the good fight and to do god’s work, its going to survive.  And thats what it does.  Housing Works speaks truth to power.  It bites the hand that feeds it.  And it tries to bring a reality to the world while it cares for the most disenfranchised people in our community.”[170] 

Part II -- Fences and Piers: An Investigation of a Disappearing Queer Public Space in Manhattan

On October 5, 2002, two women from ACT UP cut a hole in a fence separating a walking path from a Hudson River pier facing toward New Jersey on Manhattan’s West Side Highway, “as a gesture of solidarity” with the queer youth who used the space before the fence went up. “We could hear a bunch of my girlfriend’s kids cheering us on across the street, and as soon as we started it was over--the police were there, dragging us off the fence,”[171] one of the explained. The police immediately arrested both women.[172]

Why Snip a Fence?

Author Naomi Klein, a journalist who has spent years covering the convergences, riots, and worldwide confabs of the new global justice activism, explains that conflicts over public and private spaces are at the center of the movement. And so is the theme of fences. For Klein, fences serve as “barriers separating people from previously public resources, locking them away from much-needed land and water, restricting their ability to move across borders, to express political dissent, to demonstrate on public streets… Fences have always been part of capitalism.”[173] As areas of life ranging from health care and education, to intellectual property, seeds, and genes, to even water and air are commodified, fences become part of the “invading of the public by the private.” Those with antiquated skills are fenced out as fences of social exclusion discard entire countries and peoples.[174] Corporate globalization creates a lot of fences.[175]

Fences represent political barriers. After five years of an often unpopular “quality of life” campaign, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani erected a fence separating citizens from City Hall. Activists tried to cut that fence open back in 1999. A year later, many members of this same group tore down a fence surrounding a plot of land that had been a public community garden just days after being bulldozed for redevelopment.[176]

New York has lots of fences. Even before the elaborate anti-terrorist functions of post 9/11 New York, ”Giuliani-ism” as a mode of urban governance favoring blandification of public space, replete with elaborate security, racial profiling, and “stop and frisk” policing, had become a model many cities hoped to emulate. The results of Giuliani-ism can be witnessed in the details of the transformation and control of New York’s physical spaces. Fences are part of a methodical process used to target “communities of difference” as urban areas are redesigned and governed as if they were sterile shopping malls.[177] In order for these entertainment zones to thrive, the state must heavily regulate their use. Anthropologist Jeff Ferrell explains: “The caretakers of these newly segregated spaces—politicians, business leaders, community associations—contend that such closed spaces are essential to the economic vitality, interpersonal safety, and emerging identity of the city.”[178] They bring down the weight of the law on those, such as pier users, who trespass on spaces once considered open to all. The process has not been without opposition.

What emerges in the following report is one flashpoint in an ongoing class war between "corporate control of public space” and a do-it-yourself public space activism aimed at preserving public space for the people.[179] The struggle involves the West Side Highway in New York’s historically queer West Village, where fences cut queer youth of color, sex workers, runaways, and the homeless off from the piers and the feeling of safety and place once found there. This analysis focuses on the history of access to this space, considering the phenomena of queer space as a liberatory geography and counter-public, the ways users congregated there, and what happens when they are fenced out of the space. Countless groups have fought the process. Their challenge--the fences they face--speaks to circumstances facing public spaces in cities around the world.

Fences and Boundaries

Fences mark boundaries. When boundaries between private and public space are lost, distinctions between inside and outside, us and them, disappear. In their wake, conviviality often abounds. Spaces displaying this sort of openness stimulate public discourse, while fences emphasize distinctions, separating the site in question from its users.[180]

For as long as most can remember, queer people have made use of the piers as a public commons. While they have no legal claim on the space, the piers have come to represent a sort of sacred space and home for queer youth, some homeless runaways, others with nowhere else to go.[181] At one point in the mid-1970s, one enthusiast actually self published his own mimeographed Warehouse Newsletter, with a circulation of 2,500, which he distributed along with food and supplies at the piers. While the space has long been an arena for the public imagination, appropriated in myths, stories, and poems, to own such a commons means little except to those who crave power.[182] "It was a secret place with all sorts of treasures, including file cabinets, antique chairs…," Barton Benes recalled, eluding to the beauty in the ruins found there. "I knew every hole in the ground, every broken piece of wood." Once a concept like the commons enters the hearts and minds of the people, the only way to halt its use –is to shut it down completely.[183]

“Queer Youth of Color, Pushed off the Piers, Pushed into Jails,” the flyer read. On October 5, 2002 a group of pier supporters, called FIERCE, organized a rally under the slogan, “Reclaim Our Space.” The event was billed as “a public celebration of the resistance of Queer youth to the gentrification, harassment, race and gender-based profiling and brutality that have become commonplace under the pretense of ‘cleaning up’ the West Village.” FIERCE was organized to “increase public awareness of the criminalization of marginalized people in a neighborhood that has long been a hub of their communities.” The day began with a speak-out in Sheridan Square Park, followed by a march to the newly fenced-in Christopher Street Piers.

Methods

The following analysis draws on many of the testimonials presented during the October 5 rally. More specifically, its data sources consist of nine testimonials and six interviews taken during the Reclaim Our Space event. A complementary snowball sample of nine information-rich respondents was drawn among clients at a South Bronx syringe exchange and others who have used the pier and watched it change.[184] To account for validity, data is triangulated using three forms of data: historical materials on the queer presence in the West Village and redevelopment of its piers, my observation of the piers, and interviews with those who use the piers. Qualitative inquiry generally makes use of combinations of data from interviews, personal observations, and excerpts from documents.[185]

Much of the investigation emphasizes the narrative truths and interpretations of those who use the piers. Building on social standpoint theory, this report emphasizes the life stories representing the reality of a queer counter-public and its interplay with larger dominant public spheres.[186] At the center of study are questions about fences, access and impediments, and the contested nature of the use of space by social outsider