Chapter 23 Lina
LINA
The school’s auditorium was so stuffy it was like breathing through a sponge.
They had gathered there on a sweltering Saturday in July to find out who had won the Request for Proposal for the development of the Livonia Avenue lot.
In the front row sat the deputy mayor of housing and economic development with two of her commissioners.
The community board members were assembled behind them, along with Jean Bernard and his associates.
Lina sat in the back among about twenty Brownsville residents.
All the middle rows of the auditorium remained empty, and this, to Lina, signified that once again the mayor’s team had failed to conduct sufficient outreach.
She’d seen her people on the walk over. Everyone was out on the basketball courts and in the playgrounds eating Klondike bars with no idea what was about to go down at Teachers Preparatory High.
An image appeared on the screen above the deputy mayor, but it was not from their community land trust’s RFP submission.
With smiling brown people strolling on the sidewalk, it was a picturesque sketch of an off-white building bordered by birch trees.
In the left-hand corner: the Bernard & Company logo.
“This will be upzoned to R7, allowing for fifty-three units of below-market housing—that’s one hundred percent affordable housing—along with much-needed community facility space on the ground floor,” explained the commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
The Bernard & Company group applauded. Lina’s Wesley Price Community Land Trust activists cursed under their breaths and crossed their arms. Tyrell sighed, and Lina heard the creak of his wooden auditorium chair as he shifted restlessly.
But of course, the city would never hand them their land on a silver platter. The world had never worked that way.
“Now just to be clear, this project isn’t fully approved yet,” the commissioner said. “It will first have to go through the extensive democratic vetting process known as ULURP—the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.”
Someone shouted from the back row. “What the hell is that?”
“ULURP. ULURP will give your community board, the borough president, the City Planning Commission, and finally, the city council an opportunity to weigh in and vote on the project. But we are really confident about the proposal, given our city’s true need for affordable housing…”
“Affordable to who?” Tyrell bellowed, his hands cupped on either side of his mouth, his voice echoing throughout the auditorium.
Smiling, the deputy mayor asked the HPD commissioner to hand over the mic.
“This is a fantastic question,” said the deputy mayor. She was young, blond, and pretty: Jennifer Aniston with her hair in a high bun. She clicked to a new slide, and an elaborate chart appeared on the screen.
Units Per AMI Level
2–4 Person Household
30% AMI—10%
($17,300–$25,900)
40% AMI—15%
($25,900–$34,500)
50% AMI—15%
($34,500–$43,200)
60% AMI—40%
($43,200–$51,800)
80% AMI—20%
($60,400–$69,000)
The residents craned their necks toward the screen, trying to make sense of all those numbers.
Lina had studied up on the “Area Median Income” stuff about ten years earlier—AMI referred to the median income of the metropolitan area—but she knew the majority of community members had never been taught the jargon.
Her younger neighbor José chuckled and shook his head.
“I should’ve stayed in school,” he muttered, and Lina, feeling a sudden wave of protectiveness, grabbed his forearm.
“They don’t teach this in high school.”
“What’s all that mean?” Ms. Dorothy called out, her lazy eye and “awake” eye, for that’s what she called them, pointing in two directions. The Alabaman was one of Lina’s biggest supporters and served as vice president of the CLT board.
Aniston explained the chart, her voice pitched high like she was speaking to children. “Every single unit—I repeat, every single unit—will be affordable housing. And affordable to a range of incomes, but all below market rate.”
What she didn’t say, Lina thought, was that almost a third of Brownsville’s residents made less than $15,000 a year—and would be too poor to qualify for the majority of these so-called “affordable” units.
Yet Lina’s biggest problem wasn’t with who might be moving into the building. It was the fact that outsiders still made all the decisions.
“A question!”
It was the booming voice of Mr. Trevor, head of Trevor LDC, the minority-owned development company that Lina had intended to partner with.
“Yes, yes, you, sir, in the back.” The HPD commissioner nodded.
“This was supposed to be the Wesley Price Community Land Trust Cultural Center,” Mr. Trevor proclaimed, his voice soaring as if he were the one with the mic, though he was only standing with his arms crossed.
“This was supposed to be land owned by and for the community, and built up by community residents—not by Bernard and Company.”
“And we don’t need more housing here!” yelled Ms. Freda, the gardener on the CLT board. “We need green space and cultural enrichment for the kids in this neighborhood!”
“Thank you for your questions. We agree that—”
“We need developers from the community hiring workers from the community!”
“Okay. Let me address everybody’s questions.” The commissioner’s voice quivered, and Lina could see he was already getting flustered. He needed Aniston to run the show. But Aniston had walked off the stage, was whispering with Mr. Bernard.
“Let me—let me just address everybody’s questions,” the commissioner attempted again.
“The Wesley Price Community Land Trust team did submit a very strong proposal, but ultimately there were a range of factors that led the RFP selection team to move forward with the Bernard and Company proposal. But we’re glad to say there’s a lot of similarities between these two visions. ”
“Hell no.” It was Ms. Keesha Jones, the community land trust secretary.
She was a young woman, but looked exhausted as she rose to her feet.
“Y’all just come in here and tell us what to do and then y’all leave.
I was at every single community meeting.
Did you listen to us, or did you just come up with your own thing and pretend you were listening to us? ”
“You’re not listening to them,” retorted a voice from the front of the hall. It was Mrs. Jameson, who, a whole year since their argument at the precinct, still considered Lina her enemy. “You want answers to your questions, you have to give the city people a chance to talk.”
“Oh Lord,” Lina said under her breath, and as a cacophony of new voices joined the fray, she suppressed a laugh. The commissioner tried to speak, then gave up and, wiping the sweat off his brow with a kerchief, handed the mic to Aniston, who also struggled to gain the crowd’s attention.
Lina took it all in, and the warring factions summoned up her memories of the occupation at the board of education in ’66.
She’d had all the energy in the world at twenty-two—had even taken the mic herself.
She did not feel motivated to speak now as she had then, but she still prized the crowd’s resistance.
Gathering feeling and strength, the people empowered one another.
Sometimes they spoke in unison, and sometimes they voiced multiple perspectives.
Either way, it was better than slicing everyone up, seating them at little tables, and forcing them to identify neighborhood “assets.”
“Remember,” Aniston said. “Nothing is final yet.”
A half-truth, Lina thought. The community board’s vote was nonbinding.
Ultimately, it was the City Planning Commission and the city council’s vote that mattered—and even if the residents protested for the rest of the year, there was only a small chance these bodies would say no to one of the mayor’s shiny projects.
She felt a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Tyrell whispered, shaking his head. “This was our land.”
“This is the new Brooklyn,” she replied.
Back in the day, the city had worked with the churches and with the grassroots organizations.
Now, luxury developers were having a grand old time in Bed-Stuy and East New York, and the city preferred them as partners.
She knew this, and she felt almost angry with herself for participating at all, for granting legitimacy to a contest in which she’d been sure to lose.
“I guess it’s time to get organizing,” Tyrell said when they got to the sidewalk, clapping his hands. “Get the community out at some of these hearings.”
To be young, she thought. Young and inexhaustible. She looked away from him.
“ULURP’s a sham,” she muttered. “It won’t matter if the community board votes no. As long as the city council wants it, they’ll pass the project.”
“Damn.” Standing with his hands on his hips, he waited for her to say something more.
“So, Ms. Lina, what do we do?”
But she didn’t have an answer.
“My knees are killing me and I gotta lie down.”
She took hold of her cane and trudged ahead.
At three a.m., she gave up on sleep and slumped into the living room chair. She wrapped herself in her mother’s crocheted blanket and stared at the mural—at that big frizzy head with the lopsided beret. Little Lina in leather.
A few months after Nellie took her life, Lina had questioned the value of her own existence. This was once the shock had begun to dissipate, and she’d found herself back in her body, in her mother’s bed, with two bowls of arroz con dulce growing cold on the bedside table.
But as always, there was no privacy in her mother’s house, and a lot of prayer.
And knowing her well, her mother enlisted not only Sofia, Danny, and Cindy, but also Father Powis and Reverend Oliver and Nick Parson, and even the Sunday school teacher from San Juan whom her mother pitied because he’d been crushing on Lina for two decades—anyone who could give Lina a reason to heal, to live.