Vincent Boudreau
The imperative for communities to actively and equitably determine their destinies, when it comes to land use and the built environment, sparked the creation in 1964 of the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH). Considered the first community design center, ARCH and its visionary architects and planners provided resources and gave voice to Harlem residents facing urban renewal, slum clearance and commercial development pressures. This episode of From City to the World, hosted by President Vincent Boudreau of The City College of New York, features the upcoming symposium "ARCH @ 60: Bridging Past Visions & Present Realities," which takes place Nov. 15 and 16 at CCNY.
Joining the conversation are Shawn Rickenbacker, director of the symposium host organization, the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures at CCNY, and the Hon. Karen Dixon, Land Use Committee Chair of Manhattan's Community Board 10 and Executive Director of Harlem Dowling-West Side Center for Children and Family Services. Learn from Rickenbacker about ARCH's legacy and how his own CCNY organization — named for an ARCH leader and former CCNY dean — is pioneering collaborative tools that pair community input with data on development outcomes to guide decision-making on project proposals. The Hon. Karen Dixon shares her expertise on building affordable housing and how Community Board 10 is leveraging Rickenbacker's work and equipping Harlem for informed, equitable development today.
Host: CCNY President Vincent Boudreau
Guests: Shawn Rickenbacker, Associate Professor, Director of the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures, CCNY; Hon. Karen Dixon, Chair, Land Use Committee, Manhattan Community Board 10, and Executive Director, Harlem Dowling-West Side Center for Children and Family Services
Recorded: October 30, 2024
Episode Transcript
Vincent Boudreau
Welcome to From City to the World. I'm your host, Vincent Boudreau, the President of the City College of New York. From City to the World is a show about how the work that we're doing at City College matters to people across the city and throughout the world. So as part of that discussion, we will discuss the practical application of our research in solving real-world issues like poverty and homelessness, inequities of all different dimensions. So today, we're going to discuss a symposium on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Architects' Renewal Committee, and over the course of the show, we may refer to that as ARCH. That's A-R-C-H, which is the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem.
The symposium will be held on Saturday, November 16th, also on the 15th from 9:30 to 4:50 PM at Aaron Davis Hall right here on the campus of City College of New York. So if you are interested in some of the things we're talking about today, please mark your calendar and be there for that day. ARCH was led by J. Max Bond, who was the former dean of Architecture School at the City College, and it was started to serve the planning and design needs of Harlem residents. It was formed by planners and other architects to ensure Harlem residents were the ones shaping their community's future. And conversations in ARCH were centered around the 125th Street and the State Office Building, the need for more affordable housing, tenants' rights, and the fight for neighborhood autonomy.
This event, and by this, I mean the symposium that we'll be doing at City College, is supported by funding from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the West Harlem Development Corporation, the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures at City University of New York, the New York Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects, and the AIANY Diversity/Inclusion Committee. This event is, as I said earlier, open to the public, so please come if you're interested in what we're talking about today.
So to discuss ARCH today is Professor Shawn Rickenbacker and Shawn Rickenbacker is a trained architect. He's an urbanist and an urban data researcher. He's an associate professor of Architecture at CCNY Spitzer School of Architecture and he's also the director of the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures at the City College Spitzer School of Architecture. In this role, he directs the center's research that directly confronts the complex intersection of spatial equity and the socioeconomic impacts of place-based policies. Now under Dr. Rickenbacker's leadership, the Bond Center has become a hub for pioneering research, engaging faculty across CCNY departments and disciplines, for government agencies, communities, and industry partners.
Key initiatives that he has undertaken include housing and spatial reparations, equitable development, and the impact of consumer trends on Harlem small and minority-owned businesses. Professor Rickenbacker holds a Master's of Architecture with a certificate in American urbanism from the University of Virginia where he was a DuPont scholar, an LOC in Climate Change Leadership from Cornell University, and a BArch from Syracuse University.
And before I welcome him, I also say that we will, and I'll be talking about her a little more in a little bit, we're also joined for the second half of the program by the Honorable Karen Dixon, who is committee chair of Community Board 10 Land Use Committee and the executive director of the Harlem Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services. And as I say, we'll be introducing her and talking more about and with her later on in the program. But for now, it's my pleasure to welcome Professor Rickenbacker to From City to the World. Welcome.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.
Vincent Boudreau
So I want to start off by talking about the Bond Center itself. So Max Bond was both a visionary architect in New York. He designed buildings from the Schomburg Center to Harlem Hospital and all up and down that 136th Street corridor, but he was also for a time the dean of the City College School of Architecture. A great deal of the ethical content of his approach to architecture finds its way into the work and the ethos of the Max Bond Center. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, both about Max Bond himself and the way that that has infused the work of the Max Bond Center.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure, sure. I'm indebted to Max and his colleagues for the work that they have started when they first formed ARCH. It was formed in 1964 along with Richard Hatch, John Bailey, and later on Art Symes and so Max was the ED, executive director in 1968. And as many of your listeners might recognize, the period of 1968 onward was pretty tumultuous throughout the nation, particularly in cities and Harlem was no different in that regard. Lots of disinvestment. Housing was not plentiful. It looks rundown and in poor condition. And there was certainly a racial component to where you could live in New York City. So overcrowding might have been a very real concern back then if you were part of the community.
So the period by which Max was practicing with ARCH and formulating their trajectory, those values that he brought, and there's a quote that I'm going to refer to here, this is a quote from Max who says, "I've always viewed architecture as a social act. It's about values, culture, and power. And underlying my own design is the concern with social uplift." So I think he certainly recognized that the physical environment was really a platform by which one communicates their values. And so as a professional architect practicing and with the guidance of Richard Hatch, who really was the founder of ARCH, they moved into a field that had not necessarily existed prior to them, which is representing communities and using that professional acumen to address these issues. And leading the center, it's not 1968 any longer.
Vincent Boudreau
Right, right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
And the founding of this ARCH was 1964, so we're 60 years out. And one of the things that, I remember this fondly, I think you and I met just prior to me coming on here ...
Vincent Boudreau
That's right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
... we discussed how City College could be a resource to the community and I wanted to express as a slightly younger man back then, but my interest in urban data, which was a thing that was just emerging and wanting to leverage that to democratize the power of data and give communities a voice again. And I really associate that to what Max would have done if he were here now. Obviously, they didn't have that tool, couldn't leverage it, but they were certainly leveraging their professionalism and their knowledge back then. So that was the goal.
Vincent Boudreau
Can you talk a little bit ... You've talked already a little bit about the origins of ARCH, but as you say, it starts with a very different set of concerns than maybe we would've brought to it now, but 60 years is a long time. And so I imagine there were ups and downs. Some projects would come to the fore and others maybe fade out. Can you talk a little bit about the work of ARCH over the years?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure, sure. Again, some of the key projects, most notably that these are hallmark projects, they proposed an alternative plan to the State Office Building in Harlem, so the iconic tower, the only tower, quite frankly, commercial tower that exists in Harlem. They had proposed provisions for 125th Street in terms of its redevelopment, well prior to the rezoning of 125th Street. So people had been thinking about these for quite some time. The East Harlem Triangle was a series of sites owned by the city that also required massive revisioning effort, initially a state and federal project along with the city involvement probably in a scale of over 400,000 square feet.
To give your listeners an idea of how many residential units, that's probably somewhere around 800 or more units, so a fairly massive development under the guise of urban renewal, right? So this is moving from industry and those other sorts of uses and transforming parts of Harlem into functional communities and housing and they were greatly involved. There's a series of plans that exist that, if you research ARCH and East Harlem Triangle, their document will come up with some wonderful compendium of the research that they had done to make their argument on behalf of the community about what that project should look like. So there's a few examples of the projects that they really were behind.
Vincent Boudreau
I want to ask you to think about ... I know in your head you've got a list of some of their hallmark projects, the State Office Building, 125th Street, the East Triangle. I imagine they didn't all come to fruition the way ARCH imagined that they would and could you maybe pick one of these projects and talk about what we see today and what we might have seen had ARCH been followed a little bit more closely in their recommendations?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Wow.
Vincent Boudreau
I know, you all listening at home, we do a couple of questions ahead of time. This was not a question I had put to Professor Rickenbacker ahead of time, but I'm intrigued by his discussion of these projects, so understand that he's improvising, right?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Right. Well, not so much improvise, but calling upon by memory here, because in doing my own research on an ARCH and looking through these projects, one project that doesn't receive a lot of attention is their concern around housing and not new housing, but housing and pre-war tenement buildings, which make up the huge percentage of the building typology that exists in Central and West Harlem. And this document, and I want to give credit to my assistant director, Elizabeth McWillie, who unearthed this material, which is rich in a series of proposals to renovate the apartments in these buildings so that they were more livable.
As you might recall, back in the late '60s in particular, many of these apartments had already been transformed into rooming houses or they were housing numbers well beyond what they were intended for. So 15 people could easily be in these buildings. There's a wonderful history where Harlem used to ... You would walk around and see these posters for rent parties ...
Karen Dixon
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Rickenbacker
... right? I'm looking at Karen because I know she remembers this and people would host these parties to produce a little income to help pay for the rent.
Vincent Boudreau
Right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
And effectively, that meant that everyone who lived there would be a promoter. And so you would find out, "Well, you live in ... Oh, you live with so-and-so." So the idea of extended family and those living in these buildings, there was an upside to that, the social component, but there was also a downside to that, right? Lack of privacy, the family unit fracturing as opposed to being able to keep together as that unit. And I think ARCH recognized this and without the pursuit of novelty really wanted to address the existing housing stock. So you don't see the change on the outside, you see the change on the inside.
There's a whole set of documents about how these units can be better planned and renovated to increase light and air, to increase the efficiency of, in some instances, perhaps even shared kitchens, which was an idea yet to surface, which is now becoming popular. So there's an example of where you might see some of those ideas really being in the built environment today, which is pretty common for these buildings to be converted and renovated because they're quite wonderful building stock.
Vincent Boudreau
They sure are.
Shawn Rickenbacker
But as they're renovated, unfortunately, they end up moving up in terms of their value and effectively are not perhaps targeted for existing Harlem residents, but for a more affluent buyer or renter.
Vincent Boudreau
And I imagine if the renovations had happened back when folks working in ARCH had proposed them, you wouldn't have necessarily gotten the immediate gentrification as a consequence of that.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Vincent Boudreau
So I wonder, when we talk about the livable environment, something I just referred to today, you almost immediately go to the question of gentrification. You referred briefly to some of the situations, some of the conditions in Harlem in the late 1960s. Could you flesh that out for us a little bit more, what ARCH was up against?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure.
Vincent Boudreau
... when they began their work?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Yeah, no, absolutely. So the real challenges of the period then, as you point out, weren't necessarily gentrification. So years and years of disinvestment on the tail of redlining, and for your listeners who aren't familiar with redlining, that was a federally endorsed program whereby by maps of communities were generated primarily for the inancing industry that would demarcate whether an area was worthy of investment. So green was good, yellow was caution and red was, "We will not lend to projects in those communities." And sure enough, if you review the redlining maps of the '60s, late '60s in particular, a good 80% if not higher of Harlem as we know it today was marked red.
And so as you can imagine, when you go decades with minimal to no investment, that only empowers the federal government to be the one to intervene. Private sector is not intervening. And so those were the real challenges and really ARCH performed in a way to serve as a checks and balances to urban renewal and slum clearance. And if that was going to happen, they wanted to ensure that the community had a voice in what the future of their community might look like. So simultaneously, what I think is the genius of ARCH, and Max in particular, is that as an architect, oftentimes, we are associated with the visioning, but he really understood that you had to work the levers of government, you had to figure out how to gain the credibility and respect of the community, so that they were comfortable with you translating their ideas on their behalf and you had to understand how this was being interpreted by the market, knowing that they would eventually also be part of this.
And so that's where I think, although this is a prelude to gentrification in many forms, ARCH was not in that battle, but in this battle of translation, "How do we communicate what are very realistic and profound goals and desires of a community and translate those into these plans that may indeed go forward with this government support?" So there's the difference between then and now, which is in some ways the subtitle of the symposium, bridging past visions with present realities, the landscape has changed. And to your point, it wasn't gentrification then. It was an earlier incarnation of that.
Vincent Boudreau
You've talked a number of times about the concern ARCH had for bringing community voices into this process. Was it a mass-mobilizing methodology or was it more incorporating those into planning exercise?
Shawn Rickenbacker
It's a great question. I wasn't there. So I would have to believe based on what I've viewed, that the sensitivity and strategic nature by which Max and other members of ARCH approached the community. Just for clarity's sake, I don't want to dance around this, but Richard Hatch was a young white man and I think they had a very real conversation. I think Richard was also challenged with the idea. There's a term used nowadays called the credible messenger.
Vincent Boudreau
Right, right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
And I think he knew that there were some challenges based on his ethnicity and race, although he was sincere and committed. And so I think partnering and identifying Max as a key partner was part of that strategy.
Vincent Boudreau
I see.
Shawn Rickenbacker
And then Max, similarly, I often like to remind people, as important as he was and his own persona was conflicted out there in the public because he understood downtown as much as he understood uptown. And sometimes that was misconstrued like, "Whose side are you on?"
Vincent Boudreau
Right, right, right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
But I think having to balance and navigate those very different environments and those very different goals and motives that those environments had, the representation of community in that meant as we're trying to do vast amounts of community partnering, sharing information, trying to inform and keep people up to date of what their options are, "What are some of the strategies that we can help you employ that will give you some leverage?" I like to use the term and negotiating the terms of your future, not necessarily getting everything you want, but again, understanding that negotiating the terms of a future is a very good place to be.
Vincent Boudreau
You talked earlier about the idea, the inspiration, I guess, to renovate, for instance, tenements rather than replace them and take them down. So that's one example of the influence of ARCH over the years in building and planning. Are there others that we can look at when we look at the history of what's happened in the built environment in Harlem?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Well, I mean I think there's another organization that you know quite well that uses this reference quite a bit, the Harlem Chamber of Commerce and they would often say, "As Harlem goes, as does the world goes."
Vincent Boudreau
Right, right, right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
And I think many organizations that followed ARCH used them as a template. It is arguably the nation's first CDC, which is Community Design Center and so their legacy extends to just about all the organizations who continue to do this work today, some more direct than others, particularly those that are more urban focused, but that is, I think outside of one single project, there is the project of this work, of this advocacy work and that's probably where they're most influential in that regard. I do also recognize and I'm going to attribute some of the trajectories of new industries. So my own interest in urban data as a spatial tool, our young people, including here at City College are discovering this and how it actually is incredibly useful and powerful and impactful and really want to learn these skills and tools about how to use it, how to leverage it as a means of carrying on this work, whether or not they realize that it really harks back to the period that ARCH was doing.
I think if you look at some of their reports, the amount of demographic data is fascinating, especially coming from planners and architects. You would almost think they were social scientists, but they really understood the community that they were looking to impact and effect. And like I said earlier, they also understood their other respective partners, which was government and even the private sector.
Vincent Boudreau
Can you say a little bit more about how urban data figures in your work? And if I was in one of your classes and ...
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure, sure.
Vincent Boudreau
... you were telling me, "This is important, you got to ..." just say a little bit more about that.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure. Well, I have to give Ms. Karen Dixon who's sitting next to me, a plug here because Community Board 10 Central Harlem came to us and sought our interest in proposing some work on a land use study. And I felt very strongly that land use study is one of those tools of a bygone era, that the speed of the market, both government and private, moves so quickly by the time we do this land use study, it may not be very useful. So what I had proposed was another tool, a version that is a bit more nimble, could look at individual sites very quickly and we called it an Equity Index Tool, and more specifically EDI, which is Equitable Development Index.
And it allows us to go back years and years into the city's data about projects that have been approved in the ULURP process and that's the land review process. So they're asking for exceptions to be larger with the caveat that there might be a larger affordable component in there. In return, the public-private partnership will ask the community if they are in agreement with this project. And there's certainly a private developer associated with these. And as Karen I think will probably tell you, these projects move rather quickly. Community boards are uniquely involved in how they are reviewed and ultimately approved or not approved.
So we thought that what was critical here is that we're able to look at years prior to see which projects were approved. Some of them have been in an existence for a decade or so now. We can look at those and see if the numbers panned out, "Was there economic increase and opportunity based on this project? How many units of affordable space are actually apartments or part of that and what was the benefit or were there unintended consequences of this new building in a particular area?" And using that, we realized that there's lots of projects, hundreds that have this data associated with it.
If we put all of these projects together and do a comparative analysis against new projects that a Community Board might be reviewing, this would produce an objective lens by which they can make informed decisions and based on their priorities. So we give them a survey, "What's important to you?" And also to help educate things that are important to all of us now, things like, "In climate change, what does that translate to in a new building? Why should I care?" Carbon emissions, right? Each new building has a target carbon emissions number. We can look at that number, see if there's a plan to offset that number. The amount of trash that a building produces, we can look at that. We can also look at the impact that that building might have on local transit.
And by the time we have all of these key metrics, we're able to run that through an algorithm based on those priorities and calculate a tentative score. That score is not final.
Vincent Boudreau
Right, right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
What it does is allow the community to advocate for more or less of something. It allows the developer to respond to that request. And so their score on that particular project will either increase ideally or it may decrease depending on the things that they are looking to add to that project. So there's one way that we're really proud to be leveraging this data and presented this at the Mayors' Institute. So some mayors around the nation have been exposed to it and we're very proud that we've been able to work with our partner, Community Board 10, who was a contributor as well as Community Board 9, who came on early as well and helped this project to be it is now.
Vincent Boudreau
I do wonder, Shawn, if you could just tell people who might be thinking of attending the symposium, what they can expect to see on the 15th and 16th.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure. Yeah, yeah. So November 15th, as the keynote, Dr. Elora Raymond will be speaking on racialized capitalism and the financialization of housing. Those two topics alone just get me stimulated. I think these are things that people need to understand with regards to the larger question of housing. And so she has spoken in front of the Ways and Means Committee of the House on these matters and so I think she has a lot of tremendous information to share. She'll be in conversation with Moses Gates from the Regional Planning Association, who is constantly looking at the context of the Tri-State area and its needs around housing. But the last event to take place that focused on Harlem was held at Baruch College in 2006.
Vincent Boudreau
Oh, boy.
Shawn Rickenbacker
And it was called Harlem in Our Eyes: Sustaining Cultural Legacy in a Rapidly Changing Neighborhood. And we discovered this and some of the speakers at our event were part of that. They are key architects, Kenneth Knuckles, Karen Phillips, I can go down the list, key architects who were really on the ground during this period and then some. So I really feel like that, when you come to this, and hopefully, we'll see you all there, what you'll discover is a timeline, critical timeline of the things that produced the environment that we now see and to perhaps give you some insight into how that came to be and maybe that insight will give you instruction on how you might change a future that's more equitable for yourselves and for those that you're interested in being part and remaining part of this community that I think we all love and cherish.
Vincent Boudreau
So 18 years since the last conversation, that is a long stretch of time.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Right, right, right.
Vincent Boudreau
And now, Ms. Karen Dixon is joining the conversation with us. She's the executive director of the Harlem Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services. And that's an agency that provides family support, afterschool and summer camp program, evidence-based individual and group level parenting interventions and emergency food pantry services. In 2016, Harlem Dowling West Side Center and the Children's Village Incorporated completed the Home for Harlem Dowling Building Project and this is located in Central Harlem. It's 60 units of affordable housing and that includes 12 studio units for youth leaving the foster care system.
Ms. Dixon is also a member of the Manhattan Community Board 10. She serves there on the Health and Human Services Committee and she's also the chair of the Land Use Committee. Ms. Dixon holds a Bachelor of Arts from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a Master's of Social Work from Hunter College School of Social Work. She completed Columbia University's Business School Executive Education, Institute for Nonprofit Management Program and she's a licensed Master's of Social Work. Karen, welcome to From City to the World.
Karen Dixon
Hi, thank you for having me.
Vincent Boudreau
Really glad to have you here. And we're going to talk a little bit about the work that you did in getting this housing project done, but before we do that, I wanted to start just by giving you a chance to explain to people what the scope of work is in the Land Use Committee because this is really right at the heart of what we've been talking about and so maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
Karen Dixon
So thank you for that. So actually, when I joined the Community Board, I had little to no knowledge of land use other than the work we did on our own building. And so for all intents and purposes, it was about reading and learning. And unlike past chairs, I had no real estate background. So that was unique and different for the Community Board At the time. Since I've been the chair of Land Use, I've done a lot of learning in addition to my committee members and the community at large. And the work of Land Use is to really review different zoning applications.
Some may come through as the Uniform Land Use Review Process, known as the ULURP. Others may be a BSA review with the Board of Standards and Appeals. And all of these presentations come before us and we have a certain amount of time where we need to review, analyze and make a recommendation one way or the other. For ULURP, that process takes ... We have 60 days. Other processes, usually, we turn them over within a 30-day window. And you think about some of the ULURPs or processes that have come before us like the City of Yes, the three different City of Yes initiatives, one for carbon neutrality, the other for economic opportunity and the final one for housing opportunity and imagine processing in 60 days 1,400 pages of material ...
Vincent Boudreau
Oh my goodness.
Karen Dixon
... to folks who are traditionally not real estate folk, right? They're community volunteers. And so it can be very challenging, but I can say this, the committee and the Community Board at large are committed to doing that. And we are the first leg of the process. So subsequent to our review, it's followed by work with the Borough President's Office, the City Planning Commission, the City Council and then some of it lands with the Mayor's Office.
Vincent Boudreau
Shawn was talking about this equity index and said a few things about how you have been using this and it's a pioneering effort. You're right at the forefront of this. And so can you tell me a little bit about the impact it's made on your work and maybe even if you've got an example of how it's helped you in a specific case?
Karen Dixon
Certainly. So as Shawn has shared, we had received some funding to do a land use study. And to his point, by the time you get a study done, a lot of these spaces, the landscape may look differently, even in his presentation talking about what Harlem looked like in 1968 to where we are now. There are significant changes in the community throughout the community.
Vincent Boudreau
Right.
Karen Dixon
And so when we were vetting offers or presentations, we were concerned that a lot of it was the standard land use study. And one of the things that was important to us is many people in the community feel like they don't have a voice. They feel like things are happening to them, development is happening, it's not really for them, it's unaffordable. And so we wanted to make sure that we could find something that would incorporate the community voice. And so when his presentation came, I remember the first time he presented to the committee, the committee was awestruck. I don't think there were any questions. I think people had to catch their breath.
And then we started asking questions and he started to really demonstrate how this could happen. And then when the board made the selection for J. Max Bond Center to bring us the equity development index, it was, I think, passed unanimously by the board. And we're talking about a board of 50 members. And subsequently, they came to us and we had to do our survey to identify the priorities. And that was important, because right now, the Community Board every year has to do a district-need statement. And when you think about what our district-need statement, the top priority is always affordable housing and there are other pieces around safety and security, issues around transportation and just health as well when you're talking about the garbage sanitation, so forth and so on.
And so when he came back, Dr. Rickenbacker came back with the preliminary survey results, and sure enough, it showed exactly what we were saying, affordable housing, really income-driven, not based on the AMI levels, because for many in the community, the AMI levels, they are quite restrictive.
Vincent Boudreau
Could you tell people who don't know what AMI levels are, what that means?
Karen Dixon
Area medium income.
Vincent Boudreau
I got you.
Karen Dixon
And unfortunately, it's not developed based on the income of the actual community. It incorporates several communities including those of Westchester County. And so what you find is that the income levels that are required to sustain these residents are way more than what people actually have. And so the EDI gave us our voice, not the only voice, but a voice. And so while we were in one of his updated presentations, we had a developer that was scheduled to present a project that was going to be going through the ULURP process. And after his presentation, when the developer stood up to do his presentation, the first thing he said, he turned to Shawn and Alden and said, "Can I use this right now to be able ... Because this would've helped me to understand what this community wanted, what would be the best thing to do and then work my financing around to be able to deliver something that was relevant to the needs of the community." And that's huge.
And so we are waiting for it to go fully live because the plan is to bring in more community feedback around the priorities. We want to get a wider band of input and we want to be able to put it to various locations in the community that are still vacant. Whether it's a city-owned space or just a privately owned space, we want to be able to have a say about what happens and I think that is important. One, you can't take away someone's voice.
Vincent Boudreau
Right.
Karen Dixon
As a social worker, that's important and it's important that people feel like they are part of a process and that something is not happening to them where they have no power or control.
Vincent Boudreau
And just to circle back to something you just said, you said, "When it goes fully live," what will that look like? Is that a website that people can access or-
Karen Dixon
So I'm going to turn that part over to Shawn.
Vincent Boudreau
What's it look like, Shawn?
Shawn Rickenbacker
Sure. Yeah. No, certainly, we want to make it accessible. And again, referring back to ARCH and the brilliance of Max, part of the impetus for this tool was to ensure that it can be used by community members. The other piece to this puzzle, an incredibly important one, is government. So we're working closely and certainly initially through the Community Board, but we'd certainly started reaching out to City Council folk and we got involved with the Land Use Committee, Speaker Adams team to introduce it to them as well, that recognizing that, if you had, as Karen references, developers, government, and the community all using the tool, one can conceive that they'll all have different scores.
Vincent Boudreau
Right.
Shawn Rickenbacker
But that facilitates a more fruitful conversation. You now know what's at stake, you know what you're lobbying for and against. And right now, the landscape is fraught with discontent and a lot of mistrust. And so we really think that the objectivity of the tool is what's one of its key strengths. And it does allow for the interest of developers to be put forward without a preliminary review, so we can see honestly what are they thinking and that gets shared against the score of the community and what are they thinking. And then government as a key partner, "Were you sitting in this?" And once those are available for review, everyone knows they're using the same priorities, list of priorities, they may have different ones.
And then towards the end, what we really think is that we could bring those entities together in meaningful way. We often hear from communities that they feel that the process right now of community engagement is patronizing. It's not authentic. And so its value is being diminished and we really need to work on that and recovering that because that's the only way forward in our estimation.
Vincent Boudreau
I think that's absolutely true. Let's hear the story of how you got this fabulous 60-unit affordable housing project built and then I want to particularly ask you to talk to us about these 12 units that you built for young people coming out of the foster care system.
Karen Dixon
Sure, certainly. So we received the land probably in the late 1990s and there were several iterations of the project. At one point, there were condominiums being thought about and I remember in 2011, one of our board members who had a housing background and he said, "Well, let's look at doing an affordable housing project because that way you could also secure tax credits and you can bring real affordability to the community," because we were really certain that we wanted to create those units for children leaving the foster care system. For those of you out there that don't know, a lot of children leaving the foster care system don't always have a permanent housing solution.
And unfortunately, some of them end up in other systems, DHS, just other systems that are not good for overall wellbeing and development. And so we wanted to create that opportunity for these young people. We also recognize that you think about yourself at age 21, you might've wanted to live on your own, but you probably didn't really know how to do it. And so we also built in a mechanism, while it's not a supportive housing project, but we've provided supports to them. But the main thing was that this was their apartment. They didn't need anyone to sign the lease for them. It was their responsibility. So again, also treating them like adults and empowering them.
And so in 2011, we started our initiative with this affordable housing. We teamed up with Alembic Development Corporation and they walked us through a lot of it. We were financed with HPD funding, which was helpful. And as I think about ARCH and the work of J. Max Bond, that getting government to connect to affordable housing and financing that we wouldn't have been able to deliver this project if we did not get that. And so as an organization, I remember going through the ULURP process with Community Board 10. All of it is quite daunting. We had to seek support from our city councilmember, which was the Honorable Inez Dickens and the Borough President, which was then the Honorable, oh my goodness, I forgot his name, Scott Stringer.
Shawn Rickenbacker
Scott Stringer.
Karen Dixon
And so they fully supported our project, so that's wonderful, right? When we went through the ULURP, the Community Board was excited because it was 100% affordable project. And then there were these 12 units that were going to be for the youth exiting foster care. We furnished the units. I remember getting to financing and sitting in the meeting with HDC as they were talking about the bond financing and being the only social worker in a room of 50 attorneys. That was an interesting experience.
Vincent Boudreau
I can imagine.
Karen Dixon
And then we had groundbreaking in the fall of 2014 and we finished our building in the fall of 2016. And we moved in because we have our offices there along with the Children's Village. They are strategic partners. We finished the building and moved into the building in January of 2017 and tenants moved in shortly thereafter. Since we still provide supportive services as needed, Harlem Downing, as I said, operates an emergency food pantry. And so if a resident in the building needs anything, they can come downstairs and get that from us, even though we serve New York City in our pantry.
For those of you who may be familiar in the community, we're on 127th Street, and during the pandemic, we never shut down. Everything was open and our lines literally wrapped from 127th Street down to 126th down to Lenox, back up and then back around ...
Vincent Boudreau
Oh my gosh.
Karen Dixon
... feeding New Yorkers because that's what we do.
Vincent Boudreau
As chair of the Community Board's Land Use Committee, we've talked a lot about the ways in which these different projects fulfill community needs, but you must have your own vision for what Harlem should look like and could you talk to us a little bit about that?
Karen Dixon
So I think equity is the word. I think it's important that we have land use spaces and affordable housing for all members of this community. One of the things I will often say and during our land use deliberations is that we serve the entire community and it's easy to focus on the most neediest and advocacy for them certainly is very important, but we must always remember that there is a middle class that is not being helped and addressed in this community. And when we think about the projects that come before us, while certainly we want to see projects with deeper AMI and affordability, we also recognize that there needs to be some in other AMI levels because middle income folks would be excluded from those developments.
Vincent Boudreau
Right.
Karen Dixon
And I think that's really my vision, to have housing and to have land uses that serves the entire community and doesn't displace or result in people leaving the community, because one, they can't afford to, two, they can't grow their families here because they can't afford to, and three, that they maintain that connectivity. We're seeing generations of families no longer being able to remain in the community due to the cost of living in Harlem.
Vincent Boudreau
In this conversation, you wear lots of hats. You wear the Community Board hat, the Land Use hat, executive director of the Harlem Dowling West Side Center for Children Family Services. So I never bring in someone from the community without giving them an opportunity to speak to the listeners about how people can get involved in the work that you do and you've got a bunch of them. So answer that question the way you most need or could use public support.
Karen Dixon
So I would recommend, for the Community Board, even if you're not a member, please go on the Community Board's website and see the calendar of meetings and you can join the meetings virtually or you can attend them in person. One of the things that we do in Land Use is we spend as much time as possible in educating the community on various land use processes because it's a lot of information and most folks won't know. And if you understand the process, your advocacy can be a lot better because you have a sense of what is going on. So I would recommend, please attend Community Board 10 various committee meetings. They're all in the evening with the exception of the Senior Task Force meeting, which is usually the third Thursday of the month at 10:00 AM.
The Land Use Committee meeting is the third Thursday of the month at 6:30 PM. And as I said, community members can come in person to the district office located at 215 West 125th Street on the fourth floor or they can join the meeting via Zoom and it's also on Facebook Live. So in case you miss it, you could always go back and look at it. And then on the website for the Community Board, you'll see the agendas and the meeting minutes and any resolutions. If you want to see, "Well, what has the Land Use Committee been deliberating and what are they saying?" that information is there as well.
In Harlem Dowling, you can definitely go to our website, www.harlemdowling.org and you can sign up to volunteer. Most of the volunteer work is in our pantry. Harlem Dowling is the surviving entity of the Colored Orphan Asylum founded in 1836 and we are the first organization on a New York State to serve Black children. And while we continue to do this work today, obviously, it's more diversified in the families we serve, but overwhelmingly, we serve children and families living at or below the poverty level and that work is ongoing, and as you said, to have array of services.
Vincent Boudreau
Well, it sounds like, from what I've heard today, it makes a world of sense to have a social worker involved in land use projects. So I want to thank you for the work you're doing and thank both of you for being with us today. And to you at home, thank you for listening to From City to the World. I want to give a special thanks again to our guest, Professor Shawn Rickenbacker, who is the director of the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures at CCNY and at the Spitzer School of Architecture and the Honorable Karen Dixon, who is the committee chair for Community Board 10's Land Use Committee. And she's also the executive director of the Harlem Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services.
And once again, so we don't forget, encourage anyone who's been interested in this conversation, It's been a terrific conversation, I want to thank you both, to mark the 15th and the 16th of November on your calendar. Aaron Davis Hall at City College will be hosting the symposium marking the 60-year anniversary of ARCH. And if you're concerned about land use or housing or equity in the built environment, that's where you should be on those two days. This show was produced by yours truly, Vince Boudreau and Angela Harden. If you'd like to attend the 60th anniversary of the founding the Architects' Renewal Committee, go to Eventbrite and type in the following phrase, ARCH, A-R-C-H, @ 60 Symposium and put Harlem in as the location.
I did want to say, before we break, this is the last show that Angela Harden will be working with me on as producer. I want to thank you for eight wonderful years of guidance and collaboration. I know you're on to great things. After this, she will not be leaving Harlem, she will not be stepping away from her lifelong mission to serve the people of Harlem and we are all holding our breaths to see what she'll do next. So, Angela, thank you and congratulations, and everybody else, we are out. Thanks, everyone.