November 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Only Reconciliation Brings Atonement: Saving Low-Income Housing

Emma Morgan opened a rally on the steps of the Northampton, MA City Hall with the speech excerpted below. The rally preceded Erev Rosh Hashanna, the Head of the Jewish New Year, on Friday, September 26th, 2003/5763. Ms. Morgan almost withheld this speech from publication, because the yearning to be safe from the real danger of anti-Semitism motivates many Jewish people to keep internal Jewish debate within the Jewish community. She decided to risk sharing the tradition of Jewish social justice activism more broadly in an effort to bring national attention to her community's crisis, before it's too late.

Emma Morgan at home. Photo © Michael Jacobson-Hardy

Hello everybody and thank you so much for coming out today in this show of support to save our homes. My name is Emma Morgan. I've lived at what I think is a very special place, Meadowbrook Apartments, for over ten years. I am the chairperson of the Save Our Homes Tenants Association at Meadowbrook. My neighbors and my allies - not everything I have to say to you today is going to be popular or necessarily comfortable for me to say - or for you to hear.

It's popular, very popular, to talk about living conditions in Iraq, whatever ideas or feelings you have on the subject. The very critical subject of housing in Israel and Palestine is popular. Whether you are in favor of building more Israeli settlements in the occupied territories or dismantling existing settlements, you will find enormous local, popular support for your views on these constantly critical and complicated issues. These places, far away, and close to so many of our hearts, are across oceans. For all of our passion, we have very little actual control over these situations.

Local, affordable housing, an area where we have a present and compelling opportunity to make a real and immediate impact, is not a popular topic. Unfortunately, we, the tenants at Meadowbrook, have reached a point in our struggle where I don't have the luxury of concerning myself with what is comfortable or popular. Let me explain.

One of the late Senator Paul Wellstone's contributions to the struggle to save affordable housing is a provision
requiring owners of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-subsidized, affordable housing complexes like ours to issue a warning notice five months before pre-paying a HUD mortgage and converting the complex to market rates. The warning must be delivered to HUD, to all affected local government officials, and to every tenant living in the complex.

Two years ago, October, the developer Harold Grinspoon purchased Meadowbrook Apartments, and issued such a notice. But, in those five months, our tenants' association, together with the City of Northampton, led by Mayor Clare Higgins, was able to convince Mr. Grinspoon to explore another option.

The city, the state, and the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency (now MassHousing) created the most lucrative refinancing package ever made available to any developer in the state of Massachusetts for the preservation of affordable housing. In addition to profitable mortgage subsidies along the way, this deal came to include eight million dollars in equity takeout (that's upfront profit, folks!) for the owners.

Additionally, the proposed "affordable" rents were to be based on a percentage of a rapidly rising county median income and so included an inherent and significant annual rent increase. In the second year alone, the proposed rents rose upwards of $100 per unit, even while the deal languished in negotiations. Eventually, the deal grew so lucrative for the owners, and so unaffordable for residents, that HUD pulled out of the deal in February of 2003. HUD cited the "substantial equity takeout and its impact on the projects rents," which were due to increase, in many instances, by upwards of 150%.

Grinspoon's company issued a new five-month warning notice in May, 2003. The so-called affordable housing deal collapsed entirely over the summer. As I stand here, only five days remain on that five month warning notice - five days. As of October 1, Harold Grinspoon could go ahead with his mortgage prepayment plan, thereby ending all affordable rent structures and subsidy programs that were written into our mortgage when the taxpayers first built Meadowbrook Apartments in the 1970's. Some of the original tenants, or in some cases, their children, still live there today, and would like to go on doing so.

Before I tell you about the resolution we are seeking to our plight, I'd like to tell you about another extraordinary place. The place is called the Solomon Schechter Day School, and it's located in walking distance of Meadowbrook. It's a truly wonderful community school. The classes are small, the approach to learning is wonderfully creative, and the children's individual learning styles and needs are respected and met. But what I love most about this school is its commitment to teaching Jewish ethics and the values of Tzedaka (the sharing of one's personal resources), Chesed (caring for others in times of need) and G'milut Chasidim (acts of loving kindness in the larger community).

To integrate their learning of these essential values, the children make field trips to local nursing homes, homeless shelters, and the Northampton Survival Center. They donate goods and volunteer their time, learning face-to-face to value people less fortunate than they are and to give of themselves in the local community. The only thing wrong with this picture is that this beautiful school was able this year to move into its newly constructed schoolhouse because our landlord, Harold Grinspoon, donated many hundreds of thousands of dollars through his philanthropic foundation to the capital campaign that made all of this possible. A good thing to do, without a doubt. Harold Grinspoon's foundation additionally subsidizes every child's education by $2500 every year, in order to make the school affordable to a wider diversity of families.

The problem lies in the fact that this is the same Harold Grinspoon who is poised to eliminate decades-old subsidies for affordable housing on a sweeping scale, only a stone's throw away from the school.

The 252 households at Meadowbrook Apartments represent upwards of 20% of all the affordable housing in Northampton. We have one of the most culturally, ethnically, and economically diverse communities in Hampshire County, a county that prides itself on valuing diversity. The tenants at Meadowbrook include people with disabilities, elderly people, low-wage earners working two, sometimes three jobs to make ends meet, and parents raising special needs children on shoestring budgets. And almost all of us rely heavily on one of the several subsidy programs that are currently structured into our rents, subsidy programs that are no longer available anywhere else in Hampshire County. Without Meadowbrook, most of us would have to leave the county, and many of us would have to leave the state.

The people lucky enough to get a bed in one of the dwindling local homeless shelters visited by Schechter school- children are the same people who are on waiting lists to get into places like Meadowbrook Apartments. Many Meadowbrook tenants have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, and they do not wish to experience it again.

Many people who live in the local nursing homes visited by Schechter students once lived at Meadowbrook. There are elderlypeople living at Meadowbrook who take the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus every day to visit their spouses, who now live at the Northampton Nursing Home.

In a good month, people at Meadowbrook donate goods to the Survival Center, and in a bad month, when someone is laid off from a job or the foodstamps don't quite make it until the end of the month, the same people pick up groceries for their families or winter boots for their children at the Northampton Survival Center.

I want to close my words to you today by assuring you that no one is asking Harold Grinspoon for a philanthropic gesture, vis-a-vis Meadowbrook, in that no one is asking him to take a loss or give anything away. Harold Grinspoon bought the property for $9,000,000. His company's asking price, two years later, is $23,000,000, and the experience of most tenants is that the condition of life at Meadowbrook is worse, not better.

I could argue persuasively that Harold Grinspoon, whose company is reported to gross over $100,000,000 dollars annually, and whose charitable foundation gives away millions of dollars every year, can afford to give Meadowbrook, as a gift, to one of the local non-profit developers who are eager to purchase Meadowbrook and keep it affordable. This would be philanthropy at its finest. But I am not here to make that argument today.

I could certainly argue that Harold Grinspoon could afford to sell at the purchase price of $9,000,000. This would make it much easier on the public funding sources that are poised to assist an affordable housing developer in the acquisition and rehabilitation of Meadowbrook and maximize the subsidy programs that could be built into the new mortgage. This would indeed be a philanthropic gesture. But I am not here to make that argument, either.

I stand before you to argue that Harold Grinspoon can and rightly should sell Meadowbrook for merely several million dollars more than what he paid for it, thereby making a living, but not a killing.

Tonight begins Rosh Hashannah, the holy new year for Jews all over the world. I, like most Jews, will be in synagogue observing the holiday, which asks each of us to look deeply into our hearts and take stock of our lives, evaluating every deed we have done or not done, every promise or vow we have made in the last year. The holiday offers us a chance to turn towards God and to each other for the purpose of making amends, releasing each other from old transgressions and unkept promises, giving each other the opportunity to do better this year, to commit ourselves to our deepest values and make more evolved decisions this year.

We are then given eight more days (called the Days of Awe) to explore our hearts and reach out to each other before our day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. It is a time, according to our tradition, when God listens extra closely, the bounds between the spiritual and material world become diffuse, and we are given a special opportunity to turn towards that which is Godly in ourselves. On Yom Kippur, the liturgy makes crystal clear that that the prayers and rituals bring atonement only for those transgressions committed against God. However, for transgressions committed between one human being and another, "Yom Kippur brings no atonement until the injured party is reconciled."

We who live at Meadowbrook apartments would more than welcome reconcilation with Harold Grinspoon. We have indeed been injured, in that we have lived in uncertainty and even despair about the fate of our homes for two long years. Mr. Grinspoon's threatened actions would endanger our security and our very ability to keep our families intact. The preservation of our community thus far has felt like nothing short of staving off the ocean. And now it is high tide and the ocean is at our door.

There are a minimum of three affordable housing developers with a proven interest and track record in long-term affordable housing who are eager, eager to purchase Meadowbrook, if only Mr. Grinspoon would sufficiently lower the price. I am here today to ask Mr. Grinspoon to do this now. I am also here to thank Mayor Clare Higgins for publicly reiterating her commitment to seize Meadowbrook by eminent domain and to see through what could be a long and ugly battle, should Harold Grinspoon make the other choice, and proceed with a market conversion of Meadowbrook Apartments.

Lastly, I stand here in good faith to wish Harold Grinspoon, and every person here, for that matter, a happy new year - one in which all of us can live in peace - and come just a little closer to the dream of sharing our lives in the safety of loving community.

To contact Harold Grinspoon, write him at the Grinspoon Foundation, 380 Union St., W. Springfield, MA 01089. Send copies of letters to the Daily Hampshire Gazette and to the Tenants Association (donations also welcome), PO Box 60434, Florence, MA 01062. For information, call 413/584-8975. To support efforts to preserve low-income housing nationwide, please see www.nlihc.org .

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