Grand Master Billy Davis, a 10th-degree black belt and a member of the World Martial Arts Hall of Fame, who was honored by actor Wesley Snipes in his televised tribute to the masters of the 20th century, sits on his wheelchair on Jersey Street. Davis, 70, is a lifelong resident of the section of Staten Island known as New Brighton. There’s no one who knows Jersey Street better than he des, he said.
Since 1998, Davis has been waging a war of words against a plan to place a homeless shelter on the street, which back in the 1960s used to be called the “125th Street” of Staten Island because many of the businesses were owned by Blacks.
“All I’m trying to do is wake up the people to what is going on here,” he explained to the Amsterdam News, while sitting across from the proposed shelter. “This is a downtrodden neighborhood trying to get itself together. The shelter will devastate this community.”
New Brighton is an interesting mixture of housing diversity, with a large public housing project, subsidized housing, many beautiful homes as well as some that are not so well maintained. Many of the homes are owned by Blacks: native-born, Africans, and those from English-speaking Caribbean nations.
New Brighton is also a place where some activists say affordable housing is most needed.
Back on October 14, Davis attended the Affordable Housing Forum sponsored by the Staten Island Committee Against Bigotry, the Staten Island branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Communities United for Respect and Trust. He told the Amsterdam News that he believed the topic of the forum to be a smoke-screen for what he termed the real plan to take the community away from the people.
“I don’t want to talk about affordable housing until they deal with the entities that want to bust up our community, such as those who are building this shelter,” Davis stated angrily.
However, Ed Josey, president of the S.I. NAACP, has no problem talking about affordable housing, neighborhood-busting tactics or bigotry.
“My real concern is that we have been talking for a year about affordable housing and nothing is moving,” Josey told the Amsterdam News. In 2005, the New York State Assembly Housing Committee, chaired by Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez, held an affordable housing hearing for Staten Island. The October meeting was a follow up. The next meeting on the subject is scheduled for November 15 at 185 St. Mark’s Place in the basement community room.
But one of Josey’s main concerns is that the term “affordable housing” is seen by many on Staten Island as a code word for Blacks and Latinos buying a home in your neighborhood.
“Racism is alive and well on Staten Island. And it is still impossible for Blacks to live in certain neighborhoods here,” Josey said.
While Josey raised the issue of bigotry, no one else on the panel discussed it. “No one wants to talk about the housing issues on Staten Island as a Black agenda item,” Josey lamented.
Assemblyman John Lavelle, chair of the Staten Island Democratic County Committee and a member of the Assembly housing committee, admitted to the Amsterdam News that it would be difficult to build affordable homes in the heavily white South Shore area, where much of the 15 percent of available vacant land on Staten Island is located. Much of that land is public land.
Lavelle said that the city officials must be convinced that no public land is to be given to developers “without affordable housing set-asides.”
“There is no affordable housing on the South Shore,” countered Josey.
According to the Pratt Center for Community Development, the 2005 median household income on the island was $57,000 (compared to $37,000 for New York City as a whole). “Staten Island is the wealthiest borough in New York City,” stated the Pratt Center during its testimony before the Housing Committee.
In 2002, according to Pratt representatives, 70 percent of Staten Island households were homeowners, with a median household income of $74,200. Yet, poverty on Staten Island rose by 48 percent in the last decade, with 10 percent of islanders living in poverty.
Another statistic that seems not to be on the housing activists’ front burner is that of home foreclosures. Media reports state that Staten Island leads the city with over 900 foreclosures. Observers say that the real issue is “predatory lending,” not affordable housing.
Getting back to the Pratt testimony, the island enjoyed “substantial” growth over the past 15 years. “It was the fastest growing county in New York State in the 1990s, when almost 23,000 new town housing units were built, an increase of 14 percent,” the report stated.
The report also noted that the fast pace of building led to what observers say is “overdevelopment.”
“The Bloomberg administration has responded by down-zoning wide swaths of Staten Island. Unfortunately, these down-zonings affected 68,000 lots and the reduce number of potential units could be built on the island by 25 percent and will have the effect of exacerbating the affordable housing crisis,” the Pratt Center report stated.
Davis understands all this to mean that not only will there not be any affordable housing on the South Shore, but also that Black folks are being run out of New Brighton. “Well, they got a fight on their hands,” he said.
