Pierina believes in our community’s capacity to get through the most difficult of challenges and still rise.

• Provide animal shelters: The Bronx is home to a growing number of stray animals including cats and dogs, and yet we lack the necessary resources and facilities for them. As Council Member, I would advocate for the completion of the Bronx Animal Care Shelter.
• Remove barriers to affordable housing for families with companion animals: We should reduce barriers to accessible and affordable housing by allowing companion animals.
• Animal welfare as part of a broader vision of social justice: Humane treatment of animals in our city should dictate our animal welfare policies. As we advocate for animal rights in policies like expanding animal care centers, companion-animal friendly housing, humane education, plant based diets, regulating live-poultry stores, banning fur and so much more -- we must approach respect for all life, animal and human.

Just after the New Year, one of my neighbors approached me in great distress.

She is about 40 years old, and has lived in our building for 15 years. She had received a letter saying her lease would not be renewed, and she would have to leave the community she has called home for decades. And she was not alone, many neighbors in our building received the same letter. Across the Bronx and Northern Manhattan, people were getting that letter, as well.

This story was heartbreaking, but unfortunately not unique. Today, our zip code, 10468, leads the city in number of evictions filed *during* the State’s eviction moratorium, with an estimated 2,500 families involved in an eviction case in the Northwest Bronx (estimated based on this report – bit.ly/2P0bTd2 – from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development).

Here in the Bronx, 96% of our neighbors are renters. Before the pandemic, 70% of our households were only one income shock away from being behind on rent (see this report from the Community Service Society at bit.ly/3fgRbAa), and thus at risk of eviction. COVID-19 has made this precarity even worse.

Our community is 74% Latinx, and 20% Black. These housing trends are not a coincidence; they are by design.

Our solutions must be by design, as well. To truly treat our hard hit communities of color with dignity in the recovery from COVID-19, we must go further than just fighting evictions. While we need to do everything in our power to keep tenants in their homes, the issue is broader, and deeper, and our solution must meet that.

We must understand just housing policy as a form of long-overdue reparations for our communities. We must treat housing and homeownership as something that protects our most economically vulnerable from displacement, opens opportunities for home ownership, creates social housing that is deeply and permanently affordable, promotes racial justice, and builds wealth in long-disinvested communities.

The mechanisms we would need already mostly exist. Over the last two decades, the city has built or preserved hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units. All we need to do is to pivot existing capital resources from creation of preservation of rentals toward ownership, with a clear goal of benefiting those historically blocked from wealth building opportunities.

In order to do this, the state and city Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) and Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) respectively, must pass with resources provided to allow individual tenant associations and and community organizations in Black and brown neighborhoods – such as community land trusts and non-profit affordable housing developers -the right of first refusal when a property goes up for sale. In immediate cases of speculation-driven purchases now like in my building, leaders must come together to demand a voluntary implementation of TOPA/COA now, where if tenants want to purchase, they be provided every tool to do so. Furthermore, the city could foreclose properties of irresponsible and speculative landlords who do not provide basic services and allow buildings to fall into disrepair. Once in city ownership, these buildings could then be converted to affordable home ownership and other forms of social housing, in partnership with neighborhood organizations.

In Washington, we must partner with members of our federal delegation to ensure Low-Income Housing Tax Credits are flexible enough to support home ownership and social housing projects. Finally, as we strive to build equity through homeownership, we must also build equity in the very process of housing construction and rehabilitation. All housing must be built accessible to people with disabilities, and built and preserved in a manner that produces good jobs with benefits.

Why a reparations framework? This country was built on slave labor, and after Emancipation, oppression of communities of color was codified into different forms of governance: the Jim Crow laws of the South, and segregation that led to unequal access to wealth building opportunities by the federal government and private banks. Redlining, blockbusting, unequal access to financing programs like those in the GI bill effectively blocked access to financing, and excluded countless people of color from receiving mortgages and buying homes. Homeownership is one of the primary ways that wealth is passed generationally, and this has had a devastating impact in perpetuating the racial wealth gap in the United States.

Even when communities of color began to make gains in homeownership in the early 2000s, many of the loans came through the predatory practices in subprime lending. During the Great Recession households of color saw immense wealth transfers out of our communities. Real estate cycles have since allowed for the amassing of great wealth by corporate landlords, leaving tenants – often of color – more and more vulnerable to speculative activity.

If we hope to undo a racist legacy of housing discrimination, we need solutions that are as targeted as the racist policies that got us here. As policy makers, we must put policies in place now that will protect residents from the many waves of speculation and eviction threats to come.

A housing as reparations framework helps to begin to address the past, but also looks toward the future, as a major step in closing the racial wealth gap protecting families and communities from gentrification and displacement. Putting homeownership in a reparations framework is critical for my Afro-Latinx community, and for Black and Brown communities across New York.

This is possible. This is doable. The time is now to pivot the city’s housing resources to produce more homeownership opportunities for communities of color

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Burnside branch of Amalgamated Bank has remained closed.

Amalgamated Bank, an institution founded by a union of immigrants in 1923 to provide unbanked members with a trusted financial institution that brands itself as

“America’s socially responsible bank,” is preparing to cut off a critical financial lifeline to my West Bronx community.

The bank, which claims to be rooted in economic and racial justice, plans to close their branch at 94 Burnside Avenue, where it is one of only two full service banking options in the heart of my predominantly Black and Latinx, immigrant, very low-income community – which was also hardest hit by COVID-19.

I challenge Amalgamated Bank to show where they stand in this moment, live up to its stated values, and keep the Burnside branch open.My neighbors and I know the unrest that took place in our community on June 1, 2020 caused property damage to the Burnside branch. We understand that COVID-19 has hit Amalgamated Bank’s bottom line. We understand that the wealthy executives at Amalgamated are considering the bank’s financial stability.

Keith Mestrich is Amalgamated Bank’s President and CEO.

However, we know that the 60+ Burnside small merchants, organized for years by the Davidson Community Center and Burnside-Jerome-Tremont Merchant Association, rely on Amalgamated’s banking services. They too sustained substantial property damage.

We also have not forgotten that local business owners and leaders stood with and advocated for Amalgamated in 2008 to help it qualify for millions of dollars in subsidies that included subsidized deposits from city and state governments through the Banking Development District (BDD) program, premised upon the bank locating a site in this community.And while we at Burnside have been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, high levels of unemployment and civil unrest, we know the residents and many small businesses rooted and invested in this community will not be exercising an “escape plan.”

Any institution that truly believes in the commitment to economic and racial justice, that knows its mission is made manifest in its actions rather than words, does not leave a Black and Latinx community just when we need quality financial services and jobs on the ground the most.

We know that bank branches are closing across the nation as more transition to online spaces.

Yet the most underserved neighborhoods have historically had fewer accessible banking options in their communities, and now we are losing them at a faster rate. Amalgamated’s decision to close the Burnside branch, while continuing to remain open to cater to predominantly white and wealthy communities like Union Square, follows the inequitable national trend.

If Amalgamated Bank were to abandon this community now, it would only exacerbate the existing structural injustice our neighborhood faces.

The unbanked rate in our community approaches a staggering 30%, compared to a 7.7% national rate.

The Bronx is also the borough with the highest percentage of residents – 38 percent – without home broadband service. Many of our low- income Black and Latinx residents are without reliable access to Internet service; this is especially true of our senior residents who are also less tech-savyy and  who rely on the Burnside branch for in-person services. Visiting the Co-op City site, the only other Amalgamated Bank branch in the Bronx, would mean spending over 2 hours on public transportation during a global pandemic, as the vast majority of our neighbors do not own cars.

If Amalgamated deserts our community, many will likely be forced to rely on more accessible predatory financial services on which underbanked Americans spend thousands of dollars in fees and interest each year.

If Amalgamated Bank executives truly believe in economic and racial justice, they will rise to the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and choose this moment to show where they stand. They will stay in our community, support our residents and small business owners, and fight for Black and Latinx lives.