By Luke, Crossposted from DC’s Independent Media Center.
The multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan for Union Station includes an ugly extra: an “Interim plan” to park idling inter-city buses at Crummell School, in Ivy City. Many residents there already have asthma. On the 15th of August, over half of participants in an “open house” at Union Station about the proposed “master plan” were from Empower DC.
This was not a speaking presentation, but rather a collection of tables with information about the planned project. As usual, they were not soliciting any real public input, just saying “here’s what we have already decided to do” while meeting legal technicalities required of such projects.
Children wore dust masks as a symbol of diesel smoke from idling buses. Empower DC T-shirts were everywhere, as were tough questions about parking “Chinatown” buses in an African-American residential neighborhood.
One of the tough questions was my own: where’s the money, an estimated $7 billion, for the project going to come from. The answer was that they don’t know-nobody is admitting to a funding source for the project. Artwork for the proposal shows office buildings built in the “air rights” over the tracks, but relying on the demand for office space for funding is chancy at best in an uncertain economy. If funding evaporates partway through the project, the proposed 10 year “interim” bus parking at Crummell School could become permanent.
Kids in masks, hopefully they won’t have to wear them for 10 years of “interim” bus parking!
Empower DC marches in, security says no but gives up after being ignored.
Who’s in the (open) house? Empower DC dominates event as not many other DC residents show up.
The Centennial of the Alexander Crummell School, a long-neglected historic landmark in the Ivy City community, was celebrated on Saturday, November 19, 2011. (Yes, this post is well after the fact, but certainly still relevant.) Empower DC released the Ivy City Neighborhood & Oral History Project, a book that features photos, excerpts from oral history interviews, and archival news clippings about one of DC’s most historic yet least known neighborhoods. The booklet will be distributed to participants, community members and libraries.
The reception was attended by many of the former Ivy City residents and alumni of Ivy City’s Alexander Crummell School. In 2002, several Crummell alumni played a key role, along with the Ivy City–Trinidad Civic Association, in winning historic landmark status for the Alexander Crummell School, which was built in 1911 and served as one of the District of Columbia’s first public elementary schools for black children until its closure in 1972. The Crummell alumni and current residents of the community share the goal of not only preserving the school but also having it renovated to serve as a recreation and workforce development center for the neighborhood, which currently lacks amenities of the sort.
Photos featured in the book demonstrate how Ivy City was a haven for middle- and working-class blacks during the District of Columbia’s more segregated past. The book also documents the efforts of the children and youth of Ivy City as they attempt to transform the abandoned Crummell School into a community center, including a photo of DC Mayor Adrian Fenty signing a pledge to renovate Crummell for community needs. “The book will be a resource for teachers, students and all DC residents, who can learn about this small but uniquely tight-knit community,” explains Empower DC Executive Director Parisa Norouzi. “This is the first known record of the community’s history.” The goal of the Ivy City Neighborhood and Oral History Project is to bring together the former and current residents who both have the best interest of the community at heart as well as to foster pride in the community through the sharing of oral history and personal stories.
In addition to the release of the Ivy City Neighborhood & Oral History Project book, the celebration was also an opportunity to screen the documentary Crummell School: Heart and Soul of the Community, which was produced by American University Anthropology student and Grassroots Media Project intern Sean Furmage.
Don’t tell me you can’t fight city hall. Yesterday (May 15, 2012) advocates fighting to maintain and improve essential social services in the District of Columbia, packed the city council hearing room as they voted on this year’s fiscal budget. As a result, the city council passed the Budget Request Act with $25 million restored to affordable housing programs. A victory without question but more needs to be done. The final vote on the budget won’t happen until June 5, 2012. Between now and then, council members must be convinced to use fiscal reserves and/or raise more revenue to fully fund TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), homeless services, the subsidized child care program and more. For more information on what programs still need support, which council members need to be lobbied, etc., go to the Fair Budget Coalition’s campaign website Make One City Possible.
For more on what’s at stake should the city continue to cut social services, check out the fabulous video below from the Day in the Strife protest, produced by Laura Gwizdak. I don’t know where the mainstream media was that day. The halls were packed with DC residents actively participating in the political process. Personally and professionally, I call that news.
On Thursday May 10, the Fair Budget Coalition sponsored A Day in The Strife, an action at the Wilson Building in protest of Mayor Gray’s proposed cuts to the city’s budget, most of which will once again fall on the backs of the poor. For details of what’s in the budget and what’s left out, a good article to read is Kesh Ladduwahetty’s Washington Post article A Tea Party Budget for D.C. The following video from a Day in the Strife highlights what’s at stake for DC residents who will be directly impacted.
April 17, 2012, at his Ward 7 budget town hall meeting, Mayor Vince Gray said, “Just so people are clear. We’re not cutting those things. People will tell you anything. Sometimes they even think they’re right. We’re not cutting homeless services, we’re not cutting affordable housing, we’re not cutting Medicaid, we’re not cutting TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) and we’re not cutting the Summer Youth Employment Program.” Despite this, advocates for social services and affordable housing programs, like the Fair Budget Coalition who’ve been organizing around these issues, will assure you that the mayor’s proposed budget will in no way meet the growing need of DC’s low- and even moderate-income residents in these difficult economic times. In particular, the homeless families living in DC General, whose numbers continue to grow, do not believe maintaining an increasingly tenuous status quo represents their needs or wishes as taxpaying citizens of the District of Columbia. These families made their feelings known at the DC City Council Budget Hearing on April 30, 2012. Only two elected officials, Council Chair Kwame Brown and Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry were present at the hearing. ABC 7’s Sam Ford and the Washington Times’ Andrew Harnick covered the story.
The above videos make clear that DC’s safety net isn’t meeting the needs of many of our residents, but given the time constraints of a local news broadcast, it doesn’t go into much depth. For more insight, it doesn’t hurt to follow the analysis of folks like Howard University professor David Schwartzman, who routinely follows the DC budget.
Our Mayor proposes another DC budget balanced on the backs of the poor; should we be surprised? On April 20, we learned that our former mayor, Anthony Williams, has been appointed as Chief Executive of the Federal City Council, the leading local think tank of the 1 percent, or is it the 0.1 percent? (Note that Frank Keating, the former Republican governor of Oklahoma and now president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, is the FCC president). Anthony Williams served on Mayor Gray’s transition team and was also just appointed to head the new Tax Revision Commission. As CFO of the Control Board, Anthony Williams was a key architect of the Urban Structural Adjustment Program that balanced our budget on the backs of our poor, while favoring the wealthy with tax cuts (the Tax Parity Act). The Control Board regime closed DC General Hospital, privatized municipal functions, cut the so-called safety net, and increased our income gap to record levels, while setting the course for Mayor Fenty’s agenda that brought this assault on our working and middle class majority to a new level. And Mayor Gray has not unexpectedly continued along the same road.
While our mayor and council deserve credit for their liberal policies regarding sexual orientation and immigrants rights, their economic and public education policies should brand them as Republicans posing as Democrats. For example, our mayor just endorsed new DCPS school closings based on an IFF study funded by the Walton Foundation (Walmart), opening up new opportunities for the semi-privatization of public education. Colbert King just characterized conservative Democrats one hundred years ago as favoring “the wealthy, to whom much has been given, have no stake in anybody else’s success,” http://tinyurl.com/6twrwpf, an apt description of most of our local Democratic elected officials, and of course the Republican posing as an Independent, David Catania. When will these Democrats follow President Obama’s example by at least claiming to go on an “Offense Over Taxes on the Wealthy,” a headline from the New York Times?
Now to address the DC budget process. For FY 2013, Mayor Gray has proposed even more hurtful budget cuts in low income programs, amounting to roughly seventy million dollars, which include programs involving health care coverage for low income residents, affordable housing, homeless services. and cash assistance for families with children (for details go to http://www.dcfpi.org). This proposal comes on top of $239 million already cut from low income programs since 2008, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s budget data. And while the mayor and the council squabble about where to spend the $79 million surplus, specifically whether to pay back city employees for their four-day furlough taken at the beginning of 2011, the elephant sitting in the Wilson Building remains unnoticed, the under-taxed, now growing income of the top 5 percent of DC residents, whose family income is above $250,000 per year (note too that the furlough subtracted four days of pay from all affected, hence putting the greatest burden on the lowest paid employees). After the small tax hike on the wealthy passed last year, no one on the council is talking yet about another hike. Unless challenged by a relentless lobby, they will go ahead and pass another austerity budget, once again balancing it on the backs of the poor and near poor, including the former middle class. According to Tavis Smiley and Cornel West in “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto,” 150 million, or nearly half, of Americans are either poor or near poor, suffering from the lack of income security. In DC more than a majority of residents fall in that category. Fifty percent of DC’s Black children are living in poverty. Meanwhile the Washington Post tells us that the 1 percent are doing better than ever, with their minimum household income being $617,000. (Note: this minimum is lower than the ITEP minimum of $1.5 million for the top 1 percent of District families, excluding the elderly because the Census figures the Post relied on are underestimating the real income because of tax avoidance.)
Here are the latest DC tax statistics, updated by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP): the top 1 percent of DC families, with three million dollars of million income now pay a lower DC tax rate (6.1 percent) than the bottom 20 percent with $12,400 annual income (7.0 percent), while the working/middle class pays 9 to 10 percent, taking into account the federal deduction benefit, mostly helping the upper income families, restoring some of the money spent for their DC taxes. Yes, the total DC tax burden of the top 1 percent is now even lower than before the small hike on incremental income above $350,000 passed last year. According to ITEP, the very wealthy across the nation have found even more ways to hide their income from taxation.
There is an alternative: hike the overall tax burden of wealthy residents by no more than two cents on the dollar of family income, yielding two hundred million dollars a year in additional revenue, while at the same time tax relief for our low income and middle class residents could be provided, e.g., by coupling the District income tax deduction and exemption with the federal rates. The increased revenue should be targeted by legislation to restoring and expanding the gutted programs that serve low income residents, especially for affordable housing and income security (TANF and its supports that facilitate entry into the workforce earning living wages). And any budget surplus should likewise be targeted to restoring these programs. More badly needed revenue should come from curbing corporate welfare including unjustified tax abatements and subsidies, our mayor and council campaigning for PILOTS, payments in lieu of taxes from the World Bank, IMF, Fannie Mae, as well as making PEPCO pay its DC taxes and taking immediate steps to establish a DC Public Bank, investing our taxes into green economic development, living-wage jobs, and affordable housing. For more on the District government’s record since 2008, check out the Report on the State of Human Rights in DC: http://afsc.org/resource/report-state-human-rights-dc.
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