Issue 71: The return of the newsletter!
The right to counsel, fly fishing with paint, a Little Free Library got vandalized, the status of safe water fountains in our public schools, and more!
And — we’re back! Thank you all for being patient with me while I adjusted to my new schedule. Here’s a new newsletter for you, and I hope you are having a wonderful weekend! — Amy
Fly fishing at Mana Contemporary
I showed up to my studio early last week and was a little surprised to see a guy out on the lawn fly fishing?
From the Mana website:
Six years ago, Ben Miller began his Endangered Rivers series out of his deep passion for raising the awareness and importance of river preservation. The Endangered Rivers paintings, like the rivers themselves, are complex layers of color and transparency. Each work is created in reverse, with marks made on the back of a plexiglass panel. When turned around, the first strikes of paint represent surface reflections and whitewater rills. These highlights are then backed by successive color layers of deeper and darker forms.
To the best of my understanding, the artist dips the end of his fishing line into paint, and then casts it out so that it strikes the surface of the plexiglass. After doing this over and over and over, dense abstract paintings emerge that resemble the texture of a river.
During his time in JC, the Montana-based artist traveled to Liberty State Park and Lincoln Park, set up on the side of the river, and created his paintings. And then he also came to Mana Contemporary to do another version of the same project on their lawn. The paintings were then auctioned off to support local environmental charities.
To learn more about this project, check out Mana’s site or the artist’s own website, which contains a really in depth explanation of his process, including a film documenting him making a work.
Right to counsel
The Hudson County DSA chapter recently started a campaign for “right to counsel” — the idea that tenants have a right to legal representation in the event of a possible eviction. Wanting to know more, I reached out to DSA member Amanda Luchun and asked her to write something up about this campaign. She, along with DSA members Joel Brooks, Isaac Jimenez, Duncan Brooks, and Julia Tasche came together to write the article below. As they write, “Right to Counsel will equip tenants with the tools to fight back against eviction, protect their interests, and hold landlords accountable.” Here’s info on the eviction crisis in JC, along with ways you can help by getting involved:
JC Eviction Crisis:
New Jersey is plagued by an eviction crisis and Jersey City is an epicenter. In fall of 2021, roughly 393,000 households in New Jersey were behind on their rent. In Jersey City, only 820 families had received federal rental assistance as of April 2022.This is a small portion of the thousands of people who applied. The effects of eviction are profound and can include loss of material possessions, access to schools, jobs, and social networks. Landlords use their access to experienced attorneys to evict tenants, but with access to counsel of their own, tenants can fight back and they can win.
For example, nj.com covered a story about tenants at 96 Duncan Avenue in Jersey City dealing with a broken boiler. Instead of fixing the boiler, the landlord sent the tenants a letter offering them money to move out. Many of the tenants refused, but the boiler remained broken and tenants went without heat through November, December and January.
With the help of local organizers, the tenants were able to get legal support from the Waterfront Project as the temperature dipped below freezing and 96 Duncan Avenue became uninhabitable. Through legal advice, the tenants secured temporary housing paid for by their landlord. The boiler was repaired in January and tenants were able to return to their apartments.
To many tenants in Jersey City, this might sound familiar. In a rapidly changing city, a building with residents who have lived there for 30 years is a target for real estate developers and corporate landlords. The nj.com article writes of 96 Duncan, “Brian Rans of the Waterfront Project, who represents tenants of the building, said the idea the tenants were being forced out was a central part of the legal complaints. ‘Due to the failure to provide heat, the landlord has essentially constructively evicted the tenant without due process,’ Rans said.”
This policy would provide free counsel for every tenant in Jersey City facing eviction, ejectment, and a number of other circumstances that could lead to them losing their home. This includes providing lawyers for tenants who need to defend themselves when served an eviction or ejectment notice, and those who need defense in administrative proceedings. It also includes counsel for tenants who need to appeal decisions that could lead to eviction, like rent control board appeals. This legislation will also provide legal protection to tenants in a number of affirmative cases — that is, cases where a tenant has to go to court as the plaintiff against their landlord — in order to stay in their home safely. These include constructive eviction (where a landlord does not serve an eviction notice but tries to evict a tenant by failing to provide a safe, clean, or habitable space), terminations of subsidy (where a tenant could lose government assistance), violations of rent control laws, code enforcement and habitability issues, violations of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, and more.
Right to Counsel will equip tenants with the tools to fight back against eviction, protect their interests, and hold landlords accountable. Attorneys can help tenants fight back by filing actions brought by tenants including housing discrimination claims, illegal rent increases, code violations, claims of uninhabitability, improper termination of housing subsidies, and the enforcement of temporary and final restraining orders related to housing. These actions often lead to the eviction filing being dropped by the judge, resulting in less people being evicted. Landlords have legal counsel, and Jersey City tenants should too.
What places already have it?
NCCRC maps existing Right to Counsel legislation across the country. In North Jersey, Newark has adopted a Right to Counsel Ordinance but it is limited to those who are below the 200% federal poverty line, which is about $26,000 for an individual per year in 2023. In Boulder, CO, a campaign for “No Evictions without Representation” resulted in an ordinance which created a right to counsel program within the City. The program is funded by a $75 tax for landlords on any of their properties operated on long-term rental licenses and raised roughly $1.9 million in the first year. The 100,000 person city saw a 63% reduction in landlords winning eviction cases.
In some cases, Right to Counsel isn’t really a right but instead funds non-profits to provide brief legal advice to tenants over the phone. The success of Right to Counsel is determined by how strong it is from the bottom up, not the top down. We need a movement of residents and tenants to fight for a strong, universal right to counsel that can’t be co-opted by the Hudson County political machine. It will need to be the residents of Jersey City who stand up to fight for ourselves, our neighbors, and our family members who make up the overwhelming majority of renters in this City.
How does RTC work in real life?
Right to Counsel is administered differently in different places. Some cities and states allocate additional funding to legal service providers like non-profits, so they can scale up operations and provide representation to everyone in need. Other cities, like Newark, have created a municipal office to oversee that Right to Counsel program, which directly employs attorneys who provide representation to residents, and then provides additional funding to other legal service providers. In Jersey City, we’re advocating for the creation of a Right to Counsel Office in City Hall that would be the first stop for any tenant for eviction. Any tenant facing an eviction threat could call their office or show up in person to receive assistance.
Call to action:
Jersey City is one of the most expensive places in the country to live. We have good rent control laws that the administration refuses to enforce. We recently had a retiree get evicted by her landlord while she was in the hospital recovering from heart problems. As Hudson County DSA continues knocking on doors every other Saturday, we’ve seen how much need there is from tenants here. Our demands are clear:
Rather than wait for our leaders to figure it out and risk a watered down program, we crafted this policy to drastically shift the power imbalance between landlords and tenants. We’re making our politicians choose, either us, or the biggest landlords in the City. That said, we need a bottom-up, grassroots movement to actually win this. To join our coalition of organizations and neighborhood associations advocating, agitating and organizing to win. Collect petitions, knock doors, and organize tenants to win this ordinance in the City Council and fight for the Right to Counsel in Jersey City.
Little Free Library vandalized :(
Well, this sucks.
The Lafayette Park LFL’s steward, Leslie Lone, reached out to share these pictures and man, what a bummer. Imagine being so annoyed at someone giving out free books to the community that you knock the whole thing down. Very annoying.
If you’d like to donate to help them rebuild, they’re on Venmo here (@littlefreelafayettelibrary if you’d prefer to go through the app). They have plenty of books to give out — but they do need to repair the library itself to help get them out into the world.
Drinking water in the public schools
Jersey City still doesn’t have working water fountains in a number of their public schools, but the news is very slowly getting better. From CivicParent’s website:
It’s worth sharing some good news as we head into the new school year: Jersey City Together’s education team has helped push for water remediation in over a dozen schools. Specifically, more than a dozen schools now have new, 21st century working water fountains. The list of schools that have had new working water fountains installed can be viewed on NJ Together’s “Water Advocacy” page.
See if your school is fixed…or not.
And while this is certainly good news for the schools that are fixed, many are still waiting. So the Water Advocacy team with NJ Together is calling for pressure on the school district and the Jersey City MUA to complete the job and ensure new, 21st century water fountains are installed in every school, all over the city. Leave no school behind.
Learn more about Jersey City Together’s education team water advocacy here. You can also learn about the timeline of the water advocacy using this linktree.
Amy DeGise update
Well, I really didn’t think I’d be writing this back when it all got started, but Amy DeGise is still on the city council. Somehow dozens of people showing up for multiple city council meetings, several op eds, way too many social media posts to count, and a terminally ill man calling for her resignation as his last, dying wish… none of this has made her budge. And so here we are.
Yesterday at the All About Downtown festival, over a dozen activists gathered signatures on a petition calling for her resignation. I can’t imagine that given all of the things that I’ve already listed above which didn’t work that such a petition would really make her reconsider, but I appreciate that people are still pushing to get her to go and certainly there’s no harm in trying. What’s more, whoever winds up keeping that list of names and contact info will have a pretty extensive list of people who care about good government and about Jersey City civic life — which could be tremendously helpful in terms of organizing going forward. I don’t think this petition alone will be the death blow to this story, but it could be a step that helps galvanize and bring people in who have otherwise been watching from the sidelines.
Anyway you look at this, this story isn’t going away. I was certainly hoping weeks ago that we’d be done with it, but we’re not — and both sides are digging in. People are still very angry, and they haven’t forgotten. I think we’re going to see a lot more about this in the coming weeks.
ICYMI
On Thursday 9/22/22 at 7PM the NJCU Guitar Studio will be performing their first concert of the season. The concert is at 7pm at Rossey Hall on the campus of NJCU (2039 JFK Boulevard), and is free and open to all. This is one of a series of free concerts at the school, and I hope to have more dates and info over the coming weeks.
We got live-streamed city council meetings! Woo hoo! Also caucus meetings will be live-streamed too! This is a great step forward, but we still need fully hybrid meetings — aka meetings where people can make public statements from home or their office, or wherever they are. If this is an important issue to you, please let your council member know!
JCAST is right around the corner! The website for the large open studio/art exhibition festival is still a little thin (“special events” and “info stations” on their site still have “stay tuned!” underneath) but the map works, so you can start planning if you’d like to go. I’m most intrigued by what appears to be a show at Dosa Hut (come for the art, stay for the dosas — or something like that; seriously their dosas are fantastic) which sounds really good to me. Hopefully more on all things JCAST related next week, including some updates on what will be happening at Mana.