Volunteer To Serve Haitian Immigrants

We have a special volunteer opportunity for attorneys to serve Haitian immigrants in New York applying for Temporary Protective Status. You do not need to be an immigration lawyer to serve, as competent training will be provided. Our volunteers will receive one two-hour training session for a legal clinic at a later date.

If you are an attorney, please consider this unique opportunity.

The training session will take place on Feb. 19th from 6-8 PM at 475 Riverside Drive, 3rd Floor. The free legal clinic will be on Feb. 26th, 6-9 PM at St. Jerome’s Church, 2900 Newkirk Ave. (at E. 29th Street), Brooklyn.

Please RSVP (or send questions) to us at volunteer@brooklynjubilee.org.

Another Brighton Beach Story

I continue to be astounded by depths of misinformation about housing law among the Russian-speaking tenants and landlords in  Brighton Beach. In our hyper-rights-conscious American culture, it’s easy to forget that people raised under another government may not assume they have the protection of the law, or its obligations.  

We recently met a gentleman in Brighton Beach who was vexed by his landlord. He rented an apartment in her building that he had been sharing with his sister before she moved out.  After his sister left, the client continued paying the rent without her.  Remarkably, the landlord said he’d have to take in a man she’d found to be his roommate. She had already told the new tenant he could live there, and she didn’t understand why our client would resist.  

What might seem like an obvious answer was apparently not so obvious to this landlord. We spoke to our client about the certainty of his right not  to accept strangers to live in his apartment.  Because the arguments with his landlord had gotten rather heated, we made certain he knew where to see a judge if he was illegally locked out of his apartment.  Because the landlord refused to give a lease or rent receipts, we encouraged him to gather the documents he could use to prove his lawful residence in the apartment, should the police be called to mediate.  Then, Leslie  the Director of the Russian Community Life Center, prayed for him, before he left. 

We continue to be blessed to serve in a community where this kind of basic legal rights information is so needed.  Please continue to pray for a more just treatment of tenants in Brighton Beach, and for landlords to receive clear guidance about their rights and obligations in New York City.

Habitat for Humanity preps New Yorkers for tax season

You’ve probably seen the commercials. Do your taxes now, and why wait for the refund when we’ll give you the money right now? Sounds good, right? In fact, the Refund Anticipation Loans, short-term high-interest loans (50%-500%)  appeal to low-income taxpayers who could use the cash right away to pay bills.  But these loans are risky gambles, and a lot of New Yorkers will lose that gamble this year.

Habitat for Humanity is now sponsoring a series of talks on the Refund Anticipation Loan. They have some startling statistics. In 2004, New Yorkers lost more than $92 million of their refunds and credits through Refund Anticipation Loans. Approximately 77% of all New Yorkers who received a RAL were low-income. In many of the poorest NYC neighborhoods, and estimated 1 out of every 4 taxpayers received a RAL.

Habitat-NYC will provide information about the loans, as well as smart tax strategies for tax savings and free tax preparation sites.

Brooklyn Jubilee is assisting Habitat by trying to get the word out. We’re looking for locations to sponsor the talks by Habitat, and hoping to help some New Yorkers save their hard-earned money. If you know of any churches or non-profits we could approach to sponsor a talk, please contact Sandhya at brooklynjubilee@brooklynjubilee.org.

In the Bay Ridge Community

Sandhya teaches tenant’s rights at the Brooklyn Arab American Friendship Center

This year, we began serving at the Brooklyn Arab American Friendship Center in Bay Ridge. The center offers English language classes and help with citizenship tests for Arab-speaking, predominantly Muslim women. During our last class in Bay Ridge, teaching this lovely group of Arab-American women about tenant’s rights in NYC, a young high school girl used my camera to take a few photographs for me. Understanding there were certain cultural sensitivities, I assured the women that we wouldn’t show their faces to anyone, only the backs of their heads. Fadia, the director of the program, urged me to keep my word. “If their family members see them, they could come and kill them.” She was not joking. And I believed her.  Then it really began to sink in to me, what a remarkable community Fadia has created for my new Muslim friends.

Fadia Farag, Exec. Director of the Brooklyn Arab American Friendship Center, with Sandhya after class

In a world where letting your face be seen, even by accident, could lead to your death, how carefully must you consider who you are willing to trust?  And yet, Fadia’s center attracts many Muslim women every week to learn English  and receive study help for their citizenship tests. They freely talk with Fadia, and others who like me who are not Muslim, welcoming our friendship and counsel. I don’t believe I’ve ever been covered with kisses after a training until the first time I went to visit the center. One woman insisted I take her scarf as a gift! So when I explained that their pictures were being taken, and we would protect them from exposure, not one woman left. More than anything, it seems that the linguistic isolation, rather than cultural, has created barriers around them, barriers to their knowledge about the law. They are eager to learn this year as we visit on a monthly basis.  We are priviledged to have their trust, to bring other Brooklyn Jubilee volunteers to teach about housing and other areas of the law.

Habitat for Humanity: Where are the buyers?

Brooklyn Jubilee’s newest partnership has just begun to sprout. We are now an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity in New York City.

Habitat for Humanity has built several affordable housing developments in NYC. These buildings present the opportunity of a life time that many of us only dream about – homeownership in NYC. Best of all, they present that opportunity to families who might otherwise never be able to buy because of their income.

In fact, although they have recently built a beautiful, LEED-certified condo complex in East New York, Habitat cannot find enough qualified applicants to purchase these apartments. Stop and digest that for a moment. In New York City, where 70% of the residents are tenants, many of whom dream of homeownership but can’t pull together a 20-30% down payment, these gorgeous homes are sitting vacant. Now consider that the down payment on the Habitat homes is only ONE PERCENT, and the fixed-rate 30-year mortgage is only TWO PERCENT. So why do these condos sit empty?

Not everyone qualifies for the program. The family income must be within their guidelines. The applicant must have a good credit score, at least 620 or up. They must be willing to put in hundreds of hours of “sweat equity,” meaning actual physical labor in the construction of other homes, before they can purchase their own.  

So, Habitat can’t actually find enough qualified applicants to purchase the homes. Sometimes a good candidate is zooming along in the process, and they get caught in a credit scam, and their credit score goes bust. Sometimes people are working their way towards homeownership, and they lose their job and thus fall out side the income guidelines.

Here’s where we can help. Habitat wants to goes into the community to talk to people about their homeownership program, and encourage folks who might qualify to apply. And to foster a tenant population with higher credit scores, Habitat lectures in the community about consumer scams and other consumer traps that can ultimately ruin your credit score. They make these presentations when the can, but are always looking for more opportunities to speak to an audience. They don’t have enough resources to promote these events themselves to generate a good crowd, and many of the organization that might want to sponsor it won’t have those resources either. 

Could you be the answer? Could you help Habitat? It’s not as complicated as it might seem. I’m pretty confident we could find the venues for at least five presentations right away, and schedule them.  But Brooklyn Jubilee doesn’t have the staff to do extensive outreach for these events. It takes time, and with limited staff, we couldn’t do an effective job on our own. Volunteers could help  out by spending time on-line finding names of churches, businesses, etc. that might promote a Habitat lecture. Other volunteers could help us mail letters to those groups, or give them a call, or take them a flier about the event. 

No, it’s not as sexy as wielding a hammer for them. But it’s real help. Simple help. Help that Habitat wants and needs to effectively promote low-income home ownership.  Do you share that vision? Can you get involved?

David’s New Home

This is David. We met him at the St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church Helping Hands food pantry in January. We meet lots of folks like him who are looking for better housing options than they have now. Most are trying to avoid the high rents of Park Slope.  David was different. David was trying to escape pain. David walks with a cane, and every time he has to walk up and down the stairs to his walk up apartment, he experiences pain. Imagine for a minute living with that kind of burden. Imagine thinking twice before you go to the grocery store, or go to see a friend, because you need to limit the pain you live with every day.  David had put himself on the waiting list for public housing, but he’d been waiting a long time with no help from there.  We explained to David that the process is strict, and that the only way to speed up the waiting is to get a higher priority classification for his medical needs. We described the kinds of documentation he’d need to convince the housing authority he deserves a higher priority on the waiting list.  And David ran with our advice. He got letters from his doctor, and from his friends at St. Augustine RCC (“I was baptized here!”). Last month, he got his letter, proudly shown in this photo, telling him he was getting an apartment that would not require him to walk up stairs anymore. David, who couldn’t stop smiling, very kindly brought the letter to us at the pantry so we could share in his joy.  We’re so happy for him! Many thanks to David for letting us share his wonderful story.

A Day in the Life of the Legal Services Ministry….

It’s a Sunday evening and Jennifer (one of our volunteers) and I (Sandhya) step off the train in Coney Island to walk toward our destination. We enjoy the carnival-like atmosphere of the boardwalk and the beach as we walk toward our destination — the Russian Community Life Center in Brighton Beach.

This new program in Brighton Beach is our first expansion of the services we at Brooklyn Jubilee have been providing at a food pantry in Park Slope, where we answer questions about housing and public assistance and provide free legal advice. The Russian Community Life Center operates a gospel-motivated community center in the heart of Brighton Beach, where Russian-speaking residents can take English and citizenship classes and find other services.

Walking into that neighborhood is a little like traveling to another city. There are shops with mysterious foods I’ve never seen, store signs in Russian, goods sold in Russian-language-only packaging, because no English is needed within these city blocks.

On this night we are offering our first open legal clinic for tenants to ask us their housing questions. The staff at the center have let their regular patrons know we’ll be here, so some of them have been anticipating our presence there.

The first person we speak with is a senior citizen who can’t get repairs — such as a fully-functioning stove — in her apartment. We speak to her by phone, because she can’t get away from work. But she knows we’re coming that night, and calls the Director Leslie McMillan on her phone so she can speak to us.

A lot of tenants in her situation face a terrible dilemma when they need repairs. She lives in a small, privately-owned building, and hasn’t had a written lease in many years. That means she’s month-to-month, and either party can end the relationship on 30 days’ notice, for no reason at all. So complaining about repairs gives her landlord lots of motivation to evict her. She’s a senior citizen and doesn’t want to move. But she’d like to have a working stove. What to do?

It’s not legal for the landlord to retaliate against her for complaining, but it’s pretty easy for him to convince a judge that he had other motivations — even if he didn’t. With Leslie interpreting, we explain her options for getting repairs, but also make sure she understands that her landlord could try to evict her for complaining. I hate giving this advice, but I am not doing her any favors by letting her get blind-sided, or by letting her feel empowered, only to be shocked when the eviction papers are taped to her door. She is extremely appreciative, effusive even, though we certainly didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear. It feels odd to accept her thanks, but I’ve been here before.

A pregnant woman walks in. Through much effort, and our interpreter’s help, we discover she’s afraid her landlord will evict her once she gives birth. The landlord apparently did not expect children in this apartment. Even though her lease runs through spring, she’s worried he could kick her and her newborn baby out in the dead of winter. We assure her it’s illegal to evict tenants for having children in New York City, and that she’ll get to live out her lease with her baby, although she may have to move if he doesn’t want to renew her lease. She is also very appreciative of the advice, advice that seems so basic to me. I am mildly shocked at how little she understands of her most basic protections in NYC. We give her contact information for the city Human Rights Commission, in case she runs into trouble after the baby’s born.

These are the strange joys of a justice ministry like Brooklyn Jubilee. We speak to people who are in the dark, and looking for a guide. And even when the torch lights up an unfortunate path, they’re usually still grateful for directions.

Why Park Slope? – the Start of Brooklyn Jubilee

Photo by Ji Eun Kim

If you’re at all familiar with Brooklyn, you probably know Park Slope as the increasingly yuppie and stroller filled community that has boasted celebrity residents like Jennifer Connelly and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

But as a Brooklyn poverty lawyer, I (Sandhya) knew this assumption about Park Slope was wrong. I had clients in and around Park Slope, and knew the unseen needs of our neighbors around us. I knew the stories of long-time senior citizen residents who were being evicted from the only homes they’d lived in for decades, because rising property values simply made it too profitable for landlords NOT to sell their buildings. I had heard the stories of tenants, living in horrible conditions, who couldn’t get repairs from landlords because these unscrupulous owners were hoping that tenants with regulated rent would give up and leave, making room for new tenants who would pay market rate and inflated rents.

Mindful that we had a lot to learn about our new community, Brooklyn Presbyterian Church — which was then a network of churches in Brooklyn, the first of which was Park Slope Presbyterian Church — conducted a needs assessment of Park Slope.

In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus taught the importance of serving our neighbors in need. But how can we serve our neighbors if we’ve never spoken to them? How can we serve our neighbors if we’ve never asked them what they need? Too often charities are formed without asking these basic questions. As a result, precious resources may be directed to the squeaky wheel of a community, rather than its greatest needs. The two-year study was fairly comprehensive, exploring many aspects of physical “felt” needs.

The needs assessment revealed many key areas of need, including housing, and access to food. These were not the only needs we found, but some of the few where our available resources could be mobilized to have an immediate impact. We later formed a partnership with the Fifth Avenue Committee, an affordable housing developer and social service group with 30 years’ experience in serving low-income residents in Park Slope and beyond.

At the food pantry, we see residents from the public housing developments, a homeless shelter, supportive housing for the disabled, and subsidized housing developments, all of which are located within walking distance of the food pantry in Park Slope. Some of our volunteers have discovered for the first time that serious poverty exists in Park Slope, even though they had never recognized it before. As low-income residents are increasingly forced to leave Park Slope due to high rents, Brooklyn Jubilee has begun to serve in other neighborhoods further in to Brooklyn, including Brighton Beach and Bay Ridge. But we will continue to serve in Park Slope as long as low-income residents continue to stay in their community.

Jubilee? Is that like a party?

Leviticus 25 contains God’s instructions to Israel on how they were to live in relation to the land and to each other. Every 50 years, Israel was to celebrate the Year of Jubilee. Slaves were to be freed because we belong to God (v.55). Families who lost their family property were to return home in the year of Jubilee, because the land was a gift from God (v. 8). So, in the year of Jubilee, everyone goes home , and everyone goes free. In this same spirit, Brooklyn Jubilee aims to see healing and restoration for all Brooklynites who are burdened and suffering from want.

The Brooklyn Jubilee Blog

Since we first began the Brooklyn Jubilee ministry in 2006, it was clear that many of us are concerned about social and economic justice, but few feel equipped to engage with the problems that surround us and have an impact on them. Christians in the Church are (hopefully) asked to wrestle with Biblical call to serve the poor, but struggle to find meaningful ways to get involved.  

This blog will aim to encourage and challenge us with  thoughts from the Bible on questions of social justice, stories from of the ministry of Brooklyn Jubilee, and other issues affecting the life of low-income New Yorkers. We hope you’ll join in the discussion and help us develop an active network of supporters, advocates, and  others with food for thought on complex and critical issues.