“As in a Civics Text Come to Life”: The East Brooklyn Congregations’ Nehemiah Housing Plan and “Citizens Power” in the 1980s

Forming a Citizens Power Organization in 1980s East Brooklyn

At first glance, East Brooklyn was not an obvious place for a citizens’ power organization to take hold. Scattered efforts in its neighborhoods after the mid-1960s floundered on the weak state of organizing by local residents. This was due, in large part, to the fact that the rapidly changing racial composition of neighborhoods made establishing civic organizations difficult. The bruising Ocean Hill-Brownsville school struggle in 1968 pitted a group of local residents against the United Federation of Teachers over community control, curriculum, seniority, and a host of associated issues. Although it had wider importance for New York and the nation, it did not give rise to a permanent local movement. There were serious divisions along national, religious, and even language lines among local Hispanic residents. This was true for black residents, particularly African Americans and first generation Caribbean Americans as well. Key community leaders fell from power, and the small number of block clubs and secular organization produced few results. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Tenants Association, for example, launched forceful initiatives but was poorly resourced and could not reverse the mounting number of abandoned and decrepit apartment buildings. ⁷

The decades-old bipartisan promise of the 1949 Housing Act—“a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family”—eluded the vast majority of East Brooklyn residents. By the late 1960s the poverty rate for this sprawling section of the borough, which included East New York, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, and Bushwick, climbed to nearly 50 percent in some areas. As the white population of mostly Italian and Jewish Americans dropped dramatically, retailers shuttered their stores. Several housing schemes, including a Model Cities program put forth as part of U.S. President Lyndon John’s Great Society and War on Poverty, failed to deliver affordable, quality housing. Landlords, expecting to sell their properties to newly created housing authorities, ceased maintenance on aging buildings. Burned out buildings, abandoned cars, and graffiti dominated the streetscape. An astonished Kevin White, Boston’s mayor, declared during his 1968 visit to Brooklyn, “I have seen the beginning of the end of civilization.” ⁸

A new generation of mayors in New York, Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, and other struggling big cities in the 1970s touted solutions to urban decline that focused on privatization, deregulation, and subsidies to private developers who built splashy downtown high-rise office buildings, hotels, and sports stadiums. Far from this vortex of money, East Brooklyn residents continued to suffer population losses, increased crime, and failing schools alongside other hard-pressed areas of New York City. Ed Koch, elected in 1977 with considerable support from neighborhood groups, announced that “the main job of municipal government is to create a climate in which private business can expand in the city to provide jobs and profit.” During his first term as mayor, eighty-one thousand housing units disappeared from the city’s tax rolls. U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s punishing cuts to the federal housing budget—from $28 billion in 1980, the final year of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, to less than $8 billion when he left office in 1988—further compounded the rate of decline. ⁹

East Brooklyn’s strength lay in its many parishes and congregations and a clergy with deep experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, anti-poverty campaigns, and ecumenicalism. They were desperate to transform their community. Life-long East New York resident Gary Davidson recalled in a 2014 interview that “the churches looked around and realized if they didn’t do something what little that was left of the neighborhood wasn’t going to last very long.” Lutheran minister John Heinemeier convened the first EBC meeting in April 1978. Its early leadership board had a diverse membership: in addition to five clergy, there was a waitress, teacher’s aide, assistant book keeper, public school paraprofessional, factory worker, parish secretary, a director of a tenants’ rights group, and an unemployed resident. “We realized that our power lied within ourselves. . . . So from the ashes we started to rise,” said Carmelia Goffe, a Brownsville resident and an EBC co-founder. ¹⁰

They raised funds and seventy-two members completed a local IAF training series while twenty-six others attended one of the intensive ten-day training schools. The IAF reading list for organizers highlighted its citizens power identity: along with the Bible, it included books on the American Revolution (a biography on Samuel Adams; The Federalist Papers), on the nature of politics (Machiavelli’s The Prince; Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics), and on the place of individuals and communities in the contemporary world (Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer; Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest); there were works by George Orwell, John Dewey, and Malcolm X. They read in Alinsky’s writings how Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, the Knights of Labor, the Populist Party, and Progressive-era muckraking journalist shaped his criticisms of both concentrations of economic power and what he called “welfare colonialism” that kept the poor in poverty. ¹¹

IAF organizers distilled Alinsky’s understanding of power and community in Organizing for Family and Congregation, a 1978 document that framed the civic republican approach of their affiliates. In it they announced that the country was “in the kind of crisis that both Madison and de Tocqueville warned us about.” Civic responsibility and community were under siege. There was a “war over values”: the family—“the spinal cord of our society”—faced debilitating forces. These came in form of mounting household expenses, insecurity (crime, alcohol, drugs, and pornography), and “cultural pressures” from the media, advertisers, and overscheduled work and leisure. The cause of the crisis lay in “new institutional arrangements and technologies [which] have overwhelmed us since World War II.” Echoing the populists of the late nineteenth century, IAF organizers “followed where our dollars go” and found the sources of malignant power in banks, insurance companies, energy companies, real estate developers, and organized crime. Politicians colluded in this diminishment of citizens’ control over their lives, as did “lawyers and other professionals [who] provide[d] the rationales and jargon to perpetuate the top power institutions and screen them from the public.” They offered false hope to community and citizen groups attempting to gain control over their lives by “set[ting] up elaborate ‘advisory’ hoops. . . . to jump through, effectively exhausting the citizens and taking them out of the arena.” ¹²

Drawing on Organizing for Family and Congregation, the “people-controlled power structure” the EBC’s early organizers sought to build, they noted in 1980, would “change the present distribution of power, now centered in interests that seek to control us from outside and/or operate against our best interests.” Local leaders acknowledged that the IAF’s pace of training, fundraising, and institutional sponsorship “may appear tortuously slow,” but it was necessary, they reckoned, to build an effective community organization. They concluded that “Endurance, especially in poor neighborhoods, is so important an element in power. . . that the time and attention given these concerns seems appropriate to EBC’s goals.” ¹³

In mid-1980 the EBC affiliated with the IAF and hired one of its trained organizers, Michael Gecan, as lead organizer for a three-year commitment, dependent on the EBC’s renewal of his annual contract. During Gecan’s first year with the EBC its parish and congregation membership jumped from twenty five to forty institutions. Dues paying parishes and organizations were crucial to the EBC’s vitality as a citizens power organization: in order to assure independence, the IAF required that at least one third of its local affiliates’ budgets come from member organizations. That requirement was difficult to meet, particularly with cash-strapped Pentecostal and evangelical black and Hispanic pastors who were already wary of citizens power organizations (Gecan reported that one pastor worried about “the communist thing and the socialist thing”). Some Catholic and mainstream Protestant clergy could be resistant, especially older pastors who were overwhelmed by parish demands. “If we are going to have any power,” Gecan warned Edward (“Ed”) Chambers, Alinsky’s successor, “we need a critical mass and the critical mass means considering all [of] black and Hispanic Brooklyn as potential turf for our organizing drive.” In most cases, they were successful as when Gecan welcomed a Catholic parish to the fold whose pastor was enthusiastic and whose lay leadership of whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans demonstrated a “sixties-style personalized” approach. ¹⁴

Achieving a “deep roots” organization was labor intensive. From the ranks of the many trained local residents, Gecan zeroed in on an inner circle of some two dozen “long distance leaders” to sit on the “strategy committee,” which served as the EBC’s day-to-day governing body. Its members were not “rigid ideologues or crass opportunists.” Some EBC leaders came into the organization with considerable experience, such as John Powis, a Catholic priest who worked in social ministry projects in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and a New York housing project. Powis studied with philosopher Ivan Illich, a priest and prominent critic of capitalist modernity. Others claimed experience through their local church membership. Alice McCollum, a retired daycare worker, mother of ten children, and a member of the Southern Baptist Church, became a central figure in EBC organizing. In true IAF fashion, these organizers were not “charismatic leaders.” Gecan told the Daily News that “there are at least 30 top-flight leaders.” He looked for budding organizers with “native intelligence” who could engage with local citizens across race and cultural lines, had a record of successful organizing, and led stable, rooted lives. They must “see themselves as radicals whose focus is to build a true power organization.” The EBC would succeed where other groups did not because it had “roots, not rhetoric” that were found “in the Judeo-Christian tradition of the member parishes and congregations and the democratic tradition of this country’s founding fathers and mothers.” ¹⁵

EBC members steered clear of forming close ties with established black leaders on the grounds that they focused too much on charismatic leadership and ego renewal. The EBC’s most public figure, Johnny Ray Youngblood, pastor of East New York’s St. Paul Community Baptist Church, had little use for the Black Liberation Movement of the late 1960s (“it was sound and brass tinkling cymbals”); he dismissed the efforts of conventional politicians as he did Al Sharpton and other contemporary black activists. “What New York needs is not more pacifiers; not more dialogues in which militants with few followers and no programs debate liberals with few followers and tired responses,” he wrote in the New York Times. Instead, Youngblood and fellow EBC members thought community organizing was a superior means through which local residents could confront racial injustice. “Religious values help keep racism down. It’s key to unity across racial lines,” maintained one African American IAF organizer. The “IAF Black Caucus”—which included EBC members—understood citizens power organizations as the manifestation of the values embedded in the prophetic tradition. “Like Moses and the Israelites, black church leaders and black Americans are in exile. Down the road from slavery but not yet near the Promised Land,” they wrote in their 1981 statement, “Tent of the Presence.” The ministers urged African American communities to embrace a collaborative leadership with laity and clergy across faith traditions and turn their anger over the setbacks in the post-Civil Rights era into the healing, constructive, redemptive engines for change that characterized IAF-affiliates: “Anger that is focused and deep and rooted in grief is a key element in the organizing of black churches in the 1980s.” ¹⁶

Building citizen power included confronting racist behavior, as when EBC organizers, for example, rebuked the Conference Board, a liberal business-funded research and community support organization, for its “disrespectful and inherently-racist” treatment of an EBC delegation they kept waiting for several hours (noting as well the anti-Semitic “personal abuse” one delegation member suffered during the meeting). EBC leaders would not tolerate racial denigration of local residents either. They complained to New York governor Mario Cuomo that a group of Queens politicians and business leaders they met to discuss expanding Nehemiah housing into their borough had called potential homeowners “‘garbage, ‘trash,’ and other code words for racial bigotry.” As the city’s economy began to prosper in the 1980s, they advocated for equal employment opportunity as well. It was important, they reminded city officials, “that blacks and Hispanic New Yorkers will benefit from that boom.” ¹⁷

Early EBC initiatives grounded local leaders in the IAF community organizing approach of “research, action, and evaluation.” The time-consuming “research” aspect of organizing involved “relational organizing” through hundreds of meetings, including one-on-one meetings, house meetings, and large public meetings. Their relational method, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism, zeroed in on local residents responding to three key questions: “What struggles are our people going through?” “What values are implied in the struggles?” and “What are the values looking like as issues?” The nearly dozen statements local leaders submitted in 1981 questionnaire on “My Vision for EBC” illustrate the practical, local-based nature of their responses. They valued family security, economic justice, and strong neighborhoods. They noted that their neighborhoods suffered from crime, the effects of the drug trade and drug abuse, unemployment, and the lack of retail and banking outlets. “In my immediate neighborhood and community, the bad side of life shows up more,” wrote one. “I see suffering, squalor, wasted lives, sub-human treatment, indifference, poor stewardship.” Members urged that the EBC organize for, among other things, jobs, better schools, sports and recreation facilities, a new police precinct, a performing arts center, and a weekly community newspaper. Above all, they desired new housing—“to improve their lifestyle by giving them the feeling of ownership rather than just being a tenant.” ¹⁸

An “action” was a well-organized, often choreographed, event that demonstrated mass community support for a goal. Frequently they were meetings during which EBC members posed questions to public officials, landlords, and business owners in attendance with a demand for with short, relevant responses (usually “yes” or “no”). One fabled meeting between EBC organizers, led by Alice McCollum, and the city official in charge of stalled renovations of a local park demonstrated its effectiveness. As the official evaded responding to her single question—“When do you expect to complete renovations of Betsy Head Park and Pool?”—the official switched from bromides on the value of democracy to an angry denunciation of “you people.” McCollum, closing her notebook, rose and left the room in silence along with the rest of the delegation. The tactic worked: the city completed the work soon after the meeting. EBC organizers were not fixed on one type of “action.” Another early action involved EBC members donning “EBC Shopper-Inspector” ribbons and visiting neighborhood grocery stores with poor service and sanitation records. They conducted a survey of three thousand residents on their grocery shopping experiences as well before presenting their demands to chastened store managers. ¹⁹

The final component to the IAF approach, “evaluation,” required reflecting on the results of a completed “action” and how it might create additional community organizing possibilities. The Nehemiah Plan “came about accidentally” in just such a way, Gecan said in a 2017 interview, when city officials, as a result of an EBC action, demolished hundreds of abandoned buildings. During an “evaluation” meeting, strategy committee members advocated using the newly vacant lots as sites for housing. Gecan recalled, “Our leaders were saying, ‘We’ve got a lot of land here, why don’t we build something on it?’” Local leaders “really talked us into” developing a housing plan. Gecan and Chambers were skeptical: years earlier, Chicago’s Woodlawn Organization began as a strong community organization affiliated with the IAF, only to devolve into a staid community development corporation when they launched a housing program. In order to guard against “threats to our relational organizing” EBC members agreed that any housing plan they developed would be a subsidiary of their organizing, not the reverse. ²⁰

An EBC “Action”: Funding and Building Nehemiah Homes

The plain, four-page brochure for the Nehemiah Plan Homes that the EBC distributed in 1982 detailed an exciting ownership opportunity for residents. These houses would have spacious, carpeted living rooms; tiled bathrooms and kitchens with Formica countertops; and hardwood cabinets; there would be full basements, double-glazed windows, natural gas furnaces, and parking pads, so residents did not need to depend on street parking. Staggered building lines would help to mark off the monolithic, austere facades. The best feature was the price: two-bedroom houses of 1,000 square feet sold for $30,000 and three-bedroom houses of 1,200 square feet for $35,000, around 40 percent less than comparable housing in Brooklyn. Buyers would make a $5,000 down payment and then monthly mortgage payments of $300 for the two-bedroom and $350 for the three-bedroom houses. The EBC pegged the houses for working-class families with annual incomes of between $16,000 and $20,000. Embodying its Jeffersonian appeal to the sturdy, independent citizen, Nehemiah Houses were, said Gecan, “for all those striving to rise from poverty and near poverty into the promise and opportunity of the vast moderate American middle.” The houses were enormously popular: by September 1985 there were over three thousand applicants on the waiting list. ²¹

The impressive low prices came as a result of multiple cost cutting. The builder saved $6,000 per house by connecting the sewers to one line. Use of prefabricated components (roof trusses, window frames) cuts the prices further, and the “soft costs” (legal, architecture, and financing) ran only 6 percent compared to the conventional rate of 35 percent. In addition, New York State subsidized mortgages at a favorable 9.9 percent (compared to the usual 13.23 percent). The City provided $10,000 interest-free loans for each homebuilder, along with free land upon which to build the homes. Finally, forty local churches, along with Brooklyn’s Catholic diocese, the Long Island Episcopal diocese, and the Lutheran Missouri Synod pooled funds for the essential no-interest construction loans. ²²

The EBC Strategy Committee contrasted its approach with those of other housing initiatives, especially CDCs. Since the first CDC formed in the wake of New York Senator Robert Kennedy’s 1966 tour of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and the subsequent passage of the Special Impact Amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act, the number of CDCs expanded to as many as two thousand across the country in the 1980s. Although they shared some characteristics with these organizations whose members conducted a significant range of activities, including advocacy and real estate, to aid in the strengthening of neighborhoods, EBC leaders charged that CDCs were beholden to government agencies, local politicians, and foundations. Johnny Ray Youngblood urged, “Let’s not plan housing for Brooklyn from Washington. Let’s plan it from Brooklyn.” They denounced CDCs on the grounds that “there’s no significant amount of locally-controlled money and little or no local control over most efforts to build new housing or to attract new industry.” EBC leaders observed a precept of Ed Chambers that “power comes in two forms: organized people and organized money.” They took pride in the fact that unlike CDCs, they did not seek outside funding for Nehemiah, or hire a contractor, until they had secured a substantial amount of funding first from member congregations and religious denominations. Scholars’ critiques of CDCs beginning in the 1990s echoed Gecan’s charge that, by depending on money from outside communities, “the people controlling the money will work to keep those getting the money on a leash” and prevent effective community organizing. ²³

In addition, they criticized projects for their lack of boldness in scope and inefficiencies. EBC leaders rejected the “pilot-project mentality” of many of the emerging housing projects on the grounds that it took as long to complete a small number of houses as it did a large number. “[T]hose who don’t have the money, vision, and power to do major programs,” they argued, resorted to such “nickel and dime efforts.” High-rise, multi-unit, and rental projects had “profound problems” in terms of their lack of safety and absence of home ownership. EBC leaders took delight in pointing to the Nehemiah Plan’s superiority over other local initiatives, noting that Nehemiah prices were several thousands of dollars less than those of the “Housing Partnership,” a CDC launched by banker David Rockefeller and comprised of representatives from major lending institutions, businesses, housing development corporations, and local civic groups. So too did they chide the “well meaning amateurs,” as Chambers put it, in the South Bronx Development Organization—a CDC—who developed “Charlotte Gardens” in the South Bronx for the prices of the houses, slow construction pace, and bloated number of paid staff (they reported that they had thirteen while Nehemiah had only two paid staff members). ²⁴

The Nehemiah Plan was the brainchild of developer and New York Daily News columnist I. D. Robbins, not the EBC. Intrigued by Robbins’ many newspaper columns in the 1970s in which he outlined a scheme for large-scale, affordable housing, Ed Chambers urged EBC leaders to meet with him. Robbins, who moved to New York City in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, worked as a reporter for Hearst’s Evening Journal and then as a public relations representative before teaming up with his cousin and builder, Lester Robbins, to handle sales, financing, and mortgages. As a developer his major projects included a thirty-seven acre refrigerated complex in the Bronx and the “Big Six Towers” in Queens, a housing project sponsored by the Typographical Union. He was active on the political scene as well. Robbins served as president of the non-partisan City Club of New York and, briefly, sought both the Democratic and Republican mayoral nomination in 1965 before stepping aside for John L. Lindsay. Robbins was well known for his mercurial temperament. One city official confided to Gecan that many colleagues thought the builder was “a lunatic” and that he would be “a major liability going into the higher levels of New York politics.” Robbins acknowledged his reputation to Gecan over lunch in a Chinese restaurant in August 1981. “I’m hated by the bureaucrats because I’ve run them over. And I’m hated by the process liberals because of the way I do things,” he told Gecan. ²⁵

The lynchpin to the Nehemiah Plan’s success was that the EBC build a large number of houses. This economy of scale would bring down buyers’ purchase costs and make a significant impact on neighborhoods. He rejected small-scale projects and rehabilitation schemes as “the cult of Jane Jacobs, the 1960s garbage.” Instead, Robbins looked to William Levitt’s mass-produced suburban housing projects in the post-World War II period as a model. He admired decisive, bold public figures, such as New York’s polarizing city planner Robert Moses and its mayor in the 1930s and 1940s, Fiorello La Guardia, who had “the guts to do the people’s will.” Robbins lauded the single-family home as “an American ideal” that contributed to stable family life and reduced crime. “Put a few criminals in a large building, you have a crime wave,” he informed a congressional hearing. “On the basis of the same ratio, you can handle the problem very easily in a single-family neighborhood.” Gecan came away impressed from his early meetings with Robbins by his ideas about “power to get things done.” It echoed, he noted, “some of my own interests on this, or my own instincts on this.” The EBC Steering Committee hired Robbins in January 1982, agreeing to pay him $1,000 for each completed house. In turn, Robbins hired his cousin, Lester Robbins, as builder. ²⁶

True to its “citizens’ power” identity, the EBC maintained control over the design and funding of the Nehemiah Plan. Robbins and the Plan’s architect, for example, modified the house’s layout when, as a result of the hundreds of organizers’ house meetings, local residents directed that the kitchen be placed in the front so that home owners might watch their front yard, parking pad, and street as they prepared meals. While Robbins had day-to-day control over construction and sales, the “EBC-Nehemiah Trustee Board,” a group of some two dozen EBC members, met monthly to deliberate about such things as setting income levels for home buyers and considering future development sites. The EBC continued to convene large meetings to consider the weightiest issues as well. Gecan told one city official who grumbled that such gatherings were “a waste of energy” that “they’re a real chance for our people to participate in the democratic process and see politics done well.” ²⁷

The EBC forged the Nehemiah Plan free of political allegiances as well. “Nehemiah is bad for ideologues of either camp,” Gecan noted. Although the organization undertook voter registration, it did not endorse candidates or engage in partisan politics. The Democratic Party, as Youngblood put it, “seems to have lost its way. . . . [I]t needs to remind itself of its vision and values.” Gecan rebuffed overtures from one supporter to tie the EBC to leftist or progressive coalitions. “Look it: we’re not ideological. . . . [W]e’re not leftists,” he informed her. Conservatives earned even sharper rebukes for their privileging of free market ideology. Youngblood charged the Reagan Administration with “blaming the victim. . . . This is a national administration committed to closing the doors of opportunity.” When two scholars with the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative think tank, contacted Gecan to conduct a study of the Nehemiah Plan as a “glowing example of how private initiative can work,” he turned them down. “That strikes me as a nice way of saying that you want to justify Reaganomics and we don’t want to be a party to that,” Gecan wrote. EBC leaders rejected a political identity for their organization. The most they would allow was that their members were “solid, moderate-type citizens who have real values and are stable church-going types.” ²⁸

Following Chambers’ axiom about “organized people and organized money,” they worked with churches and congregations to began raising the working capital of $12 million. This advanced most dramatically in Youngblood’s congregation where one hundred members came to the Baptist church’s sanctuary during a service to give $1,000 each as a five-year, interest-free loan. With the majority of funds outstanding, Gecan considered—briefly—approaching David Rockefeller but decided against it, likening it to “buy[ing] a can or worms.” Wary of the government funding the Nehemiah Plan, EBC leaders received most of the money from large religious denominations. They began with initial commitments of $1 million from the Lutheran Missouri Synod, $6 million from the Catholic diocese of Brooklyn, and $1 million from the Long Island Episcopalian diocese. ²⁹

They remained faithful to their organization’s religious character throughout the Plan’s life. The housing scheme was, wrote the authors of a December 1981 prospectus, “rooted in the Gospel thrust of rebuilding the walls and being rid of the reproach” of poverty, crime, poor city services, and economic inequality. Nehemiah houses “must be seen as mission and ministry. . . as a base for new church development, and as the first step in the reconstruction of a community where men and women and children can live and work, learn and play, in peace.” EBC organizers viewed the raising of this capital as an “action” by local parishes and congregations. They emphasized in their meetings with Brooklyn’s Catholic bishop, Francis J. Mugavero, the Catholic notion of “solidarity.” In a prospectus they presented to the bishop, they quoted Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church’s (1964) call to identify with the poor and vulnerable by doing “all in her power to relieve their need and in them she strives to serve Christ.” EBC leaders urged Mugavero “to witness the creativity of God our Father by leading this effort to build the city.” They won him over, perhaps helped, in part, by the bishop’s social work educational background and commitment to addressing urban problems that dated back to the late 1960s when he led an effort by the nation’s Catholic bishops to fund initiatives in the wake of urban unrest. “It’s the way power works. . . . It gets down to business,” Gecan noted with satisfaction upon learning of the diocese’s financial backing. ³⁰

The tepid responses they received from other denominational ruling bodies came from religious leaders wary about the EBC’s citizens’ power approach, especially its refusal to frame the Nehemiah Plan as an explicitly anti-poverty program. The U.S. Catholic Campaign for Human Development did not support the Nehemiah Plan on these grounds (Reverend Heinemeier chalked it up to its “white liberal characteristics”). The Presbyterian Church, United Church of Christ, and Southern Baptists turned down the EBC’s appeal as well; so too did New York’s Riverside Church, the unofficial seat of the liberal protestant establishment. Gecan found William Sloan Coffin, its senior minister and a nationally known civil rights and anti-war activist, to be “full of late ’60s, early ’70s activist clichés.” He chastised Jeff Biggers, Coffin’s aide, as well for his “presumptuous” criticisms of the EBC’s approach to social and political injustices. ³¹

Nehemiah critics charged that the building of single-family homes diverted resources from fighting homelessness. Robbins acknowledged that homelessness was “a painful problem,” one that “gives everybody severe guilt feelings.” And yet, he argued that the Nehemiah Plan was superior to building other efforts, including those of the Desperados Housing Corporation, the East New York Corps, and the Mutual Housing Association of New York, which was sponsored by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (popularly known by its acronym, ACORN). Robbins criticized these organizations’ various housing schemes. He argued that an ownership plan for squatters was unproven and destabilizing to neighborhoods. In addition, Robbins thought the building of temporary dormitory quarters for the homeless was expensive and the lack of kitchens hampered food security. Finally, apartment building rehabilitation was expensive and time-consuming. Nehemiah houses, he reasoned, would ameliorate homelessness since many new owners would vacate their public housing units, thus freeing up space for other residents. “Houseless” and “homeless,” EBC organizers pointed out, was not a zero-sum struggle. Gecan told the Daily News that “when attention is focused on one part of the overall problem, perspective is lost and better, but seemingly less direct reactions, are either ignored or dismissed.” High demand for Nehemiah houses was proof, they said, of a genuine desire for home ownership. “This is what people want. They come here and weep for these houses,” said Robbins. ³²

The EBC leadership’s relationship with Mayor Koch and other city officials reinforced their civic republican-populist skepticism of conventional politics. Koch bristled at the EBC’s organizing style (for years, he would not even say “East Brooklyn Congregations” or “Industrial Areas Foundation” in public). The mayor’s well-known dislike of Robbins, as well as his occasional flare-ups with Youngblood (the minister deemed a new neighborhood advisory council “a cynical political move” by Koch), contributed to his opposition. Koch, who had great respect for Bishop Mugavero, called the religious leader in the middle of night to tell him “I don’t want you to get hurt” and to him that the EBC was “no good.” ³³

In fact, Mugavero brought Koch to support the Nehemiah Plan, writing to the mayor in February 1982 to tell him that it “holds great promise for our city,” and that he backed it “personally and financially.” As Mugavero lobbied the mayor by sending him details of the proposal with suggestions on how the city might contribute to the housing plan, EBC leaders met with the sympathetic deputy mayor, Robert Wagner, to pave the way for a formal meeting with Koch. Their efforts paid off by that June. “[I]f there is anything responsible that I can do to assist the Nehemiah Plan, I will certainly do it,” Koch promised the bishop. Still, his initial offer consisted of free city land, not the $10 million needed to fund the $10,000 interest free loans for the first 1,000 buyers. When he claimed the city coffers were empty, Mugavero won him over with the vow, “You steal the $10 million and I’ll absolve you.” Even after making public his commitment for land and money, Koch made one last attempt at a meeting to scuttle their effort by trimming the number of initial houses built to one hundred. Only when the EBC delegation rose to leave in protest did he agree to the original one thousand houses (while still chiding them, “You’re going to fail”). Thereafter, Koch ceased his opposition. “Koch’s activities are not based upon principal or conviction,” Robbins told Newsday. “He’s a pragmatic politician.” As with all their allies, EBC organizers viewed politicians as contingent partners, reflecting the IAF maxim, “no permanent allies, no permanent enemies.” ³⁴

The most troubling relationship was with Brooklyn Borough president Howard Golden, not Ed Koch. Golden was a power broker whose influence extended to his promoting the advancement of his political protégés. Although he welcomed publicly “the innovative and challenging opportunity” of the Nehemiah Plan, Golden had a visceral dislike, as Koch did, for the EBC approach to community organizing. His first meeting with the group, in January 1981, ended abruptly when the borough president, under sharp questioning from EBC members, admitted that he understood little about them. The resignation of two EBC members from a Golden-created community board compounded this antagonism. Golden bristled at the IAF-structured public meeting style, complaining that “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. . . is not appropriate or adequate to deal with the issues you raised.” Golden obstructed the Nehemiah Plan’s progress by delaying the promised demolition of the few remaining abandoned buildings on the site of the first 250 houses. Gecan agreed with one city official’s assessment of the borough chief’s office as “corrupted, incompetent, bungling.” ³⁵

EBC leaders were practical, but only to the point where it conflicted with their independence and transparency. They had a difficult relationship with some local groups, including “Operation Futures,” a self-styled black community group whose workers found jobs on Nehemiah construction crews and then demanded “protection” money. Gecan characterized its leader, Derrick Ford (who later changed his name to Akbar Allah), as a “scam artist. . . . an ex-gang member and a man with a reputation as a killer.” Reflecting on Ford’s two prison sentences for gun possession at the time, Gecan warned that “this is not a guy to fool around with.” When the EBC refused their demand, Ford spoke of disrupting the construction site. Fifty police officers patrolled the area in response to the threat. EBC leaders confronted “Operation Futures” leaders at a meeting at Reverend Clarence Williams’ Southern Baptist Church. Williams, along with Reverend Youngblood and Alice McCollum rejected Ford’s claim that the EBC was a well-funded “outside” group. Gecan recalled Williams telling him, “It’s our job, our organization, our effort. You’re not going to get a cent.” Although rebuffed by the EBC, Ford’s renamed organization, “Akbar’s Community Service,” continued through the 1990s to pressure other homebuilders, often through violence, to hire its members for protection. ³⁶

Although EBC members were suspicious of politicians and the political process they adhered to the Catholic social teaching notion of “subsidiarity,” they held that—alongside strong intermediate local bodies (these included families, local governments, community groups, unions, and businesses)—central governments were essential in contributing to the common good. New York governor Mario Cuomo’s support for the Nehemiah Plan illustrates the value these community organizers placed on the role of central governments. As with Koch, their relationship with Cuomo had a shaky start. “Slick. Liberal. Anti-organization. Anti-personal development,” a discouraged Gecan noted after their first meeting in June 1981. They won the governor over with detailed presentations on the Nehemiah Plan’s value, especially its affordability. Cuomo admitted to the Daily News that the EBC was “frustrating, annoying, relentless and irritating but that’s the secret to their success.” The governor, Robbins told a congressional committee after he guaranteed a minimum of $30 million in mortgage loan support, “is one of our most enthusiastic supporter.” Time and again, Cuomo—who dubbed himself “your uncle in Albany”—intervened on their behalf with city officials. On one occasion, Deputy Secretary Bill Eimcke met with Nathan Leventhal, Koch’s deputy mayor, and extracted a promise that the city government would resolve the pressing sewer and street paving conflicts with the EBC. ³⁷

As the Nehemiah Plan’s first phase concluded in the mid-1980s, EBC members assessed it a success. The new homeowners were, Robbins said, “people who saved their money and always dreamed on owning their own home.” Although they did not keep records of their racial or ethnic identities, the sales staff reported on the previous residency and occupations of the first 131 buyers. The majority of the homeowners were from Brooklyn; another six were from Queens, five from the Bronx, and one from Manhattan (34 percent came from public housing). Their median annual income was $26,000. They held a wide array of jobs, the most prevalent ones in medicine (fifteen were nurses’ aides or hospital technicians, thirteen were nurses), banking (13), maintenance (13), telephone company (9), post office (9), and the garment industry (6). In addition, there were cooks, drivers, secretaries, manufacturing workers, and two doctors. The houses into which they moved, reported Hugh Kelly, a leading New York real estate economist, were “sound, well-designed units” with “compact and quite efficient interiors.” They had good insulation and, despite the recent heavy rains, had no water infiltration. Paul Grotz, former Architectural Forum editor and winner of the American Institute of Architect’s “Gold Medal,” lauded the “astonishing spaciousness” as well as “first rate” materials and workmanship. ³⁸

The new homeowners extolled the Nehemiah Plan. Cornelia Jones who moved into a two-bedroom house with husband, two children, and a grandchild spoke of “a 25-year dream come true.” Sandra McCollum, a single mother with two children (and Alice McCollum’s daughter), reflected that “when you come up in Brownsville, you don’t look to set your sights very high.” After moving in with a sister for two years to save for the down payment, she ran down the street with the keys to her new house shouting, “It’s mine! It’s finally mine!” East Brooklyn residents understood the considerable barriers to home ownership. “Before Nehemiah, I had no hope of owning a home,” said Edgar Mendez, a member of Our Lady of Loreto parish and a married father of five children. “Why? Because the economy is against me. The cost of construction is against me. The redlining of our communities are against me.” Homeownership was an act of citizenship. “I had no idea that I or my church could reshape the future of this community, this borough, or this city,” exclaimed resident Joyce Jones. ³⁹

The Nehemiah Plan as a National Housing Solution

The Nehemiah Plan garnered widespread interest across the country in the 1980s. The “South Bronx Churches,” an IAF affiliate, which John Heinemeier helped to organize when he took up a pastor’s position there in 1986, adopted the Nehemiah Plan. Even Ed Koch acknowledged that “we’ve gotten away from that type of scope and courage” in housing. The mayor launched a ten-year plan to build thousands of affordable single-family houses for those with annual household incomes between $15,000 and $48,000. Public officials in Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, Florida, and elsewhere considered following the EBC’s lead, as did Mario Cuomo who assigned a top-level staff member to promote it in Buffalo, Albany, and Rochester. While Koch’s plan moved ahead, these other efforts were stillborn due, according to Gecan, to officials “wanting a quick housing fix,” or, in the case of Cuomo’s top-down initiative, hesitant local officials. ⁴⁰

The most promising advancement of the Nehemiah Plan beyond IAF affiliates was the National Nehemiah Housing Grant Program. Its sponsor, Brooklyn native and New York congressman Charles Schumer declared the EBC’s housing plan to be “the most remarkable urban revitalization project in the entire nation.” Schumer’s measure would assist those making $16,000 to $25,000 a year with federal funds averaging $20,000 that could be used as a second mortgage loan to home purchasers. These would not be interest bearing but would be repayable out of the proceeds of the sale of the home if they exceeded the amount due on the first mortgage. The money could be used only for home construction or substantial rehabilitation projects. The funds were dedicated to distressed neighborhoods. Like the Nehemiah Plan, homebuyers were required to make a down payment of $5,000. Only neighborhood-based nonprofit organizations could participate in the program, and local residents were to help plan the housing’s design and be employed in its construction. The minimum size of the project was 100 houses on contiguous land parcels. ⁴¹

The legislation picked up support from key politicians and newspapers. Connecticut Republican Stewart McKinney signed on as a co-sponsor, and Schumer picked up important Republican support in the Senate from New York’s Alfonse D’Amato and Pennsylvania’s John Heinz. The strongest opposition came from Florida congressman Bill McCollum who argued that the housing plan was unworkable outside of New York City, took scarce resources from existing low-income programs, and most families could qualify for private mortgages without federal assistance. Schumer measure ended up as part of a larger bill in the U.S. Senate that dealt with public housing, mortgage insurance, and community and neighborhood development, and legislators passed the new law, known as the Housing and Community Development Act of 1987, over President Reagan’s veto. ⁴²

Despite Schumer and other legislators’ optimism, the Nehemiah Housing Opportunity Grants program “never caught on,” concluded housing scholar Charles Orlebeke. Its chief flaws were the reduction of the federal housing loan to $15,000 and cutting back the minimum number of houses to fifty for each project. In its first year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approved only 1,321 units for federal funding. By August 1993, a mere 392 units were completed nationwide. “Instead of critical mass [housing] it was small projects. They were trying to appease Congressional supporters,” explained Gecan. Congress repealed the program through the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990. Looking back in 2017, Gecan insisted that the program’s failure “did not matter. . . . [It was]no great loss.” Its fate, however, points to the limited influence of citizens’ power organizations in the corridors of national power. Where the EBC’s “deep roots” and independence from conventional politics fueled its successes at the local level, it limited its ability to affect the shape and character of national legislation and public policy. ⁴³

Although they did not meet their ambitious original goal of building one thousand houses a year, the number of Nehemiah Houses was impressive. Since 1983, the EBC built four thousand five hundred houses in East Brooklyn. IAF affiliates accrued an impressive record as well: one thousand Nehemiah houses in the South Bronx, one thousand in Baltimore, 250 in Washington, D.C., and 135 in Philadelphia. United Power, an IAF federation of Chicago area congregations and community organizations, borrowed aspects of the Nehemiah Plan in their housing initiatives, begun in the late 1990s. While the focus remained on building affordable, single-family houses, the form and design of Nehemiah houses changed with new builders and architects. Their Spring Creek houses in the 2000s were modular houses designed by SoHo architect Alexander Gorlin, and assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; their exteriors were infused with a palette of thirteen colors, and no two adjacent houses shared the same color scheme. Despite this, the EBC’s “citizens’ power organization” identity, however, had not changed. “I believe that because of Nehemiah we’ve moved from murder capital to model community,” noted EBC co-chair, Reverend David Brawley, in 2006. ⁴⁴

Conclusion

The EBC foregrounded the importance of stable, affordable single-family housing in a city undergoing gentrification. Critics were fond of pointing out that the organization’s critical approach to established power undermined its ability to build even more houses than, for example, did the “Housing Partnership” which did not insist on scale thresholds and accorded politicians and private sector developers influence and profit in their projects. Still, where CDCs’ dependence on empowerment through development was hampered by an unresolved antagonism between capital and community, the EBC maintained its “deep roots” commitment to organizing and community-controlled projects. Although the Nehemiah Plan did not reverse New York’s deepening inequality, it did provide, as historian Jonathan Soffer writes, “a model for community response in a neoliberal era.” In the 1980s, Nehemiah houses accounted for 38 percent of the net increase in East New York’s housing stock and 77 percent of the increase in single-family houses. They bolstered family and community security with increased housing values as well. A 2001 Fannie Mae Foundation study found that living in a zone in which Nehemiah houses stood raised the value of homes by 23.6 percent relative to the wider district. The solid financing model meant that Nehemiah homeowners withstood the Great Recession’s hit on the nonprofit housing sector. ⁴⁵

In recent years, EBC organizers responded warily to the arrival of gentrification that affected much of East Brooklyn beginning in the mid-2000s. They reminded New York Mayor Bill de Blasio of what they achieved in the 1980s and 1990s when “Gentrification did not occur. Regeneration did.” Their strategy for maintaining affordable neighborhoods included getting city officials to build new schools and parks, as well as improving public transportation links to the rest of the borough. In addition, they facilitated the building of retail space of one million square feet. To counter the displacement of low-income apartment renters by building apartment units alongside new houses in its Spring Creek development, EBC leaders urged city officials to open vacant land, such as the 52 square-blocks of the East Brooklyn Industrial Park as well as the Aqueduct Race Track site, to affordable housing. They continue to mobilize local people as when thousands rallied in October 2017 at city hall to demand that vacant New York Housing Authority sites be transformed into fifteen thousand low-income senior housing apartments. ⁴⁶

Although the Nehemiah Plan was just one part of EBC community organizing, the group’s leaders worried that it would come to define their purpose, leaving them, as Gecan warned in 1986, “in danger of becoming a board of directors. . . . without a fighting tough local level.” In response, their “Sign Up and Take Charge Agenda” from the late 1980s aimed to spark new initiatives on immigration, education, and voter registration. They took up issues forged by other IAF affiliates as well, the most significant being the living wage campaign of BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development) whose example of the first-ever living wage measure in 1994 inspired similar campaigns in dozens of cities and counties across the country. In New York City, the “Metro-IAF”—an umbrella organization of the EBC and local IAF affiliates—took the lead alongside the city’s Central Labor Federation. “A living wage paycheck is better than any other program,” Johnny Ray Youngblood told a gathering of ministers. EBC leaders collaborated with Brooklyn councilman Sal Albanese to pass his bill, over Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s veto in 1996, requiring a living wage of $12.10 an hour for contract food service workers. ⁴⁷

“How are we to live? Who are we as Americans? What is our character?” asked Robert Bellah and his co-authors in Habits of the Heart, their seminal book on civic and religious life in contemporary America. EBC members embedded their responses to these questions in the Nehemiah Plan—in its rationale, its design, its building process, and its price. They began the Plan in an era when failed urban policies and political neglect made nearly invisible its poor and working class residents. To be sure, the EBC’s limited reach, particularly in the national political realm, exposed the weakness of a “deep roots” organization. And yet, their legions of trained local organizers and successful actions revealed the significant influence citizens’ power organizations brought on centralizing and technocratic forms of power. As urban America reemerged in recent decades as a vibrant force in the political, economic, and cultural force, East Brooklyn citizens have marshaled their civic and religious values to organize along the nation’s fault lines. ⁴⁸