Yonkers, Judge Square Off Over Public Housing Sites
A tenacious federal judge and an unyielding City Council are set for a showdown tonight in a desegregation fight that has made this city, in the judge’s words, “a national symbol of defiance of federal civil rights orders.”
Unless Yonkers’ seven-member City Council agrees to stop resisting a plan for building a total of 1,000 units of low- and middle-income housing, federal Judge Leonard B. Sand has promised to bludgeon the city with daily fines heavy enough to wipe out its entire budget in less than a month. Each member voting against the plan risks personal fines of $500 a day until Aug. 10, and imprisonment after that.
On the other side, the council confronts Yonkers’ embittered and equally determined white citizens. The 7-year-old battle has grown so ugly that, when four councilmen reluctantly voted last January to accept part of the court decree, bullets were hand-delivered to City Hall in envelopes bearing their names. The council quickly reversed course.
The court’s 1985 decision against Yonkers marked a landmark victory for civil rights groups, because it was the first in which school segregation was tied to discrimination in housing. Sand ruled that the city, New York’s fourth-largest, had intentionally segregated housing and schools for at least 40 years by building virtually all of its low-income housing in a single quarter of the city.
Yonkers agreed to the remedies demanded in the first part of the court order and in 1986 integrated 27 of its 30 schools. But, when it came to allowing subsidized housing into east-side areas where home values have risen to $300,000 and beyond, residents of those neighborhoods--most of them middle class and almost all of them white--dug in for a fight.
Despite the steps the nation has taken toward desegregating its classrooms and workplaces, an overwhelming majority of Americans still return home each night to neighborhoods that are black or white or brown. The Yonkers case, though extreme, demonstrates why it has been so difficult for the courts to break down racial barriers in housing.
History and economics explain why many residential areas remain all-white or all-black, but “what you have in Yonkers is a classic situation where the town had set up barriers defined by race in order to prevent people from moving into the neighborhoods,” said W. Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Praises Judge
Reynolds applauded Sand’s aggressive stance. “We’ll keep beating them over the head until they realize that this is the 1980s and you have to live and work with people of all races,” he said.
Although the judge has threatened the council with jail and fines in the past, last week marked the first time he has given the city such a deadline. Beginning Tuesday, if the vote goes against him, he plans to fine the city $100 and to double that amount every day Yonkers remains in noncompliance. At that rate the fines would consume the city’s entire $337 million by the 22nd day.
Nicholas C. Wasicsko, the city’s embattled 29-year-old mayor, predicted that the council will decide the issue on a 4-3 vote but said no one can tell which side will prevail.
Supreme Court Rejects Case
A virtual newcomer to politics, Wasicsko last year defeated a nine-term incumbent by promising to resist Sand to the end. But tonight, sobered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent refusal to hear the city’s appeal, he plans to urge his fellow council members to accede to the order.
“I think it’s unfair, but at this point of the litigation it no longer matters what I think,” Wasicsko said. “Most people in Yonkers are tired of the whole damn thing.”
Thus far, the mayor’s lone ally in supporting the order has announced that he may abstain tonight. Another councilman said he has not yet decided how he will vote, and four have indicated that they are willing to risk jail and fines. Paul Pickelle, the city’s lawyer, has put councilmen on notice that they will have to pay for their own defense if they refuse to approve the plan.
“It now becomes a matter of conscience,” Councilman Nicholas Longo said. “I am firmly convinced that (Judge Sand’s) actions would destroy the city of Yonkers. . . . He’s looking for accomplices in his crime. I don’t want to be one of his accomplices.”
‘That Cancer’ Denounced
Longo denounced the judge as “a liberal lunatic” who has little regard for “the neighborhoods that he is infesting” with “that cancer.” Sand declined to be interviewed for this article.
The residents of Yonkers’ overwhelmingly white east side insist--despite the fact that the court found otherwise--that race is not the issue. “I see it as economic,” said Jack O’Toole, president of a coalition called the Save Yonkers Federation. “The color is not black or tan or white. It’s green.”
“You put one of those projects in, and you lose the decent people,” said Mary Ann Bottone, a 45-year-old mother of seven who lives a few blocks from where some of the housing would go. Using the same description as Longo, she said the housing will bring a problem that “spreads like cancer. . . . You’ve got this complete decay starting.”
Though a lifelong Yonkers resident, Bottone said she is pleading with her husband to move. She feared that she saw her neighborhood’s future in the videotapes that Councilman Henry Spallone screened Thursday night for about 100 local residents.
Crack Vials, Bullet Holes
Bottone and other homeowners gasped in horror as they saw conditions in existing housing projects in the city’s primarily black southwest quadrant: dark, graffiti-covered stairwells strewn with crack vials and human feces; glass windows broken out or riddled with bullet holes; pools of leaking sewage, and rats darting among the shadows.
“There is no surrender for me,” vowed Spallone, whose district is slated to receive 108 of the first 200 low-income apartments. “This is total war.”
Proponents assert that the new housing will be nothing like the run-down west-side projects. They say it will consist of low-rise apartment buildings and town houses, many of which will be scattered among regular private developments.
Thus, they say, it will pose relatively little disruption in the quiet east-side neighborhoods, where huge Victorian houses and smaller Cape Cods are set back from its tree-lined streets.
The Saw Mill River Parkway running through the middle of Yonkers has become a sort of racial wall in this Hudson River city of almost 200,000 people on the northern edge of New York City. More than 80% of the city’s minority population lives in Yonkers’ southwest quadrant, primarily because that is where 97% of its subsidized housing is.
Dozens of Plans Defeated
In its finding, the court documented how, since the 1940s, Yonkers had defeated dozens of plans that would have located low-income housing outside its southwest quadrant. The lone exception was a 48-unit project in Runyon Heights--a neighborhood that is virtually the only enclave of black homeowners in the city.
In what many Runyon Heights residents see as a symbol of white attitudes toward them, the neighborhood association of the adjacent white Homefield area created a 4-foot-wide strip of land as a barrier between the two communities.
Milton Holst, a former president of the Runyon Heights neighborhood association, dismisses the economic arguments that white Yonkers residents are making as “a cop-out. . . . It’s just sheer racism.”
Those same people, he said, thought “it was all right when they dumped 48 units in our neighborhood. We are just like the people on the east side. We worked hard” to be able to afford homes in Runyon Heights.
Although he and his neighbors opposed the low-income housing when it was built in the early 1960s, he said, they now see it as “just another apartment.”
‘You Can’t Keep Running’
Noting that many of those who now live on the east side fled there from the Bronx during the racial turbulence of the 1960s, Holst said: “You’ve got to live with people. You can’t keep running.”
Longo and others contend that anyone who can afford a house in East Yonkers is welcome to buy there. “Most of the people in Yonkers broke their backs for what they got,” Longo said. “The people in Yonkers welcome their neighbors with open arms. What they don’t welcome is people being given homes next to theirs.”
But Herman Keith, former president of the local NAACP and now a Westchester County legislator, recalls a different experience. When he and his family expressed interest in a home they could easily afford in a white neighborhood in 1978, he said, the owner suddenly took it off the market, telling the realtor: “I do not want to sell my house to blacks.”
The federal investigation of Yonkers began in the late 1970s, and the Justice Department filed suit in the final weeks of the Jimmy Carter Administration.
Justice Department Memo
Many believed that President Reagan’s Justice Department would drop or settle the case, as it had others, until the Washington Post obtained and printed a harshly worded internal memorandum of the department that described the case in terms that were seen as insulting to blacks.
In that memorandum, Robert J. D’Agostino, a deputy to Reynolds in the civil rights division, wrote that blacks are “more disruptive in the classroom on average.” The Yonkers case, D’Agostino argued, was part of “a new attempt to remake America through coerced residential integration.”
The Justice Department, deeply embarrassed by the publication of the document and the resulting uproar, had no choice but to pursue the case. It was one of only three such Carter Administration cases that the Reagan Administration continued to pursue.
East-side residents say it is unfair to blame them for history, and note that when much of the west-side housing was built its original occupants were white, many of them soldiers returning from World War II. As Bottone watched the grisly scenes that Spallone had videotaped at the Mulford Gardens project, she said: “My uncle lived in Mulford.”
Affluent Cities Untouched
Also, they argue that, although the city has only about a quarter of Westchester County’s population, it already has built almost half of the county’s low-income housing. Much more affluent communities nearby, such as Scarsdale, Bronxville and Hastings on Hudson, have none.
“It seems like Yonkers tried to do its share and it’s getting kicked in the pants for it,” said Councilman Peter Chema, who represents the west side. “The money should be spent on the older part of the city, which is in dire need of rehabilitation.”
The dramatic vote comes as the city is trying to struggle back to financial stability from its near-bankruptcy three years ago. The fines threatened by the judge would throw it into so much financial disarray that city control could be handed over to the state-appointed Yonkers Emergency Financial Control Board, which already oversees its spending.
City Councilman Harry Oxman says he may abstain from voting because he is tired of taking the heat for supporting the order while fellow councilmen “go waving the flag to their constituents.” Nonetheless, he says the issue has gone far beyond arguments on either side.
“Complying with the law is the first part of it,” he said. “Whatever I think shouldn’t go into it.”
But Spallone sees tonight’s vote differently: “I get a feel for how those guys at the Boston Tea Party felt. . . . I made the commitment and I know exactly what I have to do, and I’m going to do it.”
