Fighting for the Poor Under Trump

[think]

FIGHTING FOR THE POOR UNDER TRUMP

By Jennifer Gonnerman - DECEMBER 12, 2016 ISSUE

Ritchie Torres is a rising star who represents a Bronx district on the New York City Council. His job is about to get a lot harder.

Ritchie Torres, the youngest elected official in New York City, grew up in a small apartment in Throggs Neck Houses, a public-housing project in the East Bronx, with his mother, his sister, and his twin brother. The complex is isolated—the closest subway station is a forty-minute walk away—so Torres and his friends found ways to entertain themselves. They staged W.W.E.-style wrestling shows on the playground, with fake blood, and Torres in the role of the Rock. His grandparents, who lived in a building nearby, had been among the project’s original residents, moving in soon after it opened, in 1953. In the summer, his grandfather sat on a bench in front of his building, spraying kids with a hose, while his grandmother gave out icies from her third-floor window, putting them in a bag and lowering them by rope to the children below.

Across the street was a vacant two-hundred-and-twenty-acre expanse of land, the site of a former city garbage dump, which reached to the East River. In 1998, when Torres was ten, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced a plan to transform the site into an eighteen-hole golf course. There were repeated delays, and the course was still unfinished twelve years later, when the city chose someone to operate it: Donald J. Trump. Not long afterward, a rumor spread that Trump was going to buy Throggs Neck Houses, too, and evict everyone who lived there.


~Snip~

Torres, now twenty-eight, is a member of the New York City Council, where he represents the Fifteenth District, in the central Bronx, one of the poorest in the city. He lives in the Allerton neighborhood, but one afternoon in August he was back at Throggs Neck Houses to visit his mother, who still occupies the apartment where he grew up. Torres, who calls himself Afro-Latino—his family is originally from Puerto Rico—is tall and slim and dresses stylishly. Despite the eighty-six-degree heat, he wore a gray suit, a lavender dress shirt, a purple tie, and a City Council lapel pin. He stopped to look, through a tall black fence, at the golf course, which opened last year. The weekend rate to play a round there is about two hundred dollars, which is almost half the average monthly rent for an apartment in public housing. To Torres, the course is an “egregious misallocation of resources.” Even in casual conversation, he often sounds as if he’s giving a speech. “New York is a tale of two cities,” he said. “You have the gilded city and the other city, and the core of the other city is the New York City Housing Authority.”


~Snip~

Forty-eight of Torres’s fifty colleagues in the City Council are Democrats, and before New York’s Presidential primary, last April, nearly all of them had endorsed the state’s former U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton. But Torres was interested in Senator Bernie Sanders’s progressive agenda. On March 31st, Sanders held a rally in St. Mary’s Park, in the South Bronx, and Torres arrived early. The moment he met Sanders, he started telling him about the conditions in the housing projects, and the seventeen billion dollars required to repair them. Torres says that Sanders looked shocked and asked, “Is that billions, with a ‘b’ ?”...


Read more (Short video interview also.):

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/fighting-for-the-poor-under-trump