As NYC Public Housing Turns 75, One Resident Remembers 50
As the New York City Public Housing Authority turns 75 this year, one of its residents will be celebrating her 50th birthday next week, which is also her 50-year anniversary living in the Van Dyke Houses of Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Despite five of her childhood friends dying before age 30 and others leaving for greener places, Lisa Kenner has stayed in Brownsville and watched her neighbors slip into violence and apathy. From the public housing development where she was born and still lives, Kenner decided to take action.
She first ran for vice-president of the Van Dyke Houses tenant association, then president, then as the female leader for her Democratic assembly district. She has fought city government when she believes it steps on her residents, and she’s taught Brownsville’s young adults how to lead productive lives. She chose to leave politics in 2008, though, to spend more time with her granddaughter, whose mother was then killed in a shooting.
Kenner says that she took the lessons she learned in politics – how to make connections and how to take a stand – and has applied them on behalf of her tenants. Most recently, she convinced a local nonprofit organization to create a support group for Brownsville’s young men and women.
“She is extremely representative of her residents,” said Rasmia Kirmani, the program director at The Brownsville Partnership, a newly-formed group dedicated to preventing homelessness.
A heavy-set African-American woman with a shaved head and orange angular sunglasses pulled above her eyes, Kenner describes her motivations for Brownsville activism and for her brief political career:
On Brownsville Activism
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During her career as an activist, she’s most proud of the time she and her tenants marched on City Hall to protest a proposed parole center in her complex. They won the fight against the New York City Housing Authority and the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator—the plans were shelved. Here Kenner describes the experience as she sits her office, located in the basement of one of the 22 buildings at Van Dyke:
Her Parole Center Victory
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She says that in order to keep her neighbors out of the criminal justice system, Kenner councils young men who become self-absorbed and stray towards crime. She tells them about her own earnest experience – about the example her father set raising seven children on a pittance.
On Brownsville Men
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Changing a community’s mentality will take more than just a few courses in self respect, Kenner realizes. In the meantime, she’s satisfied with her own actions—representing and motivating her neighbors, trying to get them to bring back the Brownsville of her youth:
On her Legacy
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