CB1 Member Joe Lerner Marks Five Decades of Leadership
Next week, at the monthly meeting of Community Board 1 (CB1), Joe Lerner will be presented with a proclamation from multiple elected officials honoring his half-century of service and leadership on the Board. This makes him the longest-serving member of CB1, and likely among the lengthiest-tenured members of any of the 59 Community Board through the five boroughs, now or ever. Community Boards were established in their present form in 1963, which means that Mr. Lerner has been at his post for most of the time that the institution has existed.
Mr. Lerner was born in the fall of 1933, in the then-new public housing development of Williamsburg Houses. “My family were among the first residents there,” he recalls. “My parents were a poor couple who emigrated from Russia. They wandered around for several years, and were desperately insecure until they got to Williamsburg Houses. This taught me the importance of shelter, and the government’s role in providing clean, affordable, safe homes for people who need them.”
Lower Manhattan first came to Mr. Lerner’s attention as a young urban planner for the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission, a government agency headquartered at One World Trade Center that coordinated transportation plans for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “A co-worker told me, ‘they’re building apartments a few blocks from here—why don’t you look at them?’ This turned out to be Southbridge Towers, a State-sponsored middle-income, affordable cooperative that was built alongside the Brooklyn Bridge between 1961 and 1971.
Mr. Lerner and his new wife, Barbara (a faculty member at Lower Manhattan’s Pace University), applied and were accepted in 1971. “We were the first residents in our unit,” he recalls. “It was a godsend. For an initial price of $2,000, plus dirt-cheap monthly charges, we were able to live a few blocks from where we both worked.”
“Housing is the most important single element in building a community,” he reflects, recalling that at the time, “there was nothing residential anywhere in Lower Manhattan, apart from Southbridge and a few tenements.” This insight catalyzed a decades-long campaign of advocacy for affordability and rent protections.
A dispute among Southbridge neighbors over the terms of a parking garage lease within the complex led to Mr. Lerner running for the Board of Directors that oversees the cooperative. This, in turn, led to his appointment to CB1 in 1973.
“At the time,” he remembers, “there were a lot of bankers and real estate developers on CB1. I became CB1’s in-house advocate for preserving affordability and limiting rent increases.”
Concerns about the quality of local healthcare led him join the Community Advisory Board for what was then known as Beekman Downtown Hospital, and is now New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital. “We fought to upgrade the emergency room and improve the quality of care,” he says of the group’s mandate.
Along the way, the Lerners traded up to a two-bedroom unit at Southbridge when their daughter Emily was born in 1980. Fatherhood further inspired him to become an advocate for schools and parks. “When we moved in, the only local amenity was a swing set in Southbridge,” he recalls.
After the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission wound down its work in the early 1980s, Mr. Lerner spent several years as a stay-at-home dad, looking after Emily, when she was a toddler. A few years, later, when she began to attend Hunter College Elementary School, Mr. Lerner and several neighbors with children at the same school began carpooling from Southbridge to the Upper East Side five days per week. At the same time, he began taking education classes at Pace University, to accumulate the credits necessary for his next career path, as a public school teacher. “I already had a MBA degree,” he remembers, “but needed the education credits in order to apply for a teaching license. My wife was an adjunct professor at Pace, so she urged me to take education courses there.” (In an indication that leadership runs in families, around this time, Ms. Lerner was in the process of starting the union at Pace for adjunct professors.)
After being certified to teach accounting and business, “I was offered tenure at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, and then promoted to school treasurer at Prospect Heights High School, which was right next door,” he remembers.
Being a parent also led Mr. Lerner to undertake 40-year push to build a branch of the New York Public Library on the East Side of Lower Manhattan. “I haven’t won that one yet,” he grudgingly acknowledges, “but give me a little more time. We were close on a few occasions. At one point, we had a handshake deal for a space at William and Beekman Streets, which is now used by Pace University as a conference center. This was on track to happen, but then the City had a budget crunch, and it was derailed.” The latest version of the plan, on which Mr. Lerner has partnered with community leader and fellow CB1 member Rosa Chang, seeks to locate a new branch in one of the anchorage spaces beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
A further cause that stoked his passion was the question of whether Southbridge Towers should exit the Mitchell-Lama affordability program under which it was created, and revert instead to market-rate price. “I was opposed to this,” he recalls. “I wanted to see these homes remain affordable for another generation of owners, so they would have the same opportunity we did.” Over Mr. Lerner’s objections, a majority of Southbridge owners voted to privatize the complex in 2014.
More recently, he had greater success as part of a team of retired teachers who mobilized to resist City plans “to force us into a less-desirable health plan,” Mr. Lerner says. In August, a State Supreme Court judge prohibited the City from forcibly switching hundreds of thousands of retirees (along with their dependents) to a privatized Medicare Advantage plan managed by Aetna.
Looking back over five decades of activism, Mr. Lerner says, “Lower Manhattan used to be a district of corporate headquarters. Tens of thousands of residents have moved in. This has both benefits and downsides. The community is thriving, but it is also mostly market rate. This means there is less room for families like mine.”
“There are more people here now, but we seem talk to each other less,” he observes. “Lower Manhattan should be able to hang onto its small-town character, even with a growing population.”
His advice to the next generation of leaders is, “step up, take your lumps, get involved and give it your best effort. We need good people who are passionate. Communities thrive when residents get involved, and they suffer when people become apathetic. Leading at the community level is unique, because these activists bring an awareness of micro-level issues that nobody else sees.”
“I really like doing public service,” Mr. Lerner concludes, “and I hope to keep this up as long as there’s breath in my lungs.”