News and Media

Mamdani Administration Launches New Program to Deliver Affordable Housing on City-Owned Land Faster

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:02:04 GMT

NEW YORK – Today, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg and Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Dina Levy announced the new Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, an expedited process to speed the delivery of affordable housing on City-owned land. With Neighborhood Builders, HPD will pre-qualify affordable housing builders and shorten the pre-development Request for Proposals (RFP) process by eight months for certain projects – cutting the time to select an affordable housing developer by nearly half. Together with the new Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP), which the Mamdani administration has moved quickly to implement following its approval by voters in November, these programs will cut the pre-development process by more than two years.

“Our city is facing a historic housing crisis -- the last thing we need to do is tie ourselves in red tape,” said Mayor Mamdani . “The Neighborhood Builders Fast Track will speed up housing development and make it faster to build on city-owned land. This administration is willing to move at the speed of need to make this a city New Yorkers can continue to call home.”

“New Yorkers deserve a government that doesn’t just deliver high-quality, affordable housing – but that also delivers it efficiently and effectively. I am proud to launch the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track alongside the HPD team who are working to deliver affordable housing across the five boroughs,” said Leila Bozorg, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning . “I’m also excited to be advancing affordable housing projects at 784 Myrtle Ave, 1337 Jerome Ave, and 109-43 Farmers Blvd that will help create more vibrant, affordable neighborhoods, including new homeownership opportunities.”

"New York City needs more affordable housing, built faster and at lower cost — and HPD is not waiting to deliver it," said Dina Levy, Housing and Preservation Commissioner . "The Neighborhood Builders Fast Track will reduce costs, speed up timelines, and maximize affordability. Public land is a public good — and we will not let city-owned sites sit idle while New Yorkers struggle to find an affordable home."

HPD is releasing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) due May 8th for affordable housing developers who will pre-qualify for the Neighborhood Builders program, with a focus on nonprofit organizations and minority- and women-owned businesses. Once development teams have been qualified, the faster Neighborhood Builders process will be used at sites such as 784-800 Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, 1337 Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and 109-43 Farmers Boulevard in Queens, which will together deliver as many as 300 new affordable homes, including around 100 affordable homeownership opportunities at the Bronx and Queens sites. HPD expects to use the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track to advance development of as many as 1,000 new homes over the next two years.

The Neighborhood Builders Fast Track advances the Mamdani administration’s critical goals of creating affordable housing, especially on City-owned land, and speeding up the delivery of housing across the city. On the first day of the administration, Mayor Mamdani signed Executive Orders 4 and 5, establishing the Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) and Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) task forces, both of which will deliver recommendations this spring. The LIFT Task Force is working to identify opportunities for housing on City-owned sites, and the SPEED Task Force is working to reform the affordable housing production process, including pre- and post-construction approvals, project financing, and lease-up.

“I look forward to working with Mayor Mamdani on the Neighborhood Builders program to deliver urgently needed affordable housing,” said Council Member Chi Ossé . “Since taking office, I have made one priority clear: build more housing and keep our neighbors here. The inclusion of 784-800 Myrtle Avenue in our district is both an honor and a recognition of Bed-Stuy’s need for deeply affordable homes so longtime residents and low-income New Yorkers can continue to contribute to our shared Brooklyn heritage. I’m proud to have approved thousands of units — spanning deeply affordable, middle-income, and supportive housing — that meet the diverse needs of my constituents. With Neighborhood Builders accelerating this work, we can move faster to confront rising rents and prevent displacement, because the people who give this city its life deserve to remain part of its future.”

“With the highest loss of black residents in the city, Mayor Mamdani picked the perfect place to start - Bed Stuy. Transforming vacant city-owned land to 100% affordable housing. This is what we have been calling for. This is hope. This is a downpayment of what is to come - building thousands of affordable homes in Bed Stuy and Central Brooklyn so the people who live here can stay here. Moving from words to action,” said Rev. Dr. Adolphus Lacey, Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Bedford Stuyvesant and Co-Chair of East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) .

“Today, Mayor Mamdani is showing us what is possible. Metro IAF called on the Mayor to do what others thought was impossible - develop 50,000 affordable units each year. We said it takes three things - sites, staff, and subsidy. Metro IAF showed him the sites. His staff quickly and thoroughly reviewed the sites. And today, the Mayor is acting to make city-owned land live again,” said Rev. Dr. David K. Brawley, Pastor of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York and Co-Chair of Metro IAF . “We are in a 9-1-1 moment. Mayor Mamdani is showing what leaders do in an emergency. They act. They streamline. They expedite. They cut the red tape. We can’t wait to come back here and welcome the families who will have a brand-new home. We will do it again and again. We are not stopping. Metro IAF will stand with Mayor Mamdani and we will fight. We will fight for affordability. We will fight for maximizing density. We will fight for expediting. We will fight for all New Yorkers to keep New York home.”

“With a 1.4% vacancy rate, New Yorkers need more affordable housing, and fast,” said Annemarie Gray, Executive Director of Open New York . “We need to use every tool to speed up the creation of new homes, and the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track is a powerful new one. By cutting 8 months of process, affordable housing will get built faster, enabling more New Yorkers to access homes they can afford. We're excited to see the Mamdani Administration, Deputy Mayor Bozorg, and Commissioner Levy prioritize the fast delivery of more affordable housing."

"New York's housing crisis isn't years away - it's happening right now. For this reason, government must explore every tool at its disposal to cut the time it takes to build affordable homes. The Neighborhood Builders Fast Track is an initiative that prioritizes organizations that understand our communities and looks to accelerate livability for families," said Carlina Rivera, President and CEO of NYSAFAH . "We applaud Mayor Mamdani and his team for their creativity in finding new pathways to house New Yorkers more quickly and affordably."

“As a third-generation MBE developer and general contractor, Apex Building Group is pleased to see this new Neighborhood Builders initiative that will help broaden the circle of participants in the development of urgently needed affordable units. Speeding up the process of getting from the initial idea to shovel in the ground is essential if we are going to meet the housing demand,” said Lee A. Brathwaite, CEO of Apex Building Group.

“Constructive Partnerships Unlimited is proud to partner with New York City on permanent housing opportunities for underserved New Yorkers and utilize initiatives like Neighborhood Builders Fast Track to lower costs and expedite construction. Building affordable homes is a vital cause that impacts dignity, stability, and opportunity, and we look forward to advancing additional projects so more New Yorkers can find a place to call home and build a meaningful future," said Joseph M. Pancari, President and CEO of Constructive Partnerships Unlimited.

"Comunilifeis committed to expanding affordable and supportive housing, we welcome the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track as a critical step toward an equitable development process. Prioritizing nonprofits and M/WBE developers strengthens local capacity and ensures that the communities most affected by the housing crisis are part of the solution," said Blanca Ramirez, President and CEO of Comunilife.

###

Muslims Move to Assert Political Power in New York City

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:50:41 GMT

As a wave of Islamophobic attacks began to spread late in the New York City mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani was quick to respond. He traveled to a mosque in the Bronx to denounce the offensive remarks, surrounding himself with a group of key allies: Muslim faith and community leaders.

It was a telling show of support and kinship among an emergent voting bloc that was quietly coalescing within their communities for years, but whose political power was only beginning to emerge.

Now, with Mr. Mamdani at the helm of City Hall, Muslim New Yorkers are moving to expand their foothold in the city’s organizing networks and to build on their progress after the mayoral election. And they have focused their efforts on the Bronx.

On Thursday, a group consisting mostly of Muslim organizers and faith leaders in the Bronx voted to join the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest nonpartisan organizing networks.

The group’s New York cohort has been at the forefront of a decades-long interfaith push for affordable housing and public safety, and includes the heads of the city’s most influential Black churches, community centers and synagogues. The group has also developed a cadre of organizers in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan who have trained in government accountability and community activism.

Now the foundation will incorporate a broader coalition under the moniker, the Bronx First, which includes dozens of churches and community centers as well as more than 40 mosques into its network. By the end of the evening, the self-funded coalition raised nearly $160,000 for their efforts.

Their aim is largely oriented toward policy goals, with their leaders more focused on accountability than access.

On Thursday, roughly 2,000 people across faiths, generations and socioeconomic statuses filled an auditorium at Fordham University to vote to formalize their addition to the coalition. Their attendance marked a unique show of political power among groups of people not often seen in concert with one another.

“ We all face the same challenges as everybody else in the community,” said Haji Dukuray, a board member with the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx who helped organize Thursday’s event. He added, “It’s great we have a Muslim mayor, but that’s just an example of when we come together as a group, how well we can do.”

A handful of speakers were critical of Mr. Mamdani, whose absence some perceived as a slight against the group that helped power his win months earlier. Mr. Dukuray highlighted the mayor’s failure to attend in his opening remarks, to some sneers from the crowd.

“We invited him, and he decided to ignore us. That’s a huge mistake on his part,” he said. “But we don’t need him here to organize ourselves.”

The group affirmed its top demands of city leadership, touching upon public safety, affordable housing and mental health resources. The group has kept a particular focus on the city’s affordable housing supply — efforts that have intensified amid ongoing housing and food affordability crises that have already pushed out hundreds of thousands of longtime residents.

But the group’s newer Muslim members have underscored the need for more public safety measures in their communities, pointing to instances of gang violence that have harmed their members. The increase in detainments and deportations in cities also have added more urgency, as many in the group are immigrants from West Africa and the Middle East.

Mr. Mamdani, a Muslim South Asian born in Uganda, brought his message of affordability to the city’s mosques and Islamic community centers during his campaign. His candidacy galvanized a record number of the city’s Muslim voters, who turned out in droves for him, and pushed his opponents to expand their campaign outreach to Muslim communities.

Democratic candidates have not heavily courted Muslim voters before Mr. Mamdani’s campaign. And when they did try to make inroads, their messaging to the bloc was often flawed, organizers said. The disinterest among Muslim voters was especially pronounced in the Bronx, where turnout has historically been the lowest of the five boroughs.

Still, Muslim New Yorkers more than tripled their turnout in the last mayoral election, growing from nearly 22,000 voters in the 2021 race to just over 66,000 in 2025, according to the polling firm L2.

Many Muslim leaders have been reluctant to become politically engaged and warned congregants to be wary, seeing politics as a corrupt and untrustworthy system. But in the past few years, more have come to believe that not becoming involved would only hurt Muslim communities, especially in the face of quality affordable housing shortages. The shortage has contributed to tragedies like the 2022 fire that killed 17 people — many of them Muslims from West Africa.

“This mentality of ‘listen, we’re here to do well for ourselves and our communities and to show our neighbors that we’re good people’ has kind of shifted over to ‘we’re being treated like crap and need to empower ourselves,’” said Afaf Nasher, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization. “This is not the Muslim community trying to gain power for power’s sake.”

The people of the Bronx are joining together

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:27:59 GMT

Feb. 5 was just another frigid Thursday night for most New Yorkers. But for the two of us, it was a night to remember.

We had the honor of co-chairing a founding assembly of The Bronx First — a new citizens’ power organization in our borough. More than 1,500 of our fellow Bronx residents filled the chairs and bleachers of the Rose Hill Gym at Fordham University. Another 370 supporters and allies from East Brooklyn Congregations, Queens Power , and Manhattan Together , along with observers from Maryland, Maine, and New Jersey, braved the cold and traffic to join us.

We became the newest member of the network of organizations built and sustained by Metro Industrial Areas Foundation in New York.

We weren’t just meeting on a cold night in the Bronx. We were meeting on a cold night in our nation — during a period when so many of us are being targeted, detained, deported, and harmed by an administration that has declared war on the very concept of a diverse and dynamic city. We proudly epitomized what some now believe is everything that is wrong with our city and our country

One of us is the proud daughter of Puerto Rican parents who worked incredibly hard so that I could attend Cardinal Spellman High School, then college, and law school. I became the head of one of the boroughs’ largest non-profits, BronxWorks, serving 65,000 people each year.

The other of us arrived in this country from Gambia in 1988 as an ambitious young student. I shared a mattress with my cousin before becoming a successful businessman, and a founder and leader in a network of 11 mosques in the Bronx that attracts 10,000 worshippers every week.

We both grew up and witnessed both the best and the worst of the old Bronx. The worst included the years of arson, abandonment, extraordinary violence, and despair. A parade of public officials came and went, but those conditions slowly improved mostly because of the organizing and community development that local Bronx groups pioneered.

The best, though, was that even in those difficult days, as an imam recently said, you could start at the bottom but rise slowly, from low-paid entry level work and a cramped apartment to a better job and roomier housing. And your kids could rise too.

Both the best and the worst of the old Bronx are gone. Rampant arson is a thing of the past. And street violence is less intense, although the murder of a Muslim Uber driver and a young student still fill our communities with grief and remind us that there is much more work to be done. But the best — the possibility of improvement and social mobility — is also gone.

Today, rising rents crush families. Home ownership is as rare as hitting the lottery. And deterioration and mismanagement in both NYCHA and privately owned buildings are worsening by the day.

But we didn’t gather at Fordham to whine or wring our hands. We heard from East Brooklyn Pastor David K. Brawley, Manhattan Rabbi Joel Mosbacher, and Queens nonprofit leader Ben Thomases, who described the progress that Metro IAF had already made in affordable housing, mental health, and public safety.

In Soninke, Tem, Twi, Bangla, Urdu, Spanish, French, Italian and English, we dedicated ourselves to one another with confidence that our solidarity and creativity will prevail.

On Feb. 5, we charted a new course that finally puts the Bronx — its families, congregations and communities — first. Now we have the power of 50 institutions and thousands of leaders to make that goal a reality.

Torres and Dukuray are co-chairs of The Bronx First, the newest Metro IAF affiliate.

How New Yorkers can act to melt ICE

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:56:23 GMT

In 1990, I found myself at an Anglican Fellowship Center on a hillside between Soweto and Johannesburg. My colleague Arnie Graf and I had been invited to South Africa to conduct training in organizing by Bishop Desmond Tutu, through his relationship with the Trinity Parish in New York. All during the last years of apartheid, the bishop had sent his top clergy and lay leaders to New York to observe the organizing we were doing in East Brooklyn. Our embattled South African guests sometimes lived in new Nehemiah homes and witnessed how decent, affordable housing could be built at scale in neighborhoods that resembled some of the townships back home.

One afternoon, I was conducting a session on action for about 50 of these remarkable leaders and asked the question we normally ask: “What’s the purpose of action?” The group was silent. So I posited the answer: “The goal of any action is to get a reaction.” Hands shot up. “Sir,” a young man said, “in our country we didn’t need to run an action to get a reaction. We got a reaction just because we were who we were, because of our very existence. What do you say to that?”

I paused and admitted that my whole notion of how to organize effectively was based on assumptions and experiences that made no sense in a place where unilateral violence and relentless provocation practiced by those with power were the norms. I have been thinking about that polite young man as I’ve watched the unilateral violence and relentless provocation of ICE.

It’s clear to me that the core purpose of ICE deployment is to instigate reactions that can then be used to justify more extreme provocations and more unrestrained violence. ICE isn’t trying to hide its lawlessness. ICE doesn’t care about “bad” publicity. ICE can’t be shamed. So traditional strategies used effectively for decades that seek to draw attention to ICE’s actions play right into its hands. In-your-face confrontations—great for the media and perhaps satisfying to some—are wins for their team. Appeals to human or democratic values and norms have zero impact on the proud and public violators of those values and norms.

So then what? Let me preface this by saying that my colleagues and I have dealt with groups like ICE before—drug dealers making life in local blocks and housing projects unlivable, shakedowns by a corrupt union and local hustlers, crooked cops, and slumlords who hired muscle to try to intimidate our organizers and leaders. We outsmarted and out-organized every one of them. And we never had a single leader or organizer harmed in more than four decades of work in some of the toughest corners of the city. So I speak from real-world experience, not some political science tract read in graduate school.

First, make sure that people are kept safe. Do not put them in harm’s way with people who are poorly trained, heavily armed, and sure of a pardon if they beat or shoot innocent people. Second, don’t react in the ways that ICE expects and provokes. If they show up on a block, every window should open, and every resident should blow a whistle—both to alert those being pursued of the danger and to expose the ICE attempt. Third, work very closely with the NYPD, whose new motto is “Fighting Crime, Protecting the Public.” Today, the NYPD has an obligation to protect the public from the lawlessness of ICE, and the public has an obligation to support the NYPD when it brings actual criminals to justice. Fourth, explore all state and local avenues to hold ICE agents accountable when they cross the line. Fifth, begin to plan for the dismantling of ICE and the reorganization of an effective, humane, and meaningful new immigration and naturalization agency.

The fecklessness of the old INS created the vacuum filled by ICE. The failure to use authority effectively opened the door, as it often does, to authoritarianism. We need secure borders and a professional immigration system, not a return to the chaos that led to the current crisis. This new challenge demands new responses. If reaction arrives without action, if the very existence of people is used as grounds for abuse, then we have to create strategies that won’t play into the hands of the opposition and will lead to the outcome that most Americans still seek—a sane, fair, and safe city and country.

Gecan is a senior advisor at Metro Industrial Areas Foundation and the author of Going Public.

Affordable housing, sanitation and transportation on the minds of East New York voters

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:17:21 GMT

In East New York, Brooklyn, signs of pride and progress are unmistakable.

Rev. David Brawley of St. Paul Community Baptist Church believes the neighborhood has been able to turn around because “leaders, citizens, have imagination and are willing to do the work.

Once known as the murder capital of New York City, the 75th police precinct had 126 murders in 1993. Last year, there were 12.

For many residents, signs of economic development have brought new optimism. Now they hope the neighborhood’s comeback will continue under the next mayor.

“As a pastor here in the East New York section of Brooklyn, every week it feels like I’ve got to say goodbye to members that I love because they can’t afford to live here,” Brawley told NY1.

When he’s not in the pulpit, Brawley is focused on his other calling, building affordable housing in East New York. For 40 years, St. Paul has worked with East Brooklyn Congregations to transform parts of the community like Spring Creek.

“This was a former landfill,” Brawley said. “Our leaders and our people saw more than garbage. We saw an opportunity to build affordable housing for the city of New York. There are 2,600 units here in this area.”

Brawley hopes the next administration in City Hall comes in with a bold vision to build new homes that doesn’t leave longtime East New York residents priced out.

“I would say to the next mayor that this is an urgent existential crisis that demands an urgent response,” he said.

Along the New Lots Avenue corridor, residents Erica Townsend and Eleanor Pinckney shared their concerns about sanitation.

“People are dumping,” Townsend said.

“If you look down the street, you’ll see it’s bundles of garbage all along here, why?” Pinckney added.

City Councilmember Chris Banks believes it’s important to continue “the upward trend in addressing quality-of-life issues.”

Banks believes the next administration in City Hall should be attentive to the needs of NYCHA residents and public transportation in East New York.

Black Families Are Leaving New York. Can a Pastor’s Plan End the Exodus?

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:33:26 GMT

At St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York, the congregation is divided between those who have won the affordable housing lottery and those debating whether to leave New York altogether.Credit...Jordan Macy for The New York Times

On one of the coldest mornings of the year, David K. Brawley stood on the roof of a new home for seniors he had helped create, his coat fluttering in the wind. He surveyed his domain.

He pointed to the left, toward the hazy outline of the Manhattan skyline, to the rows of rental apartments below that he had helped develop. He pointed to the right, toward Jamaica Bay, to the mall and the rowhouses, built on top of landfill and overgrown fields, whose construction he had championed.

Squint, and you could almost see it: his vision of 10,000 more apartments, in new buildings stretching into every undeveloped corner of a neighborhood once known as the murder capital of New York City.

Mr. Brawley, 56, is not a real estate developer. He is the pastor of one of Brooklyn’s most storied Black congregations, St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York.

But at a moment when Black families are leaving the city in droves, there’s no way to lead a church like his without having a keen — in his case almost obsessive — interest in building more affordable housing.

It’s the only way he can keep his flock intact.

This corner of Brooklyn, at the edge of one of the most expensive cities on the planet, has long been an epicenter of New York’s Black civil servant class, the people who drive buses, administer food stamps, work with children with disabilities.

But they are being priced out of the city they have helped power, and where they continue to have enormous influence by showing up to vote en masse.

New York has a lot to lose if they leave.

So does Mr. Brawley. “There’s an unspoken grief” every time another one of his congregants decides they can no longer keep up with the cost of living here, he said.

“There’s a part of your soul that gets affected.”

Today, many of St. Paul’s members want to stay in the neighborhoods they have lived in for decades, close to their church. But with each passing year, it feels harder to maintain a decent quality of life. They want homes they can be proud of, that they can pass on to their children, not just the first rental they can find.

They want to enjoy the occasional night out, and to have enough savings to help their kids if they need to.

For some congregants, that kind of life is now possible only outside of New York City.

‘The City That We Helped to Build’

One Sunday a few weeks before Easter, Mr. Brawley was gearing up for St. Paul’s 8 a.m. service, the week’s marquee event. Hundreds of people filed through the building, passing hallways covered in zebra-print wallpaper and a miniature museum depicting the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.

Black history is woven into every aspect of worship at St. Paul, including the church building itself, which houses a miniature museum that depicts the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.

Congregants filled the chapel, taking their seats under ornate chandeliers and rippling white curtains that looped across the ceiling like clouds.

As Mr. Brawley looked out, he saw a congregation divided.

There were those who had won the lottery, which here meant getting a subsidized home that the church had helped develop. Then there were those who were watching their rents climb in public housing or crummy walk-ups and worrying about how long they would be able to stay put.

When he took the pulpit, Mr. Brawley acknowledged a third group, for whom it was already too late: the St. Paul members who had left the city and were joining the church service online.

Linda Boyce, who was recently named an elder in the church after being a member for 49 years, took her usual seat up front. She had driven just a few blocks from her spotless three-bedroom rowhouse, purchased through the church’s neighborhood development project. Pia Horton, who has been a member for 11 years, greeted friends as she walked in, wondering if this would be the day she finally told them that she was thinking of moving to Atlanta.

He described Jesus returning to Jerusalem from Galilee to take on the establishment, and he encouraged the congregation to do the same. “It’s important to make sure we feed folks and we clothe folks,” he said, “but it’s also important to raise the question: Why are people poor in the first place?” The way that his church could flex its influence, Mr. Brawley said, was to demand that elected officials make their constituents’ lives better, easier and more affordable.

The church would not endorse a candidate in the upcoming mayoral election. Instead, St. Paul’s members would create a list of priorities that they would ask the candidates to respond to.“Turn your face toward Jerusalem for the city of New York,” Mr. Brawley said, to raucous applause. “The city that we helped to build.”

One of the Lucky Ones

After the service, a 911 dispatcher, a school safety agent and a hotel housekeeper pulled their chairs together in the church basement and started to tally the indignities of living in New York these days.

They compared notes on the time of day they had to pay their credit card bills to avoid late fees — 6 p.m., 8 p.m., midnight. A 24-pack of eggs was now $20.89 at the nearest supermarket. One member, recently displaced in a fire, had applied to 11 affordable housing lotteries and come up empty.

That was the question bouncing around the room — and the room across the hall, and the chapel upstairs — during the morning’s house meetings, a St. Paul tradition in which members vent concerns about the state of the city. The community organizing group East Brooklyn Congregations arranged 100 similar meetings at churches across the city over the past several months, and affordability was by far congregants’ top issue. Ms. Boyce watched her neighbors radiate with anger as they talked about their absentee landlords and rising bills.

She tried to strike an optimistic tone. “The work gets harder, the work gets heavier,” she said. “We can do it because we are people of God.”

But Ms. Boyce knew she was one of the lucky ones. A few months earlier, standing in her home, with its dark wood floors and electric fireplace, she described how she came to be a part of one of New York’s most ambitious affordable housing developments.

The enterprise started soon after Ms. Boyce, the daughter of sharecroppers in North Carolina, moved to Brooklyn and joined the church in the 1970s.

Mr. Brawley’s predecessor worked with community organizers and developers to create Nehemiah, an affordable housing project named after the prophet who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem.The goal was to revitalize one of the city’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Now, as St. Paul’s members scramble to find places to live, Mr. Brawley sees expanding Nehemiah as a crucial part of his job, as important as preaching and praying.

Ms. Boyce and her family watched the first Nehemiah houses go up from their rental unit in Linden Plaza, a hulking apartment complex nearby that was beginning its descent into disrepair, when she and her husband joined the waiting list for a rowhouse in the early 1990s. “I started to pray, I asked God, ‘Where should we live?’” she said. “And with God, sometimes it takes him forever to answer.” Sixteen years later, after considering a move back to North Carolina, the Boyces got the call. Their home cost $230,000, and the couple put down 5 percent, the minimum required by Nehemiah.

The cost of building rowhouses like the Boyces’ is covered by subsidies from the city, the state and the homeowner’s mortgage from a traditional lender; if the owner holds onto the home for at least 15 years, the subsidy is forgiven.

Since the early 1980s, Nehemiah has grown to over 5,000 affordable units in Brooklyn; the latest project drew 78,875 applications for 200 units.

After the Boyces moved into their new home, they painted every room a different color, one a soft yellow, another a pale orange. They decorated it with photographs of their family — their daughter, who is an art teacher for children with profound disabilities, and their son, a manager for the city’s Department of Social Services, the same agency where his mother worked for 41 years, distributing welfare benefits. As Ms. Boyce spoke about how bright her future felt in this home, Mr. Brawley listened from the entryway. He was thinking, he said later, about another longtime congregant, who he had expected would become an elder like Ms. Boyce, helping him lead the congregation. But that member had recently confided that she did not think she could afford to stay in Brooklyn.

“There’s a lot of Lindas in my church,” he said. “Every Linda you lose, you lose something.”

‘Little Paris’

Olivia Wilkins never got to travel much. But her new apartment on Schenck Avenue in East New York gives her a feeling of being in a whole new world. That’s why she calls it her “little Paris.” “You are waking up every morning to a whole new scenery,” said Ms. Wilkins, a St. Paul member of 23 years who works part time at Kennedy Airport, giving travelers directions.

Before this, Ms. Wilkins lived for 50 years in a public housing development. As she got older, and her children moved away, she found herself in a big apartment she didn’t need, but with nowhere else she could afford to go, all while the public housing wait list grew. The solution to Ms. Wilkins’s problem ended up being right across the street, on the site of a city-owned parking lot that she had avoided since it became a place for kids to make trouble. The opportunity was obvious to Mr. Brawley. He worked with East Brooklyn Congregations, which helped create Nehemiah, and a supportive housing nonprofit to create 80 units for low-income seniors, with rents capped at 30 percent of a tenant’s income. Redwood Senior Living would become Ms. Wilkins’s new home, and her old apartment went to a young mother and her children who had been living in a homeless shelter. Ms. Wilkins and the family often pass each other in the street, and they always stop and hug. Now, Ms. Wilkins never has to think about leaving New York. It’s where her anchor is, her church.

‘What About Us?’

St. Paul was created in 1927, when about 15 South Carolinians moved to Brooklyn in search of opportunity and created their own place to worship.

For many decades, the story of the church was one of a steady migration of Black families from South to North. By the 1980s, the church had affinity groups for people whose families came from North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Now, they are going back. About 100 people log on to St. Paul’s Sunday services each week from Charlotte, N.C., and a similar number from Atlanta. Dozens of people join from Greensboro and Raleigh, N.C., and Richmond, Va.

They are part of a steady stream of Black New Yorkers who have left town, well over 200,000 since 2019, according to census data.

Ms. Horton, who has lived in Brooklyn for 52 years, has so far resisted her daughter’s pleas to join her in Georgia, where her grandson still wears a Yankees cap most days.

But Ms. Horton’s rent in public housing is now close to $2,000 a month, roughly double her daughter’s mortgage outside of Atlanta. To Ms. Horton, New York has become a place where you have to be very rich or very poor, able to survive on public benefits. “But the middle class, where I would consider myself, we’re like, ‘What about us?’” she asked. Ms. Horton is in a growing class of New Yorkers who can afford to cover the costs of moving elsewhere but are struggling to keep up with the costs of staying put.She is finishing a master’s degree in social work, and hopes to provide mental health services to her neighbors in Brooklyn. “The choice I’m making, I’m being forced to make it, because I want to stay here,” she said.

During a house meeting at St. Paul, Ms. Horton decided it was time to reveal her quandary. As she spoke, Mr. Brawley stood in the back of the room, arms crossed. He nodded when someone shouted, “It’s getting expensive in Georgia, too, Pia!” Mr. Brawley knows he can’t persuade everyone to stay. But some departures still hurt. Linda Bracey-Patterson, a member of St. Paul for 22 years, was supposed to become an elder, the pastor said. But after she retired from her job as a special educator, she and her husband, who worked at Chase Bank, realized their retirement savings wouldn’t last long. They moved from Jamaica, Queens, to a three-bedroom townhouse in Hampton, Va., with a mortgage considerably less than their rent. But Ms. Bracey-Patterson barely knew anyone, and she missed her church. She sank into a depression for a few months, and then tried to shake it off. “Now that I’m used to it, I’m sort of glad,” she said. “Because we’re not going to be put out in the street.” She joined another church, but she hasn’t found the same camaraderie she had at St. Paul, when she and her friends held a weekly wine and wings night on Zoom during the pandemic. “I’m just hoping the price of housing in New York does come down, and people could stay there, especially people like myself who were born and raised there,” Ms. Bracey-Patterson said. In the meantime, she has been fielding phone calls from friends at St. Paul who are wrestling with whether they should leave. She recently spoke with a dear friend, really more like a sister, who is worried that her rent could soon rise to $3,000 a month. “I already told her that we have an extra room,” Ms. Bracey-Patterson said, “if you need to come on down here.”

As Black New Yorkers Move Out, N.Y.C. Politics May Be Reshaped

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 14:06:41 GMT

A Democratic mayoral forum at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. The rising costs of housing are fueling some voters’ discontent with Democrats they have long supported.Credit...

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

For the better part of the 35 years that she lived in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, Dorinda Pannell made affordable housing her top — if not only — mission.

A lifelong Democrat, tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations and avid voter, Ms. Pannell, 75, known to her neighbors in the Linden Houses as “Miss P,” spent years organizing her fellow residents to push for better housing conditions. She even took her fight to City Hall to give a speech about it.

Now she is following New York’s mayoral primary closely, hopeful that the city’s next leader will do more for the millions of New Yorkers experiencing housing insecurity, particularly longtime Black and Latino residents who say that good-quality, affordable places to live are more and more elusive.

But she will not be voting in the primary or be able to see for herself how the next mayoral administration affects her community. For the last five years, Ms. Pannell has lived in Hampton, Va., where she can be closer to her son, obtain better health care and enjoy what she believes is a higher quality of life and lower cost of living.

“I’m still sad that I had to leave, you know?” she said, pointing to the organizing work she felt she had to put on hold. When it came time to move, she added, “I never cried so hard.”

Ms. Pannell is one of the hundreds of thousands of Black New Yorkers who over the last decade have made the excruciating choice to leave the city they’ve called home for generations.

Dorinda Pannell, a longtime New York City tenant leader, at her home in Hampton, Va., where she has lived for five years.Credit...Hadley Chittum for The New York Times

Citing the near-impossibility of securing affordable housing, the poor quality of public housing or the chance to be closer to family members who have already made the move, many Black American residents who have lived, worked and voted in New York for years are finding it much harder to stay.

Their departures, which span New York’s age brackets and boroughs, have been difficult for demographers to fully quantify amid the city’s pandemic-induced population swings.

Even as New York’s population decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic before bouncing back this year , most reliable surveys of the city’s demographics show that the proportion of Black residents has remained largely unchanged. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an annual nationwide assessment of demographics, found that New York’s population of Black residents was roughly the same as it was 20 years ago, though that population now skews older.

Still, New York’s suburban counties, which show a sharp uptick in Black residents, are perhaps the strongest evidence that the city’s Black population is changing and may be decreasing.

And in corners of historically Black neighborhoods around New York, community leaders and residents alike say they have noticed real political and demographic shifts that stand to threaten the endurance of New York’s once-ironclad Democratic coalition, long bolstered by the millions of Black voters who are vital to the party’s successes.

“This is a staunch Democratic base, but yet it’s starting to erode because of the departure of a lot of Black people in the area,” said the Rev. Dr. Adolphus Lacey, the senior pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Old school Democrats are leaving.” The number of Black registered voters in the city has also remained steady for the last two decades. But the confluence of several crises — affordability, public safety and housing availability — makes it clear how the same trends that disproportionately harm Black Americans are also driving some of them out of New York.

The mounting problems have amplified discontent among Black voters, who in interviews pointed to a perceived lack of political will from the Democratic leaders they have supported en masse for decades to solve them. The contentious Democratic primary for mayor marks the first real electoral test of this key bloc’s loyalties since the November presidential election. The Black voters and organizers fighting to remain in the city are leveraging their political influence to push the party to make progress on an issue that could shape the contours of New York’s Democratic coalition for a generation.

As New York’s housing costs soar, southern cities like Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte have become home to a growing population of ex-New Yorkers. Some observers have described the dynamic as a reverse Great Migration, harking back to the waves of Black Americans who left the South for better opportunities in the Northeast and Midwest during the early 20th century.

The relatively steady size of New York’s Black population also obscures how much it has changed over the years. Twenty years ago, nearly two-thirds of Black New Yorkers were born in the United States, were non-Hispanic and identified only as Black, according to census data. Now just under half of Black New Yorkers identify as Latino, multiracial, foreign-born or some combination of all three.

Some experts see changes to the city’s Black population as part of its long history of ever-fluctuating demographics. And the influence of New York’s Black voters remains clear at the height of Democratic politics in the state — Black Democrats currently lead City Hall, the City Council and both chambers of the State Legislature.

“All ethnic groups go through a rise and fall in New York City politics,” said John Mollenkopf, the director of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY, who added that “Important traces of those groups remain in very influential perches” in the city.

Still, for residents and leaders who have lived in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods for decades, the changes in the character of their communities are as palpable as the rising housing costs.

“You can see it in the ownership, you can see it in the apartments, you can see it in just who’s in the neighborhood and who’s not here in the neighborhood now,” said State Senator Cordell Cleare, whose Harlem district has seen a precipitous decline in Black residents over the last two decades. “People are leaving because they can’t afford to be here. Not because they don’t love this community.”

In early June, the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation — one of the oldest and largest organizing networks in the country — gathered at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East New York to lay out the scale of the housing crunch to five of the top-polling mayoral candidates.

The group, which is nonpartisan, called for affordable housing, improved public housing conditions and steps to address the city’s mental health crisis. Thousands in the crowd of housing organizers, tenants, union workers and religious and community leaders were bused to the event from union halls and churches across the city. They quickly filled the church’s sanctuary and overflow spaces.

Yolanda Moore, 57, a retired police sergeant who has lived in East New York for more than 40 years, addressed the crowd as a tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations, a local affiliate of Metro I.A.F. She is a lifelong New Yorker who fights for affordable housing in hopes of keeping her family and close friends in their communities.

She described how hurtful it was to watch Black retirees who have been lauded for their contributions to the city, as civil servants and loyal Democratic voters, struggling the most to afford to live here.

Ms. Moore said she and her neighbors felt their policy demands were part of a larger push for accountability against a pattern they said had become commonplace in electoral politics. “These candidates have to stop coming into Black, brown, Hispanic communities and making promises to get the vote and then totally ignoring us,” she said. “These are our taxpayer dollars that are paying your salary. As much as you take from us, we need for somebody to be honest and stick to their word.”

The Democrats running for mayor have all presented ambitious housing plans . Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who leads in most primary polls, has pledged to spend $2.5 billion to overhaul the New York City Housing Authority and accelerate plans to revitalize housing on city lands. He promised to meet with Metro I.A.F.’s leaders on the first day of his administration if he is elected.

Zohran Mamdani, the state assemblyman who is the race’s other front-runner, is calling for construction of 200,000 rent-stabilized homes and has made freezing rents a cornerstone of his campaign message.

Mr. Mamdani centered the city’s changing Black population in a closing message on Monday. In a video shared on Instagram , several of his Black supporters said that rising costs were making it more difficult to stay in the city, bolstering their support for his campaign’s focus on affordability.

Other candidates have put forth mammoth proposals for additional housing: Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn, has proposed building and preserving one million homes citywide. Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, has pledged to build 500,000 new homes, as has Brad Lander, the city comptroller. Michael Blake, a former assemblyman, proposed building 600,000.

But the influential Black religious leaders who have watched their own congregants get priced out say that policy promises and church visits are not enough.

Scores of pastors, looking back on Democrats’ failed strategies during the presidential campaign, have eschewed endorsements of any candidate in the primary. Instead, they are asking that those who visit their pulpits come not to solicit votes during an election season, but instead to present a plan to keep the faithful in their pews — and, in some cases, to interest them in turning back out.

“We think that in this last presidential election, there were opportunities missed to hear from the voters — that elected officials were not listening,” said the Rev. Dr. David K. Brawley, the senior pastor of St. Paul and a national co-chair of Metro I.A.F. “And there are some consequences for not listening.”

Tawana Myers, 63, has lived in the Linden Houses in East New York for more than 40 years and is also a tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations. Over the last decade, she watched her children, grandchildren and close friends leave New York for more affordable places in Massachusetts and Maryland.

She often considered joining them, especially as the dust and mold from past renovations in her building left her with lingering health problems. But she sees the issue as bigger than just her own challenges.

“Why should I run from where I grew up all my life? Where my doctors are — people that know me, that could help me?” she said. “I have the right to live in my community where I raised my children, where the people know me and I know them.”

Ms. Pannell reckoned with a similar choice. Large actions like the rally at St. Paul, her home church, were exactly what she hoped would help keep the neighborhood she loves intact. She used to organize similar events as a tenant leader, and she returns periodically to help continue the fight.

But this year, she watched from outside New York, joining hundreds of other supporters tuned into a YouTube livestream.

Reporting was contributed by Eliza Shapiro, Bianca Pallaro and Robert Gebeloff.

Maya King is a Times reporter covering New York politics.

Bronx community teams up to promote call center for NYCHA residents

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 17:25:57 GMT

NEW YORK (PIX11) — A collection of more than a hundred congregations and community organizations has teamed up with a local legislator to promote an independent oversight agency to help NYCHA residents get repairs that they say are underused.

PIX11’s Monica Morales got an exclusive chance to see a new social media campaign to help get the word out. The OCC is an independent agency that any NYCHA resident can call or submit an online repair complaint to 24 hours a day. A representative will respond within 1 business day to address your complaint. The problem, Rep. Ritchie Torres says, is in the public relations. Congressman Torres is trying to get the word out, partnering with a nonprofit powerhouse called Metro IAF, a collection of more than a hundred congregations and community organizations, launching a social media campaign starting this week.

Torres says the number one problem is that people might not know about the OCC. Torres says more than 30,000 families have already called and received help since the OCC was created. and hopes more tenants will call for help.

A NYCHA spokesperson tells PIX11 News:

“NYCHA has employed a comprehensive strategy aimed at improving mold and leak compliance, and there has been considerable progress in decreasing verified mold complaints, reducing reoccurrence, improving scheduling, and expediting response times. NYCHA regularly works with the court-appointed, independent Ombudsperson Call Center (OCC) and, together, have assisted over 30,000 NYCHA households with mold-related concerns to date. NYCHA encourages residents to call the Customer Contact Center at 718-707-7771 or submit work tickets through the MyNYCHA application for all repair needs, including mold remediation. Additionally, residents experiencing issues related to existing mold or leak work orders can also contact the OCC hotline at 1-888-341-7152 or at ombnyc.com.”

NYC mayor’s race: Five Democrats offer big promises on homelessness and housing at interborough forum

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 19:32:44 GMT

Five Democrats in the 2025 NYC mayor’s race pitched their ideas to help the homeless, build affordable housing and improve the beleaguered New York City Housing Authority before a crowd of 2,250 watching from two different venues on Sunday night.

Metro IAF teamed with Manhattan Together, South Bronx Churches, Queens Power and East Brooklyn Congregations to organize the virtual and in-person forum for Democrats seeking to be New York City’s next mayor. The five candidates — former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, City Comptroller Brad Lander, former City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Queens Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani — addressed a crowd of 2,000 people at the St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, while another 250 watched via video at Temple Sharaay Tefila, in Manhattan.

Ahead of the June 1 forum, organizers reminded the audience of ranked-choice voting in the June 24 primary, and urged them to get to know all of the candidates so they can rank up to five of their top choices on the ballot.

Each candidate supported Metro IAF’s agenda to build 500,000 homes over a decade, “fix” the New York City Housing Authority, and address mental illness as a major issue.

“We can build 50,000 homes right now. We can fix NYCHA now,” said Rev. David K. Brawley, pastor at St. Paul Community Baptist Church and co-chair of Metro AIF and Metro AIF NY. “We can address the mental health crisis in New York City now.”

Cuomo focuses on Rikers

Cuomo, who took the stage and spoke first based on random selection, said within 30 days he would “get every homeless person out of every train and subway station and get them the help they need.” “We did it during COVID,” the former governor said. “We brought every homeless person out of the subway system to get them the help they need.” Cuomo estimated that 20% of people on Rikers Island, which he said costs $500,000 per inmate per year, are “seriously mentally ill.
“In my first 30 days, I’m going to get the seriously mentally ill out of Rikers Island, get them the mental health assistance they need,” he added. Cuomo said the New York City Housing Authority, a public-benefit corporation controlled by the New York City Mayor, has “been a problem for decades” and pledged more funds to improve it and build affordable housing.

Speaker Adams eyes NYCHA repairs

Speaker Adams, who told the group “your agenda is my agenda,” called an affordable housing shortage a serious issue. “We have to have housing of all types to meet everyone’s needs,” she said, noting that as speaker she had helped deliver affordable housing. “I have fought for these housing priorities and secured them.”
“We will invest at least $500 million in NYCHA repairs, while improving on our tracking of outstanding NYCHA repairs,” Adams said. “We want our NYCHA residents to live in dignity.”

Lander on housing crisis
Lander said on “day one” he would declare a state of emergency to confront a “housing crisis,” and supported building 500,00 homes, including thousands on city-owned and NYCHA lots.

The current comptroller said he would use four of 12 golf courses owned by New York City to build 50,000 affordable housing units that New Yorkers would rent or own. He said he has a plan to fix New York City Housing Preservation and Development called “Building Blocks of Change.”

“We don’t have to be a city where several thousand of our mentally ill neighbors sleep on the street,” Lander said. “We can end that together.” Stringer on building affordable housing Former Comptroller Scott Stringer said he supports rebuilding HPD, increasing subsidies for housing and using city land to build more housing. “We’re going to turn those lots into true, affordable housing,” he said of free and city-owned land. He told the audience that as comptroller, he helped finance affordable housing — and insisted that the next mayor take swift action to address the crisis.

Mamdani on affordability

Mamdani, who represents Astoria and Long Island City, also called for more affordable housing as a priority. “What good is being in the greatest city in the world, if you can’t afford your rent, your groceries, your childcare?” Mamdani said. “Believing in affordability is not enough. We must deliver affordability.”Rev. Rashad Raymond Moore, pastor at the First Baptist Church in Crown Heights, said voters “need leadership, land, money, and relentless accountability.”

“We get a lot of promises, but we see very little progress,” Rev. Moore said. “There’s only one person who has the power to unlock this land, and that is the mayor of the city of New York. We’re not coming here to beg. We’re coming to build.”

When It Comes to Building New Housing, Abundance Is More Like Avoidance

Tue, 13 May 2025 04:32:20 GMT

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance , is riding high on the bestseller lists . The authors argue that something has gone very wrong in our nation: “Over the course of the 20th century, America developed a right that fought government and a left that hobbled it.” They focus on a set of changes—relaxing zoning restrictions, reducing or ending review by local government and environmental agencies, among others—that would make some impact on the current crisis. At the same time, those on the left often propose a massive new investment in what is called social housing . But both sets of proposed solutions miss the mark. And neither addresses an underlying reality that both impedes housing production and explains the growing equity gap between the housing haves and the housing have-nots: the lack of a robust strategy for affordable home building.

The two celebrated political analysts admit to being liberals and confess that their primary audience is the Democratic Party. I wish them luck. I worry, however, that they and those on the left are underestimating the power of the current culture they seek to transform.

My colleagues and I know how powerful this culture is because we have been fighting it for 40 years. When we proposed building housing on vast tracts of vacant and abandoned New York City land—first in East Brooklyn, then in the South Bronx—we met with a top civic official, who listened impatiently before replying, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomachs.”

As it turned out, our stomachs were big. We ultimately built thousands of affordable houses, called Nehemiah homes , in East Brooklyn and the South Bronx that working people could buy and maintain.

We didn’t call it “abundance.” We called it critical mass: building at scale, with speed. This ran against the then-conventional wisdom that the way to rebuild cities was by sprinkling a few new units here and a few new units there.

Building at scale replaced all the negative chain reactions—abandonment, business flight, crime, despair, nihilism—with a constructive chain reaction of ownership, wealth creation, retail growth, upgraded parks, improved health and education indicators, hope and more. We succeeded. Though it took longer than it should have.

The problem was not primarily hobbling from the left that the authors describe, nor resistance from the right—not that there was much of a right in New York. The issue was that the Nehemiah effort’s proven success —the transformation of entire blocks—was not adopted in other cities without enormous pressure from our local leaders and institutions.

Here’s why.

First, a consensus developed that the best way to build affordable housing is through tax credits—which favor renting over owning. This does nothing to close the terrible equity gap throughout our country. A coalition of developers, nonprofits, consultants, housing intermediaries, elected and appointed officials, and financial institutions—all of which benefit from the reliance on tax credits—has dominated the discussion of building affordable housing in recent decades. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program unlocks private investment in low-income housing efforts. The New Market Tax Credit approach does the same for those interested in financing businesses, daycare centers, charter schools, and other community amenities. Neither provides a path to ownership and equity for those on the economic margins. These approaches are constructive and create some impact. But they have become comfortable monopolies, blandly accepted by many as the only way to rebuild communities.

Second, institutions charged with producing this housing—including the Federal Home Loan Banks, the billion-dollar intermediaries like Enterprise and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation , the multibillion-dollar foundations that funnel through these intermediaries—have amassed fortunes, paid their executives handsomely, and opted for safe and predictable housing strategies. Meanwhile, they have done little to address the housing production crisis—even as millions of Americans remain plagued by housing scarcity.

Third, lack of leadership. Klein and Thompson rightly decry a policy universe filled with lawyers:

Fourth, what Klein and Thompson mostly miss is the role of third-sector organizations in the robust effort to transform our political culture. At the Industrial Areas Foundation, we understood from day one that our ability to succeed had nothing to do with the quality of our plans or the design of our homes or, as Klein and Thompson describe it, “a new theory of supply.”

Instead, it had everything to do with whether we had the power to make mayors and governors respond to our demands, and enough persistence to keep them responding over years and decades. When we began the rebuilding of East Brooklyn and the South Bronx, we didn’t begin with an attempt to alter zoning regulations or to wait for what one deputy mayor recommended when we said that the Koch administration lacked a housing strategy. He said, “Yes, we do. It’s called federal money.”

If we had taken him seriously, we would still be waiting; thousands of minority homebuyers would still be stuck in substandard rental and public housing, and nearly $2 billion in equity would never have been created. Instead, we began with a power analysis of the city at the time. We raised our own no-interest construction financing—something the left never does. And we persuaded Koch to make an unprecedented investment of city funds in our effort and the efforts of others. Then, policy changed—in response to the power of the organization and our growing track record of success. No matter what new theory or consensus emerges, the fundamental role that power, and powerful organizations, play will still be key.

Forty years after we began building in East Brooklyn, 20 years after its success was obvious to just about anyone who looked, our affiliates in Chicago, United Power for Action and Justice, and in Baltimore, BUILD, have finally begun to build at the pace and scale needed to reclaim the depopulated stretches of those cities. Apparently, there is still an appetite for a major push toward new and even bigger critical masses of affordable ownership housing.

Our New York Metro Industrial Areas Foundation affiliates will increase the pressure until that appetite grows. But mayors and governors and others need to match or exceed the kinds of commitments that an initially reluctant Ed Koch made. We know from experience that this combination of organized citizen power and responsive local leadership can make all the difference—and actually get affordable housing built.

Mike Gecan

Mike Gecan worked as an organizer and then national codirector of the Industrial Areas Foundation for more than four decades. He is now senior adviser to the IAF.

Opinion: Guns, the NYPD, and NYC’s next mayor

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:32:34 GMT

Imagine 52,000 guns.

That’s how many guns, once belonging to police officers across the country, were retrieved from crime scenes between 2006 and 2022. How many of those crime scenes were in New York City? And how many of those guns used to belong to the officers of the New York Police Department?

We are a minister and a rabbi here in New York, leaders of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, who each have too many stories to tell about how we and our congregants have been personally impacted by gun violence. We have buried congregants, friends, and family members who were killed by gunfire. In many cases, those guns were bought or stolen by shooters who took advantage of the glut of guns in our cities and counties.

According to data obtained in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, between 2006 and 2022, more than 52,000 guns formerly belonging to police officers were used to commit crimes against civilians and members of law enforcement. Instead of being melted down or destroyed, the weapons were sold.

Of the many maddening aspects of the scourge of the gun violence epidemic in America, this ranks up there with the most maddening. While the issue of gun violence is complicated and while many responses are debatable, this trend is neither. And the next NYPD commissioner and the next mayor should make sure that this infuriating pattern is ended and that the NYPD becomes a leader in this arena.

The Reveal podcast released an episode in July 2024 on how tens of thousands of cop guns have ended up in the hands of criminals. Since then, more than a dozen law enforcement agencies across the country, including the New York State Police, have stopped reselling their used firearms or are reviewing their policies.

The New York Police Department buys more weapons than any law enforcement agency outside of the federal government. Which means that the department has massive purchasing power when it comes to the companies it does business with.We know that the department has said it doesn’t trade in its service weapons, and that’s a good start. But the department has consistently refused to use the leverage that its purchasing power provides to insist that gun makers act more responsibly.

We have met with past commissioners and assistant commissioners. We have described how the NYPD could insist that Glock and other gun makers integrate gun safety technology into all future weapon manufacturing. We have quoted the statistics on how guns acquired by criminals end up creating chaos in our communities. We have cited the studies that describe how guns in households, lacking state-of-the-art gun safety technology, have ended up in the hands of children who often harm themselves or siblings.In an era of ever-modernizing smartphones and other devices, we have argued for the integration of already available high-tech controls into weapons creation. We have reminded them that we have always given the NYPD the credit it deserves for the dramatic reduction in homicides in our city, from a peak of 2,245 in 1990 to 377 last year.

Our leaders were instrumental in working with local precincts to drive those dreadful numbers down and keep them down. But now is not the time to stop or lose focus. In recent years, high level NYPD officials have listened, nodded sympathetically, and then done nothing. The candidates for mayor are staking their claims for how they’ll keep New Yorkers safe should they be elected. An easy and impactful move they should commit to is this: insist that the NYPD requires accountability from the companies it purchases weapons from to help ensure that cop guns everywhere are destroyed rather than sold to criminals and that gun safety options are tested and integrated into future NYPD purchases.

Our faith traditions teach us not to stand idly by the blood of our neighbors. When our elected officials and those tasked with keeping us safe do nothing while the manufacturers of weapons sell retired service weapons to criminals, they are doing worse than just standing idly by. They are enabling mayhem that is often avoidable.If our next mayor expects us to trust them when they say they’ll do what’s necessary to keep New Yorkers safe, this step is one way to prove it.

Brawley, a pastor, and Mosbacher, a rabbi, are leaders in the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation network in New York City.

Organizing to meet the new challenges of Trump

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:09:31 GMT

I had lunch recently with a good friend and colleague, going back more than four decades. And he and another former colleague had wondered what those of us who have spent our lives as organizers, with many frustrations, but many more successes and a still-growing track record of impact, should be thinking about and doing given the reality of the new national administration . Essentially, they were asking, “Now what?”

Let’s start with a 17th century quote from Rabbi Nachman of Breslau : “All the world is a very narrow bridge; and the important thing is not to make oneself terrified.” In other words, don’t freak yourself out.

A few nights ago, in a planning session with our leaders from three counties in New Jersey, we discussed our plans to reach out and meet with the major candidates in this year’s race for governor .

One of the leaders said that it was so refreshing to be doing this — the normal, healthy, demanding-in-a-good-way process of non-partisan politics. I dubbed it our “sanity preservation plan,” and that seemed to resonate. But you cannot deflect and eventually vanquish the tendency to freak yourself out, if you don’t have the energy, focus, and mechanism that enables you to engage with others in meaningful political activity.

The second thought is to resist the temptation to react to every national twitch, however promoted by either party. Identify all of the arenas — city, town, county, state, region — where more normal political dynamics operate and choose the place or places where you can make a difference, working in concert with others.

Assess the challenges in each arena and pinpoint the potential allies and partners who might help make progress there — partners who might not agree with you on five other matters but could and would be pivotal in creating a change on an issue you do agree on. That requires a kind of flexibility that has gone out of fashion — working with people on one challenge, working against them on another, skipping engagement on many more.

The third thought is not to demonize your opponents. When you do, you give them status and power that they don’t possess, unless and until you confer it on them. See them for what they are: just the latest generation of power operatives. And figure out what moves they most want to make. This might be the hardest discipline to maintain.

Because opponents will demonize you and those you care about. But it’s a trap. It takes your eye off the core actions of those you believe are up to no good. And it alienates those in the mixed middle, who are tired of the dramatic demonizing that has characterized public life recently. If anyone thinks that this is a plea to be soft, ask any mayor, governor, or corporate leader that our network of organizations has battled with. “Soft” is a word you will never hear them use to describe our approach.

So what is one of the core actions of the new crowd? My best guess is that crypto is its No. 1 priority. Axios just reported that crypto has made Trump a billionaire. In addition to generating wealth for themselves, crypto is their way of not regulating or deregulating the financial system of the nation but, as an insightful observer said to me, of replacing the existing system with a complex alternative that only they and their cronies understand, own, and control.

Crypto pioneers were among the largest contributors to both parties in the recent national election, as well as in local and state elections. They were adopted and touted by leaders in both parties at every level of government. Crypto proponents have been meeting feverishly with the transition team, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Crypto will make the financial extraction and damage done by the housing scandal surrounding the so-called collateralized mortgage obligation securities look like child’s play. Crypto, like those bogus bonds, wraps itself in layer upon layer of tech complexity. The crypto crash, when it comes, which it will, will be blamed on the unwashed who simply didn’t understand the new system and who will pay the highest price.

So think through the plays they want to run and disrupt them early and often. Fight smart and fight hard. Combined with a robust offense — priorities and improvements that your organized work advances at every level — you have a game plan for four exciting, hair-raising, productive years.

Gecan is a senior Metro IAF organizer and the author of “Going Public.”

How to Make New York City More Affordable: 40 Big Ideas

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 16:30:49 GMT

Written by By Eliza Shapiro Illustrations by Tim Peacock Jan. 16, 2025

Click to read the article on the NY Times

The FHL banks must do more for housing

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:11:27 GMT

When the famed Depression-era criminal, Willie Sutton, was asked why he robbed banks he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Nearly a century later, that’s still true, although modern technology has created new options for depositors; and modern bank robbers are as likely to be hackers hidden behind digital masks than stick-up crews with weapons in their belts.

But banks remain places where massive amounts of money are held. The problem is that some banks have become so remote and so insulated that they are operating like Willie Suttons in reverse: they are withholding money from those who have a rightful claim on its uses. This is a form of robbery. And it is not a victimless crime.

Take, for example, the nation’s Federal Home Loan Bank system — a network of 11 regional banks founded in 1932. Its stated mission was to assist other member financial institutions so that they could invest responsibly in housing and community development efforts. The Federal Home Loan Banks offered lower cost financing to its members, saving them billions in the process.

As the decades passed, the system grew — now reporting approximately $1.7 trillion in assets. And while it boasts that it is a kind of co-op, benefitting its members and sending large dividends to its shareholders, it downplays the fact that it was and still is a government sponsored entity and that it receives significant subsidies to this day.

Last year, it received $7.3 billion in subsidy, according to the Congressional Budget Office. During that same period, it dedicated only $752 million to an affordable housing program, mandated by statute. And it served the needs of many member institutions that failed to originate a single mortgage in the past five years. In fact, 40% of those institutions did nothing to make homeownership more accessible. The U.S. Air Force has a phrase for a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself: self-licking ice cream cone.

This self-licking ice cream cone shelled out $3.4 billion in dividends to its member banks, but spent less than a quarter of that on its housing obligation.

We would argue, in all seriousness, that the behavior of the Federal Home Loan Banks robs America’s cities and counties of desperately needed dollars that could stimulate an expansion of all forms of new housing.

It leads to intense and costly competition among those of us who have built affordable housing but would and could build much more if additional funding was forthcoming. It slows the production of housing, enriching those who already own their homes, but burdening all others with high costs.

It delays the time when a person can actually buy his or her first house. The average age of homebuyers currently is astonishingly high — 56 years old. And it traps hardworking Americans of all races, in all communities, in congregations of all faiths, in cramped, unhealthy, and sometimes dangerous housing.

So here’s what the current president should do in his remaining weeks in office or the newly elected president should do on Day One:

Demand that the banks increase their commitment to affordable housing from 10% (yielding $752 million) to 30% (which would generate $2.25 billion) per year. When pressed to increase by the Treasury Department recently, the banks’ flacks claimed that this was terribly unreasonable and would undermine the banks’ stability. That’s an odd claim to make, because for 22 years, from 1989 to 2011, the banks actually did commit 30% of their profits to both housing and paying back the federally subsidized bail-out in the aftermath of the savings and loan debacle.

The president should also demand that the banks stop providing low-cost capital and large dividends to members that do nothing to improve housing conditions in the country.

We live and work in a world where these resources, if properly redeployed and professionally managed and distributed, could make a difference.

It’s time to end the government-subsidized, tax-free ride that has benefited the Federal Home Loan Banks and their members, but not most Americans. There is enough money to address the nation’s housing crisis. It’s just being hoarded by those who control it, who engage in robbery on a scale that Willie Sutton could only dream of.

Brawley, Edmonds, and Daniels are pastors and leaders in Metro IAF affiliates in New York City and D.C. Gecan is a senior Metro IAF organizer and the author of “Going Public.

Opinion: Creedmoor Plan is a Chance for a New Generation to Call Queens Home

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:24:50 GMT

Lots of people are talking about the state’s plan for 2,800 housing units at the Creedmoor site. Understandably, many life-long residents of the area fear that the project would change the character of the surrounding neighborhoods. Their parents or grandparents worked hard to buy homes in Glen Oaks Village or Hollis Hills: this new plan feels like a threat to their legacy.

As two people who care deeply about the Eastern Queens community, we’ve been listening carefully to our neighbors’ concerns about the Creedmoor plan. We don’t think Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan is perfect: there are plenty of details we want spelled out.

But we see at Creedmoor the opportunity for a new generation of New Yorkers to make a home and leave a legacy for their children and grandchildren. We support the plan’s vision because we see it as a chance to stand up for people just like our parents and grandparents—who struggled bravely to make a life and a future for their families.

It’s in that spirit that we want to address our neighbors’ concerns about the state’s plan for Creedmoor. The first big concern many neighbors have expressed is that affordable housing will bring lower-class neighbors, which in turn will bring a lower quality of life to their neighborhood.

But the families who need this affordable housing are just like us. The cost of housing has far outpaced the wages of working people. Many of us who bought in the neighborhood decades ago, or even just a few years ago when interest rates were at historic lows, wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s market. That’s why we need to build affordable housing for working families.

So far, the Creedmoor Plan has identified housing targets for households earning 80 percent of the city’s Area Median Income (AMI). A single person at 80 percent AMI earns $79,120 per year . The median income of Queens Village is about $85,000, with nearly 20 percent of residents earning less than $35,000 per year, according to the most recent census data. That means the new neighbors who would move into a Creedmoor development are earning about the same as current neighbors, in some cases maybe more.

We will certainly need to build for lower incomes as well, but that shouldn’t scare us either. For example, a two-person household at 60 percent AMI earns $67,800 per year. That’s a single-parent public school teacher looking to raise their kid in a stable and affordable home. We think teachers deserve decent housing like the rest of us.

Some of the housing in the Creedmoor plan will be set aside for seniors, like our own aging parents, and formerly homeless folks, like our most recent neighbors at Zion Church in Douglaston. These folks also need our compassion and support. Many New Yorkers don’t realize that between 30 percent and 40 percent of single people in shelters are employed and just need a helping hand to get an affordable apartment. We should all be able to empathize with folks in this situation because, as Councilmember Vickie Paladino said at a town hall about the Douglaston women’s shelter, many of us are one paycheck away from being in the same place as they are.

Our neighbors’ second big concern is about density: we’ve heard people say that building mid-rise housing will destroy the character of the area. But in Eastern Queens we already have numerous examples of six- to eight-story buildings existing side-by-side with two- and three-story garden apartments and single family homes.

Right here in Bellerose, at 245-10 Grand Central Service Road, we have 250 families living in three, seven-story apartment buildings that most residents probably don’t even realize are there. Other examples include the Windsor Park co-ops in Oakland Gardens, the Cambridge Hall buildings in Hollis Hills, and we would be remiss as members of Zion to not mention Douglaston, which has blocks of multi-family apartment buildings existing side-by-side with some of the most desirable single-family homes in the borough. Those mid-rise buildings haven’t ruined Douglaston, and they won’t ruin Glen Oaks or Queens Village.

The last concern we have heard a lot about is why we should subsidize the creation of affordable housing at all. Once again, let’s think about our parents and grandparents before pointing fingers at our new neighbors. The truth is that most housing in the United States, let alone New York City, has benefited from some subsidy. Glen Oaks Village would not exist today if the developers in 1947 had not received $54 million (nearly $750 million in 2023 dollars) in subsidized low-interest loans from the Federal Housing Administration.

Most apartment buildings have benefited from some state-backed subsidy, like 421-a, J-51 , or the 1955 Mitchell-Lama program. And the largest housing subsidy over the last century has been for single-family homes. Homeownership today is built on pillars of government support, from the explicit insurance of FHA loans, to the implicit support of a massive federally-sponsored secondary mortgage market, to the mortgage interest tax deduction.

The GI Bill of 1944 put many of our grandparents into homeownership for the first time—and kept many Black and brown families out of it. We believe that everybody deserves the same support and investment that our parents and grandparents received. This Creedmoor plan is one way to make that a reality—to make this city a place where everybody has a shot.

It’s only human to be nervous about change—especially in the places our families call home. But we think the state’s plan for Creedmoor represents an investment in the essential workers who make this city great.

We’ll keep pushing the governor to ensure that the Creedmoor site—public land—is used for the public good. Because our hope is that in 75 years there will be second and third-generation residents of this new development who love their neighborhood as much as we love ours now. Supporting this plan is part of the legacy we can leave to them.

Brownsville school receives major changes to its library due to student families voicing concern

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 18:12:11 GMT

More than 100 repairs have been made in several district 23 schools. The total repairs by the end of this year will total to 168. It's part of $10 million from the city to make the changes.

At P.S. 137 in Brownsville, the library received new flooring. Other fixes throughout the district include staircases, outdoor space and more. Students and families rallied together with the help of the East Brooklyn Congregations to get the changes made.

"Some people may think they're little things but when you add all of them up you show our young people that we care about them. We want to have an environment where our young people can thrive," said Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church Brooklyn Pastor Shaun J. Lee

Rally Backs Affordable Housing Initiative in Wingate

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:12:03 GMT

The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.

Hundreds of central Brooklyn residents and local officials rallied to endorse New York Governor Kathy Hochul's plan to convert part of the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center campus in Wingate into more than 1,000 affordable housing units.

Hosted by Metro IAF NY, a coalition of various organizations that advocate for NYC-area projects, the event on Sunday at the First Baptist Church of Crown Heights featured stories from those directly affected by the housing crisis, including Nia Haggwood, a Brooklyn resident and teacher whose narrative highlighted the urgent need for accessible housing solutions.

Also speaking at the event was Reverend Rashad Moore, pastor at the First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, who said that the Kingsboro plan would provide help to residents that are in critical need of affordable housing.

"Every day, New Yorkers are being forced out of the city we love — separated from our families, friends, congregations, and schools,” said Moore. "Many will try to delay the plan, but we can't wait — let's break ground on Kingsboro in 2024.”

Attendees included Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, New York State Homes and Community Renewal Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas and State Senator Zellnor Myrie.

The rally follows Metro IAF NY’s previous effort in securing affordable housing at the state-owned Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. Hochul announced that a 2,800-unit affordable housing community are in the works there.

A sleeping giant for new homes: Creedmoor could be the key to Hochul’s housing agenda

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 14:06:44 GMT

In July, in the wake of a disappointing legislative session in which state leaders failed to pass any sort of meaningful housing legislation, Gov. Hochul put forth her plans to address New York’s housing crisis. Though the announcement outlined several executive actions, the most powerful and exciting policy tool the governor floated as a solution to New York’s housing woes is her vision to convert state-owned sites into housing.

For years public lands in public hands have served many purposes, as the alphabet soup of city, state and federal agencies utilize countless acres for social services, administrative buildings, operations centers, storage depots and everything in between. But as anyone could easily imagine, many of these sites have languished in the inefficiency of bureaucracy, just waiting for a bold strategy of transformation and redevelopment.

In fact, in New York City alone, there are more than 800 city-owned lots under the jurisdiction of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development that are, if not entirely vacant, certainly underutilized to the maximum heights of their potential.

No government site embodies this failure better than the largely abandoned Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Totaling around 100 acres in eastern Queens, there is room for more than 3,000 units at the state-owned facility. And although Hochul promised to issue a Request for Proposals earlier this year, at best their anemic pace of action calls to question this administration’s true commitment toward putting the creation of affordable housing above the bad-faith attacks of local civic groups and NIMBY activists. At worst, it demonstrates an alarming lack of urgency.

Even still, what makes Hochul’s call to use government land as a tool to ease our affordable housing shortage so powerful — and possibly even revolutionary — is the potential to ensure those new units go to those who need access to high quality, low cost housing opportunities the most.

To us, that means our essential workers, first responders, teachers, senior living caretakers, and countless Black and Brown New Yorkers who have been slowly crushed by the housing market of the past several decades. Because while these are the families who quite literally make New York run, they are increasingly being driven away by the lack of housing affordability and economic opportunity.

Despite the city’s continued population growth, the number of Black residents has declined by more than 200,000 in the past two decades. The 2021 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey findings showed that renters with the lowest incomes, particularly Black and Hispanic renters, struggle to find apartments they can afford as the severe lack of housing supply has kept more than a third of the city’s renters — an estimated 600,000 households — severely rent burdened, meaning they pay more than half their income on rent.

Worse, just last month city Comptroller Brad Lander’s latest analysis of the city’s financial picture, rents are proportionately higher than before the pandemic and have exponentially increased over the past year.

Converting a state-owned facility like Creedmoor into housing is no easy task, but when we the people own the real estate, the State and City of New York have the power to negotiate not with private developers focused on their bottom line, but with themselves, making this not only possible, but also creating another opportunity entirely.

It would be a complete waste for the state to give away public sites to private developers for market-rate projects. In recent memory, the governor has used her authority over state-owned land to push through several real estate deals that benefitted developers more than the New Yorkers who need new housing the most. In July, she announced a 421a-like property tax break for several ongoing developments in Gowanus in which less than 40% of the units are earmarked as affordable. And at the state-owned 5 World Trade Center site, only 30% of units will be income-restricted even though it was within Hochul’s power to mandate 100% affordability.

Indeed, “affordable housing” means something different to every office holder in New York. In Hochul’s case it most often refers to 421a-style tax abatement — as Lander calls it, an “excessive giveaway to developers masquerading as an affordable housing program.” What results is not just billions of dollars siphoned from the municipal property tax pool, but a type of housing production that does almost nothing to create the permanent and deep affordability that our city desperately needs.

As ambitious as it sounds to transform an underutilized state facility into a fully affordable housing development for essential workers and communities of color, New York can and should dream big. To that end, looking beyond affordable rental housing, Creedmoor could also be an opportunity for Hochul to work with Mayor Adams to bring back the types of programs that in the not-so-distant past created a path to homeownership for low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Mayor Ed Koch worked with East Brooklyn Congregations to invest an unprecedented amount of city subsidies in the construction of new affordable homes in East Brooklyn known as Nehemiah, which have now helped more than 3,000 everyday New York families become homeowners who over time saw their home values soar, their costs of living remain stable, all while accruing equity and wealth that could pass from generation to generation.

More recently, in partnership with Monadnock Development, East Brooklyn Congregations is transforming the Spring Creek area of East Brooklyn by building nearly 2,700 affordable Nehemiah homes and apartments, transforming a once abandoned site into a flourishing community with tree lined streets, parks for children, and proud homeowners. But while Spring Creek is a remarkable success and revival of the Nehemiah program, the well of New York’s housing crisis runs far deeper than any one development could possibly fill.

But the good news is that Creedmoor is no ordinary development, and as state-owned land with unmatched size, its potential cannot be overlooked as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create truly affordable housing, and potentially homeownership, for the New Yorkers who deserve it most — essential housing for essential workers.

And despite minimal progress in meaningfully expanding New York’s affordable housing stock, the crisis has grown so untenable that there is now near-universal agreement that New York’s housing woes and affordability crisis must be addressed. In fact, a brand new Data for Progress poll found that addressing the housing crisis is a major priority for city voters, with two-thirds saying it is “very important” to address the city’s housing crisis.

Further, roughly six in ten also found the government should create more “permanent” rental housing that is affordable across all income levels, including the unhoused and the lowest-income New Yorkers. On the flipside, just 16% of voters support making it easier for private developers to build housing.

The survey makes it clear as can be, when it comes to housing, New Yorkers care most about creating affordable, not-for-profit rental housing that is prioritized for those who need it most. Taken together, it’s clear that New York City voters are dissatisfied with the status-quo. The era of publicly subsidized private housing must come to an end.

The for-profit approach to affordable housing has been a failure in too many ways to count, and when it comes to using public land in a manner that will deliver the most good for the people, we must treat housing as a public good.

In July, Hochul declared to every New Yorker, our “housing crisis isn’t going away, and I’m committed to doing everything in my power to make New York more affordable and livable for all.” Luckily for the governor, transforming Creedmoor is not merely well within her power, but by partnering with the mayor it could also be a foundational pillar in a new era of New York housing.

Brawley is co-chair of East Brooklyn Congregations and Metro IAF, a New York City housing advocacy coalition. O’Connor is the lead pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens .

How Community Builders saved its Far Rockaway project

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:41:55 GMT

From left: Member of New York City Council Selvena Brooks-Powers and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. along with a rendering of 29-32 Beach Channel Drive (Getty, Urban Architectural Initiatives + Department of City Planning)

Rare case of City Council opposing 100 percent affordable rentals.

Rental projects often hit a wall in the City Council for not offering enough affordability. In the case of the Community Builders’ 106-unit proposal for Far Rockaway, the opposite happened.

The nonprofit tried to run its 100 percent affordable project through the city’s political gauntlet, only to meet stiff resistance from the local community board and, more importantly, the local City Council member, who had the power to block the needed rezoning.

Facing a deadline to get its application for 29-32 Beach Channel Drive through, Community Builders attempted an unusual and speedy pivot, converting its project into an 89-unit co-op that promised to bring homeowners rather than low-income tenants.

After some frantic phone calls, quick thinking and a hand from the Adams administration and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, the developer won Council approval Aug. 3.

“It took a lot of work and some leaps of faith,” said Community Builders executive Jesse Batus.

The 100,000-square-foot, all-affordable multifamily project with a gym, roof deck and 50 parking spaces had early political support from Richards. But Selvena Brooks-Powers, the Council’s majority whip, sided with the community board, whose vote is advisory but can be influential, especially with a Council election just a year away.

Brooks-Powers hosted a community meeting in July to find common ground with the developer, which had less than a month to radically revise the proposal.

Switching from rentals to co-ops is not like changing a light bulb. It involves reconfiguring the building and the array of funding and subsidies to finance it. Complicating matters, Community Builders, which owns and manages 14,000 apartments and had done a 224-unit, 100 percent affordable rental at Beach 21st Street, had never orchestrated a home ownership program in the city.

“We had a lot of studio apartments in the original plan,” said Jesse Batus, Community Builders’ regional VP. “We removed those because they’re not as marketable for sale. They’re easier to rent, but they’re not as easy to sell.”

The project had an important ally in the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which had been eyeing the site for affordable housing since Community Builders bought the land mere days before the pandemic hit in 2020.

Nehemiah HDF C , a New York City nonprofit affordable housing developer, helped the project get state funding. It got the Hochul administration to kick in an 11th-hour subsidy for the development, which had previously relied only on city funding.

“If we didn’t have access to it, [the project] would not have been feasible,” Batus said.

Community Builders, a national nonprofit developer, tapped the state’s Affordable Homeownership Opportunity Program, designed for first-time homebuyers, and HPD’s Open Door Program, which funds the development of co-ops and condominiums for middle-income New Yorkers. The rest of the project’s money will come the old-fashioned way: from home sales.

Far Rockaway’s gripe with new housing goes deeper than one project. The community board’s opinion bucks the trend seen in much of the city, where development concerns center on gentrification.

“We have more vacant land and land is cheaper, so money could be made doing affordable and low-income housing but we’d much rather see market-rate housing,” Queens Community Board 14 district manager John Gaska told Commercial Observer.

Building height, a more universal concern in the city, was also an issue. A year ago, the board called for a moratorium on projects higher than six stories. Community Builders had proposed eight.

The board voted against the project in March, calling it out of context with surrounding one- and two-family homes. Opponents said it would overburden local infrastructure and claimed its schools were at capacity, although the original 106 rentals proposed would likely have brought just a handful of students.

But Mayor Eric Adams has railed against not-in-my-backyard sentiment, saying every community must do its part to solve the city’s housing shortage.

“We got to do the Rockaway project,” the mayor said at a press conference following the project’s approval. “Every day is a new day and we are going to do new things. And those areas that we disagree on, so what? We disagree on them and then we move forward.”

Development’s struggle for sites and subsidies

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 15:07:45 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

Over the past year, New Yorkers have witnessed the rollouts of a series of major development proposals that will leave indelible marks on the region’s physical and economic future. A year ago, the state announced a decision to subsidize a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills to the tune of $850 million. Recently, the city, not to be outdone, announced a major plan for Willets Point — 2,700 units of affordable rental housing and a new soccer facility for the New York City Football Club. The club will build the stadium with its own funds, but the Independent Budget Office estimates at least $516 million in lost property tax revenue because the city will lease, not sell, the land to the developers. In addition, proposals to build a casino by several different development groups in the city now vie for attention and approval. Finally, in the ongoing state budget negotiations, a proposal to loan $455 million to the fading racing industry is very much on the table. While the attempt by Amazon to create a headquarters in Queens generated a firestorm of scrutiny and opposition, these proposals, involving billions in direct subsidies and lost tax revenues, have not.

Not every major development proposal should be rejected. But every proposal should be rigorously analyzed at inception and then evaluated periodically. Why, after decades of examples, many falling far short of original projections, there is not a clear, public upfront way to examine each proposal and to weigh each against other plausible alternative uses for both scarce sites and limited subsidies remains a mystery.

I write from personal experience — beginning on a sunny afternoon in Baltimore 43 years ago. On July 2, 1980, my wife Sheila and I attended the festive opening of Baltimore’s Harborplace (photo). Harborplace was the brainchild of James Rouse, a developer and a visionary who had won the respect of the leaders of our fledgling citizens power organization, Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development (BUILD).

Despite that good feeling and mutual respect, we had grave misgivings about the Rouse plan. When it was discussed, it was billed as the salvation of a sagging city. Sagging it certainly was. But we argued that the salvation wouldn’t follow the stores, shops, sports arenas, convention center and hotels of Harborplace, but that it would come, if it did, through a campaign of fundamental neighborhood reconstruction — largely with the kinds of affordable homes that once formed the economic and social backbone of Baltimore and every aging industrial city in the U.S.Why do these initiatives like Harborplace generate so much attention, political support, massive subsidies, and media hyperventilation and so little rigorous analysis and clear-eyed assessment of both their costs and their benefits?

I asked this question to one of the nation’s most astute observers of economic matters: David T. Flynn, the Research Director for the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of North Dakota. Prof. Flynn said, “Most project outcomes are ill-defined ...There is a deliberate obfuscation of the outcomes making actual quantification ... almost impossible to trust and verify...”

In every one of these projects, the metaphors fly and multiply. Harborplace would be an anchor for all kinds of other enterprises. Flynn points out that an anchor could also mean that the “local economy could be tied to it and sink into depths not yet explored by man.”

That, unfortunately, is the kind of anchor Harborplace became. In the two decades after the grand opening, Baltimore and the State of Maryland poured more and more subsidies into attractions, according to a 2002 study by Good Jobs First — $200 million into the Camden Yards baseball field, $200 million more for Ravens Stadium, $151 million into the Convention Center, $147 million into Columbus Center, $40 million into the Marriott Waterfront, and a 30% subsidy into every downtown hotel. None of this worked.

Harborplace, for many years used as a model for other cities as they planned redevelopment, filed for bankruptcy in 2019. It was placed into court-ordered receivership — its stores and shops shuttered and one of its struggling hotels still subsidized 43 years later. Long before this collapse, Good Jobs First concluded, “An analysis of Baltimore’s economic development efforts reveals a recurring history of high costs, low benefits, and a lack of safeguards to ensure that taxpayer investments really pay off in family-wage jobs and an enhanced tax base.”

The second comment Flynn makes is: “There is typically an improper counterfactual offered up. In locations where projects are proposed to occur, there is an attitude like no other activity will happen there if not for this project. Essentially that every aspect of the project is a net gain because the alternative was zero.”

But the alternatives in Baltimore in 1980 and the alternatives in New York in 2023 weren’t and aren’t zero. Here’s a counter-counter-factual: what if the city had reduced or even rejected the Rouse proposal and, instead, invested the same amount of subsidy, energy, support, and loyalty into a 40-year effort to reconstruct every sagging neighborhood, primarily with affordable ownership housing for working families? Where would Baltimore be today if the fabricated alternative of zero had been replaced by a plan to build decent homes that enabled people to live full and decent lives?

We don’t have to speculate about that. In East Brooklyn, beginning in 1983, another Metro IAF affiliate, East Brooklyn Congregations, persuaded then-Mayor Ed Koch to do just that: to invest unprecedented amounts of city subsidy, managed by several waves of capable and focused housing professionals, in the construction of thousands of new affordable homes.

The subsidies include a no-interest second mortgage to every homebuyer, free land from the City of New York, and reduced mortgage interest rates from the State of New York Mortgage Agency. The thousands of new Nehemiah homes have generated equity for the owners, freed up units of public housing once occupied by the Nehemiah buyers, and raised the value of property for all existing owners in the area.

A report by NPR — “The American Dream: One Block Can Make All the Difference” — used data collected by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. His evaluative tool, called the Opportunity Atlas, showed that Black kids of Nehemiah homeowners did better economically than their parents, while those kids still trapped in public housing, literally across the street, did not. And a 10-minute piece narrated and reported by Ted Koppel several months ago on the “CBS News Sunday Morning” show told the story of how Nehemiah homeowners had been able to achieve what everyone discusses these days — equity, wealth — because they purchased, cherished, and maintained their affordable Nehemiah homes.

In spite of the demonstrated impact and success of the EBC Nehemiah effort, attempts to replicate it, not only in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, but even in the neighboring borough of Queens in the same city where it has worked so well, have moved at a glacial pace. They are hampered by bureaucratic interference, by scant subsidies spread thinly among too many smaller initiatives, and by an affordable housing environment that favors rental construction over ownership opportunities.

And in spite of a long history of sometimes catastrophic and costly failures, like the Tesla solar panel factory in Upstate New York, every new version of Harborplace is treated with the same lack of objective analysis and historical context that Jim Rouse’s was.Decades after the 1980 opening of Harborplace, when Baltimore was home to 780,000 souls, the meter for Rouse’s miscalculation keeps running. Today, fewer than 580,000 Baltimoreans continue to pay the price for his — and the establishment’s — lack of rigor and objectivity. The Jim Rouse we knew would be appalled by this nightmare, I believe, and would want people to have the tools and protections that prevented a result like this from reoccurring.

The meter — or meters — are running in New York too, enriching the already-rich, filling spaces with entertainment hubs for the better-to-do, and quietly and relentlessly draining finite resources away from initiatives that would allow millions to realize their dreams of owning affordable housing, of creating diverse neighborhoods, and of writing the next chapter in the life of a dynamic and welcoming city. The answer to what ails the city and region today, as we have written in these pages before, is hiding in plain sight — vacant land owned by NYCHA, by religious institutions, by the state itself, both in the city and in the nearest suburbs, land that could support the next generation of affordable homes for the city’s working class and working poor. Forget the risky bets on vaporous crypto currency and ponies that fewer and fewer want to see run around a track. The governor and the mayor should put their chips on a proven winner — critical masses of affordable housing hundreds of thousands would line up to buy or rent.

Michael Gecan (Author) of “Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizens’ Action,” is senior adviser to the leaders of Metro IAF.

Opinion: A little perspective on housing for Mayor Adams

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 18:04:12 GMT

Every mayor tries to make his own mark on New York — in part by showing how he differs from his immediate predecessor, in part by choosing themes and programs that he can call his own. We have seen this pattern play out since the first term of the first “Mayor Swagger,” Ed Koch. As leaders who have created our own initiatives and developed our own programs, we’ve learned to operate with a combination of thick skin, a sense of humor, and a willingness to confront every mayor when they either ignore the successes of others or make claims that simply don’t reflect reality.

We recall a meeting with then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg when he talked about his role in bringing education reform to the city. He waxed eloquent about his support of scores of quality charter schools, as if those were the first new schools in recent memory. We reminded him that Metro IAF and others had fought for mayoral control of the dismal public school system and the dismantling of 110 Livingston St.’s Board of Education bureaucracy long before he arrived on the scene.

We wrote a piece in the Daily News titled, “Draining the school swamp.” Our educational advisor at the time, Ray Domanico, dubbed districts with chronically failing schools “educational dead zones.” We had also championed the first wave of new, smaller community-based high schools with an earlier chancellor, Joe Fernandez, long before Bloomberg arrived on the scene.

So we reminded the mayor that, while he had indeed played a role in bringing long-delayed educational reforms to New York, he wasn’t the first or the only champion of change.

Flash forward: When Mayor Adams recently announced several new housing plans, including one in Willets Point that called for 2,700 new affordable apartments, he claimed that this was “the biggest 100% affordable housing project in New York City since the 1970s.”

That is technically true, but barely. All Adams had to do was to take a ride to Spring Creek, in East New York, where East Brooklyn Congregations is completing the final phases of 2,665 all-affordable homes and apartments, including ownership housing that enables African-American and Hispanic buyers to begin to build equity — real wealth.

There’s another nit we have to pick. His recent announcements with the Related Companies (which, full disclosure, built the wildly successful retail portion of Spring Creek) and Silverstein Properties give them full — actually fulsome — credit.

We don’t begrudge that. What we begrudge is the tendency to ignore the impact over a 40-year period of grassroots leaders and activists who are not celebrities, who don’t hang out at the best clubs, and who certainly don’t make large campaign contributions to elected officials.

Yet it was those (mostly anonymous) neighborhood leaders who stood in the breach when the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and dissolution and designed a home-building effort that none of the great academics, pundits or developers thought possible at the time.

Their work has been recognized in two recent accounts of New York’s growth, ”New York, New York, New York” by Thomas Dyja and “The New Yorkers” by Sam Roberts . These people and their organizations — East Brooklyn Congregations and South Bronx Churches among them — delivered thousands of new homes on the once-vacant and devastated acres of their communities. And a sister organization, Queens Power, stands poised today to deliver at least 3,000 more on the Creedmoor site in Queens.

To overstate the impact of the establishment’s real estate darlings and ignore the impact of tough, focused, persistent community leaders minimizes or ignores the effective work of everyday New Yorkers. It encourages the corrosive sense that merit doesn’t matter; only insider connections do. It discourages others from designing and implementing innovative strategies that are informed by those closest to the issues and deepest in their communities.

The radical change needed now in our nation is the construction of scores of thousands of new, affordable ownership homes and condos in New York and approximately 4 million new affordable starter homes, a need fully documented by Fannie Mae and others . The injection of critical masses of affordable ownership housing would enable millions of Americans to begin to build equity and bridge the wealth gap. The mayor should join us as we press for a national campaign to address this issue. If he does, he will truly have a horn worth tooting.

Brawley and Mason are co-chairs of East Brooklyn Congregations. O’Connor is co-chair of Queens Power. All are leaders of Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.

Editor’s note: This op-ed originally said the Willets Point plan is smaller than the Spring Creek development, asserting that the latter was producing 3,100 units of housing. That is untrue. Willets is in fact the largest affordable housing development by numbers in the last 40 years.

Opinion: Hiding in plain sight, a housing solution

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 19:40:19 GMT

The conventional wisdom declares that, after four decades of renovation and new construction, the only way to increase the number of affordable housing homes and apartments in New York is to maximize density. The same conventional wisdom asserts that the best way to expand this pool of desperately needed housing is to make developers include a percentage of affordable units in their high-priced market plan.

As usual, the conventional wisdom is, for the most part, wrong.

Hiding in plain sight are almost unlimited numbers of sites where 100% affordable homes and apartments could be built. For instance, the city is loaded with hundreds of unused parcels and vacant buildings owned by religious institutions that have dwindled in size or even closed. Some enterprising private developers have begun to snap these sites up, largely for market-rate housing.

The city needs a streamlined process of analysis, financial assistance and subsidies to unlock these sites — which exist in every community, no matter the income level or racial make-up. These sites present an unprecedented opportunity for achieving manageable increases in affordable housing in areas that are otherwise too expensive for the vast majority of regular New Yorkers.

In other words, this is possibly the last, best chance for the city to remain economically and racially integrated — a chance that decreases with every day that passes without a robust and focused strategy to repurpose these sites and facilities for the New Yorkers who need housing most.

In addition, there are scores of sites within NYCHA developments that would be ideal locations for an increase in affordable senior housing — essential because it would free up existing NYCHA apartments for larger families now stuck in the city’s shelter system and because the senior population continues to grow in the city. Metro IAF pushed for this strategy during the previous administration, without success.

The current administration seemed more open to this approach, but NYCHA’s limited development team is incapable of implementing an aggressive expansion of this approach. Three or four such developments are built each year — all eagerly filled — but a yearly total of 20 or more developments of 80-to-100 units each would be a more robust response.

We have said it before, but it bears repeating: This is by far the most affordable and most effective way to pop the cork that keeps seniors stuck in apartments they now struggle to maintain and prevents families from moving from shelters and other substandard housing into NYCHA units freed up by seniors who move into buildings with the services and support that they need.

Finally, there are sites owned by the city, state and federal government that have languished, in some cases for decades, waiting for a bold strategy of new construction.

The city alone, according to a 2018 study done by then-Comptroller Scott Stringer, has 1,000 sites of varying sizes. That was a follow-up to a 2016 study that found more than 1,100 such properties. In other words, in two years, despite a historic housing crunch, 90% of the vacant lots in the municipal government’s inventory remained undeveloped. These sat woefully unutilized, said Stringer’s audit, for at least 20 years, some “up to a half-century.”

The state controls many such sites too, but it isn’t doing the kind of urgent review necessary to release them for development or build affordable housing on its own.

One huge case in point: the largely abandoned Creedmoor Psychiatric Center site, totaling around 100 acres, in eastern Queens. Metro IAF has proposed building more than 3,000 high-quality affordable homes and apartments there. The state has promised to issue a Request for Proposals, but not, according to a state official, until “sometime in 2023.” This tentative, slow pace reflects the anxiety elected officials feel when several local civic groups, adept at NIMBY tactics, scream bloody murder about the erroneous assumption that local property values would plummet.

There’s no evidence that this would be the case and every sign that property values would remain stable or even increase, as they have done in the communities adjacent to the Spring Creek development that Metro IAF affiliate East Brooklyn Congregations and Monadnock Construction are now completing.

In addition, the city should contact the General Services Administration and see if any large federal sites, like downsized military locations, would be available for affordable home construction. The Kingsbridge Armory has sat vacant for decades. Plan after plan to revitalize it has come and gone. Does no one have the imagination and wherewithal to transform it into housing?

All of these opportunities and more depend on well-staffed housing teams at the city and state levels, as well as an expanded commitment of subsidy dollars to make these developments possible. While these costs would be significant, they pale in comparison to the current dynamic — exorbitant spending on hotels and shelters, all made necessary by the unwillingness to create the next generation of permanent, stable, affordable housing for regular New Yorkers.

This is yet another area where there is no outside person or institution — no Texas governor, no federal regulator, no private sector monopoly of available land — that can be blamed. This is another home-grown crisis that calls for a home-grown solution.

The mayor and governor need to invest the time, energy, resources and creativity necessary to unclog the affordable housing pipeline and to unleash a strong new flow of affordable homes and apartments. Until they do, regular New Yorkers of all races, but particularly African-American and Hispanic residents in places like Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Mott Haven and a dozen neighborhoods like them, will continue to head for the suburbs or other states because they simply can’t afford the costs of housing in the city.

The existential crisis faced by our school system — a steady loss of students — is in our view directly linked to the lack of affordable housing options for families with school-aged children. We faced and reversed a version of this same crisis in the 1980s and 1990s when our East Brooklyn and South Bronx affiliates first built thousands of new Nehemiah homes, attracting families and filling local schools threatened with closure with new students. We recall the principal of a shrinking DOE school on Mother Gaston Blvd. in Brownsville moved to tears when EBC built 700 homes in the blocks near her school — stabilizing and then increasing the student population.

Build them, and working families of all races will come, or remain. Don’t build them, and the developers eager to build luxury housing at impossibly high rents will fill the vacuum and reconfigure the city in ways that will be impossible to reverse.

Peter Goldmark once wisely said that New York has a tendency to take its successes for granted. It took visionary leadership and unprecedented investment by then-Mayor Koch, a generation of extraordinary government housing professionals attracted to that vision and investment, along with the dedication and persistence of a wide range of non-profits organizations focused on production, to stop the bleeding and bring New York’s struggling neighborhoods and schools back to life. That often contentious and argumentative team spurred an unprecedented period of new and renovated housing work — in some years outspending and outbuilding the next 50 American cities combined.

We need those same qualities from both the mayor and governor now.

Brawley is the senior pastor of St. Paul Community Baptist Church and Co-Chair of East Brooklyn Congregations. Cruz is the pastor of Monte Sion Christian Church and Co-Chair of Manhattan Together. Both organizations are affiliates of Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.

Nehemiah - Making the American Dream possible for first-time homeowners

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 17:37:26 GMT

There was a time when this community was known as the murder capital of the state of New York," said The Reverend David Brawley, of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East Brooklyn, N.Y. A lot of his parishioners now live in this neighborhood. Linger on that for a moment. Live there? People didn't even want to drive through the neighborhood. It was that unimaginably awful.

One word Rev. Brawley says was instrumental in changing that neighborhood: imagination. "You have to imagine something new," he said. "So, you had empty lots, abandoned swaths of land. And we were able to imagine something else." He's talking about an enterprise that's been 40 years in the making. In the early 1980s, community organizers dreamed up an audacious plan to build privately-owned houses to be sold at working class prices. They took land that nobody wanted, and turned it into something highly desirable. They called it the Nehemiah project. It got its name from an Old Testament developer, the prophet Nehemiah, who rebuilt the walls around the ancient city of Jerusalem.

A program organized more than 40 years ago by East Brooklyn churches helped build a community within a destitute neighborhood, and has since enabled hundreds of first-time homeowners to build equity - and hope for the future.

The goal of the project was to create equity. "It's the American dream," Brawley told "Sunday Morning" senior contributor Ted Koppel. "Everything changes when you have equity. Communities are able to build wealth. Families are able to build wealth. Life changes inter-generationally."

In East Brooklyn, as in many parts of the country, African American and Latino families faced rampant discrimination getting affordable financing, or even where they could buy property. Sarah Plowden, a repository of the history of this community, is a venerated figure at St. Paul's Church, holding the honorific title of Queen Mother. She's been involved with the Nehemiah project from the beginning, when she was a church secretary and her family lived in what used to be called the projects.

"It was like living with no hope," she said. "These kids cannot imagine how bad it was."
"Well, remind them," Koppel asked.
"I want to forget it!"
"I know you do. But I want you to remember it, just for the moment."
"Okay. To shut the lights off and the roaches appear, to live with rats and mice, I don't wish that on nobody.

Kirk Goodrich, president of Monadnock Development, with senior contributor Ted Koppel, at the site of a Nehemiah housing development.

Kirk Goodrich grew up in the area to become an affordable housing developer, one (it should be noted) who has helped transform this East Brooklyn neighborhood. "These were neighborhoods you drove through to go someplace else, not any place you wanted to be."

He told Koppel,

"This was landfill."

"Landfill sounds like such a nice neutral term. What does landfill mean?"

"A trash dump!" he laughed. "People would come here and dump dead pets. Although I didn't see it, I'm sure bodies were, you know, here."

But what was also buried under all that rubble and garbage was opportunity. Those community organizers came from local churches and worked with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the engine driving the Nehemiah project. EBC, or East Brooklyn Churches (which later changed its name to East Brooklyn Congregations), worked with local people to raise money that could be used for loans. They mobilized the community to put pressure on local politicians.

Back then, Ed Koch was the Mayor of New York City. As he later recalled in a PBS documentary, "Groundbreaking," "You came to a big open meeting; they would bring in 500 people. They would cheer you. They would boo you. Whatever it is to manipulate you."

And the pressure paid off. Koch sold 16 square blocks of New York City property at $1 a lot. And the city provided subsidies

In the 1980s New York city-owned lots in destitute neighborhoods were sold for $1 to allow construction of affordable homes.

Under a Democrat mayor, sure! But how about this fellow? In 1995 the Republican Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, pledged, "We're gonna make sure that there's enough funding in the budget so that Spring Creek can begin, so that it can begin on time, and so that it won't be interrupted."

And all the while, East Brooklyn Churches raised millions toward a fund that helped defray costs. Even so, initially, there were very few takers. "When I got to look at the area, though, I was not excited, I'll tell you that," said Matilda Dyer, an immigrant from the Caribbean Island Dominica. She worked as a nurse. Her husband, Clinton, worked as a welder. They were not easily discouraged. "It was totally abandoned," Dyer said. "It didn't seem possible that you could have a thriving community of homes."

What tipped the scales for Dyer was that the project was being put together by East Brooklyn Churches. "I didn't know all about EBC, but I knew it was churches," she said. "I know with churches, God is at the center." Koppel said, "You are describing what is often referred to as an act of faith."

"It is. It was faith. And after I stepped forth, three or four of my friends, they purchased homes in there." Those first Nehemiah homes cost $40,000. Now this was almost 40 years ago. For many homeowners like the Dyers, the mortgage payments were actually less than the rent they had been paying. Soon, those Nehemiah homes became so popular that people had to enter lotteries just for the chance of owning a home. People like Sandra and Armando Martinez. He was a political refugee from El Salvador. Both of them were teachers, each working two jobs to raise their two children whom they helped put through college.

Sandra recalled: "2002, we went to church on a Sunday, like always. The priest told us that it will be a coupon in the newspaper to apply for affordable houses." Koppel asked, "And then what happened? Then you wait?" "Then, we waited," said Armando.

"How long before they called you?"

"Five years after," said Sandra.

"They pull the number, you move into the house?"

"No!" said Sandra. "We had the number, so that mean we, eventually one day, will have a house."

Ted Koppel with Armando and Sandra Martinez.

By the early 1990s, Sarah Plowden, who worked at St. Paul's Church, finally could afford to buy a home of her own. "I stand as a witness, a dream can become a reality. It was a struggle for me to own it, but it was worth it." The home she paid $120,000 to buy, she said, is now worth more than $500,000. Koppel asked, "So, when you pass on, and you leave that to your children, you're leaving an estate?"

"Yes, I am. But I don't intend to leave them a paid-for house. I intend to enjoy my money and my house!" she laughed.

Message received! All three of Ms. Plowden's sons own property of their own.

Sarah Plowden was finally able to own her own home. "I stand as a witness, a dream can become a reality."

Overall, the Nehemiah homes have created an estimated $1.5 billion in wealth for first-time Black and Latino homeowners.

Developer Kirk Goodrich said, "This is the most consequential, important community development effort in our country, because it was done by one organization over 40-plus years and they've never stopped." There are Nehemiah projects, at various stages of development, around the country. So far, they've built 6,500 homes.

The houses are, quite literally, the foundation. But the owners, said The Rev. Brawley, are the ones who breathe life into a community: "People who are city workers who now own a home, people who have come out of public housing, teachers, law enforcement officers, fire department workers who now own their own homes." And the harder the struggle to get here, the greater the sense of achievement. It took the Martinez family seven years to get their house. "This is our palace," said Sandra, "and every day we thank God. We think that every other families should have the same opportunity." Brawley said, "You can't be what you can't see. Nehemiah for us is something for everybody to see. It is possible."

Koppel noted,

"As you like to say in this building, Amen."

"Amen!"."

East Brooklyn Congregations Tells City Leaders Where Action Is Needed Most

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 15:23:00 GMT

More than 1,000 members of East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC), including faith leaders, NYCHA residents and community members, hosted a virtual assembly Thursday night to outline expectations for local politicians heading into election season. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Senator Chuck Schumer, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and Comptroller Scott Stringer attended the meeting and were identified by EBC as necessary allies moving forward.

Founded in 1979 in Brownsville and East New York, EBC is an organization composed of member institutions, including congregations, schools and homeowners associations. The collective is best known for the construction of the Nehemiah Homes — over 5,000 affordable units and houses in East Brooklyn.

EBC led the way forty years ago. Were still here, Father Edward Mason said during Thursday nights opening remarks.

During EBCs first virtual meeting, leaders outlined the organizations vision for the future, focusing on the core issues of police reform, health and mental health, education and housing.

Reform policing while maintaining relationships

Rev. Shaun Lee of Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church addressed the organization’s mounting concerns with law enforcement in its communities. During the presidential campaign we are hearing terms like law and order, he said. We know that terms like that are no longer just a dog whistle, its a bullhorn for police authorities to abuse their power.EBC called for local leaders to focus their efforts on diversion centers as a primary destination for offenders struggling with mental health, as well as increased investment in non-police crisis personnel. Speakers said the organization did not see itself as being at odds with local precincts, instead EBC wanted to increase opportunities for collaboration.

During the presidential campaign we are hearing terms like law and order, he said. We know that terms like that are no longer just a dog whistle, its a bullhorn for police authorities to abuse their power.EBC called for local leaders to focus their efforts on diversion centers as a primary destination for offenders struggling with mental health, as well as increased investment in non-police crisis personnel. Speakers said the organization did not see itself as being at odds with local precincts, instead EBC wanted to increase opportunities for collaboration.

Specifically, EBC wants to work on projects such as Do Not Stand Idly By, an effort to hold gun manufacturers accountable, and COMPSTAT for Cops, which were statistical crime metrics established by the NYPD in the 1990s that could root out bad apples within the department.

BP Adams, who helped implement an early iteration of COMPSTAT during his time as a police officer, echoed those sentiments.

The impact of COVID-19

Donna Perry, a member of one of EBCs affiliate churches, spoke on the toll the pandemic has had. Perry, who was infected with the virus along with her mother and sister, said in her church alone 65 members had contracted the disease and 15 had passed away. The situation made it clear better access to healthcare needed to be a top priority for both EBC and local officials, she said. Natalie Flores, a student at one of the EBC public schools, said many students at her school were having issues accessing WiFi, a necessity for remote learning. She said many families were unable to pay their bills, making virtual classes impossible to attend. Senator Schumer said he would advocate for universal access to high-speed internet.

Mismanagement in NYCHA

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City came under fire for shortcomings in providing safe and liveable public housing for East Brooklyn residents.

NYCHA resident Tawanna Myers said that the only time the city does anything about the unsanitary, unfair and unsafe conditions is when EBC makes them.

Senator Schumer called out an immoral lack of investment in NYCHA, and Comptroller Stringer called for a new housing plan centered around the needs of working people. Stringer had put affordable housing at the center of his mayoral bid . Its not just bridges, roads and tunnels that are crumbling and need to be repaired. We need to repair our public housing, Congressman Jeffries said, adding public housing needed to be treated with the same level of urgency as other public works. Some of the most passionate remarks on housing came from BP Adams, who described NYCHA as a bottomless pit, with the levels of corruption and mismanagement.

Adams stressed his commitment to NYCHA went deeper than empty words. I want to help people that are living the life that I lived as a child, he said, adding that during the pandemic when other politicians went to the Hamptons, I went to housing, passing out food and facemasks.

For EBC, the goal of the meeting was to express priorities going into next year’s mayoral and municipal elections. We are going to work to create a city where we can see ourselves in the picture, Rev. David Brawley said. The four politicians said they would work to support EBCs vision.

Some NYCHA senior centers are set to close; residents are outraged

Tue, 07 May 2019 15:29:00 GMT

NEW YORK — More than a dozen NYCHA senior centers across the city are set to be closed or consolidated and tenants are not happy. Holding signs and chanting, residents of New York City Public Housing Authority called on Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday to restore the $500 million they say he promised for senior housing on NYCHA property.

Public housing residents and pastors with Metro Industrial Areas Foundation( Metro IAF) and East Brooklyn Congregations called on the mayor to allocat money to NYCHA or resign.

“The city allocated $500 million for new housing for NYCHA seniors. Then the mayor pulled a bait-and-switch, betraying thousands of low-income seniors in the process,” said Metro IAF leader Rev. David K. Brawley. “Until the mayor lives up to his promise and restores funding for the senior housing program, low-income seniors will be stuck in units with broken elevators, dark stairwells, mold, and other hazards that are even more dangerous for the elderly.”

“Our commitment is the same today as it was last June – we are developing six public sites with 1,000 homes for seniors. These developments are just a portion of our effort to serve 30,000 seniors by 2026, and we have financed over 7,000 homes for seniors to date. We recognize there was public confusion about the details of this plan, and we wish he had communicated better from the start – but we never backtracked on our commitment,” said Jane Meyer, Deputy Press Secretary, Office of the Mayor.

Inside the city council executive budget hearing Tuesday, NYCHA Interim CEO Kathryn Garcia was in the hot seat once again.

News was released that up to 14 NYCHA senior centers across the city are set to be closed or be consolidated to save $885,000.

“There will be a cost effective new approach to providing seniors in public housing with access to senior centers rather than the ‘senior clubs’ that had been provided by NYCHA directly,” de Blasio said. “Those clubs, we found were underutilized, could not provide the same quality of service as our DFTA programs could. So, seniors will go to an established senior center that specializes in supporting seniors. There’ll be free transportation provided that will also save us money while providing a better product to our seniors.”

De Blasio Slammed for Leaving Senior Housing Funds Out of Budget

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 15:43:00 GMT

A year after Mayor Bill de Blasio stood on the steps of City Hall and promised $500 million to build senior citizen housing on public lots, his administration this week quietly conceded the money was not put in his budget, THE CITY has learned.

Top city housing officials confirmed in a letter to city Comptroller Scott Stringer Tuesday that the “$500 million commitment is not memorialized in the budget.” At the time, the mayor’s pledge to fund the senior housing proposal resounded as a signature victory for the Metro Industrial Area Foundation. The advocacy group has long pressed City Hall to support the creation of housing on publicly available lots.

“What the letter verifies is that the mayor lied,” the Rev. David Brawley of Metro-IAF told THE CITY Wednesday. “He made a commitment to us — a commitment to New York City for the $500 million in the budget — and it’s not there.”

“There was no ambiguity in the commitment,” Brawley added. The letter also revealed some of the planned housing sites — with 300 to 400 apartments slated to rise on vacant lots at the Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn and Morris Houses in the Bronx.

A Day of Grins and Handshakes

On June 12, the mayor stood outside City Hall next to Brawley and other Metro-IAF leaders, grinning broadly, shaking hands and stating flatly that he would put the money into his budget. The previous day, the mayor and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson issued a press release announcing details of the new budget agreement — with the $500 million funding allotted for senior housing touted as a featured item of the deal. The plan described that day called for construction of new senior housing on land inside two NYCHA developments and on four sites controlled by the city Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD). But when the mayor announced his preliminary budget in February, there was no sign of the $500 million. Metro-IAF asked City Hall what happened, but got no answer, Brawley said. Stringer stepped in, writing to the mayor last month requesting details on City Hall’s plans, including the specific project ID number for the housing in the budget.

A Letdown Letter

On Tuesday, Interim NYCHA Chairwoman Kathryn Garcia and Acting HPD Commissioner Eric Enderlin told Stringer that the money wasn’t put in. They instead described the $500 million as “an estimate of the total public resources needed to fund the City’s commitment to develop these six sites.”

On Wednesday, Jane Meyer, a spokeswoman for de Blasio, said the plan was never for the city alone to fund this housing, stating, “For decades, these projects have always been funded from a mix of sources including city capital, low income housing tax credits and debt leveraged by section eight vouchers – never by city capital alone.”

“This Administration is fighting to ensure the New Yorkers who built this city will always have a place to call home,” Meyer added.

City Hall initially said it planned to move forward immediately on building the senior housing, but Garcia and Enderlin’s letter revealed that to date, the city has to date requested proposals from developers for only one of the six projects. The city won’t seek proposals for the other five until the last quarter of this year, at the earliest.

The letter provided no specific future commitments for city funds but Meyer said the sites “will be financed in a subsequent year.” She said the projects would ultimately be financed by $100 million in direct city subsidies, $150 million by providing developers with low-income housing tax credits, and borrowing $250 million off of anticipated revenue from rent subsidized by the federal Section 8 program.

On Wednesday, Stringer expressed disappointment in City Hall’s decision, stating, “I have long supported the proposal to create fully affordable housing units for NYCHA seniors. Our city is in a housing crisis and we need to prioritize helping seniors who have built up our communities.”

About 20% of NYCHA’s 400,000 residents are senior citizens, many of them living in two- and three-bedroom apartments where they raised children who have since moved. NYCHA, which has a waiting list of 250,000, has been encouraging seniors to take smaller apartments.

Metro-IAF’s plan would allow NYCHA to move many of the seniors into new apartments within or near the developments where they now live, minimizing disruptions to their lives — and freeing up hundreds of apartments for families on the waitin g list.

Opinion: What Bill thinks he said: De Blasio shrugs off a commitment to build thousands of units of senior housing

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 19:59:21 GMT

Mayor de Blasio committed $500 million to Metro-IAF’s plan for building new apartments for seniors, starting with six already identified NYCHA and Housing Preservation and Development sites where money could be spent and units put up quickly. Or at least that’s what the community group says.

And what Council Speaker Corey Johnson says, and Controller Scott Stringer. And headlines like “City says it will spend $500M on new housing for seniors.”

As rents and homelessness keep hitting record highs here, it’s what everyone seems to have heard de Blasio say when he shook hands with Rev. David Brawley of Metro-IAF’s East Brooklyn Congregations on the steps of City Hall last June. The mayor called the new money an investment in “fairness,” so “people who worked so hard their whole lives can actually make ends meet.”

Now, City Hall says that, actually, the mayor meant about $100 million from the city, with the feds and other development partners bringing in the rest. And that this was always clear, and that they’re confused how people ended up with $400 million worth of the wrong impression about the commitment de Blasio made.

It reminds me of a classic Daily News front page: “He Said-She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said, She Said,” and on and on, from the press and the pastors and the other politicians and the public. (If he doesn’t recognize the reference, de Blasio could ask his old political pal Louis CK.)

Back to Metro-IAF, they have a high-pressure approach: insisting politicians first to respond to the group, then to meet with its members, then to publicly commit to the group’s goals, and finally holding the politicians to account for those commitments.

The group has every reason to play things straight, since they don’t have billions of their own, or lobbyists. Their currency is their word and their proven ability to live up to it. And de Blasio?

“I don’t feel good when I see something that’s someone quoting someone, so we’ll put out a clear statement about this,” he said Monday, after Errol Louis asked on “Inside City Hall” about a Daily News editorial questioning the city’s reported plans for less than 1,000 units on those six initial sites. “Some of the advocates involved had ideas that although I’m sure noble were not necessarily functional.” De Blasio then asked himself: “But the notion of creating more senior affordable housing?”

He answered himself: “Absolutely a high priority. And I think this idea can work — we have to work out the best way to do it.” Council officials, though, say that they’ve had a hard time extracting basic information over months of frustrating meetings with administration officials. City Hall spokesperson Jane Meyer says a response is coming soon to a letter from the controller’s office demanding specific updates about the money dedicated to the initial sites the city identified and the progress of the apartments there.

“We are following through on our commitment and moving aggressively to get these six sites totaling $500 million in development costs built,” Meyer emailed Friday. “We have already financed over 7,000 homes for seniors, and we all must all work together to provide more.” Speaking of clear statements, “there was no ambiguity from the mayor when we shook hands about this being $500 million from the city,” Brawley told me Friday.

“If in fact we have been deceived and lied to, this would be a great disrespect to the black and Latino community — certainly the greatest lie that I have ever seen, and maybe in the history of our organization.”

Brownsville tenants team with developers and community to change their lives

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:36:44 GMT

Jacqueline (Jackie) Melendez had enough. The elevators didn't work, and she complained. But it was more than that. Melendez had an 8-month-old, and a 3-year-old battling leukemia.

Living on the ninth floor of the Riverdale Osborne Towers in Brownsville, steps from the Rockaway Ave. 2/3 subway, Melendez had to take the working elevator in the building next door to the top floor, climb to the roof and walk across to her building, and down a flight of stairs with two children in her arms, just to arrive at her front door.

"Here I was with a child in chemotherapy, praying when I walked into my building that the elevator would work," says Melendez. "I should have been praying for my son to live. Something wasn't right."

After she complained, the building management, an organization that seems to have later disbanded, tried to evict her. City marshals came to her apartment. Melendez, an organized woman who had never been late on rent, was forced to go to court in downtown Brooklyn and carry her rent receipts with her at all times as proof of good standing.

That wasn't the worst of it. In 2003, drug dealers ruled the four-building complex, where most of the 524 residents pay a portion of their income as rent through the subsidized Section 8 program. The courtyard out front was an asphalt field. Some apartments had kitchens without refrigerators or stoves. Water leaked from the roof into apartments below.

Lindsay's job is to help members of EBC's groups take action on issues important to them. He remembers early meetings with Melendez. "When I first came to see her, the drug dealer working that building opened the door for me," says Lindsay. "When Jackie described the living conditions, I told her it would be hard, but if we got a plan of action, we could make a change."

That plan of action included building a team, but doing it quietly so nobody knew.

"There was already a tenant association, but they were in with the landlords," says Lindsay. "We had to make sure that the powers that be didn't know what we were doing so we could work behind the scenes. Otherwise, they would make things very hard for our group."

Twenty-four tenants set up a formal meeting with building management. At the meeting, Melendez and Villanueva presented the building manager with formal complaints including leaks, mold, apartments without refrigerators, and elevator problems.

"We gave her a test," says Melendez. "Ten apartments that had such horrible living conditions that they would be violating city and federal housing standards if they weren't repaired. Of course, they did nothing. Eight apartments they didn't touch at all, and two of them, they did 25% of the work and stopped."

Placing management responsible, the tenants noticed that the landlord, a nonprofit group consisting of several owners, was beginning to do the minimal amount of work necessary to escape prosecution.

"We were at a crossroads," says Lindsay. "I gave the tenants two choices: Either we fight this legally, which can be costly and take years, or we try to find a buyer for the complex who can come in, take over and clean this up. That's what we opted to do."

Lindsay remembers both comical and tragic things that happened when they went to seek a buyer.

"At one of our meetings to discuss crime, automatic weapons were shot in the courtyard below us," he says. "We had to duck, and some of the parents in the meeting had children out there. On another occasion, new fridges meant for tenants were sold on the street by the building's super. One time, we were arguing with [the manager] when she started yelling at us while running away. She kept pressing the elevator button, but of course the elevator wasn't working and never came."

None of this was funny to lower Park Ave.-based Community Preservation Corp. (CPC), one of the biggest builders, developers and lenders for affordable housing in the history of New York City. The top brass from CPC Resources, the organization's development arm, met with Lindsay and the tenant group because of its strong relationship with EBC.

After hearing the story, CPC Resources did what it does best. It structured a financial deal with a partnering local landlord who had experience dealing with tough apartment complexes, and began the process of simultaneously ridding it of crime and purchasing the property.

"Our mission is to renovate and restore communities," says Michael Lappin, president & CEO at CPC Resources and Community Preservation Corp., who has run both organizations for over 30 years.

"It's very simple. These people weren't receiving basic living services. No one should live in fear. This complex wasn't being run efficiently. This could be profitable and be a model for other places going through similar problems."

Lappin contacted Demetrios Moragianis, a development partner and property manager with experience working in tough neighborhoods. His team worked with the 73rd Precinct and representatives from the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development's crime task force to make several arrests, ensuring that gang and drug elements could not operate on-site. One day, more than 26 arrests were made.

After working with New York Sen. Charles Schumer and U.S. Rep. Yvette D. Clarke to ensure federal aid, Lappin and company were able to purchase the property. Since 2006, they have poured in over $39 million in development and renovation costs ($36 million came from federal and state tax credits). They installed new windows, two new roofs, three new boilers, replaced all elevators, gave new kitchens to every tenant, ensured all intercoms were in working condition, installed security cameras and hired security guards.

Moragianis' team built gates around the property, so that all visitors had to enter through a new lobby. A new management office and security center had new tenant mailboxes. The one-story brick building became the center for all management, rent-paying, maintenance and safety operations. By 2010, the Riverdale Osborne Towers were safe, with all building operations functioning almost perfectly with few tenant complaints.

'We're not a charitable institution," says Lappin, whose group is a partner in the Parkchester complex in the Bronx and the developer for the conversion of the Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg to an affordable and market-rate mixed-use housing complex. "It's about making the economic system work to better people's lives and for us and our partners to make some money as well. That's what this organization is here to do."

Melendez and her group of fellow tenants live different lives now. Renovations were completed in December 2009. The asphalt field is a modern playground where kids can play. All elevators work. Hallways are clean. There are no leaks. People come and go as they please, never in fear. Intruders from the surrounding area can no longer waltz through the courtyard anytime they like.

Rents have hovered around $710 for a one-bedroom and $810 for a two-bedroom. There is a waiting list for the complex, and nonsubsidized tenants have sought apartments there. Melendez is saving money to buy a home nearby in a complex developed by CPC. She walks with a hop in her step, proud of what she's done, always looking forward.

"This taught me to never give up," says Melendez, who lost her son to cancer and now works for the city Department of Education. "I know I'm low-income, but it still shouldn't be okay to accept that I should be ashamed to have visitors.

"I'm a Garifuna woman, meaning I'm African and Latino. Like other less-privileged women, we're taught to accept our circumstances. Well, that's not okay. That's not how I want my daughter to grow up. I want her to be proud and educated and remember what we did here." For info on CPC, go to communityp.com.

***

HOW TENANTS CAN ORGANIZ

Jacqueline Melendez with Grant Lindsay

Is your landlord or building owner violating any housing acts? If you think so, here are tips on what you can do to fight back, legally and efficiently.

1- Build a team. Talk to other tenants who are equally fed up. Gather a list of leaders inside the building.
2- Do it quietly. Some managers and landlords will attempt to evict tenants who complain and disrupt any attempt to organize. Set a meeting.

3- Think of a test. Ask landlords to repair something that is a basic living right, like working bathrooms, leaks or elevators. Check the New York City Department of Housing Preservation Web site for a list of what landlords must do to keep up to code. nyc.gov/hpd

4- Approach the building manager. Set a formal meeting with building management to document the request for repairs. Get all facts together and a list of demands. Make sure you role play the meeting in advance so that you are prepared. Give them a strict but fair deadline to complete repairs.

5- Evaluate. Monitor their work. On the day of the deadline, assess the repairs to determine if the demands have been met. If they have, rejoice and ask for more. If they haven't, get tougher.

6- Involve potential allies. Contact HPD or the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. Certain regulators inside these organizations are there to ensure landlords maintain proper building codes and services.

7- Don't give up. If things appear slow, remember, you've come this far.

8- Decide whether the best course of action is court or letting the city or federal government help. If the landlord has met requirements but things are still in disrepair and living conditions below standards, tenants need to decide if they want to take the landlord to court. Keep holding meetings to hold them accountable.

9- Let the landlord know you're not going away. Any communication with the landlord that firmly states you know your rights as tenants could lead to quicker repairs.

10- Keep the faith. Stay organized, and keep pressing for change. As Melendez says, "The battle never ends." Solidify a working relationship with the landlord. Keep requesting things until there's nothing left to request. Then relax. Have a party. Ask the landlord to pay.E