What is UHAB?

The Urban Homesteading Assistance Board's mission is helping people in low-income neighborhoods achieve the dream of vibrant, healthy communities. We start off with a focus on one important aspect of community-building — housing.

Our expertise is helping residents take control of distressed, neglected or abandoned buildings and enabling them to become co-operative home owners. But we don’t focus solely on bricks and mortar. Our emphasis is using the self-help housing process — a slow and complicated but enormously rewarding experience — as a catalyst for leadership development and broader community change.

Since 1973 (read history), UHAB’s training, technical assistance and services have played an essential role in the creation of the nation’s largest community of limited-equity, low-income co-operatives: about 1,300 buildings that are home to approximately 27,000 families in New York. We also offer training and technical assistance in tenant participation and self-help housing to groups across the country and overseas.

Our work spans three basic areas:

Creation of and ongoing assistance to co-ops

We help tenants in city-owned, federally-subsidized and distressed buildings become cooperative homeowners. We inform them about tenant ownership options, and help them through the steps of the co-op conversion process, which include: organizing a tenant association, negotiating a tenant purchase with the owner, obtaining financing, and planning and overseeing repair work.  We assist groups of “homesteaders” to acquire and rehabilitate vacant buildings for low–income co-op ownership.

We also offer ongoing assistance to low-income co-ops, including crisis intervention, loan packaging, and low-cost member services like group fire and liability insurance, a legal assistance plan, and computerized monthly bookkeeping.

Assistance to other groups that work with co-ops

We help community groups and local governments – in New York, nationally, and internationally – to create and support low-income co-ops.  We provide training and technical assistance to groups on the cooperative development process, and we have helped local governments develop programs to convert government-owned property to tenant ownership.

Training on co-op development, governance and management

We offer a comprehensive curriculum of training classes for tenants at all stages of the co-op development process: those considering the option of tenant ownership, those in the process of becoming owners, and those living in established co-ops.  These classes are designed to give tenants the skills and tools they need to take and keep control over their housing, and are taught using a participatory training method.  Topics range from co-op governance to building maintenance and repair, to “Getting Rid of Drug Dealers.”  We also offer classes to community organizations, including a “Training for Trainers” course on our participatory training method.