Stories:

How UHAB and Self-Help Cooperative Housing Transform Lives and Neighborhoods

In the past 25 years, UHAB has seen how self-help housing can be a powerful catalyst to develop the human, social and economic potential that exists within low-income communities.  The process of tenants taking control of their housing yields much more than bricks and mortar.  For the tenants we work with – most of them earning less than $15,000 a year, many of them formerly homeless – the process of becoming an owner nurtures pride and confidence and develops employment skills, democratic decision-making, and civic activism.

Here are the stories of some of the people we work with. 

Sandra Carmona could have easily been a welfare statistic. Instead, getting off public assistance and into the work force is one of the proudest achievements of her life. "I didn’t want to be in a situation where the mother is on welfare and then the children end up on welfare and it keeps going on in a cycle," says the 44-year-old single mother. "I feel more respect for myself now that I’m working."

Carmona made the switch long before welfare reform. And instead of being forced off government support, she was inspired by her experience taking control of her dilapidated tenement at 138 East 98th Street in East Harlem. She explains it simply: "I used to go and run all the errands for the building, and I was still taking care of my kids. That made me feel I could go out and get a job."

When Carmona moved in to her five-story tenement, it was owned by a landlord. But he didn't pay taxes, so the property landed in the hands of the City of New York. Maintenance, which wasn't stellar to begin with, downshifted from poor to nonexistent. One winter Carmona, her kids and the other tenants in the building, many of them senior citizens, even went a week without heat and hot water in below-zero weather. "We had some terrible times," she recalls. "It wasn't easy."

Yet it was exactly this adversity that united the tenants and made it clear they could do a better job if they were in charge themselves. The building joined an early version of the Tenant Interim Lease program, which is a bridge to tenant ownership. Carmona attended almost every UHAB class available and was elected president of her building's board of directors, a position she still holds today.

After the residents successfully purchased the building, UHAB staff members helped the building apply for a loan to do renovation and helped with monthly paperwork. "Now we are in a different stage," Carmona says. She does the work on her own.

She is also in a different stage of her own life. Employed for more than a decade as a home health care attendant, her hourly wage has risen from $4.15 to about $8. She no longer has to work weekends and nights to make ends meet and after she pays her monthly bills, including $239 for housing maintenance, she sometimes has money left for savings.

Even more gratifying are the achievements of her children. Felipe, who is 22, is studying at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) to become a social studies teacher. Jeannette, who is 18, will join her brother at BMCC and dreams of working as a psychologist. The older two help take care of Herika, who is 5.

Some would say Sandra Carmona is just another single mom in a low-wage job. But in this household, she's a hero.
 

Lucy Padron stands in her kitchen slicing mangoes and watermelons, pears, oranges and bananas. Just as the sweet and tart flavors and the soft and firm textures mix to make a delicious fruit salad, elements of Padron’s life recently combined to give her the confidence to set up her own catering company.

"I’ve always been a go-getter, but sometimes my lack of education held me back, gave me low self-esteem," she says. "But seeing the building come to life gave me a sense of pride. I could say I was successful with my housing, so I can be successful in another area."

The building Padron owns with seven other families is a low-income co-operative located at 401 East 145th Street in the Bronx. It’s a four-story walk-up with a garden in front, lace curtains on the windows and a picture of the Virgin Mary in the entranceway.

This oasis of stability is the end result of a 14-year odyssey. The building was part of New York City’s early "sweat equity" program, and for almost a decade Padron and her husband and seven other families worked all day on Saturdays and after work during the week to transform an abandoned shell into a livable home. When they had done as much gut rehabilitation as they were able, the homesteaders and UHAB applied for a State Housing Trust Fund loan, which helped them hire a contractor to finish the job. Padron and her husband are now the proud owners of a three-bedroom apartment. Not bad—especially since Padron remembers arriving in New York City with her mother from Puerto Rico and living in one furnished room with nine other relatives. "This is a mansion for me," Padron says.

Padron is the president of her co-op’s board of directors. She credits a lot of her knowledge to time spent with Maria Roca, a UHAB staffmember in the early 1990s who helped her apply for the state loan. "When you deal with a state grant or loan, the packet almost looks like ‘War and Peace,’" Padron recalls. "For a person who is not an accountant, it's hard. Maria was very helpful. She always helped us with budgets and cost estimates, all those things you have to do. Now I have a good concept of how that all works."

After decades working in low-paid, low-skilled jobs—packing eggs, waxing floors, typing letters—she recently set up a catering company that specializes in Spanish food. "I've gotten to the point in my life where I don't want people to tell me what to do. I realized I wanted to lead," she says. The skills she acquired as the president of her board of directors have been essential. "All those years with Maria from UHAB, working with numbers, that paid off. I feel confident now in business. It gives you an edge."

She compares cooking a good meal to an orchestra, with all the ingredients and spices creating magnificent music. And now, for the first time, she's the conductor.
 

Lawrence Fable is a striver. But he isn't just trying to get ahead for himself and his family —he's bringing his neighbors and his community right along with him.

The 42-year-old arrived in the United States from Guyana with his wife and four sons in 1993. He had no job and no home, and the whole family moved into his mother's small apartment in Brooklyn. But it didn't take long for things to look up.

Fable quickly found work as a messenger and a security guard while attending technical school. Now he's finishing the electrical engineering degree he started in Guyana studying four nights a week at City College—and holding down a well-paying job as a subway inspector for the New York City Transit Authority.

Fable and his wife are also home-owners. They live in a low-income co-operative at 1057 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and Fable proudly welcomes a visitor to his living room decorated with white leather couches, burgundy carpeting and framed photos of his family. A well-used computer sits in the corner. "Coming across this building was a blessing," Fable says simply. "There's no other way I could live this way for the price I paid."

The self-help aspect of tenant co-ops struck a chord with Fable. He moved into the building after his brother told him about a vacancy and dedicated himself to learning about the building's management, with help from UHAB. "I took every class they offered. It was beautiful," he says. Today Fable is the president of the co-op's board of directors.

But he didn't stop there—he's also active in a Neighborhood Network of tenant-owned co-ops. "Our duty is to take building that are suffering and show them the way, show them the seriousness of buying the building for themselves," he says.

This level of activity is not unusual for Fable. Back in Guyana, he worked as an electrician and was an active member of the Lions Club and a Masonic lodge. "I know about organizations, I know how to lead," he says. "It's not hard to share what I've learned to help this and other buildings be successful."

Since he and his wife are both working, they now have a middle-class income. Their low monthly housing costs make it possible for them to keep a car in the city, send their youngest son to private school and pay college tuition for their oldest son. Plus they have a growing savings account.

They're doing so well, in fact, they could move. But becoming homeowners has rooted them in Central Brooklyn. "I have the privilege to be able to go to the suburbs if I wanted, but I wouldn't go," says Fable. "I like it right here."

In our daily work with tenants, we see many examples of how the self-help housing process nurtures confidence, leadership, and civic pride (see "Stories" above).  Academic research backs up our observations, providing empirical evidence that limited-equity co-ops offer an extraordinarily effective model for community development.

The work of Dr. Gerald Sazama and Dr. Susan Saegert is particularly illuminating. Dr. Sazama, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, is a national expert on housing co-operatives. Dr. Saegert, a social scientist at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is an expert on the experiences of low-income co-operatives in New York City.

Sazama and a colleague, Dr. Roger Willcox, recently reviewed the academic literature on limited-equity co-operatives and combined this information with interviews with leading practitioners and their own personal field experience. They reached two important conclusions:

"Resident participation reduces operating costs."

"There are intangible benefits to residents from living in a co-ops."

The conclusion about operating costs draws on several studies that have found co-ops have lower operating costs—usually from reduced maintenance and repair expenses—than alternative forms of publicly subsidized housing. The reduced costs are usually in the form of smaller repair and maintenance expenses. This finding confirms what UHAB has seen over the years—when residents own a property, they have a personal stake in preventive maintenance, which reduces costs.

In their evaluation of the intangible benefits of limited-equity co-operatives, Sazama and Willcox conclude that residents of limited-equity co-operatives usually have greater satisfaction with their housing circumstances than residents in other forms of subsidized housing.

Saegert’s research explores this satisfaction. Much of her analysis employs data from two large surveys of residents in various types of low-income housing in New York City in the mid-1990s. The surveys consisted of interviews with individuals in more than 6,000 households, primarily in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The interviewers targeted buildings that were currently or formerly City-owned, and spanned five different ownership options: tenant co-operative ownership, community group ownership, private landlord ownership, continued City ownership, or transfer to Housing Authority ownership. Saegert found:

"The program that performed the best was tenant co-operative ownership. It was head and shoulders above the others in terms of management quality and building services, had many fewer problems with drugs and crime, showed the greatest tenant satisfaction, and was comparable to other sales programs in terms of preserving rent affordability."Saegert’s research looks closely at the benefits of co-op housing. These include empowerment, increasing civic participation, developing social capital, increasing job opportunities and wealth accumulation.

Empowerment

Empowerment has been defined as "a mechanism by which people, organizations and communities gain mastery over their own affairs." This mechanism is clearly at work in the buildings UHAB assists. Dr. Saegert has found:

"Residents who participated in the conversion of their buildings not only substantially improved their building conditions, but also very often changed in their sense of control over their lives, their ideas about how effective they could be in social and political processes and in their expectations for the future of their communities." Social Capital

In the debate about community development in low-income neighborhoods, the concept of social capital has become widely used in recent years. It has been defined as "the features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Social capital theorists propose that besides financial and human capital, social capital enables individuals to achieve economic goals and provides an essential foundation for a democratic society. Saegert sees social capital as the currency of co-operative housing:

"Our ethnographic studies suggest that co-ops provide social capital that acts as the first line of defense in times of crisis. In almost every co-op we have studied closely, residents also provide encouragement and practical assistance to each other in pursuing education and employment opportunities. It is also common for some co-op residents to use the skills they learn running a building to advance both their education and their employment status." Creating a Mixed-Income Community

Besides creating education and employment opportunities, the tenant co-op process encourages the development of a mixed-income population in inner-city neighborhoods. Theorists like William Julius Wilson have argued that the flight of employed, middle-class African-Americans and Latinos to the suburbs concentrates inner-city poverty and leaves these residents without role models for educational and employment success. Tenant-owned co-ops counter this trend. By offering a very affordable home ownership opportunity, they anchor employed, educated residents in areas like Harlem and the South Bronx. These residents—people like Lawrence Fable—use their skills to improve their community instead of leaving it for more middle-income surroundings. Studies by Saegert have shown:

Compared to other types of low-income housing, the average resident in a low-income co-op has a slightly higher income of $14,782.

Compared to other types of low-income housing, a higher percentage of the residents in tenant-owned co-ops are employed: 58 percent.

Wealth Accumulation

It could be argued that since residents in tenant-owned co-ops have slightly higher incomes and a higher level of employment, that a process of self-selection occurs where buildings with a more stable, working population are the ones that choose the tenant co-op process. However, research by Saegert suggests that while this is sometimes the case, another process is more common. She posits that taking part in the tenant co-op process encourages wealth accumulation—the process that Lawrence Fable, Sandra Carmona and Lucy Padron have all undergone.

Saegert’s research has shown that the average income in a City-owned building is $9,709. After these buildings join the Tenant Interim Lease program, which is a bridge to tenant ownership, the average income rises to $11,948. And the average income for residents in tenant-owned co-ops, as stated earlier, rises again to $14,782. Saegert states that this data suggests:

"...that residents’ incomes improve during the course of the TIL program or after it is completed."It could be argued that incomes improve during the tenant ownership process because lower-income residents are displaced and replaced by higher-income newcomers. Saegert counters: "The fact that the tenant cooperatives show the longest lengths of residency of any of the programs—and the fact that canonical correlations indicate that higher income tenant cooperatives have the longest lengths of residency—suggest that displacement is much less likely as an explanation than upward economic mobility of the existing residents."In fact, wealth accumulation by co-op residents is a common sense explanation for the rise in incomes. The average monthly housing cost in a tenant-owned co-op is $325. Even for tenants with a modest income, this sum enables them to have a large portion of their income available for other purposes that increase their economic mobility: for higher education, for starting a business, for child care, for transportation, for savings. In this way, tenant-owned co-ops clearly contribute to wealth accumulation in their communities.