UHAB has a long history of promoting and facilitating the development of affordable housing co-ops. In the early 1970's we helped homesteaders take control of abandoned buildings, rehabilitate them, and convert them to limited-equity co-op ownership. A few years later, UHAB was instrumental in the creation of the city's Tenant Interim Lease program - which evolved into the single largest programmatic source of low-income co-op development.

Within the past five years, shifts in city housing policies and programs have significantly changed the landscape of tenant co-op ownership opportunities. In an effort to divest itself of its quarter-century role of "landlord of last resort," the city has created new programs and initiatives - including "Asset Sale," auction, and negotiated sales - to speed up its disposition of city-owned buildings. It has also stopped taking title to buildings through tax foreclosure, and has created a new program - Third Party Transfer - to directly transfer privately owned, distressed, tax-delinquent to new owners.

Unfortunately, as originally structured, the programs tended to give priority to for-profit developers, rather than tenants. Over the past two years, through a combination of organizing, advocacy and project development work with individual buildings, UHAB has been very successful in inserting or expanding the tenant ownership option where it was non-existent or weak before.

As a result of our organizing successes, and our active engagement with the city's newer disposition programs, UHAB's role as housing co-op developer has grown significantly over the last two years. UHAB's development role includes: taking interim ownership and management reponsibility, arranging financing, managing renovations, training residents, and helping them convert to a resident-controlled co-operative. UHAB has emerged as the primary non-profit organization in New York City developing affordable housing co-ops through programs such as Third Party Transfer, negotiated sales, and others. For example, are developing:

• Two city-owned, mortgage-foreclosed former Mitchell-Lama rentals (2 buildings, 378 units);
  
• An "alternative TIL" building on the Upper West Side which was originally targeted for Asset Sale (1 building, 51 units);
  
• Fourteen city-owned buildings in West Harlem and 3 city-owned buildings in the Lower East Side which UHAB is developing as co-ops through HPD's TIL II program (17 buildings, 221 units) (See press release on Harlem buildings.);
  
• Eleven city-owned buildings in the Lower East Side which UHAB is bringing up to code, legalizing the status of the buildings' "homesteaders," and converting to co-op ownership (11 buildings, 162 units) (See press release.);
  
• A vacant city-owned building in West Harlem which UHAB has gut-rehabbed and developed for co-op ownership in collaboration with a local group of homesteaders (1 building, 15 units);
  
• Ten buildings in Harlem and West Harlem which are going through Round Two of the Third Party Transfer program (10 buildings; 437 units).