For 50 years, UHAB has empowered low- and moderate-income residents to take control of their housing and become homeowners in the buildings where they already live. We turn distressed rental housing into lasting affordable co-ops, and provide comprehensive training and technical assistance to keep these homes healthy and stable for the long term. UHAB has created 30,000 cooperative homes across the five boroughs, predominantly in formerly redlined neighborhoods where rates of homeownership continue to lag behind the rest of the city. UHAB is also a founding member of Interboro CLT, the city’s only citywide community land trust.
While UHAB’s mission is centered on preserving existing housing and helping residents to remain in their homes, we are also keenly aware that adding to the City’s housing supply is a crucial pillar in stabilizing communities of color and bolstering opportunities for homeownership. That’s why we are here today adding our voice in support of the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (ZHO). UHAB stands alongside the Mayor, affordable housing advocates, and New York City communities to call on the Commission to implement what we see as common-sense reforms to alleviate our dire housing crisis.
ZHO creates more housing and creates it more fairly. These reforms ensure that communities that have historically benefited from zoning restrictions support their fair share of development, easing pressure on historically disinvested communities of color like Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn, and Williamsburg, which are now experiencing rapid gentrification and displacement of longtime residents.
In 2023, the New York Times shared an alarming statistic—nearly 200,000 Black New Yorkers have left the City in the last two decades, primarily due to the precipitous rise of basic costs for families like food, childcare, and of course, rent. ZHO aims to create more affordable housing and thereby a more livable city, while also spreading out development so that a few communities are not disproportionately affected by upward market pressure and drastic change.
What’s more, ZHO opens up the opportunity to create more affordable cooperatives, a proven source of stability for at-risk residents and communities faced with rapid change. In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, a 2019 study by Churches United for Fair Housing (CUFFH) revealed that while aggressive gentrification after the 2005 rezoning resulted in the displacement of one quarter of the Latinx population between 2000 and 2010, high concentrations of affordable co-ops and rent-regulated units in South Williamsburg helped to abate similar displacement pressures, resulting in higher rates of stability.
UHAB knows from 50 years of experience that expanding homeownership for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers is a critical step toward interrupting the cycle of displacement in an increasingly unaffordable housing market. In affordable co-ops, where low-income New Yorkers cooperatively own their multifamily buildings, residents use economies of scale to keep energy expenses and other housing costs as low as possible while maintaining healthy and affordable housing for the long term. Building more middle housing typologies like HDFCs that prioritize affordable cooperative homeownership helps neighborhoods benefit from long-term community investment and control. ZHO interventions like the Universal Affordability Preference (UAP), transit-oriented development, town center zoning, and the conversions of office buildings to housing could all be used to create more affordable cooperative homeownership.
City of Yes presents bold proposals to address New York City’s housing crisis. It creates new housing supply, distributes it fairly across neighborhoods, and creates space for more housing typologies including affordable co-ops. For all these reasons, UHAB is here to say “Yes, please” to the City of Yes!
We are also here to say “Yes, and…” As we boldly create new housing, we need to be just as bold in our plans to preserve and revitalize our aging housing stock. Zoning alone cannot ameliorate the dire housing crisis New York City finds itself in. We need a preservation plan that ensures all New Yorkers’ homes are healthy and safe; a plan that creates a blueprint to ensure the longevity of the new affordable housing City of Yes creates.
Specifically, we would like to highlight a few key measures and initiatives that we believe can create more deeply affordable housing, open up affordable homeownership opportunities, protect tenants from displacement, and preserve our existing stock of affordable housing:
- More robust funding for HPD preservation programs that help create homeownership and support existing homeowners like the Green Housing Preservation Program (GHPP), Participation Loan Program (PLP), Affordable Neighborhood Cooperative Program (ANCP), Neighborhood Pillars Program, and Third Party Transfer Program (TPT)
- Additional funding to create new affordable cooperatives through the Open Door program
- More support to desperately-needed tenant protections to stem the tide of displacement and eviction, and stabilize New Yorkers in their homes, like the Right to Counsel and the Anti-Harassment Tenant Protection Program (AHTP)
- Additional voucher subsidy to house New Yorkers in most need of housing stability, and for whom the vast majority of affordable housing programs are still out of reach
We are encouraged by the Council’s effort to deepen its commitment to affordable housing and push for a comprehensive housing plan to complement ZHO. We offer our firm support behind the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, and would encourage the City and the Council to think of this package of zoning amendments as an opening for a broad swath of interventions to ease our housing crisis, stabilize New Yorkers in their homes, and both build and preserve the New York of the future.
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October 22, 2024