How to fix the affordable housing crisis in the U.S. is the focus of a new book that taps a broad array of experts and includes important strategies for New York City.
Authors Alexander Gorlin and Victoria Newhouse gathered 20 experts—architects, planners, and community organizers—to look at the topic from every possible angle and contribute chapters and samples of their work. The result is “Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture and the Future of Affordable Housing,” published by Rizzoli.
The book underscores the depth of the housing crisis: On any given night, more than 650,000 people in the U.S.—many with families and full-time jobs—experience homelessness. The shortfall in affordable housing is estimated to be 5 million units or more. The ripple effects of this crisis include an increase in multigenerational poverty, a decrease in economic mobility, and a heightening of racial injustice.
In the chapters on NYC, writers offer visions of how we can move forward, and include some terrific examples of affordable housing developments both in NYC and beyond.
The authors undertook this project because of their belief that the “insufficiency of affordable housing, combined with long-standing income inequality coinciding with race, means that this wealthy country, built on principles of equality and fundamental rights, has become unjust and dysfunctional.”
Brick Underground interviewed the two NYC contributors: Michael Gecan, an author and community organizer who contributed the chapter “Affordable Housing: Forgotten Factors,” and David Burney, who has held numerous roles related to NYC housing, who wrote the chapter, “What Happened to NYCHA and How Can We Fix It?” These interviews have been edited.
‘We have a tremendous opportunity’
Brick Underground: What’s the present state of affordable housing in NYC?
Gecan: Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to create affordable housing in every borough. We need to make use of religious organization sites—churches, community centers, schools—that would like to rebuild. There are so many of these congregational sites that could be a platform for the next generation of affordable housing. The buildings would be small, 15-50 units, but they’d be in just about every neighborhood. There’s been a lot of talk about this but implementation has been lacking.
Another thing that needs to happen to move affordable housing initiatives along is to staff up Housing Preservation and Development. The pipeline is very slow. It’s more a problem of capacity than funds.
Burney: It’s not unfair to call it a crisis. The lack of affordable housing is hollowing out the city. People are going as far as Pennsylvania to find an affordable home. I live in Gowanus, which is a very mixed-income neighborhood but it’s the neighborhoods around us that need more affordable housing built.
And, we shouldn’t give up on NYCHA. In Holland and Germany, there’s massive and successful not-for-profit housing being built. NYCHA is doing its best but isn’t getting the resources it needs.
BU: The editors chose essayists who are active in the field of affordable housing. What’s your role?
Gecan: I’ve been a community organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) for decades. We deliver housing ownership to first responders or what we once called the working class. In the ’80s, we helped members of the East Brooklyn Congregations organize to turn a piece of land that was just a garbage dump, filled with old tires and construction debris, into the Nehemiah development, a community of over 600 starter homes and over 1,000 rental units. There are 424 more homes now under construction and another 560 planned.
Powerful unions used to provide this kind of housing for their members. That’s no longer true so now it’s powerful citizens organizations that need to fill that gap. No one ever thought this neighborhood could ever be viable but they were wrong. I remember having a meeting with Jimmy Carter while he was working with Habitat for Humanity and we were just beginning our project. He said that our Nehemiah effort was too big; I said that Habitat is too small. We were both wrong.
Burney: I’m an architect and the director of the Urban Placemaking and Management program at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Placemaking is a new way of thinking about public planning. It supports planning around public spaces, a park or plaza or the street. It’s the kind of urban planning that Jane Jacobs envisioned.
For 12 years, from 1990 to 2004, I was chief architect of the New York Housing Authority. Back then, we had very little money for development so we could only build small projects on little bits of land. During that time, the federal government began to starve NYCHA of funds.
What began as housing for working people became housing for very poor people. Congress began to consider public housing as a failure and cut off funds. Public housing was not to compete with the private sector. The distinction between early and later subsidized developments can be felt viscerally in the Lower East Side. At Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, ground-floor retail enlivens the street; [NYCHA’s] Wald and Baruch Houses, on the other hand, provide only bare-bones apartments with none of the commercial activity that enhances streets and sidewalks.
BU: What’s your outlook on the future of affordable housing in the city?
Gecan: I’m optimistic. IAF’s leaders are very persistent. I really don’t see any difference in the enthusiasm for organizing between now and the ’80s. In fact we have some of the sons and daughters of the people who did the original organizing for the Nehemiah project working with us now.
And, I think that the emphasis on the role of NIMBY is overblown. Negative activism gets media coverage but, if you do the right kind of organizing, explain what will happen to people involved, you’ll win.
Political leaders are incredibly sensitive to NIMBY activity and may be scared away from supporting a project from the coverage that the NIMBY activities usually get. But, if you do the real work, deal in an old fashioned person-to-person way, you’ll win.
[Editor’s note: Michael Gecan wrote a manual for community organizers,“Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action” that was recently included in a Washington Post list of seven great political books.]
Burney: I’m a fan of public housing and am convinced that, if NYCHA were adequately funded, it could once again be attractive to essential workers, to teachers, cops, and city workers. The public would support that reconfiguration, it would be politically more acceptable as an economic necessity. Just think of where some of the developments are situated: Some, like Amsterdam Houses, sit on extremely valuable land; many others are on or near the waterfront in all five boroughs.
NYCHA needs to be able to build to scale inexpensively and on free land. There was a time when it was thought that the private sector would step in and bolster affordable housing; that never happened.
BU: Can you cite some successful affordable housing developments in the city? Developments worth replicating?
Burney: Via Verde in the South Bronx fits that description. It won a city-sponsored design competition for affordable housing. Building began in 2009 on a long-abandoned parcel of land that had once been part of a rail freight yard and had become an abandoned brownfield.
Architects and developers who entered the competition were required to submit plans that would serve as a model of affordable housing that would substantively promote the health and wellbeing of the residents.
Via Verde’s plan was for a mid-rise component and a 20-story tower, 222 units in all. One hundred-fifty-one units are rentals, affordable for households earning 40 to 60 percent of the area median income (AMI) and 71 middle-income co-ops for households earning 70-100 percent of AMI.
A series of green roofs step from one building to the next and a ground-level courtyard sits at the heart of the development. A building garden club grows food on the roofs and there’s plenty of room provided for residents to exercise both indoors and out.
Though Via Verde is a very dense urban development—with 400 people living on 1.5 acres— residents have a variety of outdoor spaces for recreation and socializing with neighbors, plus spectacular views, an urban farming experience, and spacious units with balconies. It’s an excellent example of design that integrates nature and the city and is certainly replicable in other urban spaces.
Gecan: Of course I would say that would be Nehemiah-Spring Creek. It’s a nationally and internationally recognized development. We get visitors from everywhere, from Newark to Barcelona…And, it was an effort that started with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and has persisted through the next two mayors to the present—no small feat. It created a new part of Brooklyn and NYC as a whole, occupied by working class New Yorkers, mostly people of color.
The community that surrounds the residential buildings includes commercial space along Elton Avenue with a pharmacy, medical offices, restaurants, civic organizations, and retail shopping. There’s a school campus that’s been added since the beginning and three public schools, one of which houses a gifted and talented program. The campus has a state of the art library, a computer lab and boasts a stadium-style football field. The schools have a very high graduation rate with test scores that are very strong.
Can this be replicated? Yes, it can and it will be. On the Creedmoor site in Queens.
BU: What are your thoughts on NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s citywide rezoning plan to create affordable housing, City of Yes for Housing Opportunity?
Burney: There are some good aspects of the City of Yes proposal, including the elimination of parking mandates and identifying new sites for housing development. But I would characterize the City of Yes plan as a continuation of the city’s attempt to plan using only the tool of the zoning resolution. Zoning is not planning. So the City of Yes proposal is one of those “one-size-fits-all” that actually fits nobody. Staten Island is very different from Manhattan. The Bronx has different needs from Brooklyn. There is no substitute for actual neighborhood planning. That is what is lacking here, and the reason the City of Yes plan has so much opposition and will probably not pass the City Council, at least in its present form.
Gecan: It’s ok. And it reflects initiatives that several groups, including ours, have already identified and explored—like making use of congregational sites for affordable housing. But the real question is: Will it be implemented effectively and fully? That means additional staff to vet proposals at Housing Preservation and Development and Housing Development Corporation and additional subsidies to make sure that approved proposals get into the ground.
