City Housing Negotiations: Can Affordability Be Preserved?

Big Tests Ahead for de Blasio

The mayor faces serious challenges to his agenda on affordable housing, rezoning and neighborhood development

October 01, 2014
By Adam Pincus

Excerpts: One of the biggest tests in this arena is dealing with the giant 11,200-unit Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex on Manhattan’s East Side, and the 3,962-unit Upper Manhattan and Roosevelt Island package known as the Putnam portfolio.  . . . . [Stuyvesant Town / Peter Cooper Village's] tenants are working with Brookfield Property Partners on a tenant-led purchase bid that would include a condominium conversion and affordable housing preservation.

Meanwhile, Brookfield is at the center of another large affordable housing preservation tussle.

The Toronto-based property giant signed a contract during the summer to purchase the nearly 4,000 units in the Putnam portfolio from a group led by the New Jersey-based Urban American Management.

Almost half of those units are occupied by tenants holding a less common version of the federal Section 8 housing voucher, which in this instance remains with the tenants. That means if the tenants move, their former apartment becomes market rate.

Housing advocates want the city to preserve these units as permanently affordable.

“We would like to see some kind of preservation plan for the buildings,” said Katie Goldstein, executive director of the housing advocacy group Tenants & Neighbors.