
How Habitat for Humanity Went to Brooklyn and Poor Families Lost Their Homes - jeo1234
https://www.propublica.org/article/habitat-for-humanity-brooklyn-bedford-stuyvesant-poor-lose-homes
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imglorp
The central HFH model is sound and successful even if some affiliates are
straying from it and getting into trouble.

A common misconception is that HFH hands out houses to poor people. HUD does
that and it doesn't really work. You end up with "the projects", a swath of
bad hood, buildings stripped of copper before they're completed, and a bigger
disaster.

Instead, HFH involves the community, especially and centrally the prospective
home owners, who are screened for having steady jobs, existing contributions
to their community, and other indicators. Nobody could buy a house on one
minimum wage income or even two, no matter their character, and that's the
niche filled. The owners participate in the chapter via "sweat equity", where
they might help with others' houses in addition to their own, alongside
volunteers from the community. They buy the house from HFH with a low-interest
mortgage; it's not a gift. Owners are also monitored and advised afterwards,
and they often continue to hang around chapters helping the next batch. The
result is pride in their home, bonds with the chapter, and an improved
neighborhood.

I have no clue what the NYC chapter was thinking but it doesn't meet the core
values, but we should concede inner city chapters have different challenges
than suburban or rural ones.

Source: former chapter board member

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mathattack
Seems like the model doesn't scale well. Hard to do this is very large cities
where there isn't much white space to build. The city is so crowded that
everything existing is already lived in, and zoning, politics and regulation
make it very cost-prohibitive to build cheap housing.

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true_religion
White space?

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jacalata
It means 'empty areas', presumably

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tn13
There is no sham bigger than affordable housing. While ordinary folks have
certain notions about what is a "housing" and what is "affordable" in
government world these are terms that a defined in ways we cant comprehend.

Town admin demolished homeless shelter in Sunnyvale to build affordable
housing. So many homeless people then had to find shelter in the parks. My
friends who make north of 100K a year are in affordable housing units across
the city. Staying in $700 p.m. for 2 bedroom apartments with utilities paid.
The trick was to show "evidence of being" poor.

In short more needy people on street while the better off people live even
better.

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linkregister
Elsewhere in the bay area, affordable housing has income caps for a household.
It appears either that Sunnyvale is an aberration for have few restrictions or
these caps are routinely circumvented. Thanks for the information.

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bhickey
The income limit in Sunnyvale for a single person is just a hair under $60k.

[http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/CDD/Housing/BMR%...](http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/CDD/Housing/BMR%20Income%20Limits.pdf)

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stegosaurus
Affordable housing is a misnomer. Definitionally: afford: 'To have the
financial means for'.

Affordable housing in London, UK.

Does it cost 3.5x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a single person? ;-)
Does it cost 6x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a couple? Not there
yet.

Instead it costs some percentage of market rate.

Which generally ends up being 20x min wage or similar. Yes - as a person you'd
need to become three, four, five times more useful before you can get this
starter home.

As far as I can tell it's just trolling. It genuinely feels like those with
wealth laughing at the lower classes, there's no other explanation for such a
ridiculous use of language.

A Bentley does not become 'affordable' if I offer it to you for 50% off.

Even minimum wage would be a high bar to set because it doesn't feel
affordable to everyone. But at the moment we're saying 'the top 10% can afford
it so that's fine'.

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fleitz
I see mostly colleagues who rack up big bar bills complaining about how
unaffordable apartments are instead of saving their money.

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guard-of-terra
Saving all your money to buy a home instead of spending is losers' game.

It deprives service economy of cash, bumps home prices even more and makes
everybody unhappy. So no, it's not a sound societal advice.

This is problem of supply versus demand, which can be solved by either more
supply or redirected demand. And maybe by removing bad money from the economy.

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beambot
Yeah! Get out there and drink more instead of saving and living within your
means.

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guard-of-terra
I did not say that. You did.

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blisterpeanuts
If I understood the article, Habitat for Humanity contacted some building
owners and developers about acquiring several charming but rundown brownstones
in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood, with the goal of renovating them and selling
them to low income deserving families. The buildings were supposed to be
unoccupied, but in fact seven families were evicted or paid to leave, and they
ended up homeless or living in shelters. A developer was able to flip at least
one building to HFH for 100% profit.

While it does sound as if a few tenants were taken advantage of, and the
charity probably over paid for the properties, the whole situation doesn't
seem that out of line with what has been happening for 100 years in congested
New York neighborhoods. In this case, it was a "charity", but in many other
cases it was for-profit ventures attempting to capitalize on the very high
demand for housing.

At least the brownstones are earmarked for lower income owners who will
stabilize the neighborhood and presumably not push up housing costs. That's
probably a good outcome, if that's what comes to pass. Maybe HFH can help out
those families somehow, perhaps offer them low cost rentals in one of the
renovated properties.

Unfortunately, this rosy outcome is not necessarily what will happen. The
minute a neighborhood is perceived by developers and intrepid urban warriors
as the next up and coming place that's affordable, edgy, and trendy, these
powerful players will descend on the place like locusts. Current owners will
receive high offers to sell out, and gentrification will set in.

In my opinion, the only real solution to this kind of churning of property and
displacement of low income families is to build more housing. New York can't
really expand outward, but it can expand upward, and so they need to build
some high rise apartments and condominiums. I'm not really sure why they're
not meeting demand; perhaps New Yorkers just don't want any more congestion,
and regulatory and tax structures make it prohibitive for all but the richest
developers, who then are incentivized to sell or rent to the richest families,
cutting the poor and moderate families out of the equation.

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rco8786
Your assertion that NYC is not building up is quite wrong. Just because every
brownstone isn't being converted into a skyscraper doesn't mean there isn't a
ton of new housing coming into the market.

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djrogers
tldr; In a neighborhood with no open space for new housing, existing housing
must be torn down in order to build new housing.

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jhull
more like: dr; that is not at all what the article is about.

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calbear81
TLDR; H4H, in an effort to grow their public profile, took a federal grant to
develop affordable housing in an ill-suited neighborhood with low vacancy
rates which in turn forced them to acquire properties from a shady landlord
who may have illegally pressured tenants to vacate. Pressure to meet the grant
requirements led to disregard of objections raised by concerned parties within
the group.

