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The Public Housing Preservation Trust, created in 2022, announced the closing of a $607 million deal to renovate over 1,000 apartments at Brooklyn’s Nostrand Houses. It’s the first project financed through the Trust.
On Wednesday, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) announced the closing for a $607 million comprehensive rehabilitation of Nostrand Houses, located in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood.
The plans at Nostrand Houses, which aim to “address decades of capital needs” across over 1,000 apartments, are the first to be financed through the city’s Public Housing Preservation Trust, a public benefit corporation created in 2022 to unlock repair funds for public housing that NYCHA can’t access on its own.
City agencies plan to spend the $607 million on fully rehabilitating all 1,148 apartments across Nostrand’s 16 residential buildings, which about 2,000 residents call home.
“We’re talking about six phases of construction over five years that’s going to begin this fall,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a press conference announcing the closing on Wednesday.
“We’re doing about two buildings at a time at each phase,” added Deputy Housing Mayor Leila Bozorg, who said that the majority of tenants will be temporarily relocated to other apartments within the development during construction, while “some will be happening off site.”
Renovations will include new kitchens and bathrooms, improved heating and cooling systems, new elevators, lead and mold remediation and other improvements.
“We expect to be able to deliver the project on time,” Bozorg said, adding “so much this relies on the deep work that the Trust and NYCHA has done with residents—some of whom have already been starting to relocate to make that first phase possible.” The project is expected to be completed by the spring of 2030.
As federal funding for traditional public housing continues to dwindle, the city’s housing authority—which oversees hundreds of developments that house over 500,000 residents—continues to grapple over how to secure direly needed resources to repair and modernize its housing stock.
Two housing initiatives, the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) program and the Trust, were created to help bring in more of that needed money—and under both, the housing authority can access a much larger federal subsidy. The Trust can also issue bonds to raise funding, something NYCHA can’t do, while PACT brings in private developers to pay for and carry out repairs.
Residents of Nostrand Houses were the first to participate in a vote over which of those programs their development should join, and also had the option to remain as traditional public housing. In the first of its kind vote—which was held in December 2023, and by law required at least 20 percent of heads of households to participate—the Trust had garnered the most support, with 424 of 759 votes.
At Wednesday’s announcement, one 80-year-old resident named Larisa expressed feeling excited about the upcoming renovations, but also concerned about the temporary moves.
She told City Limits that she’s lived in her apartment at Nostrand Houses for more than 25 years, and worries about moving furniture and other things she says she’s collected “over decades.”
“I’m glad for the new apartment,” she said. “But I worry that it’s a long time, and I’m not sure I’ll come back to the apartment.”
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