Ask a Housing Expert: What Does 50 Years of Community Development Look Like?

The Association for Neighborhood Housing & Development, or ANHD—founded in the 1970s to reclaim the growing number of burned and abandoned apartment buildings across the city— turns 50 this year. City Limits sat down with Executive Director Barika Williams to talk about that work, and what’s ahead.

The Association for Neighborhood Housing & Development, or ANHD, turns 50 this year. The coalition—made up of dozens of community groups across the five boroughs—has a stated mission of building “community power to win affordable housing and thriving, equitable neighborhoods for all New Yorkers.”

The organization also gave birth to City Limits. Now an independent nonprofit newsroom, City Limits was launched in 1976, two years after ANHD’s founding, as a means for housing organizers to communicate and share resources with one another amid the city’s fiscal crisis, as they sought to reclaim the growing number of burned and abandoned apartment buildings across the five boroughs.

“Private sector investment in New York City housing had virtually dried up, and ANHD members did what they could, with minuscule resources, to fill the void,” former City Limits editors Alyssa Katz and Jarrett Murphy wrote in a 2016 recounting of the newsroom’s history. “Like any group looking to inform and motivate members, ANHD published a newsletter. It was called City Limits.”

In the decades since, ANHD has evolved and grown; its member groups have built more than 120,000 affordable homes across the city, and the organization today has active campaigns focused on preventing displacement, pushing for equitable land use policies to benefit low-income communities and advocating for fair banking practices, among others. 

City Limits’ Executive Editor Jeanmarie Evelly recently sat down with ANHD’s Executive Director Barika Williams to hear more about the association’s history, how its mission has changed and its goals for the years ahead, as New York City faces new challenges around housing and affordability. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

City Limits: ANHD was founded in 1974. What was the origin story? 

Barika Williams: Our origin story is actually one of my favorite parts of it. Most of the time, you know, some individual leader was like, ‘I’m going to create this thing.’ And that’s not our origin story. The individuals and community members who were working on housing issues, community groups, whether they were official nonprofits or not, there were eight of those groups across the city, and they came together in a series of informal dinner meetings where they were talking about what they were doing in in the Bronx, and what somebody else was doing in Brooklyn, and what somebody else was working on in Manhattan.

And in between those conversations, they really made the decision…that they wanted something to be able to help them work together, to have combined efforts. They said, we as individuals, want some sort of community space that helps us be coordinated, that allows us to share, allows us to collaborate, and allows us to be something bigger and greater—the sum of all the pieces. And that’s how ANHD came about. So we started with, actually, what is eight of our member groups saying, ‘We want to make this other thing, to help us be able to work together.’

^{Top left: Margaret McNeill, an early president of ANHD, featured in the January 1977 issue of City Limits. Top right: A derelict building featured in the same issue. Bottom: Housing organizers in ANHD’s early years, December 1977.
(Credit: City Limits’ archives)}

CL: Could you tell me about some of the campaigns that were going on at that time? I know City Limits covered a lot of this in the early years, and I read back in our archives—this was the era of the fiscal crisis in the 1970s, and a lot of blocks being basically abandoned.

BW: It [was] both the hyperlocal and the national. So, they’re working on being able to take control of blocks or individual buildings in their neighborhoods, to be able to say, ‘We are going to get a seed grant to be able to take over and now run this individual building to rehab it. What’s the city program that we now need to create?’ Because many of them didn’t exist. 

And at the same time, we have sort of brand new federal programs and policies that are simultaneously happening at the beginning of ANHD’s origin. The creation of the Community Development Block Grant is the same year that we start. And so there’s both, how do we use and leverage and participate and engage in calling for these big federal programs, at the same time that people are doing hyperlocal work of, ‘I want to take over a building on my block.’ They were like, ‘We need heating assistance, heating oil across our buildings.’ And so we would buy bulk heating oil that then got distributed across our membership.

CL: How would you say ANHD’s mission has changed over the years? Has it? Does it feel similar to where it was in 1974?

BW: I think at our core, supporting member organizations that are working in and on community development in New York City’s marginalized neighborhoods, that has been consistent throughout. We are driven by our members, and we are connected to them—our advancement is their advancement. We’ve got to make sure all of us are sort of rising and evolving together.

I think the pieces that have changed are, as community development has gotten more complex, it means including a number of different issues and topics in ways that weren’t necessarily there 50 years ago. The bank work has been a part of it for quite some time, but definitely evolved and grown a lot. Sustainability, the role of our small businesses, thinking increasingly about how we steward our public spaces…that’s really continuing to grow and evolve as we think about the holistic elements that our members are facing, in order to really see forward movement and progress for their communities and neighborhoods.

We have always worked in marginalized communities with our members. Our mission over time, and as the city especially has changed over time, means that our role as a steward and as a voice, and a part of a movement specifically for communities that often get left out—for racial justice, for economic justice—it’s always been a part of our work, but it needs to be much more front and center, explicit and intentional.

CL: What are some of ANHD’s key accomplishments over the years?

BW: Right after our founding, alongside some of our counterparts across the country, ANHD and our members really helped win the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act [Editor’s note: this legislation, passed in 1977, was intended to address inequities in the banking system, and to spur banks to meet the credit needs of low-income communities]. We have always had a very complex understanding of what it takes to do this work, and people understood 50 years ago, the role of money and investment and stewardship that it took to sort of get this work done.

There’s a huge set of work in the ’70s and ’80s…the really piece-by-piece work of taking over and preserving abandoned and neglected buildings. It often goes unrecognized in how the city tells its story and its history and its arc. When you think about who the actors were who were still there and still investing in their communities and neighborhoods when the Bronx was burning—it’s our members, right? There are people who really dug in and said, ‘I’m going to save this building, and then I’m going to go down the block, and I’m going to do this building, and then I’m going to do this building,’ and dedicated their lives to that. 

We get to the ’90s, and this leads a little bit into the 2000s, and our members really fought against predatory lending practices. And now predatory equity is a conversation and concept that gets talked about, not just here in New York, but other places. I would specifically attribute a lot of housing being front and center on each mayoral agenda to the work that ANHD did. Back in the Koch administration, we called for what now is the first affordable housing plan that a New York City mayor did, which is now the template. 

CL: A key part of ANHD’s work is focused on “mission-driven development.” What does that look like?

BW: Mission driven development is about community nonprofit organizations whose development, management, and stewardship of their physical building assets are driven by, and grounded on, a mission and purpose for and with their communities. It connects to all sorts of these different conversations that we’re having now, be it social housing, be ‘it community controlled.’ 

It’s about who is driving what is being built and developed, who those buildings are for, and ultimately who the developers, the owners, the managers of those buildings are very much accountable to. It changes what you’re putting in the space.

Sometimes we feel like we get penalized or sort of downgraded by the city because we’re not as quote unquote ‘efficient,’ but that’s because we’re not interested in doing very templative, more cookie-cutter buildings. What folks are more invested in is figuring out how to do a complex project, like upgrading a library and then putting affordable housing on top, and recognizing that what is actually very much needed is a child care space in the neighborhood, and so how do we then incorporate that into the ground floor? 

It’s more complicated projects, but it comes from the fact that our mission-driven developers are having conversations with their local community about what kind of housing do you actually need and want.

How do we make sure that we’re creating housing that fits the needs of the New Yorkers that are in these neighborhoods and in our communities is a very different thing, and sometimes it costs us money. It’s hard to do, it’s complicated.

^{Above: ANHD members and elected officials rallying outside City Hall, 2006-20013. Courtesy of ANHD.}

CL: New York City’s housing landscape right now is different than it was in 1974, but we still have what many would call multiple crises. What would you say ANHD’s biggest priorities are now, 50 years later?

BW: We’ve had amazing wins and accomplishments and lots of challenges, and nobody can look at New York City’s housing and economic development landscape and say the job is done. So first priority and challenge is, what is the road ahead of us, and how do we collectively have the space to think about, plan for and ensure the longevity of our work in order to do that and be there for these communities. 

Another one is land use justice. As land, as where to build, as what we build, continues to be such a center of the conversation across the city, ensuring that what we’re doing is equitable—is actually addressing and meeting the needs of our most marginalized communities and New Yorkers, that we’re not planning over them, but they are planning for themselves. As New York City gets so much more expensive, I think that’s a piece that’s just increasingly resonating…that feeling like you’re getting priced out, and pushed out, is a widespread experience.

And then I would say: preservation of our really vital affordable housing stock. This is one piece where I think we would say we are concerned that New York City and New York State are maybe not focused on this the way that we hope and would want to see. There’s so much conversation, and it is important, around what we are doing new—new production, new supply. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we have spent 50 years really building up and investing in thousands of units across the city, and we cannot afford to turn away and let them fall out the bottom.

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