Housing Update: Meet the Organizer Behind the Passage of the Tenant Protection Act

Sign up for our Mapping the Future newsletter to receive housing updates—including the latest news, statistics, tools for tenants and homeowners and affordable-rental lotteries—in your inbox weekly. Here are some of the headlines from this week’s update:

From City Limits:

Affordable homeownership was an ingredient in the prescription that brought New York City back from the dead. Now, some experts say, it is homeownership that needs saving in New York. Read more. 

Tenants of a rent-stabilized building testified in Brooklyn housing court Tuesday after filing a lawsuit against their landlord and the city’s housing department over what they allege were a lack of repairs and enforcement that has prevented them from returning home since an August 2018 fire.  Read more.

The 2019 Mayor’s Management Report, New York’s annual data dump of interesting and esoteric statistics from the city’s various agencies–dropped last Friday. Here are a few housing and homelessness-related takeaways to know. Read more. 

From Around the City:

A landlord who threatened to call ICE on their tenant was fined $17,000 by a Queens judge, likely a first in the United States, WSJ reported. The case was brought by the city Commission on Human Rights which this week, updated its guidelines to explicitly prohibit such an act by a landlord or employer.

A study released by the city’s Independent Budget Office has the mayor and homeless advocacy groups speaking the same language. The report says that the presence of a homeless shelter caused home prices to drop but advocates and the mayor say its wrong. They say it only shows a correlation between those two things. Patch has the story.

“The real estate industry never saw Weaver coming,” The Real Deal writes in their profile of Cea Weaver, the organizer staffing the Upstate Downstate Alliance. She was instrumental in negotiating the passage of this year’s Tenant Protection Act using a bold strategy, keeping Governor Andrew Cuomo on the sidelines and negotiating a deal between the Assembly and Senate. “She’s good at back-channeling with politicians,” one source told the outlet.

A proposed Kew Gardens rezoning that would allow single-family homes to be enlarged passed the city council’s land use committee, the Queens Eagle reports. The application was initially put forward by 200 families and would allow 400 homes to grow.

Development in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights has ratched up significantly in the last several years. While definitely geared toward the gentrifier-to-be, Curbed has mapped 12 of the ongoing and recently completed projects.

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeless Services held a hearing on a proposed rule to require working homeless people staying in shelters to save 30 percent of their incomes. When the proposal was introduced in late August, we reported that many advocates felt iffy.