A real estate trust bought single-family homes in gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods, renovated, and rented them out at a premium. With the trust now looking to offload the assets, tenants are left in an uncertain position, feeling like homeownership is further out of reach than ever.
“Now, longtime neighborhood residents across the city, people who put up with dangerous housing conditions for decades because they had no choice, but who fought to improve their neighborhoods, finally have the best chance in decades to get public support.” Adi Talwar Three buildings in the East Village are a part of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust. CityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits. Add your voice today! The Lower East Side, 1970s.It was a short five blocks from my apartment on East 4th Street, between Avenues C and D, to my job at a local community organization in the abandoned P.S. 64 on East 9th Street, later re-named El Bohio.
The developer’s failed promise to build a glass-enclosed public plaza in front of the Barclay’s Center is a bad sign for its other pledges to the community yet to be fulfilled: Most importantly, the 877 units of affordable housing still unbuilt, advocates and officials say.
“Our elected officials are threatening hard-fought reforms designed to counteract the historic – and present – racism in law enforcement that targets my neighbors and eventually will target my son. Meanwhile, they fail to invest in our communities.”
Home prices in the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood began to tick up before then-Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to rezone 190 blocks in 2014. But affordable housing advocates and local residents say the rezoning, approved in 2016, only drove more speculators to scoop up homes, jack up prices and push out existing residents.
The MTA will add four new Metro North stations to the East Bronx as part of its Penn Station Access Initiative. The Department of City Planning is researching the best ways to develop the surrounding neighborhoods, and garnering public feedback.
Residents of low- to middle-income communities of color have resisted various neighborhood-level land use applications which they say will fuel gentrification and increase rents.
The CRA, a crucial but flawed tool intended to give communities leverage over banks, is up for reform—and though community advocates have long advocated for substantive changes to the law, they are currently worried about conservative moves to hobble it.
Three experts on neighborhood change discuss what the G word has meant for New York City, its neighborhoods and their people.
In an excerpt from a new book, Newcomers: Gentrification and Its Discontents, an up-close look at one tenant-landlord dispute shows what’s really happening around the city.
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