Our Work
Developing and Preserving Affordable Housing
ANHD’s program and policy work are centered on promoting a progressive, comprehensive housing agenda for New York City’s neighborhoods. Much of our focus is on the creation and improvement of publically-funded housing programs and initiatives which address affordable housing and community development priorities of our members’ neighborhoods.
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Supporting and Strengthening Community-based Development
ANHD works to improve city housing development policy by educating policy makers, elected officials and funders about the strengths of neighborhood-based nonprofit housing developers.
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Preserving at-risk Section 8 Housing
Section 8 projects are a key source of affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods, where many of these buildings are at risk of failing or opting out of the subsidy programs that keep them affordable. ANHD – in a joint project with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), provides data, research, organizing skills and other technical support to our member organizations and citywide groups to fuel their work to preserve federally subsidized Section 8 properties.
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Strengthening Community Organizing
ANHD’s policy work is rooted in and strengthened by grassroots organizing in neighborhoods around the city. Through direct funding and capacity building programs, our members are able to organize in their own neighborhoods as well as increase community residents’ ability to influence city-wide policy on housing issues.
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Initiative for Neighborhood and Citywide Organizing
ANHD’s Initiative for Neighborhood and Citywide Organizing (INCO) is a funding and capacity-building program that has become a national model of how to catalyze and support high-impact community organizing.
INCO is a partnership with the Neighborhood Opportunities Fund (NOF), a local donors’ collaborative which provides $50,000 per year for 15 groups to support intensive capacity-building assistance and policy advocacy coordination provided by ANHD.
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Combating Predatory Equity
ANHD was the first to analyze and sound the alarm about predatory equity: the multifamily version of subprime mortgage abuses in our neighborhoods. During the peak of the recent real estate boom, speculative owners backed by private equity investors purchased some 100,000 affordable apartment units.
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Promoting Bank Reinvestment and Responsible Lending
ANHD works to hold banks accountable to low-income New Yorkers through the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) by providing local communities with the resources they need to ensure banks are responsive to their credit needs.
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Campaigning for Permanent Affordability
Most current affordable housing programs only require temporary affordability, often expiring in less then 30 years. This is a clearly inefficient use of public subsidy, and contradicts Mayor Bloomberg’s call in his PlaNYC 2030, to build infrastructure that will support the one million new residents expected in NYC by 2030. Yet, most of the housing being build under the Mayor’s ambitious New Housing Marketplace plan will have lost its affordability by 2030.
Irregardless, ANHD continues to maintain a commitment to deep affordability, resulting in a major policy victory in 2010 when the city announced that over 3,019 new units will be permanently affordable. All of these units are being built on city owned or controlled land. The recognition that development on public land should trigger permanent affordability is an important first step toward ANHD’s overall goal. The task before us remains to formalize this commitment into a consistent, comprehensive policy.
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Expanding Public Resources
ANHD advocates for public resources for the affordable housing movement. We recently directed a successful campaign to win re-funding of a $1.5 million City Council program, the Housing Preservation Initiative (HPI). This ANHD-initiated program provides $60,000 each to 25 groups for housing preservation organizing in the city’s most disadvantaged areas.
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New York Mortgage Coalition
ANHD is proud to sponsor the New York Mortgage Coalition, a unique collaboration of nonprofit agencies and major lenders working together to help low- and moderate- income families become first-time home-buyers. Given the ongoing wave of foreclosures, the Coalition’s work has expanded to include foreclosure prevention and neighborhood stabilization.
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