City Council Candidates Talk Affordable Housing

Keeping Bed-Stuy housing affordable in a fast-developing market was the dominant theme at Monday night’s candidate forum at Restoration Plaza, hosted by the The Bedford-Stuyvesant Real Estate Board.

BSREB convened the candidates for the City Council's 36th District seat, including District Leader Robert E. Cornegy, Jr., Rev. Kirsten John Foy, Akiel Taylor, Rev. Conrad B. Tillard, Rev. Robert M. Waterman and Reginald Sweeney, to outline their positions on real estate and housing in Bed-Stuy.

Waterman, pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, argued, the first way to help solve the affordable housing crisis is by fostering a better relationship between the community and the developers.

“The people’s voices should be heard: Community boards need to get more involved; NYCHA residents should also have input about where they want to live; and medium-income residents need also to be considered.”

Foy, pastor of Abiding Love Ministries in Brooklyn, suggested that residents who have "stayed in the community during those hard times," should be awarded with subsidies, rebates or progressive residential property tax abatements.

"Dollars from housing fines should be returned and used as a poll of money to assist struggling homeowners," he said. "We need to put more money back into the pockets of homeowners."

Cornegy, who, aside from his role as district leader, works as a legislative policy analyst for the Committees on Aging and Veterans Affairs in the New York City Council, said that he would work to ensure that current laws such as the 80/20 Program and other subsidies stay available.

The City-sponsored 80/20 Program uses tax-exempt bonds to create affordable housing for low-income tenants in generally desirable locations throughout the City. In exchange for the low-cost financing, developers must ensure that 20 percent of the apartment units are reserved for low-income tenants earning no more than 50 percent of area median income.

“The 80/20 laws are enforced loosely and developers are opting out of the program,” said Cornegy. “I will work to protect and enforce these laws that are already on the books.”

However, Sweeney, disagreed: He said the solution should come from a community collaborative effort since the “developers have never kept their word.”

“Forget about 80/20,” he said. “Instead of depending upon the developers, let’s get the community engaged in playing a part in building the type of properties they want for themselves, through programs like Habitat for Humanity that leverage the community’s sweat equity.”

Taylor, a political neophyte and, at 26 years old, the youngest of the candidates agreed with Sweeney but offered an even less encumbered (and more spirited) approach:

“If we want affordable housing stock, then we need to pool our money as a community and invest in building our own housing,” he said. “Forget the developers! We need to be our own god-d*mn developers and do what we need to do to make housing affordable. That’s all I’ve got to say!”

BSREB President Bessie Edwards posed other questions to the candidates, such as their views on a balanced approach for ensuring homeowners are able to maximize their profits on home sales while still maintain the property’s affordability for the next homeowner.

Edwards also probed the candidates’ plans for expanding real estate resources as the city loosens the reigns on ensuring subsidies are available and, most recently, proposes to use public housing community centers, parking lots and playgrounds as real estate to build more luxury housing.

“Visionary leadership understands that not everybody works on Wall Street,” said Rev. Tillard, senior pastor of the Nazarene Congregational United Church. “The truth of the matter is, public housing at one point was an entry point to a better life. Today, public housing is not serving that function any more. We have to invest the money in upgrading the quality of public housing.

“I’ve worked with [housing advocates] during a time when people bought their units. And there was a greater pride and dignity in those units. The city council member needs to be able to get inside of the housing situation and inspire hope.”