How Habitat for Humanity Went to Brooklyn and Poor Families Lost Their Homes | Hacker News Reader

How Habitat for Humanity Went to Brooklyn and Poor Families Lost Their Homes

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87 pointsjeo123436 comments

The central HFH model is sound and successful even if some affiliates are straying from it and getting into trouble.

A common misconception is that HFH hands out houses to poor people. HUD does that and it doesn't really work. You end up with "the projects", a swath of bad hood, buildings stripped of copper before they're completed, and a bigger disaster.

Instead, HFH involves the community, especially and centrally the prospective home owners, who are screened for having steady jobs, existing contributions to their community, and other indicators. Nobody could buy a house on one minimum wage income or even two, no matter their character, and that's the niche filled. The owners participate in the chapter via "sweat equity", where they might help with others' houses in addition to their own, alongside volunteers from the community. They buy the house from HFH with a low-interest mortgage; it's not a gift. Owners are also monitored and advised afterwards, and they often continue to hang around chapters helping the next batch. The result is pride in their home, bonds with the chapter, and an improved neighborhood.

I have no clue what the NYC chapter was thinking but it doesn't meet the core values, but we should concede inner city chapters have different challenges than suburban or rural ones.

Source: former chapter board member

So the NYC HFH idea was indeed to use millions of federal money to kick out low-income families to the street in order to build houses for families who are better off than them? Damn, that's some ice cold ruthlessness.

Most of your comment is in defense of HFH but it doesn't address anything about what was actually happening in NYC.

Many of those who bought Habitat’s renovated homes earned around $50,000 a year

The idea was to have Katz do the renovation work on Madison Street, instead of the charity doing it itself.

The chapters are largely independent, so I have no information or defense re NYC.

But yes, total plug there. The model, the national organization (unless they somehow got involved with NYC debacle?), and most of the chapters are organizations largely successful and worthy of people's volunteering and donation. The article was lacking background there. The chapters all need the HN kind of people helping out.

Seems like the model doesn't scale well. Hard to do this is very large cities where there isn't much white space to build. The city is so crowded that everything existing is already lived in, and zoning, politics and regulation make it very cost-prohibitive to build cheap housing.

True, the model is low and slow. I believe rehabs of degrading row houses are more common in the urban chapters than scratch built: they buy, fix up, and sell to homeowners, involving them and community as my comment above. But yeah, the model doesn't work well for dense housing like condos so they aim elsewhere.

If you want to house huge numbers of people quickly, this is not the way to go maybe.

White space?

It means 'empty areas', presumably

Unbuilt land.

What's HUD?

Department of Housing and Urban Development.

There is no sham bigger than affordable housing. While ordinary folks have certain notions about what is a "housing" and what is "affordable" in government world these are terms that a defined in ways we cant comprehend.

Town admin demolished homeless shelter in Sunnyvale to build affordable housing. So many homeless people then had to find shelter in the parks. My friends who make north of 100K a year are in affordable housing units across the city. Staying in $700 p.m. for 2 bedroom apartments with utilities paid. The trick was to show "evidence of being" poor.

In short more needy people on street while the better off people live even better.

That's a ridiculous assertion.

This story has nothing to do with affordable housing, it's about "big charity" acting to advance the agenda of the Executive Director instead of the mission and the normal corruption associated with scumbag slumlords.

The story has some issues in other areas as well. The lady featured qualifies for public assistance, has children and is homeless 5 years later? There is more to that story.

Elsewhere in the bay area, affordable housing has income caps for a household. It appears either that Sunnyvale is an aberration for have few restrictions or these caps are routinely circumvented. Thanks for the information.

The income limit in Sunnyvale for a single person is just a hair under $60k.

http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/CDD/Housing/BMR%...

Those income caps are a sham. You can always pay a poor man to apply and then stay with that poor person. Also X can add Y to his agreement and X can later leave.

This is the problem with government aid programs. The more money there is, the more distorted it gets. At least that's the way it seems. It seems that it's very difficult to effectively administer a large-scale aid program. They all end up corrupting the market - like this NYC story, or like your story. It erodes the confidence in government and results in people like Donald Trump getting broad support.

Please don't try to take a short cut like this. The way to cut wasteful and harmful government spending is to cut wasteful and harmful government spending. Cutting government income or budget with the hope of it making a dent in wasteful spending is incredible stupid today as it was when Reagan proposed that we "starve the beast".

There are no short cuts. We can't cut income and automatically assume bad spending will be the only thing that hurts. Indeed, we can't be sure if spending we consider bad will hurt at all. I think even Trump understand this idea.

Cutting government funding is the best way to make government agencies compete for resources. The gigantic debt is what keeping current government from single payer healthcare or free college or waging more needless wars. That is a good thing.

Affordable housing is a misnomer. Definitionally: afford: 'To have the financial means for'.

Affordable housing in London, UK.

Does it cost 3.5x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a single person? ;-) Does it cost 6x the minimum/living wage, affordable to a couple? Not there yet.

Instead it costs some percentage of market rate.

Which generally ends up being 20x min wage or similar. Yes - as a person you'd need to become three, four, five times more useful before you can get this starter home.

As far as I can tell it's just trolling. It genuinely feels like those with wealth laughing at the lower classes, there's no other explanation for such a ridiculous use of language.

A Bentley does not become 'affordable' if I offer it to you for 50% off.

Even minimum wage would be a high bar to set because it doesn't feel affordable to everyone. But at the moment we're saying 'the top 10% can afford it so that's fine'.

I see mostly colleagues who rack up big bar bills complaining about how unaffordable apartments are instead of saving their money.

I see your words. Let's do some math.

Please explain to me, using a worked example, how a person earning 30,000 GBP pretax (triple minimum wage) can buy an apartment that costs 200,000 GBP (cheapest I can find anywhere apart from under Heathrow Airport).

For extra credit, work out the additional time taken for the purchase if the person buys 500 pints per year at a cost of 5 GBP per pint.

Yeah the reason people can't afford rent in London is due to expensive booze.

Saving all your money to buy a home instead of spending is losers' game.

It deprives service economy of cash, bumps home prices even more and makes everybody unhappy. So no, it's not a sound societal advice.

This is problem of supply versus demand, which can be solved by either more supply or redirected demand. And maybe by removing bad money from the economy.

Yeah! Get out there and drink more instead of saving and living within your means.

I did not say that. You did.

What do you do when something doesn't go according to plan and you have to stop into your savings?

What do you do when something doesn't go according to plan and you have to dip into your savings?

If I understood the article, Habitat for Humanity contacted some building owners and developers about acquiring several charming but rundown brownstones in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood, with the goal of renovating them and selling them to low income deserving families. The buildings were supposed to be unoccupied, but in fact seven families were evicted or paid to leave, and they ended up homeless or living in shelters. A developer was able to flip at least one building to HFH for 100% profit.

While it does sound as if a few tenants were taken advantage of, and the charity probably over paid for the properties, the whole situation doesn't seem that out of line with what has been happening for 100 years in congested New York neighborhoods. In this case, it was a "charity", but in many other cases it was for-profit ventures attempting to capitalize on the very high demand for housing.

At least the brownstones are earmarked for lower income owners who will stabilize the neighborhood and presumably not push up housing costs. That's probably a good outcome, if that's what comes to pass. Maybe HFH can help out those families somehow, perhaps offer them low cost rentals in one of the renovated properties.

Unfortunately, this rosy outcome is not necessarily what will happen. The minute a neighborhood is perceived by developers and intrepid urban warriors as the next up and coming place that's affordable, edgy, and trendy, these powerful players will descend on the place like locusts. Current owners will receive high offers to sell out, and gentrification will set in.

In my opinion, the only real solution to this kind of churning of property and displacement of low income families is to build more housing. New York can't really expand outward, but it can expand upward, and so they need to build some high rise apartments and condominiums. I'm not really sure why they're not meeting demand; perhaps New Yorkers just don't want any more congestion, and regulatory and tax structures make it prohibitive for all but the richest developers, who then are incentivized to sell or rent to the richest families, cutting the poor and moderate families out of the equation.

Your assertion that NYC is not building up is quite wrong. Just because every brownstone isn't being converted into a skyscraper doesn't mean there isn't a ton of new housing coming into the market.

tldr; In a neighborhood with no open space for new housing, existing housing must be torn down in order to build new housing.

more like: dr; that is not at all what the article is about.

TLDR; H4H, in an effort to grow their public profile, took a federal grant to develop affordable housing in an ill-suited neighborhood with low vacancy rates which in turn forced them to acquire properties from a shady landlord who may have illegally pressured tenants to vacate. Pressure to meet the grant requirements led to disregard of objections raised by concerned parties within the group.

That is the fundamental problem with Brooklyn, though. The vast majority of housing is hugely inefficient. Ugly little two-story apartment buildings where you could have a really nice 5-6 story building instead.

Lol...so true ;)

The vacant lots on which new homes were built probably qualified as "open space". Even so, this is not a proud moment for Habitat.

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