Outgoing shareholders could sell their units for four or five times the initial equity they invested, and pocket half of the sale. Most saliently, 2-to-11 conversion at Cadman Towers would entail a spike in sales prices. Advocates of affordable housing who have long fought to protect one of New York City’s signature low- and middle-income housing programs now worry that other Mitchell-Lama boards will follow Cadman’s lead in attempting to dismantle this important public good. This threat of semi-privatization has raised the concern of Mitchell-Lama coalitions across the city.

The process, known as “Article 2 to Article 11 conversion” in housing law parlance, would reconstitute our public, subsidized housing complex as a much more expensive, semi-private HDFC co-op. So it was alarming when, in December of 2021, our board of directors formally submitted a plan to take our building out of the Mitchell-Lama program. Subsidized by the city and state in the form of generous tax abatements and public financing opportunities, Mitchell-Lama housing was created so that families with modest earnings could afford to put down roots in the city, and so that prices would not lurch upward every time a unit turned over.

Since I moved in at Cadman Towers with my partner two years ago, I have felt exceptionally lucky to benefit from the uniquely affordable arrangement that is the New York State Mitchell-Lama program. Tobias Salinger The Lindsay Park Mitchell-Lama co-op in Williamsburg.ĬityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits.

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