City To Turn 'Cluster' Shelters Into Affordable Apartments

THE BRONX, NY — New York City officials will take steps turn run-down apartments used to house homeless people into permanently affordable apartments, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday. The city will use public money to help nonprofit groups buy the so-called cluster sites or use eminent domain to force them from the hands of landlords, de Blasio said.

The proposal — the first of its kind in city history, the mayor said — represents a two-pronged policy supporting de Blasio's goals of boosting the city's affordable housing stock and ending the use of cluster sites, which critics say are dangerous and expensive.

The city currently rents about 2,300 privately owned apartments to shelter homeless families, paying rent and additional costs for supportive services. Now it wants to turn about 1,100 apartments in 25 to 30 buildings, mostly in the Bronx, into permanent rent-stablized homes.

By next year, the city will negotiate with landlords to sell those buildings to nonprofit groups or initiate court proceedings to take them through eminent domain if the owners don't cooperate, de Blasio said.

Officials have not yet finalized the list of buildings. But the 800 homeless families living in them will get the chance to stay for good after they're acquired and renovated, possibly with help paying rent, officials said.

"It is unquestionably a new idea and a bold idea, but it is a necessary idea, and we will do wahtever it takes to turn the tide on homelessness," de Blasio said at a news conference Tuesday in the Bronx.

De Blasio refused to estimate how much the city could pay for the buildings, saying disclosing prices could hurt negotiations. The money, however much, will come from future city capital budgets, Budget Director Dean Fuleihan said.

De Blasio pledged earlier this year to end the 17-year-old cluster program as part of a plan to reduce the homeless population. There were more than 3,600 apartments in the program at its height in 2016. Since then the city has left 1,000 of them and turned another 300 into state-certified shelters, said Steven Banks, the city's social services commissioner.

Cluster apartments have proven controversial, expensive and dangerous. In 2015, the city Department of Investigation found 223 building violations for rodents, locked exits and other unsafe conditions at five cluster buildings it reviewed. On average the city was paying more than $2,400 a month for cluster apartments in neighborhoods where the typical market rent was about $1,200, the DoI found.

Tahisha Fredericks said her family dealt with poor security and failing electricity in the Bronx cluster apartment where they used to live.

"There were times where the ceiling was falling in on us," said Fredericks, who was working two jobs at the time. "It would rain down on us because the water would accumulate as we're getting up, getting ready for work and getting ready for school. But we did what we could."

Converting the cluster buildings supports de Blasio's goal to build or preserve 300,000 affordable homes by 2026, and his plan to open 90 new homeless shelters throughout the city to help staunch the growth of New York's homeless population. Progress toward the latter goal has been slow — the city is on track to have opened as few as 11 of the 20 shelters it planned to have in place by March 2018, The New York Times reported.

Advocates praised the cluster-conversion plan as a long-overdue step to attack the city's affordable housing andd homelessness crises simultaneously.

"As we’ve maintained, the only true fix to combat homelessness lies with the preservation and creation of long term, affordable housing," Seymour W. James Jr., the attorney-in-chief of the Legal Aid Society, said in a city news release. James praised de Blasio "for transforming cluster site housing into permanent affordable housing and using eminent domain to ensure that the taxpayers do not reward slumlords more than they have already been rewarded."

The plan may face opposition from landlords unwilling to sell. But city officials say they have a strong legal case for eminent domain, in which the government must show that taking private property would serve a public purpose.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at a news conference in 2015. Photo by Julie Jacobson-Pool/Getty Images)