Pratt Center for Community Development

The long-anticipated negotiations for Columbia University's Community Benefits Agreement will kick off this Friday, a necessary step for the university to gain the City Council's approval for its $7.4 billion proposed expansion into Manhattanville.

Designed to be more sophisticated than the CBAs at Atlantic Yards and the Bronx Terminal Market, this time around area City Council members and the community board formed a local development corporation to talk on behalf of the community--whatever that is--and persuaded the city's Economic Development Corporation to provide a mediator, John Bickerman. (Yes, that is his real name.) The Pratt Center for Community Development provided back-up.

Susan Russell, chief of staff for Councilman Robert Jackson and a member of the local development corporation, says the negotiations could last through the seven-month rezoning process that will begin shortly. She said the two sides will discuss how the project can provide affordable housing, jobs, health-care facilities and the like.

- Matthew Schuerman

As so often happens in New York City, affordable housing isn't always affordable. In the case of Queens West, the city's biggest new middle-income development in 30 years, this reality is particularly ironic.

The 5,000 rental apartments slated for the 24 acres on the Long Island City waterfront are targeted at families making from $60,000 to $145,000 a year. Rents at Queens West are slated to be $1,200 to $2,500 a month.

Thing is, however, most Queens residents, including civil servants like firefighters and cops, can't afford those rents, according to a recent study (PDF) from the Pratt Center for Community Development. Crain's reports this week that the study found that the median household income in Queens was $45,000 in 2005, below Queens West's minimum income requirement. For civil servants, the median income was $56,000, also below the income requirement.  read more »

These statistics seem to buck Mayor Bloomberg's declaration that Queens West would "provide much-needed housing for the real backbone of our city - our teachers, nurses, police officers."

- Tom Acitelli

A report this month by the Pratt Center for Community Development says "workforce linkages"--which seems to be another name for community benefits agreements--work, and "have not, as some have warned, driven land developers away or discouraged property investment." (PDF of report)

No mention made of the Atlantic Yards or Bronx Terminal Market community benefits agreements, however.

- Matthew Schuerman

The Pratt Center for Community Development report finds just 47 percent of units built with tax-exempt bonds administered by the state Housing Finance Agency were affordable--a percentage that went down to 28 percent last year. See full press release on our sister site The Politicker. -Matthew Schuerman

This bodes ill, I'd say, for Governor George E. Pataki as he girds for a national run.

From the AP:

A state agency that is supposed to finance the construction of affordable housing in New York has instead provided most of its money to developers building luxury homes over the past five years, according to a report to be released Thursday.

From 2000 to 2005, only 5,959 out of 12,715 total units built with funding from the state Housing Finance Agency, mostly in Manhattan, were deemed affordable in a Pratt Center for Community Development study critical of Gov. George Pataki's performance on housing issues.

A full release from the Pratt Center is after the jump.  read more »