HDFC HISTORY

When Andrew Reicher, now the director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, arrived in New York in 1978, the city was riddled with substandard apartment buildings owned by landlords who were not only failing to make basic repairs but also failing to pay their taxes. The city's response was to get into the landlord business on a major scale. By reducing the grace period on unpaid real estate taxes from ten years to one, the city was able to foreclose on a staggering number of substandard buildings. "All of a sudden," Reicher recalls, "the city became a landlord of 100,000 apartments."

In years past, the conventional approach of most urban planners was to bulldoze such marginal buildings rather than try to save them. UHAB had a better idea. "We championed the self-help approach," Reicher says. "Why not let the residents take over management of these buildings? We helped turn the tide of bulldozing slums."

The main tool was education. UHAB set up a training program to teach residents how to hold co-op board meetings and elections, how to make or contract for repairs, buy insurance, draw up a budget, run a building. The goal was to get the buildings into the Tenant Interim Lease program, under which the city provides financial assistance for repairs until the co-op is up and running. The renewable 11-month leases traditionally run from three to 10 years.

At UHAB's first training session, representatives from 20 low-income buildings showed up to learn the nuts-and-bolts of how to become a successful co-op. By the end of the first year, 200 buildings were involved and a small revolution was under way.

— Bill Morris