New York, NY – Following approval by its Board of Directors at a meeting on June 5, the New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC) announced plans to issue up to $838 million in multi-family housing revenue bonds and provide more than $321 million in additional financing to fund the new construction and preservation of 5,120 affordable homes across 19 developments in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan.
Of the 19, three are preservation developments which will ensure the continued affordability of 1,518 homes. These include Masaryk Towers, a 1,109-unit Mitchell-Lama cooperative that provides an important source of affordable homeownership on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Financed under the Mitchell-Lama Reinvestment Program, this project reflects the City’s renewed commitment under Housing New York 2.0 to preserve the last of our remaining Mitchell-Lama housing stock.
“The financing actions approved by the HDC Board today will support the creation and preservation of more than 5,100 affordable homes, including much-needed supportive housing for seniors and the formerly homeless,” said HDC President Eric Enderlin. “These dynamic projects demonstrate the continued importance of resources such as private activity bonds and housing tax credits to combat the affordability crisis in New York City and throughout the nation.”
"To achieve the accelerated and expanded goals of the Mayor’s housing plan, we’ve primed our city’s affordable housing engine with new policies, programs, and investments. The actions taken by the HDC Board will provide critical financing for more than 5,100 affordable homes across the city, and help jumpstart our new Neighborhood Pillars program through additional resources for the New York Acquisition Loan Fund,” said HDC Chairwoman Maria Torres-Springer. “I would like to thank my fellow board members, the hard-working HDC team, and all our project partners for advancing innovative solutions to our city’s housing crisis.”
The remaining 16 are new construction developments which will create 3,602 new affordable homes. Of these projects, 9 will be financed under HDC’s Extremely Low & Low-Income Affordability (ELLA) Program, 5 under HDC’s Mix & Match Program and 2 under HDC’s Mixed-Middle Income Program (M2). In keeping with the Administration’s increased commitment to senior housing in Housing New York 2.0, these developments notably include two affordable supportive and senior housing projects:
- 121 senior apartments in the Concourse Village section of the Bronx will be co-developed by Volunteers of America for Greater New York (VOA-GNY) and Robert Sanborn Development, with supportive services provided by VOA-GNY; and
- 158 new supportive housing units, including 48 for formerly homeless seniors, in the Jamaica section of Queens will be co-developed by Fifth Avenue Committee, Northeastern Conference Corporation of Seventh Day Adventists, and Mega Development, with on-site services provided by the Hellenic American Neighborhood Action Committee (HANAC).
HDC’s Board of Directors also approved two new proposals which aim to combat rapid turnover of unregulated and rent stabilized buildings by bringing opportunity to non-profit and mission-driven organizations that are best positioned to identify buildings most at risk. The first is the approval of HDC’s new Neighborhood Pillars Loan Program which will make available up to $100 million to aid in the financing, acquisition and moderate rehabilitation of existing affordable buildings that have received no previous City investment. The second is a proposal to use the Corporation’s unrestricted reserves to make an interest-only loan to the New York City Acquisition Fund (NYCAF) of up to $15 million in order to facilitate an increase in the volume of loans generated by NYCAF. Both of these proposals support the Neighborhood Pillars initiative, another priority of the recently expanded Housing New York 2.0 plan which aims to achieve the creation or preservation of 300,000 affordable homes by 2026.
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The New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC) is the nation’s largest municipal Housing Finance Agency and is charged with helping to finance the creation or preservation of affordable housing under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Housing New York plan. Since 2003, HDC has financed more than 140,000 housing units using over $20.2 billion in bonds and other debt obligations, and provided in excess of $1.8 billion in subsidy from corporate reserves. HDC ranks among the nation’s top issuers of mortgage revenue bonds for affordable multi-family housing on Thomson Reuter’s annual list of multi-family bond issuers. In each of the last five consecutive years, HDC’s annual bond issuance has surpassed $1.3 billion. For additional information, visit: http://www.nychdc.com
