CUP and Beth Sorce from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) presented CUP’s Online Affordable Housing Map on ‘Brian Lehrer Live’! We took a mini-tour of NYC income demographics and housing costs and talked about the concept of ‘affordability.’ Fun!
Beth showed how UHAB — which helps lower-income tenants convert their buildings co-ops — uses the map to educate staff and clients. Let’s say UHAB was working to convert a building in East Harlem, and wanted to see which families could afford to live there. Well, they use the rent sliders to input the monthly maintenance plus mortgage payment and — voila! — it shows which income categories the building targets and how well the conversion would serve the people already living in the building and neighborhood.
Watch the show here.
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Our pals from the Planning Center at the Municipal Arts Society used the Affordable Housing Toolkit as part of the curriculum for CITI Youth — a neat program that educates high schoolers in land-use and development issues and then places them in paid internships at their local Community Boards.
MAS Planner Sideya Sherman used the workshop to stage a mock Community Board meeting. First, students picked a neighborhood (Bed-Stuy) and used the felt pieces to map income demographics there. Then they used the program patches to learn about various housing subsidy programs — from Section 8 to 421-A — and looked at which families are eligible for each.
But rather using the rent patches to look at actual rents in the area, they used them to mark rents in a hypothetical proposed development. Would the rents there be ‘affordable’ to the people who live in the neighborhood? Does that matter? The students used the data on the chart as a platform for a debate over whether the Community Board should recommend the project. Very neat!
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GOOD Magazine invited CUP and super-designer Glen Cummings of MTWTF to present the Affordable Housing Toolkit at their event featuring “projects that enhance daily life for the residents of New York City.”
We presented a little slideshow that you can look at here.
Thanks for having us!
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