Newsfeed Category: Member News

DePaul’s Skybird Landing Apartments Opens Doors to Residents

Apr.17.2019

On March 14th, city, county, and state officials joined Network member DePaul to celebrate the opening of the Skybird Landing Apartments in Geneseo, a National Historic Landmark Village in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Named to honor Geneseo’s National Warplane Museum, Skybird Landing consists of 60 affordable and supportive one- and two-bedroom apartments spread across six new buildings.

“A Tree Grows on Arthur” Through Supportive Housing in the Bronx

Mar.18.2019

About 100 people gathered on March 1st under a heated tent in the Bronx to celebrate Hebrew Home at Riverdale’s groundbreaking of Arthur Avenue Apartments, the result of its second collaboration with Foxy Management. The building promises 54 supportive housing units reserved for formerly homeless or chronically medically ill residents out of a total of 176 affordable housing units dedicated to low-income older adults.

Shelly Fox, president and CEO of Foxy Management, and Jeff Fox, Executive Vice President and General Counsel for Foxy Management, welcomed attendees and introduced the special guests to the event — including Jeff Fox’s one-year-old son. This was especially symbolic given that the Fox family’s presence in the Bronx had begun four generations earlier with Shelly Fox’s father settling first in the borough, where Foxy Management is based.

Down Payment Assistance Fund for Nonprofit Developers Launches

Mar.12.2019

The Supportive Housing Network is excited to help announce the launch of the Down Payment Assistance Fund (DPAF), whose creation resulted from a multi-year collaboration among stakeholders seeking to accelerate supportive housing development in New York City. DPAF is intended to assist nonprofit developers with down payments on property, allowing them to move more rapidly into contract for privately-owned sites. The nonprofits’ ownership will ensure the long-term affordability of the housing developed with DPAF as well as provide critical social services. Eligible projects will include supportive housing residences, in which the majority of units are supportive, and affordable residences in which at least 30 percent of units are set aside as supportive.

Opportunities for Broome Brings More Supportive Housing to Downtown Binghamton

Nov.13.2018

Friends and supporters gathered October 18 to celebrate the opening of 88-90 Carroll Street in downtown Binghamton. This newest development will provide permanent supportive housing for 10 formerly homeless individuals and families, including several who have high medical needs.

“Individuals and families that come here are faced with problems, and housing is usually the first step in addressing those problems," said Mark Silvanic, CEO of Opportunities for Broome. 

Dana Greenberg and Jason Harper represented NYS Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) at the ribbon cutting and Binghamton Mayor Rich David was also in attendance to celebrate this opening with the community.

A tenant, Alonzo Harper spoke about the impact having an apartment and working with Opportunities had had on his life: “I landed another job..I actually have a better relationship with my children because I get to see them more often because I have a place… and (the people at Opportunities for Broome) have given me faith in other people. I didn’t think that anybody would fight for anybody out here.”

The building is a three story brick structure near several Opportunities redevelopment sites and offers comprehensive social services to tenants.

The project is funded by the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) under the Homeless Housing and Assistance Program (HHAP).  Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative funds the services for the 10 supportive housing units. Patricia Every was the architect and WL Kline was the contractor for this project.

Supportive Housing: The innovative model for ending chronic homelessness

Sep.17.2018

WSFSSH's Laura Jervis (left); St. Francis Friends of the Poor's Father Tom, Fathers John (center); Broadway Housing Community's Ellen Baxter (right).

Supportive housing had a number of mothers and fathers, all of whom were trying to help the most vulnerable New Yorkers — homeless people, people living with mental illness, the elderly, and those living the most marginalized lives — and who were all, simultaneously, coming to the same conclusion: to make a difference in the lives of the people they cared about, they could no longer just provide services. Somehow they would also need to figure out how to provide them with housing AND services.

It is hard to imagine now that there was no such thing as widespread homelessness in New York City before the late 70s. Sure, there were homeless people, but nothing like what happened when massive amounts of "housing of last resort," including rundown Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing and dilapidated hotels, were knocked down at an alarming rate to make room for market rate housing. Since the 60s, deinstitutionalization had meant that tens of thousands of people who had only lived in psychiatric institutions joined the ranks of other very vulnerable individuals who were living in whatever housing they could afford. As this housing disappeared, people with the least resources found themselves with nowhere to go. Suddenly there were people sleeping on the streets everywhere and elderly women pushing grocery carts with their worldly goods inside.

Ellen Baxter (second row, third from left)

Advocates across the City began fighting for the most basic forms of housing, finally winning a seminal victory in the courts with the Callahan decree in 1981 guaranteeing homeless New Yorkers a right to shelter. Meanwhile, Ellen Baxter, and Kim Hopper went into the streets to interview homeless people sleeping in public places and found that many homeless New Yorkers needed more than shelter to thrive: they also needed easy access to an array of social services.

This was the conclusion that many others were coming to experientially on their own. Laura Jervis was seeing (and abhorring) the term “bag ladies” all over the Upper West Side. Elizabeth Stetcher Trebony was seeing the same thing for elderly people in Midtown. Fathers John McVean and John Felice were ministering to poor people living in SROs in Chelsea, only to find that a huge number of them had come from living in psychiatric institutions. And Stephan Russo was seeing poor tenants on the Upper West Side lose their housing to gentrification. All of these individuals were organically moving toward the same solution to all these problems — own the housing and provide necessary services.

Stephan Russo, John Tynan, Bill Traylor, Elizabeth Trebony

Ms. Trebony, who went on to create Project FIND was the first to begin the process of buying and rehabbing an old SRO and turning it into supportive housing although completing the task of  turning the old Woodstock Hotel into supportive housing ended up taking nearly two decades. So the first pioneers to actually buy a building, rehab it and offer services to the most vulnerable were Father John McVean and Father John Felice of St. Francis Friends of the Poor.

The Fathers John ran the Thursday bread line at their church on 31st Street where they met many residents from the Aberdeen, an SRO in terrible disrepair one block away. As Father McVean did outreach to seniors at the Aberdeen, he discovered that there were also 150 deinstitutionalized people from psychiatric institutions, causing him to cobble together a group of volunteers to provide onsite psychiatric and social work services to residents. All went well with “The Aberdeen Project” until the owners decided they wanted to convert it into a tourist hotel.

With the imminent eviction of the vulnerable people with whom they had been working so closely, the Fathers John sat down one evening, each with a glass of scotch, put up their feet, and said "let’s buy our own hotel" having, of course, no idea what that entailed.

Father John Felice at signing of the NY/NY Agreement; Father John McVean (left) and Father John Felice (right)

They soon found out. With the help of friends and supporters, they found a building on East 24th Street and raised enough money to buy it. Their Provincial administration then provided the money needed for renovations, HRA, OMH and psychiatric staff from Bellevue provided on site services. So it was that on November 24th, 1980, the first St. Francis Residence opened and the first supportive housing was born.

Ms. Trebony, in the meantime, started Project FIND as part of a national demonstration project on elderly advocacy and was an early vocal opponent of the destruction of West Side SROs. In 1975, the agency obtained a management and operating lease on the Woodstock Hotel, a former luxury hotel located in the heart of Times Square that had fallen into deplorable condition with only 80 of its 320 rooms habitable. Through the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of federally funded low-income city workers in the CETA Maintenance program, Project FIND rehabilitated the building from a nearly abandoned eyesore into permanent housing for over 200 seniors. A Senior Center on the second floor of the hotel was added in 1977 which included a social service case management component. Project FIND purchased the building in 1979 but the struggle to make it fully habitable extended until 1995.

Meanwhile, Ellen Baxter was meeting with and following in the footsteps of the Fathers John. She formed a new nonprofit called the Committee for The Heights Inwood Homeless (CHIH) (now called Broadway Community Services) designed to provide a secular model that  garnered investment from every level of government.

In the early 1980s, CHIH transformed an apartment building on West 178th Street into 55 units of supportive housing finally opening in 1986. While the St. Francis residences had relied on simple financing packages, renovation of this building, known as “The Heights,” required an extremely complex combination of funding sources, including a low interest HPD Participation Loan from the city (for capital and acquisition costs), a state Special Needs Housing Act grant, private bank loans, and federal tax credits.

Ellen Baxter (left) and Tony Hannigan (third from right and above)

Operating costs for The Heights were subsidized through a new federal subsidy which provided rental support for low-income tenants. But the Heights introduced another innovation: the notion of partnering with another non-profit to provide onsite services. Those were to come from a partnership with Columbia University Community Services (CUCS) (now called the Center for Urban Community Services).

CUCS President & CEO Tony Hannigan’s story began a few years out of graduate school in 1981 when, he was tasked with a field initiative of locating vulnerable homeless single people staying in SROs — and remembers that 40% of SRO housing stock had been lost to gentrification at that time. As Ellen was working on transforming the Heights, CUCS applied to the Department of Mental Health to provide services to the tenants.

Another motivating force behind the birth of supportive housing was coming from communities’ desire to preserve and revitalize what they perceived as rapidly disappearing affordable housing. Thus, in 1981, when the West 87th Street Block Association heard that a deteriorating SRO, Capitol Hall, might be replaced with luxury housing, they approached Goddard Riverside Community Center and The Settlement Housing Fund to help preserve it. Goddard purchased the property in 1983 and started rehabbing it the following year into 202 supportive housing units.

Meanwhile, also on the Upper West Side, Laura Jervis was doing outreach to elderly people living in SROs there, having recently graduated from seminary. The now-retired West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing (WSFSSH) Executive Director witnessed first-hand the fear people had to leave their rooms and the impact of isolation on elderly communities. She formed a coalition of community groups and religious institutions from the West Side to help these individuals, and WSFSSH was born. Their first building was The Marseilles, which Laura insisted on staffing with a social worker. “It’s hard to imagine today, but having social services on-site in senior housing was a radical idea in 1980!”

Laura Jervis maintains that seniors and those who have experienced the trauma of homelessness need more than just housing — her advocacy message from the start. “Over the years, in all of our buildings, it is the sense of community that is developed by residents and staff that has been the key to the success of our mission.”

Among the most ambitious and prolific early adopters of supportive housing in the early 1980s was Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens who melded their mission of serving the most vulnerable and combined it with the Church’s significant real estate portfolio by  converting three vacant schools and a convent into 225 units of supportive housing called Caring Communities. The organization put together twelve separate funding sources to finance the project, including an HPD Participation Loan, federal Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation rental support and state Homeless Housing Assistance Program funding.

Another significant contribution from Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens was as a crucible for a generation of powerful advocates: Executive Director John Tynan had the great good fortune to have Bill Traylor, Connie Tempel, and Laura Mascuch all working for him in housing development or management.

As these buildings were opening, however, the question of who could live in them came to the forefront. Thus, in the mid-1980s, Stephan Russo of Goddard Riverside Community Center called together other early pioneers to ensure that homeless neighbors and community members were going to continue to be served in this new model of housing, leading to the now-normal 60/40 mix of individuals referred from the shelters and low income individuals from the community. The coalition became the SRO Providers Group, which then met regularly to share promising strategies and to lobby city and state government in a single, unified voice.

The SRO Providers Group evolved into the Supportive Housing Network of New York.

Unique People Services Cuts Ribbon on its First Supportive Housing Development

May.18.2018

Friends, champions and elected officials gathered on Friday May 11 to celebrate the opening of Lynn’s Place, the first supportive and affordable housing building developed by Unique People Services (UPS) in the south Bronx. Named after UPS’ founder Lynn Wonsang, the six-story complex consists of 69 units, 42 of which are supportive housing.

"Looking in front of me, I see the fruit of nearly three decades of dreaming. Dreaming that grew into a clear vision with amazing champions---- and we’d like to say thank you for your passion for our vision in making Lynn’s Place a reality," remarked Yvette B. Andre, the Executive Director of UPS at the opening ceremony.

Yvette B. Andre was joined by Ann Sullivan, Commissioner of NYS Office of Mental Health (OMH); Melissa Mark-Viverito, former NYC City Council Speaker; Assembly Member Michael Blake, NYC HPD Assistant Commissioner Emily Lehman, Hudson Housing Capital’s Sam Ganeshan; Corporation for Supportive Housing’s Kristin Miller, as well as representatives from State Senator Gustavo Rivera and City Council Members Diana Ayala and Rafael Salamanca Jr.

“Over 50% of units are dedicated to people with serious mental illnesses. This opens up their dreams,” said Commissioner Sullivan.

Melissa Mark-Viverto, who represented the neighborhood when the project broke ground, congratulated all the partners and spoke about the importance of investing tax dollars in housing for those in need.

“It is projects like this that give you faith that government is here to serve the most vulnerable. Proud that as speaker of the City Council we invested in such a worthy project,” she said.

Two of Lynn’s Place residents, Ms. Ivory and Mr. Digilio also spoke at the ceremony, expressing their gratitude for having Lynn’s Place as their new home.

“It is really hard to be homeless, especially when you’re older. I’m just really grateful to be in a place where people can see me as a person - not as someone with an illness, but just as me,” shared Ms. Ivory.

The building features a community room, a large sunken courtyard for recreational use, and a beautifully landscaped rooftop. Comprehensive on-site social services are funded by NYS Office of Mental Health (OMH).

This project was funded through the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), CSH, Hudson Housing Capital, Capital One Bank, Deutsche Bank, New York City Council and NYSERDA.

The building is designed by Urban Architectural Initiatives and Procida Construction Corporation was the contractor for the project.  Robert Sanborn Development was the developer.

Beautiful Renaissance Village Opens in Middle Island, NY

Oct.24.2017

Beautiful Renaissance Village in Middle Island, NY. Photo credit: Kimathi Witt (2017 Tenant of the Year).

On October 16th,  a beautiful, autumn day, Concern for Independent Living celebrated the opening of Renaissance Village, a 123-unit mixed-income supportive housing development in Middle Island, Suffolk County. Renaissance Village provides 50 units for homeless adults with mental health challenges who are high Medicaid users, 72 units for low-income individuals and families, and one superintendent unit.

After a warm welcome from Concern’s Executive Director and Network Board Treasurer Ralph Fasano, Gail Lynch-Bailey, President of the Middle Island Civic Association, spoke movingly about how Renaissance Village is “not only a rebirth for all the people who are starting new lives, but for those of us who have been here a long time, and awaiting a rebirth for our community.”

NYS Homes & Community Renewal (HCR) Assistant Commissioner Sean Fitzgerald was honored by Concern at the opening for the integral part he’s played in making Concern’s many supportive and affordable housing projects a success.

Other dignitaries who spoke at the opening included Commissioner Ann Marie T. Sullivan of NYS Office of Mental Health (OMH) who said “what is really successful is when individuals who are living with mental illness have the opportunity to become part of the community that will help them traverse that road of hope and recovery and that’s what you’re doing here;” Commissioner Samuel Roberts of NYS Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance (OTDA); Steven Bellone, Suffolk County Executive; Supervisor Edward P. Romaine, Town of Brookhaven; Sarah Anker, Legislator, Suffolk County; Councilman Michael Loguercio, Town of Brookhaven; Brian Loeb of Federal Home Loan Bank of New York; and Maurice Coleman of Bank of America.

Formerly underutilized land in the heart of Middle Island, Renaissance Village now features nine townhouse-style buildings; a community center with exercise room, a computer room, and ample outdoor space for residents to enjoy.

Funding for Renaissance Village was provided by HCR, OMH, Bank of America, County of Suffolk, Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, and Astoria Bank.

The development team included the law firms of Russo, Karl, Widmaier & Cordano, and Nixon Peabody, the project’s attorneys; Belfor Long Island, the general contractor; DeLaCour, Ferrara & Church, the project architect; and Betts Housing Consultants. 

Kenyon Craig, Housing Visions’ CEO, steps down after 27 years

Aug.02.2017

Kenyon Craig.

In 1994, I returned to my home town of Syracuse to help Central New York Services open the first upstate supportive housing residence. I was fortunate to have Housing Visions (HV) as a next door neighbor.  HV had been buying and rehabbing multiple properties in the area, using the fairly new Low Income Housing Tax Credit to create neighborhood change. That’s how I came to know the brilliant work of Kenyon Craig, HV’s founder.  I was fortunate to see our neighborhood change around us as these investments helped make run-down Greek Revival, Queen Anne and Arts and Crafts homes new again.  Over time, the boarded-up, dilapidated and often vacant homes of East Genesee Street have been replaced by well-maintained homes and rising property values: so much so that HV can no longer afford to develop there (not that they need to)!has been transformed. 

Housing Visions has continued to grow and innovate since those days, creating extraordinary residences like VanKeuren Square for homeless veterans or replacing an old public housing tower with beautiful garden apartments in another supportive housing development, Maple Heights.

After 27 years of success that began in a church basement in that same neighborhood Ken recently announced his retirement.  Over the years, Ken and HV developed about 1,600 units of affordable and supportive housing across New York, from Niagara Falls to Albany, from Oswego to the Pennsylvania border.  He showed me the amazing way affordable housing development can lead to community renewal.

I wish you well in retirement, Ken!

Stephan Russo Departs Goddard Riverside Community Center

Feb.24.2017

Executive Director Stephan Russo stepped down from his position at Goddard Riverside Community Center (“Goddard”) at the end of the year, succeeded by Dr. Roderick Jones, formerly the President and CEO of Grace Hill Settlement House in St. Louis, Missouri. Prior to his eight years at Grace Hill, Dr. Jones served as President and CEO of the Community Place of Greater Rochester.

Tribute to Gina Quattrochi

Jan.18.2017

Gina Quattrochi, Bailey House CEO and lifelong HIV/AIDS advocate, passed away December 13, 2016 from complications due to cancer. During the 25 years she led Bailey House, Ms. Quattrochi played a key role in transforming the organization into an innovative leader in HIV/AIDS care and supportive housing.