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.
HHAP Approves Funding for 11 Supportive Housing Projects
Nov.07.2018
The New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance’s Homeless Housing Assistance Program (HHAP) approved capital funding for eleven supportive housing projects, totaling $41 million during its first meeting of the fiscal year. About two thirds of the annual available HHAP allocation is now committed, due to the unprecedented demand for supportive housing projects, fueled in large part by the Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative (ESSHI). Over $75 million in requests are lined up for the remaining $22 million in HHAP, making it probable that these funds will be exhausted by the next meeting in December.
Nine of the eleven projects that recieved this funding have already secured ESSHI grants and ten of the eleven awards were won by Network members. These projects will provide supportive housing for 276 individuals and families struggling with a wide range of life challenges that resulted in their homelessness. This includes trauma experienced by veterans as well as people escaping domestic violence. These awards cover the state from Niagara County in the west to Suffolk County in the East.
Here is the list of awardees:
St. Catherine's Center for Children, Inc., Albany County - $5.6 million
20 permanent supportive housing units
Rehabilitation Support Services, Inc., Albany County - $2.5 million
10 units of permanent supportive housing
Albany Housing Coalition, Albany County - $1.8 million
9 units of permanent supportive housing
New Destiny Housing Corporation, Bronx County - $5.7 million
37 units of permanent supportive housing
Unique People Services, Inc., Bronx County - $5.5 million
55 units of permanent supportive housing
CAMBA Housing Ventures, Bronx County - $7.5 million
87 units of permanent supportive housing
Odyssey House, New York County - $1.6 million
15 units of permanent supportive
YWCA of Niagara Frontier Inc., Niagara County - $1.4 million
8 units of permanent supportive housing
Finger Lakes United Cerebral Palsy, Inc., Ontario County - $1.9 million
9 units of permanent supportive housing
Mercy Haven, Suffolk County - $3.2 million
8 units of permanent supportive
Lakeview Health Service, Inc., Tompkins County - $3.7 million
18 units of permanent supportive housing
Congratulations to all the awardees!
Homeless Housing and Assistance Program
Oct.05.2018
Enacted into law by the New York State legislature in 1983, the Homeless Housing and Assistance Program (HHAP) was the first program in the country to target substantial financial resources for the development of homeless housing. Administered by the New York State Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance (OTDA), HHAP provides capital grants and loans for the acquisition, construction or rehabilitation of housing for persons who are homeless and are unable to secure adequate housing without special assistance.
The NYC Acquisition Fund
Oct.04.2018
As anyone who develops supportive housing these days knows, acquiring a site is half the battle. It’s difficult to imagine now, twelve years into the NYC Acquisition Fund, how the supportive housing community would have fared without it.
The NYC Acquisition Fund (the Fund) was spearheaded by Shaun Donovan, then HPD Commissioner, in 2006, along with LISC, Enterprise, Forsyth Street, and the Rockefeller Foundation. It addressed a growing need to provide early stage capital to developers to acquire sites for affordable and supportive housing. In the eighties and nineties, when supportive housing was born in New York, dilapidated SROs abounded and tax-foreclosed properties could be transferred to nonprofits for a dollar, but by 2006 these options had dried up and nonprofits were competing in the marketplace for privately owned sites.
One of the best features of the Fund is that it provides loans at 130% of the property’s value, allowing nonprofits to have additional capital for predevelopment expenses. Many banks stay away from these loans because of their risky nature, but defaults are almost unheard of with the Fund because of close collaboration with government partners, who are engaged in all aspects of the deal at each stage.
“The Fund’s structure was novel,” says Brian Segel, senior vice president at Forsyth Street. Assembling capital from public and private philanthropic sources allowed for flexibility and a variety of risk appetites.
Since its inception, the Fund has enabled the creation of 24 supportive housing residences, serving 1,701 special needs tenants and providing an additional 952 affordable apartments for the community.
Judi Kende, vice president and New York market leader, Enterprise Community Partners notes that in addition to providing much-need affordable homes, the Fund “enables mission-driven, nonprofit and minority and women-owned enterprises to compete with market-rate developers. It is a testament to what can be accomplished when private and public partners come together to improve the lives of New Yorkers”
According to Sam Marks, executive director of LISC NYC, the Fund is “designed to share risk across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors, has proven incredibly flexible, and continues even today to innovate in response to the city’s evolving challenges and strategic priorities.”
Medicaid Redesign Team - Using state medicaid dollars for supportive housing
Oct.01.2018
In 2012, as part of the state’s comprehensive strategy to reduce costs and improve care of the state’s Medicaid program, the Department of Health established the Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) Supportive Housing Program. This was the first time in the country, a state used Medicaid funding from the state’s Medicaid cap to fund supportive housing.
NYS Department of Health (DOH) established a $75 million annual commitment to expand supportive housing for high cost/high need Medicaid recipients and the state Legislature adopted and funded the state’s first ever MRT Supportive Housing Program to provide service funding, rent subsidies and capital dollars to create supportive housing for high-cost Medicaid recipients.
Since its inception in 2012, the program has continued to grow with state general fund dollars from $75 million in 2012 to $107 million today. The financial support for this program comes solely from funding under the State’s Medicaid cap within DOH’s general fund budget. This funding has supported supportive housing capital programs, services and operating funding for both supportive and long term care programs, nine pilot programs to support potential interventions to reduce Medicaid costs and tracking and evaluation programs.
To date, 53 congregate supportive housing projects with approximately 1,907 units of supportive housing have been funded with a portion of the resources coming from the MRT Supportive Housing Program. In each of these projects MRT funding constituted part of the projects’ overall funding, blending MRT funds with other state and/or local resources.
The MRT program also funds 3,117 scattered site supported housing units across the state for formerly homeless individuals struggling with either mental illness, substance use disorders, HIV/AIDS, or other chronic medical conditions, or those who are transitioning from an institutional setting throughout New York State Since 2012, over 12,000 individuals have been served.
Read profiles of the first two supportive housing projects created with MRT Supportive Housing Capital, Son House Apartments in Rochester and Creston Avenue Apartments in the Bronx.
Click here to see State Medicaid Director and leader of the MRT, former Medicaid Director, Jason Helgerson, discuss the program at our 2012 Annual Conference.
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.
Round three ESSHI Conditional Awards Announced
Sep.11.2018
Governor Cuomo announced the third round of conditional awards for the Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative (ESSHI) yesterday. Awards went to 116 nonprofit agencies, totaling 182 projects across the state.
The list of providers that received conditional awards is available here. 70% of the awards went to Network members.
These awards will provide service and operating funding for 1200 units of supportive housing. This is the third year of funding in the Governor’s 15 year commitment to develop 20,000 new units of supportive housing.
Awardees will now be able to take these ESSHI conditional awards to secure capital funding for projects.
For more information on ESSHI, please see the Network’s website.
Congratulations to all of the organizations who were successful in this round!
The Damage is in the Details of HUD’s Proposed Rent Policy Changes
Jun.08.2018
Laura Mascuch, the Network's Executive Director co-authored with CEO of Breaking Ground, Brenda Rosen, an op-ed on the impact of HUD's new rent increase proposal.
Check it out: The Damage is in the Details of HUD’s Proposed Rent Policy Changes
NYS HCR Announces 2017 Unified Funding Awards
May.17.2018
NYS Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) has announced its 2017 Unified Funding Awards. Sixteen projects include 388 units of supportive housing that have services and operating awards through the Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative. Twelve of these projects are being developed by members of the Network.
- Arbor Development will begin work on Phase II of Lamphear Court in Corning, creating 82 units of affordable housing, of which 34 units will be supportive housing serving either mental health populations or families that have experienced trauma.
- Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers’ Westminster Commons will provide 84 senior housing opportunities with comprehensive medical, support and community services. Included are 26 units of supportive housing for homeless seniors.
- Concern for Independent Living in Port Jefferson, Suffolk County will build a 77 unit building with 45 supportive housing units for veterans and individuals with mental health disorders.
- DePaul’s Perry Knitting Mill Apartments in Wyoming County will convert a vacant factory into a 48 unit complex with 34 supportive housing units serving homeless adults with mental health issues and the frail elderly.
- DePaul’s DeWitt Clinton Apartments will anchor Rome’s Erie Canal waterfront development while providing 80 units of affordable housing, with half supporting mental health populations.
- Housing Visions Unlimited’s Winston-Gaskin Apartments in Syracuse will rehabilitate 66 units of housing including 20 units of family supportive housing managed by the YWCA of Syracuse.
- Hudson River Housing’s Fallkill Commons will help revitalize Main Street in Poughkeepsie with 78 units of affordable housing. Half of the units will be supportive housing serving mental health populations.
- New Destiny in New York City will develop a Bryant Ave property in the Bronx into a 62 unit building for families and individuals, including supportive housing for 33 homeless households.
- Oswego County Opportunities will provide supportive housing to 17 homeless people in Champlain Commons, a 56 unit complex, co-developed with Rochester’s Cornerstone Group.
- Rehabilitation Support Services will develop a 20 unit infill project in Albany’s Arbor Hill. 10 of those units will be supportive, serving homeless people with serious emotional disorders.
- RUPCO’s Energy Square in Kingston will provide 7 units of housing for homeless young adults in a new, net-zero energy project.
- The YWCA of the Niagara Frontier will redevelop the North Tonawanda YWCA into a mixed use facility, including 12 supportive housing units for homeless families and a social enterprise coffee shop.
Congratulations to all of our members receiving funding in this round!
CAMBA Gardens II Brings 300 Units of Affordable and Supportive housing to Brooklyn
Apr.26.2018
City, state and private sector partners gathered on a beautiful April afternoon for the ribbon cutting of CAMBA Gardens II, a LEED Gold, 238 unit permanent, affordable and supportive housing development in the East Flatbush/Wingate neighborhood of Brooklyn. The project is built on the NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County campus in what is an exemplary partnership between a public hospital, a nonprofit community developer and community stakeholders.
“Projects like these are about our shared goals. We do this so families are not making choices between food and housing, and are able to get the health care they need,” said Ruth Anne Visnauskas, Commissioner/CEO of NYS Homes and Community Renewal.
CAMBA Inc. CEO, Joanne M. Oplustil welcomed the audience and introduced all the speakers for the program that included Commissioner Samuel D. Roberts from the NYS Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA); Dr. Dave Chokshi, Vice President and Chief population officer at the NYC Health + Hospitals; Council Member Dr. Mathieu Eugene; Deborah DeSantis, CEO of the Corporation for Supportive Housing; Victoria Rowe-Barreca from Enterprise Community Partners.; Matthew Schatz from TD Bank; Maurice Coleman from Bank of America Merrill Lynch; and Daniel J Randall from Federal Home Loan Bank of New York.
“This gathering is a testament to the efforts of all of us. When we work together there’s nothing we cannot do,” remarked Council Member Eugene.
Dr. Dave Chokshi spoke to the importance of supportive housing in providing health care to the most vulnerable New Yorkers.
“As a primary care physician, I know that housing is medicine. Supportive housing provides the stability that people need to be able to live their healthiest,” he said.
The star of the show though was Clarissa Martin, one of the supportive housing tenants who brought the crowd to tears with her story of finding her way out of homelessness to living in CAMBA Gardens II.
“Coming out of the shelter system, I wasn’t fed spiritually, mentally, or medically. They had me in a shared apartment with two active addicts…and I am in recovery,” she told the audience. “Being here is like a bridge back to my life. That’s what it is for me.” she added.
CAMBA Inc.'s on-site staff works with all residents to develop customized service plans for independent living skills training, financial literacy, job readiness, substance abuse, and group social, cultural, and sporting events. Other services such as case management, supportive counseling, coordination of health care and education, nutrition and fitness classes, recreational/family activities, and computer training are also available to all tenants and are funded by the New York State Office of Mental Health, New York City Human Resources Administration, HIV/AIDS Services Administration, and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
The project came together through a mix of private and public funding provided by NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal, NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, NYS Homeless Housing Assistance Corporation, New York City Council Member Dr. Mathieu Eugene, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, NYS Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, TD Bank, the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York and the New York State Research and Development Authority.
CAMBA Gardens II was designed by Dattner Architects and the contractor was Bruno Frustaci Contracting, Inc.
In the News: CAMBA Debuts $100M Brooklyn Affordable Housing