By Kim Velsey 2/21 2:50pm

Green Development

Arbor House, a 124-unit affordable housing complex in the Bronx, embraced green building practices.

An Arbor In the Forest: Green Affordable Housing Development Opens In the Bronx

New York City’s public housing complexes are small cities unto themselves, sealed off from the grid and flow of surrounding streets, pinwheels of bricks and concrete with scant patches of green. Built in 1956, Forest Houses, a 46-building New York City Housing Authority complex in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, is characteristic of its era. Besides the fact that the buildings top out at two stories, they do not relate to their immediate environment, let alone the environment.

More than 50 years later, affordable housing remains one of the city’s greatest challenges (if not its greatest). The architecture, on the other hand, has improved considerably. Arbor House, a privately-owned 124-unit, housing complex that abuts Forest Houses, opened today at 770 East 166th Street. It boasts not only energy-efficient features and a living green wall, but also a 10,000 square foot hydroponic rooftop farm. Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/04/12 8:15pm

Troubling Developments

Housing, housing everywhere. (Courtesy NYCHA)

With Public Housing Under Attack, Can An Ex-Lehman Banker Save New York’s Last Affordable Apartments?

Stepping off the elevator on the 12th floor of 250 Broadway, you pass by a dozen  photographs of idyllic, almost bucolic housing projects. The dogwoods are in bloom, matching the pink matting within the frames. That the pictures are a bit faded only adds to the utopianism of the scenes: families frolic in green grass courtyards, the sun is always shining.

These days, the picture is far less rosy: Apartments are overcome with toxic black mold, riven with cavernous leaks, overrun with rats, sometimes all three and then some. Repairs? Fuggetaboutit. Those will be years away. And that’s just inside; outside, it’s a war zone.

Or so the city’s tabloids would have you believe.

But the Housing Authority—or NYCHA, as almost everyone calls it, pronouncing it like some bureaucratic sneeze—represents much more than those run-down apartments we read about, of which there are fewer than the coverage suggests. Read More

By Eliot Brown 5/14/09 3:39pm

Council Members Upset Over Bloomberg Pick to Head Housing Authority

Six months after New York City Housing Authority chairman Tino Hernandez said he was leaving, Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday afternoon announced his replacement, John Rhea, an executive at Barclays. The appointment immediately drew criticism from many in the City Council.
It came because Rhea has no experience in housing. A few hours after his Read More

By Eliot Brown 11/21/08 4:30pm

City Housing Authority Chief Hernandez Leaving for Nonprofit

Tino Hernandez, chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, is leaving his position to head up a drug treatment center, Samaritan Village. He and Mayor Bloomberg announced the news in the mayor’s weekly radio show, and the mayor said there will be a national search to find his replacement. From The Observer’s Read More

By Staff 3/23/06 3:57pm

City Limits

Public housing residents are either unhappy or uninformed. The New York City Housing Authority is raising its fees, but many aren’t even aware.

The NYCHA posted the four-page announcement in each lobby, but residents claim the papers were either torn down or unnoticeable. The information was also published in the NYCHA monthly newspaper, which Read More