Outgoing shareholders would bypass the previously regulated sales procedure, and find their own buyers on the market.ĭissolving our building’s Mitchell-Lama status would be a small but significant injustice in an already deeply unequal city. Those who had been waiting for years for a Mitchell-Lama unit would be left in limbo, since the city-run, external waiting list of prospective residents would be discarded. A two-bedroom unit at Cadman that currently costs $60,000, for example, would go for about $300,000-still a steal compared to stratospheric market rates in our neighborhood, but now out of reach for the majority of New Yorkers. Outgoing shareholders could sell their units for four or five times the initial equity they invested, and pocket half of the sale. Most saliently, 2-to-11 conversion at Cadman Towers would entail a spike in sales prices. Advocates of affordable housing who have long fought to protect one of New York City’s signature low- and middle-income housing programs now worry that other Mitchell-Lama boards will follow Cadman’s lead in attempting to dismantle this important public good. This threat of semi-privatization has raised the concern of Mitchell-Lama coalitions across the city. The process, known as “Article 2 to Article 11 conversion” in housing law parlance, would reconstitute our public, subsidized housing complex as a much more expensive, semi-private HDFC co-op. So it was alarming when, in December of 2021, our board of directors formally submitted a plan to take our building out of the Mitchell-Lama program. Subsidized by the city and state in the form of generous tax abatements and public financing opportunities, Mitchell-Lama housing was created so that families with modest earnings could afford to put down roots in the city, and so that prices would not lurch upward every time a unit turned over. Since I moved in at Cadman Towers with my partner two years ago, I have felt exceptionally lucky to benefit from the uniquely affordable arrangement that is the New York State Mitchell-Lama program. Tobias Salinger The Lindsay Park Mitchell-Lama co-op in Williamsburg.ĬityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits.

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