Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

New York City's Community-Based Housing Movement: Achievements And Prospects, Laura Wolf-Powers

Laura Wolf-Powers

A contribution to the book about the relationship of community-based activism to planning, this paper, highlights the experience of community-based not-for-profit housing organizations in New York City and their relationship (from the 1970s through to the present) with that city’s elected officials and executive agencies. I argue that in New York City, community-based organizations have unambiguously added strategic value in the social housing arena, becoming part of the production system and governance framework for the city's affordable housing. Moreover, their political participation and advocacy have helped to bring about many of the policies that currently structure this system. Their role …