UHAB
| Abbreviation | UHAB |
|---|---|
| Motto | Co-ops for Communities |
| Formation | 1974 |
| Type | Non-profit organization |
| Purpose | Supports self-help housing and community building in low-income neighborhoods by training, organizing, developing, and assisting resident-controlled limited-equity housing cooperatives. |
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
|
Region served
|
Brooklyn, Manhattan, Bronx, United States |
|
Membership
|
1,600 HDFCs |
|
Executive Director
|
Andrew Reicher (1979-present) |
| Affiliations | Partnership for Affordable Housing (PPAH), New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council (RBSCC), The Housing Partnership Development Corp., Lower East Side Peoples' Credit Union, Cooperators United for Mitchell Lama |
|
Budget
|
$5.4 Million |
|
Staff
|
65 |
| Website | www.uhab.org |
The Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, or UHAB, is a non-profit organization in New York City that helps create and support self-help housing. UHAB works with residents to acquire, rehabilitate and manage their apartments. In the process the organization creates and helps sustain high-quality limited-equity housing cooperatives that are to remain affordable, in perpetuity, to people of low and middle-income.
In 1974 UHAB started as a resident advocacy and training group serving residents in foreclosed or abandoned properties in New York City. Since then, UHAB has evolved from a largely assistance and training-focused organization into one of the city's leading developers of affordable housing.
Today, UHAB develops co-ops and also supports, trains and assists residents in many low-income Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC)s, citywide.
Between 1970 and 1978, New York City lost an average of 3,274 apartments per month as a wave of abandonment and arson swept the city from the Bronx to Brooklyn. By 1976, the city owned 4,611 multifamily buildings that had formerly been rental units, and the unwitting landlord stood to take on several thousand more before the crisis was over.
The Very Reverend James P. Morton, or Dean Morton, a progressive minister working at St. John the Divine, hosted a symposium in fall of 1972. There, led by I.Donald Terner, an urban studies professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the idea of creating viable form of urban homesteading for the city's beleaguered renters was born.
UHAB was founded in April 1974.
UHAB is not a government agency, but a private not-for-profit organization that contracts with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to perform services such as training of tenants living in certain buildings and co-ops.
One of the larger city contracts is administration of the city's Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program. TIL assists organized tenant associations in City-owned buildings to develop economically self-sufficient low-income cooperatives where tenants purchase their apartments for $250. Tenants in the TIL program have expressed interest and ability to self-manage their building for a number of years before it is converted legally into a co-op.
UHAB also participates as a developer in New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development's Third Party Transfer program and receives loans from HPD to rehabilitate buildings.
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