NYC Housing Program Funds Stalled Apartments
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- The city has begun awarding affordable-housing grants under a program to relaunch projects that were stalled in the credit crunch, City Council Speaker Quinn announced Tuesday.
The first building to be selected for the $20 million pilot Housing Asset Renewal Program started going up in 2007 but stopped a year later when the developer fell behind on payments.
Now the city is paying $3 million to subsidize the construction in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens area of Brooklyn. In return, the developers will reserve the building's 46 apartments for middle-income New Yorkers who will be selected through a lottery.
"With the credit crunch leaving so many buildings empty and so many New Yorkers looking for an affordable place to live, it seemed natural to take those two problems and make them into a solution," Quinn said in a statement.
Quinn, who first proposed the program in 2009, said other similar agreements are in the pipeline.
The city Housing Preservation and Development agency has received dozens of applications, and the agency is in the process of negotiations on four of them, which would add more than 200 affordable apartments to the program.
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