Housing Abandonment and New York City's Response

Abstract

Since 1978, New York City has taken ownership of buildings where the private sector had been unable to provide decent, affordable housing for low- and moderate-income tenants. The City managed this dilapidated housing stock and created programs to dispose of it to the private for-profit and non-profit sector. This article reviews and evaluates the debate surrounding the management and disposition of housing that had been abandoned by the private sector. In focuses, in particular, on the Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Program (NEP). NEP was instituted in New York City in the mid-1990s to return abandoned housing to the private sector. NEP replaced the Private Ownership and Management Program (POMP), which had been ended after numerous complaints regarding high eviction rates, high rents and poor management. This article analyzes the structure of NEP in an attempt to predict whether it would be able to avoid the problems of its predecessor. The article finds that NEP incorporated some lessons learned from POMP, but those lessons may not have been sufficient to help NEP achieve its stated goals.

Keywords: housing policy, privatization, New York City, abandonment, in rem