39e39992

Next Phase of Construction begins for Spring Creek Affordable Rental Properties

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 17:54:06 GMT

Developed in partnership with Nehemiah HDFC

(the development arm of East Brooklyn Congregations)

This phase is comprised of 240 units of low-income rental housing in 30 eight-unit buildings and is the final portion of Phase 4. Closing on construction financing occurred in December 2022 and is currently under construction. Construction will last two and a half years for the entire phase. The marketing and lease-up process of units will begin in the middle of 2024.

The project is financed under the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC) Extremely Low & Low Income Affordability (ELLA) Program. Units are affordable to households ranging from 30% of Area Median Income (AMI) to 80% AMI. Like the prior phases 4B-1 and 4B-2, the design of these octets maintains the low to mid-rise character of the Spring Creek neighborhood.

LOCATION

Brooklyn, NY

TYPE

New Construction, Multi-Family Rentals

UNITS

240

Brand New Senior Development Opens In East New York’s Spring Creek Section Next To Gateway Mall

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 16:31:35 GMT

New York City Council Member Inez Barron and New York State Assemblymember Charles Barron joined the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the New York City Housing Development Corporation, East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC), Monadnock Development, and local leaders and residents for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the Senior Building of Nehemiah Spring Creek Phase 4B-2. The Senior Building is located at 516 Schroeders Avenue in East New York and is welcoming its first residents. Rev. Dr. David K. Brawley, Co Chair of EBC, led the event, sharing the history that has driven this multi-phase development and previewing its future. Ms. Olivia Wilkins, a longtime resident of the community, a senior herself, and an EBC leader who has advocated for affordable housing for seniors, also joined in celebrated the opening.

photo: (left to right) Kirk Goodrich, President of Monadnock Development; Ms. Olivia Wilkins, Senior Resident, East Brooklyn Congregations Leader; Rev. Dr. David K. Brawley, Co Chair, EBC; New York State Assemblymember Charles Barron; New York City Council Member Inez Barron; NYC HPD Associate Commissioner Brendan McBride

“Today, we celebrate. For over 40 years, East Brooklyn Congregations has organized thousands of New Yorkers to fight for affordable housing with and for our seniors. Today, we see the transformation. We see what can be. Today, EBC commits to stand together with our partners to ensure that thousands of other seniors get the affordable housing they desperately need and deserve,” said Rev. Dr. Brawley.

Nehemiah Spring Creek Phase 4B-2 is the latest in a sprawling, multiphase partnership in East New York, Brooklyn between Nehemiah Housing Development Fund Company (an affiliate of EBC) and Monadnock Development. After four phases of building hundreds of affordable homes for sale, Phases 4B-1 and 4B-2 represent the first 400 of a proposed 1200 affordable rental units to be built over the next five years. Phase 4B-2 is comprised of 240 units of low income rental housing, 2,180 sq. ft. of community facility space, and 4,615 sq. ft. of commercial space.

“I am pleased to join in celebrating the fruits of our labor,” said City Council Member Inez Barron. “It has taken so much collaborative work to get here and it is wonderful to see, today, this tangible improvement to the community that delivers equity to the seniors in our city.”

“We see East New York on the rise here,” said New York State Assembly Member Charles Barron. “Creating homeownership opportunities in Nehemiah Spring Creek has made East New York the place to be. And now this housing, that serves our seniors, who are so deserving of the best, is giving them exactly what they deserve: our best.”

Phase 4B-2 includes 20, 4-story octets (8-unit buildings) comprising 160 units and a 7-story, 80-unit Senior Building, where the community facility and commercial space are located. Centered around Schroeders Avenue, the octets stretch out from the Senior Building, which is located on the southwest corner of Schroeders Avenue and Elton Street, bounded by the Gateway Shopping Center to the south. The octets are 148,919 sq. ft. and the Senior Building is 74,984 sq. ft., for a total project size of 223,903 sq. ft. The exteriors of the octets match the colorful brick and siding patterns of Nehemiah Spring Creek, while the Senior Building sports a multicolor brick exterior to match the adjacent mid-rises along Elton Street.

“From affordable homeownership opportunities to the 80 new senior homes we are celebrating today, the Nehemiah Spring Creek project continues to provide transformative affordable housing to the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn,” said HPD Commissioner Louise Carroll. “From day one, this administration has prioritized senior housing and we are proud to partner with HDC, EBC, Monadnock Development and our elected officials to deliver much needed affordable housing for New Yorkers who helped make our city great.”

“Thank you to all our partners for their dedication to this project, which has been decades in the making. Nehemiah Spring Creek is an expansive, multi-phased development that will revitalize the surrounding East New York neighborhood and benefit its residents for years to come,” said HDC President Eric Enderlin. “HDC is proud to be a part of this effort to provide 80 senior households with affordable and stable homes.”

The earliest work to create Nehemiah Spring Creek began in 1982, finally leading to a groundbreaking in 2008. Since then, the pace of change has been staggering with Phases 1-3 making affordable homeownership possible for thousands of qualifying New York City residents. Phase 4A has continued that effort, while 4B has begun to create affordable rental options in the community. Future phases anticipate at least an additional 800 affordable rental units. Along with the continued expansion of the Gateway Shopping Center, Nehemiah Spring Creek has completely transformed this corner of Brooklyn and created a quality of life and vibrancy that has been otherwise difficult to access for low-income New Yorkers. This is especially true when considering the options that New York City’s oldest residents would face without a building like this.

“Today’s ribbon-cutting has been decades in the making, and creates important options for housing for our seniors, who are both among the most vulnerable New Yorkers, and among the most treasured community members,” said Kirk Goodrich, President of Monadnock Development. “We are grateful to our partners at EBC, HPD, and HDC, our financial partners, and the leaders and community of East New York for sharing this important vision and making it possible!”

“Living in Redwod Senior Living has changed my life, but others deserve the opportunities afforded to me,” said Ms. Wilkins. “I will continue to fight for more AFFORDABLE senior housing in this city, because everyone deserves to spend their golden years in dignity. This building in Nehemiah Spring Creek is a symbol and example of what we can do when we recognize our obligation to our senior community, and I’m excited for the residents who will be moving in soon!”

While the application period for this building has ended, interested New Yorkers can learn about other Affordable Housing opportunities throughout the City through NYC Housing Connect ( https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/ ).

Affordable Housing Lottery Opens for 241 Units in East New York, Starting at $471 a Month

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 17:21:52 GMT

An affordable housing lottery has opened for a whopping 241 newly constructed units across a series of buildings as part of the latest phase of the Nehemiah Spring Creek development, with addresses at 389-402, 498-504, and 516 Schroeders Avenue, 127 and 129 Gateway Drive and 1111-1123 Lower Ashford Drive in East New York.

Of the affordable apartments, there are three studios, 93 one-bedroom units, 105 two-bedroom units and 13 three-bedroom units. Monthly rents start at $471 and top out at $2,096.

The lottery is set at an area median income range of 30 percent for 60 of the units, 40 percent for 24 of the units, 50 percent for another 24 of the units, 70 percent for 21 of the units, 80 percent for another 21 of the units and 90 percent for the remaining 64 units.

Eligible incomes range between $18,618 and $126,900 for households of one to seven people.

Sitting on 45 acres of former wetlands, and later landfill, the Nehemiah Spring Creek project has been in the works for many years. Nehemiah HDFC, the development offshoot of nonprofit East Brooklyn Congregations, put together the first three phases of the project; this and the next phase were developed in collaboration with Monadnock Development.

The building at 516 Schroeders Avenue, designed by SLCE Architects, is designated as senior housing. MHG Architects is behind the design of the other buildings, including 1111-1123 Lower Ashford Drive and 127 and 129 Gateway Drive.

The complex includes assigned parking spaces (for some residents), shared laundry rooms, energy-efficient appliances, common area Wi-Fi, a gymnasium, outdoor areas, security cameras and on-site resident managers.

Rendering by SLCE Architects

Applications for the affordable housing lottery must be submitted by December 31, 2020. Apply through NYC Housing Connect . To learn more about how to apply for affordable housing, read Brownstoner’s guide.

More Affordable Houses Coming To Nehemiah Spring Creek In East New York

Mon, 16 May 2016 16:05:25 GMT

The modular homes at Nehemiah Spring Creek. photo via Alexander Gorlin Architects

Last summer, the Daily News reported that the city was dragging its feet on building gas, sewer, and electric lines for the final phases of Nehemiah Spring Creek’s affordable housing development in East New York. Now, wheels are cranking into motion at the city housing agencies. Building applications have been filed for the fourth stage of the project.

On Friday, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development submitted plans for 57 single- and two-family homes. Reps from the agency tell us this phase of construction, 4A, will bring 83 one- and two-family houses to the neighborhood. They’ll rise on a far-flung lot near the southern Brooklyn coast, tucked behind the Gateway Center Mall and semi-wilderness of Spring Creek Park.

Each of the homes will have 1,640 square feet of residential space and one parking spot. So far, plans have been filed for 407-419, 418-450, 474-507 Schroeders Avenue, 1218-1235 Jerome Street, and 714-728 Walker Street.

The city is almost finished installing sewers and water mains, and they’re ready to turn the site over to Con Ed, National Grid and Verizon to add electric lines, gas, and internet, according to HPD.

Ultimately, the final stages of Spring Creek are expected to bring 225 homes and 1,295 apartments to the vast, empty plots next to mall.

The most recent crop of houses went up for sale through a lottery in 2014, when prices for a single-family home started at $225,000 and went up to $300,000. A family of four who wanted to buy needed to earn a minimum of $52,000 a year and no more than $109,070.

Cobble Hill-based Delacour, Ferrara and Church Architects applied for the permits. We’re not sure if they’ll design the homes, but we hope the architects behind this phase are as innovative as designers of the first crop of houses. Alexander Gorlin Architects helped design nearly 300 modular townhouses for the first three phases of Nehemiah Spring Creek. Capsys, a modular manufacturer, assembled them in its factory at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then shipped them on trucks to the southeastern corner of the borough. Unfortunately, Capsys couldn’t afford to renew its lease at the Yard, and the company shut its doors there in March.

The firm will relocate its operations to Pennsylvania, Curbed reported in February. But many developers, faced with the complexity and cost of transporting modules from 150 miles outside the city, are deciding to go back to traditional construction methods.

We don’t know what will happen with the next phase of East New York’s sprawling affordable housing complex. East Brooklyn Congregations—through the Nenehmiah Housing Development Fund—is developing the project.

Spring Creek Nehemiah is an affordable housing success story in East New York

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:01:29 GMT

Spring Creek Nehemiah is East New York is one of the city's great housing success stories. Already, 233 first-time owners have moved into these

well-designed townhomes. (Aaron Showalter/for New York Daily News)

Linda Boyce says it happens all the time. People turn off Flatlands Ave. in East New York, Brooklyn, and slowly cruise Linwood, Vandalia, and Egan Sts. They look around, admiring multi-colored boxy houses with big backyards, private driveways, and patches of front gardens.

"Someone always asks 'How can I live here?' " says Boyce, a member of the first Homeowner Association at Nehemiah Spring Creek, one of the city's largest affordable homeowning developments and a national model for affordable housing programs. "That makes us proud. We work hard to keep this neighborhood clean and safe. Sometimes I forget I'm in Brooklyn."

In what is the city's newest neighborhood, Spring Creek Nehemiah (as residents call it) is home to 233 first-time homeowners who won the right to live at Nehemiah in a lottery sponsored by the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, a major partner in the project. They applied to the lottery more than five years ago, some as many as 17 years back. Soon, 50 new owners will move in. Five parks, a supermarket and EMS station will be finished upon plan completion.

From left, proud Nehemiah owners Milagros Gerez, Walja Moody, Linda Boyce, organizer Grand Lindsay, Roxanne Thomas, Elizabeth Daniel, and Dawn Brown. (Aaron Showalter/for New York Daily News)

Built in partnership with East Brooklyn Congregations and designed by architect Alexander Gorlin, Nehemiah is composed of prefabricated one-, two- and three-family homes assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Homeowners put down as little as $8,000 to purchase their houses, which ranged in price from $158,000 to $488,000.

When completed by 2016, over 1,525 new homes and apartments will be built on these streets tucked in behind Related Companies Gateway Plaza Mall, Belt Parkway, and two state parks opening by 2014. In September, three new schools will open on a $75 million campus constructed by the Department of Education.

Boyce and her fellow homeowners are part of phase one. They work hard daily to ensure their streets, homes and neighborhood stay safe and clean.

Linda Boyce shows off her kitchen in a Spring Creek Nehemiah home. (Aaron Showalter/for New York Daily News)

As you enter the area dominated by the Nehemiah prefab houses, it has the feel of newness. It's cleaner than a hospital. On a quiet and hot Saturday, it feels like a movie set. But life lives inside these homes. Some people have pools, others gardens and outdoor patios with Southern smokers. People on the streets say hello to one another. They stop to talk about meetings, fairs, the new school and construction phases.

Grant Lindsay, an organizer for East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC), knows a tight-knit neighborhood has more power combating local problems.

"Our job just doesn't stop when people move in," says Lindsay, who has helped EBC members empower themsleves in Brownsville, East New York and Bushwick. "That's when it starts. We help work together to achieve their needs. Often big government and landlords take advantage of people. We don't want that to happen. At Nehemiah, we want to build a strong community. This is a place that looks out after each other and is proactive in seeking change. A home is just a home. A neighborhood takes relationships."

Low-Cost Brooklyn Housing Sees Few Foreclosures

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:22:14 GMT

Yvonne Ziegler had an apartment in a central Brooklyn housing project and a decent job in an office. But like a lot of New Yorkers, she figured she'd be renting forever. Owning a place seemed beyond the realm of possibility.

Thanks to the Nehemiah project, a church-run affordable housing program, Ziegler now owns a trim, neatly maintained three-bedroom house, where she lives with her elderly mother in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as East New York. The program has built more than 4,000 houses in Brooklyn and the Bronx since the 1980s.

"When it came to light that these churches were building affordable houses and how low the mortgages were, I thought, 'Well, maybe this is something I can aspire to,' " Ziegler says.

The Nehemiah project, named for the biblical prophet who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, has provided a bulwark of stability in neighborhoods once devastated by arson and neglect. That's been especially true during the mortgage crisis. In a part of the city where foreclosures topped 10 percent last year, few of the program's homeowners have defaulted on their loans.

Tough Love Breeds Success

While exact numbers are difficult to access, Mike Gecan of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, which helped organize the Nehemiah project, says no more than 10 of the properties built by the program have suffered foreclosure.

Program officials say they owe their success to their rejection of the worst excesses of the subprime mortgage era. Applicants get mortgages through private lenders and from the city, but Nehemiah adds its own layer of tough income guidelines and credit checks. For instance, mortgages can't exceed about 20 percent of an applicant's income, Gecan says.

"At the time [the program began], the conventional wisdom said that people should be asked to spend a third of their income on housing," he says. "That is extraordinarily high, and if someone has a family emergency, has a job loss, or if the economy gets weakened, and if they go from 40 hours a week to 27 hours a week, then if you're spending 35 per

'The Organization Wanted Clean Money'

"In our community, there were ways to make money illegally, you know," says Sarah Plowden, a Nehemiah official and homeowner. "The organization wanted to make sure they had clean money coming in there."

In fact, Nehemiah succeeded because, despite all the crime and poverty in East New York, the neighborhood also boasted a core of working people with solid credit, Plowden says. They jumped at the chance to buy their own properties. While some applicants were chafed by Nehemiah's restrictions and probing questions, most people were willing to tolerate them as the price of maintaining a stable neighborhood.

"We more than just bought homes. We bought into one another as a people," Plowden says.

Applicants also put up with the restrictions for another reason: When all was said and done, Nehemiah was a great deal.

Because houses were constructed on land abandoned to the city, and building costs were kept to a minimum, Nehemiah could sell a house for as little as $39,000 in the early days. That price has risen over the years (houses in the newest development, Spring Creek, top $120,000) but is still well below comparable Brooklyn properties.

That was why applicants like Zandra Brockman were willing to jump through hoops to join the program. "Where else could we live at the prices we had?" she says. "It was truly a blessing for us."

In fact, applicants who were turned down because of poor credit or a lack of a down payment would often go home, work on their finances and reapply later. As often as not, they were accepted the second time around.

With its thorough vetting of applicants' finances, Nehemiah "in theory, leaves a lot of people out," says Alyssa Katz, author of Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us.

"But look at what it actually did," Katz says. "It brought the entry point into home ownership to a point that working people could afford, in a very, very expensive city, where people who make modest incomes invariably rent. So on the contrary, rather than decreasing opportunities for home ownership, it was opening them up to an entire group of people who had never had access to it before, and it did it on sustainable terms."

Homes, Hope Rising From N.Y. Rubble

Fri, 12 Jul 1985 14:01:31 GMT

In the desolation of East Brooklyn, a suburb grows.

Each day, stolid brick row houses with trim lawns sprout incongruously on arson-gutted streets. Black and Spanish-speaking families who have never lived in their own homes dress in Sunday best to sign mortgages on the dotted line. Rose bushes bloom, and barbecue grills send a new kind of smoke signal into the air.

The message from East Brooklyn, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation, is that from the ashes -- with no help from Washington, thank you -- housing for working-class families can be built without red tape, corruption or skyrocketing price tags.

At a time when the Reagan administration has slashed federal housing funds by 60 percent since 1980, and the wastelands of urban poverty continue to spread, city and state officials from Maryland to Texas and from Britain, Pakistan and South Africa are flocking here to see a successful grass-roots enterprise called Nehemiah.

"This community was considered a graveyard," said the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, pastor of St. Paul Community Baptist Church. "Nehemiah saved it."

The project, sponsored by about 50 parishes that formed an ecumenical group called East Brooklyn Churches, was named after the biblical prophet Nehemiah who was sent in the 5th century B.C. to rebuild Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity.

So far, 384 two- and three-bedroom homes have been built and sold for $41,000 each to families with annual incomes of $20,000 to $40,000. Twenty-seven more are rising each week in the project's first 1,500-home phase, which covers 200 acres of Brownsville, a neighborhood of rubble-strewn lots, boarded-up stores and grim public-housing high-rises.

Sandra McCollum, 32, an unwed mother of two, heard about Nehemiah through her Baptist church.

"When you come up in Brownsville, you don't look to set your sights very high," she said. "You get a job. You make just enough to meet your needs. You don't look for pleasure. I knew I could never afford a home. That was like wanting the impossible."

As a $19,000-a-year secretarial supervisor at a Manhattan hospital, McCollum had meager savings. But her religious faith, she said, gave her the strength to scrape together the $5,000 down payment in two years. She doubled up with her sister's family, living in one room with her son, 4, and daughter, 9. Her mother cared for the children, and McCollum stopped taking them out for Sunday dinners. She stopped buying clothes.

"There were times I said, 'I can't,' " she remembers now, sitting in a pristine living room, her flowered china displayed in a glassed cabinet. "But every day after work, I'd walk over to the empty lots where they were going to build. There was garbage and abandoned cars. I'd try to envision what it would look like. I'd claim it for myself. Nehemiah was a dream, and my dream was to be part of Nehemiah."

On Dec. 11, she took title.

"I got my keys," she said. "I ran to the house and I shouted, 'It's mine! It's mine! It's finally mine!"

If Nehemiah seems to be a Great Society dream come true, it is in some ways the antithesis of that era of heavy-handed federal intervention. What makes it unusual is that it grew out of the community, rather than from the drawing boards of any federal, state or city agency.

In 1980, five pastors from local Roman Catholic, Baptist and Lutheran churches invited the Industrial Areas Foundation -- heir to Saul Alinsky's Chicago-based community organizing group -- to help them form a social action group. With other parishes, they raised funds for two full-time organizers to train the black and Hispanic parishioners who now lead the East Brooklyn Churches (EBC).

In five years, the EBC has become a powerful, politically independent, dues-based organization that can turn out 7,000 people for a rally, register 10,000 new voters in a year, and persuade politicians to put up new street signs, inspect local grocery stores and now, in its most ambitious endeavor, help with Nehemiah.

"We're saying to government, 'Let's do it a different way,' " Youngblood said. "Let's not plan housing for Brooklyn from Washington. Let's plan it from Brooklyn."

Washington is listening: Legislation to spur similar programs in other cities passed the House Banking Committee this week. The bill, incorporated in an omnibus housing act, would provide $150 million for a revolving second-mortgage fund.

"The federal government has been floundering in the housing field," said Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill's chief sponsor. "The old programs have been discredited. But Nehemiah has a real chance of working elsewhere."

In New York, EBC was inspired by a series of columns in the Daily News by retired builder and civic activist I.D. Robbins. A plain-spoken gadfly and one-time mayoral candidate, now well into his 70s, Robbins was pushing a simple idea: "Levittown" in the ghetto.

"The devastated inner cities give you a chance to do in big cities what you formerly did in the potato fields after World War II," Robbins said, referring to William J. Levitt's vast subdivisions on Long Island. "If you knock everything down, you can start all over again."

EBC persuaded Robbins to come out of retirement on his New Jersey farm to run the project. For each house built, he receives $1,000 -- far less, after overhead costs, than he earned as a commercial builder.

Nehemiah's success is based on home ownership, critical mass, low density, and low-cost mass-production building techniques. Other programs have failed, Robbins argues, because even middle-class occupants will not maintain buildings that do not belong to them.

Scatter-site housing and selective rehabilitation do not work, he said, because a few blocks of new or upgraded housing are soon overwhelmed by surrounding decay. To turn a neighborhood around, Robbins argues for a minimum of 1,000 houses built side by side -- a factor that could limit Nehemiah's applicability to cities such as Baltimore, which has been studying the project but may not have large enough tracts available.

While Nehemiah is intended for stable families of mechanics, mailmen, nurses and other moderate-income workers, it has an important ripple effect on the availability of low-income housing. Forty percent of Nehemiah's new owners come from public housing where they were stuck, paying supplemental rent as their incomes rose, because of the city's drastic shortage in middle-income housing. As they move to Nehemiah, they free up units for some of the 175,000 families on the city's public-housing waiting list.

Robbins saved about $6,000 per house by persuading the city to allow him to build a central sewer main to hook up to the city's sewer system, avoiding the need to tear up streets for individual hookups. Mass production reduced the building cost to $51,000 for each row house -- the same kind of home, according to Robbins, being built for $80,000 each elsewhere in the city. (High-rises, which neighborhood residents oppose as dangerous and impersonal, cost about $100,000 per apartment.)

EBC initially raised $5 million from its churches for a revolving interest-free construction fund. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, spurred by their Brownsville parish, committed $1 million; the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn $3 million, and the Episcopal Diocese $1 million toward a $12 million goal.

Bishop Francis J. Mugavero, son of a Brooklyn barber and leader of the diocese's 1.4 million Roman Catholics, headed the EBC delegation to Mayor Edward I. Koch. The churches, he told Koch, would put up the building funds if the city would provide free land, which had fallen into its hands through tax default, and subsidize each house with a $1,000 loan, repayable upon resale.

"At first the bureaucrats thought we were whacko," Mugavero said. "The mayor said he didn't have the money. Finally, I looked at him and I said, 'I'll tell you what: You steal the $10 million and I'll absolve you.' He looked at me and said, 'You've got it.' "

The city also agreed to defer property taxes for 10 years, and the New York State Mortgage Authority provided 9.9 percent mortgages to the new homeowners, bringing down their monthly costs to $350.

This week, New York officials approved Nehemiah's second phase, 1,100 lots in East New York, near Brownsville. A third Nehemiah project of 3,000 homes in Rockaway, Queens is on the drawing boards.

On a recent afternoon, Wayne Sexton, a 28-year-old postal worker, patrolled the lawn around his corner house scooping up dog droppings. Dozens of people he has never met knock on his door each weekend, wanting to know about Nehemiah.

"They be saying, 'Can we come in your house?' ", he said. "This is a beautiful thing going on, a beautiful opportunity.