How banks and developers collude to get rid of New York's affordable housing

[LiberalElite]

http://www.thenation.com/article/how-banks-and-developers-collude-to-get-rid-of-new-yorks-affordable-housing/

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Kim Powell has lived in West Harlem all her life, most of it in her rent-regulated apartment. The 53-year-old remembers cruising the neighborhood in her father’s car as a kid, looking at the gutted and burned-out buildings of the 1970s. But over the last two decades many of the homes and shops in Powell’s neighborhood have been restored. As early as the 2000s, gentrified Harlem was on the entire country’s radar as Bill Clinton set up offices for his foundation in the neighborhood. It was around then that the Pinnacle Group, the owner of Powell’s building at 706 Riverside Drive, started planning a condominium conversion for the property.

(This article is part of our podcast series There Goes the Neighborhood, produced in partnership with WNYC Studios. Subscribe at iTunes.)

Gentrification as a theory is sprawling and chaotic. Gentrification as it plays out in real life on the streets is always exacting—lot measurements, rent rolls, income levels. Each number is part of an investor’s plan. And each investor in the city’s housing market is operating independently, executing a specific plan for this building or that neighborhood—everyone’s got a niche. But what bonds these disparate players together is the institutional support they receive: aspirational mortgages from banks that are predicated on displacement of rent-regulated tenants.
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