From the communal roof deck of the brand-new Eliza apartment building in the diverse northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, you can see the Hudson River sparkling beyond the trees and the top of the George Washington Bridge. The 14-story building also has a penthouse gym, laundry room and co-working space, and one of the most technologically advanced branches of the New York Public Library on the ground floor. Individual apartments have big windows and closets, pale wood floors and oversized doors. The A train is just across the street, next to a Starbucks, where three teens were hanging out when I arrived, complaining about their parents over lattes.
If this sounds like regular, non-subsidized housing that any of us might feel lucky to land — it does feel like that. The Eliza (named for Alexander Hamilton’s wife, who lived in the area and donated to the predecessor of the Inwood Library) is a relatively new take on deeply affordable housing and part of a movement supported by philanthropy to put well-designed, high-quality buildings with good amenities in desirable neighborhoods with good services, great schools and transportation. All this for prices unheard of in Manhattan.
The Eliza offers 100% permanently affordable housing: studios for $360 a month and two bedrooms for $585. A similar building rising next door called Tryon North was advertising studios for $2,800, one-bedrooms for $3,100 and two bedrooms for $3,600 on the day I visited. And it doesn’t have a roof deck.
This whole model of creating high-quality, conveniently located housing in cities for children and vulnerable young adults, including those aging out of foster care, evolved from a 2006 Children’s Village project in Westchester County, just north of the city. Children’s Village is a nonprofit that developed from a mid-19th-century orphanage into an innovative, multi-campus, multi-service provider serving vulnerable children, pregnant teens and families. Children’s Village is a co-developer of the Eliza, along with the nonprofit Community League of the Heights, Ranger Properties and Alembic Community Development.
In 2006, the Lanza Family Foundation gave Children’s Village a multi-year, $9-million grant to build a community center on the campus of its 114-unit affordable housing complex in the tony suburb of Dobbs Ferry. The project was a massive success. Drawing on testimonials from Dobbs Ferry residents and improving on the design, Children’s Village decided to bring this approach of integrated, high-quality affordable housing in a desirable neighborhood down to the city in 2012.
The first such Manhattan development, A Home for Harlem Dowling, is located in central Harlem and can (and does) house 12 former foster youth among the 60 available apartments. The Eliza is the second. Two other projects are in progress in New York City. A handful of foundations have thrown their support behind these earlier projects, and now they’re backing the Eliza and the whole housing strategy, including the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Clark Foundation, the Frog Rock Foundation, several anonymous donors, Children’s Village trustees and other Children’s Village donors.
Location plus amenities equals a shot at success
Location is one key part of creating a quality living experience for vulnerable people, said Jeremy Kohomban, president and CEO of the Children’s Village. Kohomban met me at the Eliza to show me the new building and adjoining community center. “We developed this model of beautiful, affordable, integrated housing and in desirable neighborhoods (four non-negotiable conditions) 12 years ago because almost 90% of all affordable housing in the United States continues to be built in our most segregated and deeply burdened communities,” Kohomban told me earlier by email. The tip of Manhattan isn’t the most convenient location to get to from the Upper East Side, where I was staying, but it’s accessible by a good subway line, is close to Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval collection at The Cloisters, and surrounded by the beauty of the Hudson. It’s not in some super-remote neighborhood far from transportation and known for poverty and high crime rates, where so much affordable housing tends to be located.
The model speaks to a reality that has drawn periodic attention from big funders — the fact that where a child is born and raised, down to the neighborhood and zip code level, often has a huge huge impact on how their life turns out. “The best statistic we have for second-generation success is where you live and where your children go to school,” Kohomban said as we walked to the roof’s north-facing seating area, gazing past the plantings and high-end deck chairs with thick metal arms and fat black cushions. An elementary school was on recess down below, and we could hear the kids playing. Kohomban summed up the scene below: “A beautiful, vibrant, multiracial community with incredible transportation and gorgeous views.”
Can good design change lives?
Beyond location, much of the excitement today in the world of affordable housing comes from a focus on good design and good quality, Kohomban said. This is one area where philanthropy is helping and can pitch in more — by funding the designs of buildings like the Eliza, and providing extra amenities that state and city money won’t cover. Good design is a perfect place for philanthropy to step in because it’s a way to leverage an initial investment into decades of value.
As Kohomban pointed out, we have the artistry and technology to build beautiful places on a budget; there are plenty of nice, reasonably priced new developments all over the country that don’t have the label “affordable” slapped on them, but in fact, are. I have driven past complexes featuring acres of new three-bedroom homes with starting prices in the low $300,000s popping up in the vast open land between high-priced urban hotspots like L.A. and Phoenix, for example, and Tucson and Austin. They have fireplaces and community centers and low price points, at least in this era of extraordinary real estate prices.
The Eliza is partly financed with the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development’s Extremely Low and Low-Income Affordability Program (ELLA). That money is a start, but not a finish. “You can’t use state money to buy Peloton bikes for the gym, but we’re going to have them,” said Kohomban, pointing to one extra feature that philanthropy will fund. Children’s Village is also tapping philanthropy to outfit its community learning center, which has a complete STEM lab in the building’s daylight basement (meaning, a basement with windows, thanks to good design). The community center will also feature a sensory room, performance space and teaching kitchen operated in partnership with Emma’s Torch, a restaurant and social enterprise that offers culinary training to refugees, asylum seekers and survivors of human trafficking, among others.
As Kohomban said, “Design and the money you spend on the quality of the product is a frontier we have to cross. People feel good when you give them good things. When you give them good things, good things happen to them.”
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Housing former foster youth
When fully rented out, the Eliza will house families, former foster youth and other systems-impacted young people among its 174 units, tapping their subsidies to help. As Rohomban said, many of these young adults “are relegated into substandard homes and often they are also segregated into buildings where over 80% (or more) of the tenants are also former residents of foster care or coming from homelessness.”
At IP, we’ve been following philanthropy’s involvement in housing for foster youth, including the efforts of journalist turned philanthropy innovator Daniel Heimpel to tap foundation endowment money to lower the cost of building housing for teens aging out of the system in L.A. (Heimpel is now involved in a new effort, along with Children’s Village and others, to launch a research project on financing affordable housing for former foster youth at scale in NewYork City.) I’ve talked to former foster youth about the struggle to find housing in L.A., including one young woman who waited for more than a year for a housing voucher she’d been promised.
In New York City, some 500 young people age out of the foster care system each year without having been adopted or reunified with their families. They are then thrust into one of the most competitive housing markets in the world. As in L.A., this leads to many people trying to start their adult lives while crashing on someone’s couch, maybe living temporarily with a boyfriend, or sleeping in a car; one-fifth of former foster youth in New York City experience homelessness within six years of leaving the system.
When they do get housing, it’s often in places that do not feel like home. Cheyanne Deopersaud is a policy entrepreneur at Next 100, a think tank and initiative of the Century Foundation designed to harness the lived experience of young people facing the effects of pressing policy concerns and train them to research, analyse and write. A former foster youth and current college senior, Deopersaud has first-hand experience aging out of foster care and into traditional, so-called “supportive housing.” As she recently wrote, it’s hard to feel supported in an apartment infested with mice that you can hear at night eating through the sheetrock in search of your snacks. Her description of the building she lived in with a roommate while a full-time college student working two jobs sounds like something out of Dickens, by way of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “There weren’t any security cameras in the lobby and my packages were stolen all the time. The floors smelled like urine every day. I even experienced neighbors defecating in bags that they left in the hallways.”
Deopersaud now lives in what she called a beautiful building, located in a happening part of Harlem. She agrees that a nice home in a safe area creates more of an on-ramp to stability. “It really matters where you lay your head at night. Those things really affect your mental health,” she told me by phone. “I feel like when we are able to be in nice environments, we’re able to function properly, cook in the kitchen, go to college. I felt like when I was in the other building, I was in college, but when I got home, I had another problem to deal with.”
Kohomban said that shoving young people into vertical group homes, where every resident is system-impacted, creates problems in and of itself. This leads to the idea that “supportive housing” is needed, that some children are somehow just “broken” and need to be fixed. He said that in many cases, the need stems from the environment, not from some fundamental flaw of those consigned to it. “Which is why we don’t buy into this idea that all young people coming out of the system need supportive housing. In our experience, much of that is situational. They are reacting to how they’ve been treated.”
At Next 100, Deopersaud is working to create more quality, affordable, safe housing for youth transitioning out of foster care, and to “bring their voices to the table.” As she said, young people with parents may have assistance well into their late 20s. “We’re out on our own at 18 or 21. We’re kind of expected to work, go to school, do everything on our own because we don’t have that family support.”
Her pitch to philanthropy? “Think of what your parents were able to give you. Try to picture a world where those things are available to us, too.”
