Housing & Development

Hope Community’s Real Estate Development Department creates permanent residential housing through moderate or gut rehabilitation of East Harlem rental tenant buildings, cooperative homeownership opportunities, appropriate retail space and new construction projects of both large and small scale.   Starting with an initial eight units many years ago, Hope has subsequently developed over 1,400 units in 74 buildings using 15 separate partnerships.  Hope Community is highly committed to green development and sustainable buildings and has utilized NYSERDA and Enterprise Green Communities Initiatives programs successfully and currently has six LEED Silver buildings in development.  Hope Community is also a New York State DHCR recognized Community Housing Development Organization and a participant in New York State’s Main Street program.

Affordable Housing

To create and preserve affordable income housing in East Harlem, Hope Community Inc has worked with virtually every development and subsidy program available through the City of New York, the State of New York and the Federal government and has also utilized creative non-standard methodologies to promote affordable housing initiatives.  Hope Community has a highly successful history of project planning, financial analysis and underwriting, development finance and refinance, due diligence satisfaction, capital needs determination, architectural and construction management, and development of housing that harmonizes with the community and the needs of the people we serve.

Market Rate Housing

To promote our mandate of affordable income housing creation and preservation, when funding and subsidy sources are not sufficient, Hope Community cross-subsidizes affordable income housing developments by including market rate housing into the development mix.  In this manner, Hope Community takes maximum advantage of funding while developing mixed-income projects that assist in stabilizing neighborhoods.  Currently, we have two mixed-income cooperative housing developments in construction utilizing cross subsidization.

Home Ownership

There is great need for affordable income home ownership opportunities in East Harlem.  Hope Community is assisting in resolving this need by developing twin new construction cooperative housing developments where many of the dwelling units will be reserved for households earning substantially less than the area median income.  

New Construction

Hope aggressively seeks additional development opportunities to further its affordable income housing mission.  Hope is extremely experienced in housing and mixed-used development and continuously explores wide ranges of innovative acquisition and development strategies including responding to all applicable NYC Requests For Proposal, tracking all land status and development issues in our area, working through the City’s  various real estate acquisition and transfer programs, and partnering with both social service agencies and for-profit real estate developers.