UNHP Brings Experience, Data & Research to Support Tenant Groups & National Housing Efforts
A new initiative by UNHP, The Bronx Housing Research Network, has been working to deliver UNHP’s community development experience, multifamily housing data, and technical assistance to NYC groups as well as a growing national housing movement.
UNHP is well-known for its research and data collection work for NYC multifamily rental properties. The Building Indicator Project (BIP), an aggregated database for all 70,000+ rental buildings in NYC, tracking more than 120 data points for each building, is widely shared and used by 47 community organizations and advocacy groups, 7 agencies, 41 financial institutions, and bank regulators to identify and address distressed multifamily properties in NYC. The BIP database is the primary tool of UNHP’s Multifamily Research and Action Center, a collaborative effort with affordable housing stakeholders to improve living conditions and preserve the long-term affordability of multifamily rental units for low-income NYC households living in distressed housing. Timely data on a lender’s multifamily portfolio, yearly meetings with the leading multifamily lenders in NYC, and buy-in from bank regulators have made the BIP database known among its institutional subscribers.
In 2023, UNHP launched the Bronx Housing Research Network (BHRN) to expand and deepen our efforts to support tenant leaders and advocates, and community organizing with technical assistance that shares our data, research, and community development experiences in an accessible manner. UNHP has long been involved in technical assistance and research support for community-led housing initiatives and the BRHN provides its research, community acquisition experience, and data to tenant organizers, leaders, and advocates to break down and dissect complex multifamily finance issues to effectively engage with landlords, lenders, and regulators.
The first initiative of the BRHN was a short course for Bronx organizing groups, Banana Kelly, NWBCCC, and Moms on the Move covering community acquisitions, the role of lenders in housing and multifamily finance.
Drawing on our experience as community-based developers and lenders in community and tenant acquisitions of Bronx multifamily properties, the first effort of the BRHN was a summer 2023 short course for three Bronx community organizing groups to explore multifamily finance and tenant strategies to acquire their buildings in the context of organizing campaigns. In the face of the collapse of Signature Bank, the BRHN with its access to the BIP data on the portfolio was positioned to focus its efforts on empowering tenant and community groups with data and research to improve the portfolio and work towards long-term affordability. Community engagement through the Bronx Housing Research Network has already made an impact in the preservation of that distressed multifamily portfolio and has supported the efforts of an emerging national tenants movement.
The Collapse of Signature Bank
One major effort of BHRN has been involvement in the advocacy around the collapsed Signature Bank portfolio. UNHP’s data and research have played a significant role, becoming a central part of the conversation around Signature’s extensive multifamily portfolio immediately after the bank’s collapse. UNHP’s BIP and its ability to identify the senior lender for multifamily properties pinpointed Signature’s exact portfolio at its collapse. UNHP shared that information with the FDIC, electeds, and community organizations. UNHP has remained engaged with the FDIC, community organizations, public agencies, and lenders to improve and preserve this portfolio. Before its collapse in March 2023, Signature Bank was one of the most significant lenders to multifamily rental housing in New York City, with a portfolio of close to 3,000 properties, almost 80% of which were likely to contain rent-stabilized units.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in its role as Signature’s receiver, has instituted an ambitious post-disposition program meant to ensure that the eventual holders of these mortgages will use their role as lenders to prioritize tenant safety and stability. Tenants and organizers across NYC advocated for the structure of this program in Signature-financed properties and represents a historic opportunity for the new loan holders to collaborate with tenant groups to address long-deferred maintenance and irresponsible ownership in a substantial stock of physically and financially distressed multifamily housing.
UNHP has engaged at the grassroots level in several different ways — by creating materials (like demand letters, one-pagers, and presentations), meeting with individual organizers and community-based organizations, attending weekly strategy calls through ANHD’s Equitable Reinvestment Committee, collecting data on organized buildings within the Signature portfolio, and more. As an example of the value of our technical assistance work, this City Limits article tracks the experience of a group of tenants living in a Brooklyn building financed by Signature Bank. The complex financial backstory of the property and the ability of the tenants to understand that story was enhanced by the Bronx Research Housing Network, which provided debt analysis and technical assistance to both the tenant group and the journalists.
Jacob Udell and the BRHN work closely and in collaboration with ANHD, Stabilizing NYC, and tenant advocacy and organizing groups toward the goal of improving conditions and preserving affordability in the Signature Bank portfolio.
An additional opportunity for meaningful technical assistance on the former Signature portfolio arose as the FDIC selected its Joint Venture partners: Community Stabilization Partners (CSP) and Santander Bank. These winning bidders entered into joint ventures with the FDIC and committed to working with borrowers to address serious building issues that affect tenant well-being and building safety, including exploring the possibility of debt write-downs and, in certain cases, foreclosure and transfer of the loan collateral to responsible actors. The JV partners are also expected to communicate proactively with community groups working in Signature financed- properties, to find adequate interventions to the issues being experienced by tenants.
Developed in partnership with JustFix, the Signature Bank portfolio dashboard will be used by stakeholders to track progress toward building improvements.
Leaning on our expertise developed as the creators of the BIP database, UNHP has teamed up with JustFix, a longtime partner and accomplished nonprofit that builds free tools for tenants to exercise their rights to a livable home, to create an easy-to-use data dashboard that will track the progress toward improvement goals of the properties The dashboard, still in a draft format, will be shared with the JV partners, the FDIC, tenant organizing groups, advocates and coalitions, public agencies and have data on violations, property trends, BIP scores, and property record data. A preview of the dashboard to end users, the Joint Venture lenders, and Stabilizing NYC generated a lot of excitement. UNHP is excited too – this initiative of the Bronx Housing Research Network aligns with our goals to offer accessible information at a grass-roots level to ensure that tenants’ input and experiences are part of the process to improve and stabilize this portfolio and allows us to be part of this bold approach to addressing distressed properties.
The National Tenant Movement Learns from the Bronx
While the affordable housing crisis in NYC and our work to address the Bronx impact remains our focus, this crisis is nationwide, and tenant groups across the country are increasingly realizing the importance of understanding trends in the real estate market. One such group is the newly formed Tenant Union Federation (TUF), formerly known as the Homes Guarantee, which has been engaging in a multi-year effort to win rent regulations and other tenant protections in rental housing across the country that is financed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Freddie and Fannie, collectively known as the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) are major lenders to affordable housing across the country and have set the terms of lending and investment for landlords investing in rental properties over the past decade. UNHP is working with TUF to help provide context and detail about the role of banks and lenders in the housing market, and the particular place that the GSEs occupy.
This is not the first time UNHP has focused on the GSEs. In the 1990s, Freddie Mac overfinanced multifamily properties in the Bronx and NYC, and the increased debt was part of a story of deteriorated conditions, lack of building maintenance, financial extraction, and ultimately many foreclosures. UNHP worked with the NWBCCC and tenant associations in seven (7) of these foreclosed properties to obtain acquisition-price concessions that supported the needed renovations, affordable rents, and a community-based acquisition process. UNHP continues to be part of the ownership structure for one of these projects, known as The Wilton. Read more about the history of The Wilton here.
This 32-unit building, known as The Wilton, in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx, was overfinanced and ultimately forclosed on by Freddie Mac in the 1990s. It is one of 7 properties that transitioned into community ownership with a negotiated purchase price and money for much-needed renovations.
Through BHRN, UNHP has shared this experience and our expertise on the role of banks and mortgage lending in rental housing ownership and operations. By providing research and technical assistance, sharing data access lessons with group leadership, creating property profiles using data from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae investor portals, and offering a presentation to the TUF local tenant groups, the BRHN has been supporting this national tenant effort. UNHP is particularly proud of an effort to build a database of GSE-financed properties across the country, so that tenants, organizers, and advocates can identify local Freddie or Fannie-financed properties in their locales, and find and use crucial loan and operating data in their organizing campaigns.
The BRHN has been able to support a national tenants movement by creating a GSE database with information on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae-financed properties in every US State in a campaign for rent regulation in GSE-financed rental properties.
UNHP is collaborating with academics and researchers on conditions of GSE-financed properties, including a research project with Climate and Community Project and Princeton’s Eviction Lab looking closely at evictions in government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)-financed properties across the US. Additionally, we are collaborating with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) on GSE-based research to build off our Gambling with Homes report in 2022. That report, which demonstrated an empirical link between high debt leverage and worse outcomes for tenants, has been central to our effort to make policymakers in NYC and across the US aware of the central role that banks play in the outcomes most important to tenants, like safety, stability, and affordability.
UNHP shares data and information with national and citywide research groups towards our mission. These two recent reports can be found on our publications page.
UNHP is proud of our work and the Bronx Housing Research Network that builds on a community-engaged history and our persistence in bringing all stakeholders together to address multifamily housing conditions and affordability. While this is an unstable time for multifamily rental housing both in NYC and nationwide, it is also a time to work proactively and move forward with new and bold approaches that will support low-income tenants in the effort for equitable, safe, well-maintained, and affordable multifamily rental housing.