Lots of Potential: Call for More Housing for Homeless on East Harlem’s Vacant Properties

Al Williams and Charmel Lucas have been homeless since their Coney Island apartment flooded during Sandy nearly six years ago. Now, they bounce from shelters to hotels, supporting themselves by making deliveries through Postmates.

But the couple has a more permanent address in mind: a stretch of Park Avenue between East 124th and 125th Street. The property is mostly vacant, with a boarded-up hotel and some parked cars. Williams and Lucas have been working with the nonprofit Picture The Homeless to turn properties like this one into affordable housing.

“Here in East Harlem you’ll see a lot of buildings and lots that have been historically vacant,” Williams said. “And the landlords are waiting for just this right time — right now — with gentrification coming to the neighborhood to rent them out at these so-called fair market rents.” He calls it “warehousing.”

According to city records, the Park Avenue block is actually divided into multiple lots. The city has owned the two in the middle since Urban Renewal in the ‘70s, and they’ve been vacant for decades. A company called Adjacent Realty bought two others in 2009 for over $1 million each. It sold them to the Durst Organization this past year for more than $18 million each.

Back in 2012, Picture The Homeless partnered with Hunter College and identified 3,551 vacant buildings and 2,489 vacant lots citywide — enough, they said, to house nearly 200,000 people. The group is advocating for stronger incentives to transform empty property into housing. “If you’ve been holding on to a building and you cannot produce a solid plan of what you’re going to do with the building within a year, you should be fined,” said Mo George, the organization's executive director.

Not all of these lots, however, are suitable for apartments. Some are located in flood zones, under litigation or oddly shaped. At other locations, there are projects underway, as companies tweak their designs and get financing. Real estate developers say a fine on vacant properties isn’t realistic as owners are already taxed on the land. In addition, they say new developments take time and that the government can’t dictate what or how fast they should build. Meanwhile, the de Blasio administration says it’s working on all fronts to address the housing crisis, including financing more than 9,000 apartments on previously empty lots since the Mayor took office. He's also called for a tax on vacant land as part of property tax reform, though no actual legislation has been proposed. Last winter, the City Council did pass a law requiring an estimate of the all the city's vacant properties.

Williams, Lucas and others have drafted their own designs for that block on Park Avenue. They worked with an architectural designer named Emma Silverblatt to map out a new building with drop-in services for the homeless on the ground floor and affordable apartments on top. A spokesman for Durst said the developer probably will build apartments at the site, with as much as a quarter targeted to families that make around $35,000 a year. Williams doubts he and Lucas will be lucky enough to get those units, but he said there are plenty of other vacant buildings and lots left.

“If you’re in a car, you’re in an Uber, you’re walking just look up," he said. "Look up at all the empty buildings there are and you’ll know how much real estate is available to alleviate and hopefully end homelessness in the city."

Editor’s note 7/24/18: This article has been updated to clarify Emma Silverblatt’s role.