There may be joy in the world of sports and a ticker tape parade down the canyon of heroes for the USA Women’s American Soccer team that won the World Cup yesterday, but it is coming at the expense of black and brown property owners with millions of dollars of intergenerational wealth at stake.
That after the city has rescheduled for the third time a City Council joint oversight hearing on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Third Party Transfer (TPT) program. The hearing is slated to reveal the results of a 6-month long investigation into the program.
The TPT program has been subject to an ongoing Kings County Politics investigative series dealing with how the program has been taking properties of mainly black and brown property owners and giving them to favored non-profits.
City Council Member Robert Cornegy Corengy Jr. (D-Bedford-Stuyvesant, Northern Crown Heights) chair the Housing and Buildings Committee, and Council Member Ritchie Torres (D- Bronx), chair of the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, will direct the hearing.
KCP did learn the working group membership of a city task force to modernize its controversial Third Party Transfer program. The task force is very top heavy with non-profits and for-profit developers either that are associated with or have been given these properties and assigned to redevelop them for a 10 percent fee of the total cost of redevelopment.
These non-profit and for-profit property developers include Salvatore D’Avola from Neighborhood Restore, Bernell Grier from IMPACCT Brooklyn, Judi Kende from Enterprise, Ismene Speliotis from MHANY, Emilio Dorcely from Bridge Street Development Corporation, Chris Bramwell from Shinda Management Corporation (M/WBE), Sandra Erickson from Sandra Erickson Real Estate Inc. (M/WBE), Susan Ifill from Neighborhood Housing Services of NYC, and Christie Peale from the Center for NYC Neighborhoods.
Others on the task force include Assembly Member Tremaine Wright, Harold Shultz from Benavi Advisors, Derrick Lovett from the Mid Bronx Community Housing Corp, Eva Alligood from LISC, Sandra Lobo from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and Michael Grinthal from the Urban Justice Center.
Cornegy and HPD Acting Commissioner Louise Carroll will co-chair the task force and several city agencies will also have representatives on the task force.
The new date for the scheduled hearing is 1 p.m., Monday, July 22 in City Council Chambers, Lower Manhattan.
