Eric Foreman, AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, testifies on preservation financing

Should I begin?

All right.

Well, first, I'd like to thank Chair Lee and Chair Sanchez and all members of the City Council present for holding this important forum, and also thank the representatives of HPD and other city officials for being here.

It's a crucial meeting.

But most of all, I'd like to thank the many tenants in the audience for speaking up.

It's difficult for working people to take time out of their day to engage in democracy, but it's critical.

So myself, my name is Eric Foreman.

I'm Director of Housing Policy for the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust.

We are a social impact fund that invests union pension dollars in union-built affordable housing, new construction and preservation.

HIT has invested since 9-11 when HIT launched an initiative to help rebuild the city's economy.

We have invested $2.2 billion in affordable housing development projects in New York City.

Of that, $569 million has been invested in Mitchell Llamas and affordable cooperative housing organized under other articles.

We want to applaud the city for committing capital resources to the cooperatives and the rental Mitchell Llamas.

We work very closely with the cooperatives that we have helped finance and refinance in order to meet their needs to keep the co-ops in a state of good repair while maintaining affordability.

We also are a voice in Washington, D.C.

We're a national fund for augmenting the federal resources that our city is very dependent on for maintaining our affordable housing stock.

I think many great points have been made here.

I've offered more detail in the two-page written testimony that I submitted.

But in the last 20 seconds, maybe I just want to leave you with a couple points.

One is that from what we've seen, public investment is needed probably beyond the scale that has been committed in the capital budget to help stabilize the cooperatives.

That said, private capital investment from sources such as HIT is a great resource.

This is a moment where we all need to think big about how to preserve this resource.

In the process, we should make sure that we create good union jobs for tenants who are also workers all across the city.

Thanks.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Eric.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, next we have Ryan Schallenberger, Janice Brody, and Susan Peters.