In the Media

CHPC’s expertise has been valued for over 70 years and our non-partisan analysis and opinion features widely in the media. You can read all of our latest press mentions here.

City Feels Foreclosure Effects

By Laura Kusisto, Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2012

Foreclosures that have depressed property prices and caused the deterioration of single-family neighborhoods across the country have had similarly harmful ripple effects in New York City when apartment buildings are foreclosed, according to a new report. “In single-family neighborhoods, you see empty homes and swimming pools filled with algae, in a way that you don’t see them in multifamily neighborhoods,” said Harold Shultz, a Senior Fellow at the Housing and Planning Council.

Planning the Broadway Triangle

The Brian Lehrer Show, January 17 2012

The proposed Broadway Triangle development has been halted by a judge on grounds that it benefits part of the community more than another. Jerilyn Perine, executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council and former Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, explains how the Broadway Triangle project and other developments like it come to be, how interests are represented, and what might have gone wrong at the Brooklyn site.

The Mod Squad: Will Bruce Ratner Transform the Way New York Builds, or Is Prefab Another Project Too Far?

By Matt Chaban, New York Observer, 7 December 2011

Given the complexity of building a 32-story prefab tower—with taller ones to come—a number of building professionals were suspicious the firm could achieve the 20 percent cost savings Forest City has been boasting about. Among them is Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Planning & Housing Council and a former housing commissioner in both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, where she worked on a number of low-income modular projects. “I’m not against modular. I think it has its place,” she said. “I don’t think it’s like discovering fire.”

NY1 In the Papers

Pat Keirnan, NY1 In the Papers, November 17, 2011

Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times Arts Section cover story on Making Room was picked up by NY1′s “In the Papers” segment. The mention is at 1:45 into the clip.

WNYC News Blog Architects Attempt to Make Illegal Apartments Safe, Well Designed

Cindy Rodriguez, WNYC News Blog, Novemer 7, 2011

“The guy who brought you your Chinese food delivery where does he live, students that you see on the train, where are they living,” asked Perine, who once headed the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. “We have to start thinking about people’s lives for real not just how we would like to imagine success, like everyone is married with two kids in a house or a big apartment some place.”

Imagining Housing for Today

Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, November 17, 2011

Most new homes in the city today are still designed for nuclear families. According to the nonprofit Citizens Housing & Planning Council, two parents raising young children occupy only 17 percent of New York dwellings; another 9 percent house single parents with children under 25. The city meanwhile has a growing population of singles — students, young professionals, immigrants, empty-nesters and the elderly — who can’t afford market-rate rentals. (That’s not to mention a report last week from the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group that has frequently clashed with the Bloomberg administration , which put the city’s homeless population at 41,204, up from 31,000 a decade ago.)

Crackdown on Conversions Confronts Danger and Necessity

Patrick Arden, City Limits, November 7, 2011

Enforcement will never eliminate the underground housing market, said Sarah Watson, a senior policy analyst at CHPC, who noted that increased fines have not lessened the illegal housing stock. “It’s too widespread,” she explained. “There’s no doubt the path forward is difficult politically, but we need to recognize that there’s a mismatch between the types of housing we have and the ways we’re really living today. The housing stock has not kept up with how people have changed.”

Rethinking Ways to Divide Living Space

Fred A. Bernstein, New York Times, November 10, 2011

IS there a mismatch between the housing New Yorkers need and the housing that gets built? Only 17 percent of dwelling units in the city are occupied by parents raising children under 25, according to the nonprofit Citizens Housing and Planning Council, but most new homes are designed with such traditional families in mind.

At event for innovative housing, a doubter

Crain's Insider, November 8, 2011

At a conference yesterday in midtown, architects and advocates pitched solutions for the high cost and low supply of housing in the city. Their proposals were innovative, ingenious and illegal: not allowed by city rules and codes.

Making Room at the Japan Society

Mark Strauss, FX Fowle blog, November 9 2011

As a member of the Board of Directors for the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC), a non-profit research organization founded in 1937 to improve housing and neighborhood conditions throughout New York City, I have been fortunate to help organize and participate in a number of unique programs.

Affordable housing? Borrow a page from NYC

Jerilyn Perine & Julie Sandorf, Jerusalem Post, 30 August 2011

Looting in Britain’s cities, mass demonstrations in the Arab world, protests in Greece; none have the same possibility of a straightforward solution as does the recent uprising (largely of the middle class) in Israel in response to a lack of affordable housing. What began as a single person’s fight against eviction quickly became a mass movement from all sectors of Israeli society-Jewish and Arab – defenseless against housing costs that have skyrocketed by more than 40% in three years. And while pundits debate the underlying causes of Britain’s social unrest, experts hope that democracy will emerge triumphant in the Arab world, and everyone holds their breath that Europe’s debt crisis will be resolved; Israel’s affordable housing crisis can most certainly be fixed.

Do 36 Harlem Tenements Hold the Key to the City’s Affordable Housing Future?

By Matt Chaban, The New York Observer, August 29, 2011

This addition-by-subtraction might frustrate some hard-line housing advocates, who see any reduction in the city’s low-income housing stock as a threat to New York’s livability and diversity, but Harold Shultz, a senior fellow at the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Commission, thinks the city is making the most of what it has. “I think it’s a very reasonable response to a bad situation,” he said. “On the whole a positive, though the advocates probably won’t see it that way.”