Examining CPC's Development Patterns

Gotham Gazette has a meaty article on how “the Community Preservation Corp.—and the market-based affordable housing system it represents—may actually be a major contributor to the accelerating gentrification of Brooklyn.” CPC, which is part of the Domino development team, has a “carefully cultivated image as a benevolent developer of affordable housing” that, according to the story, doesn’t completely jibe with its pattern of investments. As shown in the map above, many of CPC’s affordable investments since 2007 have been in areas such as East New York and Brownsville, while quite a lot of its market-rate developments are in what the article characterizes as “the frontier of gentrification”; perhaps most interesting of all is the assertion that more than 65 percent of the $701 million CPC has invested in Brooklyn since 2007 has gone to market-rate housing. The article ends on this note, which is certainly food for thought: “Since 2000, average rents have doubled in Williamsburg-Greenpoint and almost 40 percent of the Latino population has left the neighborhood likely because of the housing costs. Similar shifts are occurring all along the frontier of Brooklyn gentrification. The market-based, public-private affordable housing system embodied by CPC is helping to create and preserve thousands of affordable units across the city. But looking at the big picture and tracing the connections between affordable development and the explosion of luxury construction reveals that it also may be fueling gentrification and housing segregation—the very problems that the city and developers claim it is helping to solve.”
Affordable Housing Policies May Spur Gentrification, Segregation [Gotham Gazette]