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Community Environmental Center joins Queens Library for “Greening Libraries” Project
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Weatherization Funding: Surviving by the Skin of Our Teeth, by Alexis Greene
Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Luck of the Irish – A Winner of the CEC Raffle
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Want to create jobs? Consider an Energy Corps, by Richard Cherry
Friday, December 9th, 2011

Community Environmental Center Installs Solar Thermal System at JCC on Staten Island
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

Community Environmental Center Is LEED Consultant for LEED Gold Dormitory at Queens College
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The partnership between Green City Force and Community Environmental Center, by Lisbeth Shepherd
Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Helen M. Marshall, President of the Borough of Queens, Proclaims Tuesday, November 1, Community Environmental Center Weatherization Day
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Community Environmental Center receives Service Merit Award from NYSERDA
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

Community Environmental Center to celebrate Weatherization Day November 1
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Spring Creek Towers: A City Within The City

Monday, June 7th, 2010

By Alexis Greene

From the distance, the tan-colored brick buildings appear to rise slowly out of the haze, growing taller and taller as you drive toward them along Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania Avenue. They look like an urban Stonehenge, a monolithic stand of brick towers, bare against the sky.

Upon arriving at Spring Creek Towers, however, the prospect is different. Now the buildings are surrounded by expanses of meticulously trimmed grass, and flowering trees and shrubs overhang asphalt pathways and decorate the lawns. Along the avenues that encircle this universe are banks and supermarkets and restaurants, and people walk about on personal and purposeful missions. This is, despite the first impression, a community after all. A city within New York City.

Initially called Twin Pines, the project was the brainchild of the United Housing Federation (UHF), a conglomeration of unions, civic organizations, and housing cooperatives created after World War II to sponsor housing developments. The UHF had emerged, in part, from a post-war drive to rid the city of slum buildings and create multistory affordable housing, which ideally would rejuvenate run-down neighborhoods.

The other aspect of UHF’s goal was to create affordable housing for union members. But their plans ran aground with Co-op City, which UHF built from 1965 to 1973 in the East Bronx. A debacle for UHF in terms of design, construction and financing, Co-op City ended up a much more expensive venture than UHF had ever conceived. What’s more, these additional costs were passed along to tenants, who promptly engineered the longest, largest rent strike in history.

In 1971, UHF decided that it was “not organized to sponsor housing which average working people cannot afford” (1). It sold Twin Pines to a private developer, National Kinney Corporation and the Starrett Housing Corporation, and exited the housing development business.

Starrett Housing Corp. (SHC) took control.  The company had a long history, beginning in 1887 as a family-owned construction business, going on to erect the Empire State Building and spending much of the 1960s building low- and middle-income apartment complexes in the metropolitan New York area. SHC finished building the mega-complex under the State’s Mitchell-Lama program, as subsidized working- and middle-class housing.

Starrett City, as Spring Creek Towers was originally called, opened in 1974. The giant complex contained 46 buildings ranging from 11 to 20 stories, with 5, 881 apartments. It stood atop what had been more than 140 acres of swampland and marsh. Indeed today, if you are lucky enough to rent an apartment facing west, you overlook Spring Creek Basin. Facing south, you can see Jamaica Bay and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean.

A 1979 television commercial for Starrett City, available on the Internet, advertises the advantages of living in this enormous development: the proximity of supermarkets, an indoor gym and swimming pool, attractively dressed men and women going off to work, and happy youngsters playing safely on landscaped grounds.

For people willing to make a 90-minute subway commute to and from jobs in Manhattan, Starrett offered the allure of a community that could answer every need. There were a post office, churches and a synagogue, and an extensive and well-monitored security system. A co-generation plant on the grounds supplied heat, electricity, hot water, and air conditioning to all the buildings.

Starrett Housing Corp. was far-sighted in terms of installing energy-saving measures. In the early 1990s, for instance, the management caulked and/or replaced windows throughout the complex, to prevent the loss of heated air during the winters and to retain cool air during the summers.  They installed bi-level lighting in hallways and CO detectors in apartments.

But there were also difficulties. When apartments were first rented at Starrett City in 1973, a racial quota system was in place, and SHC sought to maintain 64 percent of the apartments for white tenants, 22 percent for black residents, and 8 percent for Hispanic. In fairness to SHC, it always maintained that the quotas were designed to preserve racial integration within the Starrett complex. But times had changed, and the US Attorney General challenged this arrangement. In 1988 the US Supreme Court banned the quotas, ruling that they violated the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

As of the 2000 US Census, the demographics had changed considerably: 44.7 percent of the tenants were African American, 38 percent were white, 18.4 percent were Hispanic or Latino, and 4.1 percent were Asian.

The owner’s next significant challenge came on November 30, 2006, when Starrett City Associates, as the company was now called, announced plans to sell the entire property. Fearing that a new owner would raise rents and force out tenants, residents sought the assistance of Tenants and Neighbors (the State’s largest tenants rights group) and the community activist organization ACORN, and formed Save Starrett City.

On February 8, 2007, at 3AM, Starrett City Associates agreed to sell the sprawling complex to Clipper Equity LLC for an astonishing $1.3 billion.

The buyers insisted the complex would remain affordable; housing advocates were doubtful. Among other things, Clipper Equity had a history of irregularities, which had led to its being banned from converting apartments to condominiums or co-ops in New York State.

The State’s prominent politicians, including New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, voiced concern about the sale. Congressmen Anthony Weiner and Edolphus Towns indicated that federal hearings might be in order. Senator Charles Schumer “vowed … that he would not allow the deal to go through without an ironclad agreement from any buyer that Starrett stays affordable.” [2]

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rejected the deal, and Clipper Equity proposed a new bid aimed at appeasing its critics. But that, too, met the cutting-room floor when, on April 7, 2007, Commissioner Deborah Van Amerongen, speaking for the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), asserted that Clipper’s plan for rents to reach market rate after three years failed to protect residents adequately and would require more government support than was feasible.

The story has a happy ending for both Starrett’s tenants and owners (although not perhaps for Clipper Equity). As Affordable Housing Finance Magazine reported in February 2010, Wells Fargo originated a $531.4 million refinancing loan for the massive complex, through Freddie Mac’s Capital Markets Execution program. “The loan is the largest single-asset affordable housing loan in Freddie Mac’s history,” the magazine reported, “and allows the owners to pull out a substantial sum of equity while agreeing to keep the complex affordable for the next 30 years.”

These days, the owners continue to improve Spring Creek Towers’ physical plant. In one of the largest weatherization projects since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the non-profit Community Environmental Center (CEC) of Queens, NY is heightening the energy efficiency of Spring Creek Towers’ 5,881 apartments. ARRA funds cover $6 million of the total $9 million cost of the retrofitting; Spring Creek Towers is supplying $3 million.

Ramasu Ryan, a Green City Force trainee, tests for carbon monoxide levels at Spring Creek Towers

The retrofitting, which will take place over 2 phases and extend until the end of June 2011, will save energy, combat the climate crisis, and help preserve the apartments’ 36-year tradition of affordability.

These energy-saving and health measures will prevent approximately 5,800 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from being emitted into the atmosphere each year—the equivalent of taking almost 1,000 cars off the road.

To assist with the energy audits, an essential step before retrofitting can begin, CEC is employing trained energy conservationists from Green City Force, a non-profit organization that prepares young people for careers in the new green economy.  To see men and women in their late teens and early twenties—men and women whose backgrounds often make them among the most vulnerable in the City’s workforce—learning how to test for carbon monoxide levels, or assess the efficiency of a refrigerator or a smoke detector, and learning the discipline involved with performing a job on a regular basis, are some of the biggest rewards of the Spring Creek Towers’ weatherization.

It is a fitting achievement for a housing project that began, so many years ago, as a peaceful, beneficial community within the community of New York City.

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