Trump Village

August 21, 2017

Loss of affordability at Coney Island’s Trump Village highlights issues with the city’s Mitchell-Lama program

Built by Donald Trump’s father, Fred, in 1964, Trump Village in Coney Island features seven 23-story towers with 3,700 co-op and rental apartments. To pay for the $70 million project, which would total $564 million today, Fred Trump used Mitchell-Lama, a government program that granted financial incentives in exchange for setting aside affordable housing. The typical rental contract lasts 20 years, and after that, landlords can opt-out of the program. As Crain’s reported, Trump Village became one of the first co-ops to exit the Mitchell-Lama program in 2007, letting residents sell their apartments for whatever the market allowed. Owners of 38,000 Mitchell-Lama apartments, representing 28% of the program's housing, have left in the past 20 years. But as the value of these apartments, which were once affordable, keeps rising, New Yorkers looking for affordable housing there, and other former Mitchell-Lama apartments, may be out of luck.
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August 29, 2016

Like father like son: The Trump legacy of housing discrimination

Black potential tenants who just wanted a decent place to live were routinely turned away at the Trump family’s Queens housing complexes and others. Housing activists and equal housing organizations took note, and in 1973 Trump Management was sued by the Justice Department for discrimination. Some of those tenants who stood firm remember the indignities all too well. The New York Times took a look at the early days of the Trump empire, when Donald's father, Fred C. Trump, built and managed middle-income residential complexes like the Wilshire Apartments in Jamaica Estates, Queens. A former employee of the elder Trump tells the Times that when receiving applications from potential tenants who happened to be black he was told, "Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there."
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