New Stories: Transforming Inwood’s Public Library with the Eliza Apartments

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Learn more about the Joseph & Shelia Rosenblatt Building.

To learn more about the New York Public Library, visit their website.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@robinhood.org.

“This Robin Hood Moment” is produced and edited by Cory Winter; graphics are produced by Mary Power; visual content captured by Olivia Waldron and additionally provided by Motion Array; fact-checking by Chloe Sarnoff; music and sound are provided by Epidemic Sound. Special thanks to Susan Sack, Emary Aronson, and especially our donors—the Rosenblatts—Sam, Sarah, and Jill.

The views and opinions expressed by external podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Robin Hood or its personnel, nor does Robin Hood advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Kevin Thompson: From Robin Hood—New York City’s largest poverty-fighting philanthropy—welcome to “This Robin Hood Moment.”

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Kevin Thompson: It’s not news to anyone: New York City is facing a dire housing crisis.

Over 1 million households here are rent-burdened, spending over 30% of their income on rent.

The city’s rental vacancy rate is at a historic low of just 1.4%, and the median price for a studio apartment in New York City is now above $4,000 per month—for a studio!

To be fair there are more affordable rental options available, especially in the Bronx, but even in the Bronx, it’s difficult, almost impossible to find an apartment for a family of four under $2,000 a month.

That all means housing options for the city’s 2 million residents who live in poverty range from scarce to nonexistent.

Complicating New York City’s housing landscape are insufficient rental assistance programs, an imperiled housing voucher program, weakening tenant protections, a growing list of evictions, and a swelling population of unhoused New Yorkers now living in shelters.

In fact, on any given night, 131,940 New Yorkers including 45,000 children rest their heads in city-operated shelters.

Many New Yorkers believe housing here is in a state of crisis.

Which begs the question: is this problem too intractable to even solve?

At Robin Hood, we don’t think so. The real solutions lie in bold transformative action and one of those solutions must include building hundreds of thousands of new homes for New Yorkers who desperately need them.

But therein lies another challenge: where do you build in a place like New York City?

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Kevin Thompson: On June 26, Robin Hood, along with community leaders, elected officials, and representatives of governmental agencies, gathered to celebrate the ribbon cutting for a new, mixed-use, affordable housing development and library building in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood.

The new two-story, multi-million dollar complex houses a modern, state-of-the-art branch of the New York Public Library, in a gleaming light filled structure named the Joseph & Sheila Rosenblatt Building.

Above it, a 12-story tower with 174 deeply affordable housing units, with 20% of these units going to families moving out of shelters into their first permanent homes in some time.

The housing tower is known as the Eliza apartments, named after Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the wife of one of our country’s most illustrious founding fathers. If you’ve seen the musical or read the book, you understand.

If having a city library and affordable housing under one roof was not novel enough, the Joseph & Sheila Rosenblatt Building also includes a child care center with universal pre-K, a STEM education center, a community kitchen, and space for meetings and large gatherings.

At Robin Hood, we’ve dubbed this 14-story development “New Stories,” a place where new beginnings happen and it’s the largest co-location project of a library and affordable housing under one roof in New York City’s history.

Its completion is thanks to a $5 million memorial grant from the living children of the late Joseph and Sheila Rosenblatt—Robin Hood donors Sam, Sarah, and Jill. Their generosity is the lynchpin that made “New Stories” possible, and the building now stands as a testament to their parents legacy.

During the ribbon cutting ceremony, I heard Sam speak about his father’s dream of giving every New York City student a place to read and do their homework, and how his mother was committed to sheltering and housing families, and how he imagines the space…

Sam Rosenblatt: Picture many of the public libraries in New York. They’re two-story buildings that were built in the 1950s that really don’t even function effectively as a public library anymore. Our idea is to tear down these structures and build brand new, state-of-the-art modern libraries with affordable housing on top of it. Your gift will unlock the public funds that are needed to start this project.

My sisters and I immediately agreed that this was the perfect project on our parents as life long New Yorkers. That was the start of a wonderful eight-year partnership with Robin Hood and the New York Public Library that has resulted in this magnificent, transformative building we’re standing in.

We hope this is the first of many of these projects that get built. We really do hope that this inspires other families; we can do many more of these. Our dad always said he wanted to create a pilot project that was transformative. My sisters and I know that both her parents are certainly shining down on us today.

Kevin Thompson: That’s a powerful aspiration for this new addition to Inwood.

As I was standing in the lobby of this new library, reflecting on the modern glass facade that, even from the outside, instantly attracts anyone who might be passing by, I kept wondering, with such demand and such promise of chipping away at New York City’s affordable housing crisis, why is new story such a unicorn?

Surely, it couldn’t have been that difficult to build more affordable housing, or was it?

So I enlisted the help of my fellow Robin Hood-er and partner-in-crime Crystal Cooper, and we went on a search to find out exactly what it took to write this “New Story” for the Inwood community.

And as always, if you want to e-mail me with guests suggestions or thoughts on future episodes, send us an email at info@robinhood.org.

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Kevin Thompson: Welcome, Crystal! Let’s begin with the big question first: where did the idea of “New Stories” originate?

Crystal Cooper: So, Kevin, the “New Stories” development culminates in more than a decade of planning, community meetings, and collaboration between city agencies, elected leaders, the New York Public Library, developers, and other stakeholders. 

Kevin Thompson: Well, it sounds like everyone was invited to the party…

Crystal Cooper: You sort of need to invite everyone to the party for projects like these. But I think that speaks to how many groups are working to fight poverty, and how that can only be accomplished if we work together, right?

Kevin Thompson: Because poverty is so multidimensional, and creating that upward mobility means you have to attack it from all angles, from food, to material hardship, to housing, all of these are needed to establish stability in one’s life in order to allow the seeds of upward mobility to take root.

Crystal Cooper: Which is why Robin Hood exists today, and where a Robin Hood founder and our longest serving executive director, David Saltzman, enters the picture.

David Saltzman: When we started Robin Hood in 1988, we knew we wanted to focus on homelessness. And in fact, our very first two grants were to combat homelessness. 

One that went to the Association to Benefit Children provided plumbing for a new shelter they were building. We didn’t need to do the sexiest thing in the world, but we knew you needed plumbing and nobody else would pay for it, right? The second went to the Children’s Health Project to provide health care to homeless children living in shelters who had no access to doctors or clinical care of any type whatsoever. So, the roots go way, way back. 

Crystal Cooper: That’s David Saltzman, one of the original five Robin Hood founders.

David Saltzman: Fast forward to when we began to think about “New Stories,” at that time, 8 or 9 years ago, we realized that the housing market no longer worked for poor people. There was no affordable housing available, and one of the main issues was that the private sector couldn’t afford to buy property and build housing, and then rent it at an affordable rate. So, we were thinking about how could we find a way around that? And people much smarter than I realized, oh, government owns a bunch of buildings where you wouldn’t have to spend money buying property if you could partner with government.

And there were a lot of buildings: libraries, firehouses, police precincts, schools that were in states of terrible disrepair that needed to be rebuilt on land that had air rights. And so if you could figure out a way to partner with government to rebuild that government building, so it was better than it had ever been, totally modern and totally functional, and then use the air rights to build affordable housing, you might be able to do something really special. So that’s how New Stories came about. 

Crystal Cooper: And one of these smarter people that David had alluded to—no shade to David—was Bea de la Torre. 

Kevin Thompson: And who is Bea? 

Crystal Cooper: Well right now, she’s the Chief Philanthropy Officer at Trinity Church Wall Street, but before that, she was actually at Robin Hood as our Managing Director of Housing and Homelessness, and before that, she worked for the City of New York as a Deputy Commissioner for the Department of Housing Preservation & Development or HPD. So clearly, Bea had the skills and experience, and it turns out, she was in the right place at the right time. 

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Bea de la Torre: I will first tell you that this project has taken a long time. The vision for it started over ten years ago, and I, personally, my background is, I’m an urban planner that has been working on affordable housing issues for a long time. And, before Robin Hood, I was working for the City of New York, and basically, my job was to figure out which sites we could develop affordable housing in, what kind of public sites. 

Crystal Cooper: Bea had spoken with Julie Sandorf of the Revson Foundation about the problems that public libraries were facing, and that got her thinking about the “air”?

Kevin Thompson: Air, as in…the sky above?

Crystal Cooper: Yeah, essentially, what if you co-locate housing with another public use, like a library, using its air rights?

Bea de la Torre: So, then the idea of what could you basically address two really important needs with one solution, meaning could you address the needs of what, you know, a public library that was designed a long time ago that’s not even big enough to really meet the needs of the people that are using it, and then use the air on top of it to build affordable housing. 

Could you do that in one building and kind of, you know, take care of all of that together, as a package, came up? And I thought it was brilliant. I, you know, again, going back to my urban planning background, I just think it’s the smart way of developing, but also it just really brings two key community needs and, you know, integral to the fabric of the neighborhoods that make New York City.

Kevin Thompson: That seems like such a common sense idea, but I’m sure over a decade ago, that was pretty novel. 

Crystal Cooper: I mean, for me Kevin, whenever I walk down the street in New York, I can’t help but notice the empty air space above some older, smaller two-, maybe three- story buildings, and I always wonder why developers didn’t just build into that space, and it turns out, Bea wondered the same thing.

Bea de la Torre: So we, hired a group of architects, to help us think through this process, identify some of those libraries, of course, work very closely with the three different library systems: New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library. And went to City Hall and said, “you know, as Robin Hood, we believe that we can raise enough money to be able to put capital towards the fit out of these libraries, and we know that the city has a lot of subsidies in order to pay for the affordable housing. 

Could we do five of them? Could you, can you commit to saying that, “yes, you will help us do all of these projects and we could do five of them and we’ll raise some money?” And there were some challenge, and I would say the challenges were maybe at Robin Hood we were being overly ambitious. The scale was not something that at that moment the administration was willing to commit to. And I was fortunate enough to have a very close relationship with the commissioner of the housing agency at that point, Vicki Been, who then later went on to become the Deputy Mayor under the De Blasio administration. 

And she said, “listen, at HPD, we can commit to at least one of these projects, let’s do it.” And that’s how basically the Inwood site was identified. And then we started the process of getting it to, you know, to the start, to the start everything to get it to where it is today. 

Kevin Thompson: So, we go from five of these sites, down to just one. Crystal, I’ll be honest, it doesn’t sound like it’s looking good for “New Stories” at this point. 

Crystal Cooper: I mean, when I learned this, I was just as surprised as you are. I used to work at the City under the De Blasio administration and I know that even one signature project takes a massive amount of resources, commitment, and perhaps most importantly, leadership. And from what Bea told me, if it hadn’t been for Vicki Been, there’s no way the city would have gotten on board to begin with.

Kevin Thompson: So, how did Bea go from the no on five, to getting them to say yes to the site in Inwood?

Crystal Cooper: Honestly, it sounds like the concern was that we, at Robin Hood, were asking the city to commit to more than they were comfortable with at the time. Frankly, they couldn’t afford it. The idea being that we’d commit $5 million per branch.

Bea de la Torre: Robin Hood is able to raise $5 million per branch, so a total of $25 million in order to help pay for the library, but you match that amount. You need to have skin in the game in here as well was basically the initial idea on how we were packaging it. And I think there were concerns about the amount of money that we were asking, at that point, the administration to commit to, because the reality is public libraries are very underfunded. They really are. And this is a really big issue that, frankly, still exists today. So at that point, it was not deemed as one of the top priorities from a city hall perspective. 

Having said that, I think, you know, the relationship that we had with HPD really helped, and HPD was able, HPD is the housing agency, HPD was able to then say, we don’t have the $25 million to match the amount of the public libraries. And the money that we have, frankly, has to go towards the development of affordable housing, of course, but we think there is some way to do one by tapping in this infrastructure fund that they have set up that basically looks at the facilitation of the public library as a way to then be able to allow for the affordable housing on top. 

So, that’s basically how we overcame that. But it really did take some time, a good amount of back and forth. And really, as so many things in life that seem difficult, it really came down to a very strong relationship that we have with the agency at that point, and a visionary leader like Vicki Been, I very much credit her for making this project happen.

Kevin Thompson: From the little we’ve heard about Vicki Been, she sounds impressive. What was her role in all of this?

Crystal Cooper: Oh, quite! Vicki is a law professor at NYU and Director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, but during the early days of New Stories, she was the commissioner at HPD, and the city insider we needed to get this project off the ground.

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Crystal Cooper: So, remember when Bea had said that Robin Hood had originally proposed five of the “New Stories” projects to the City? Well, Vicki Been, who was then the commissioner for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development, taught us just how powerful a strong proof of concept could be. As the city’s housing champion, her theory was that the key to getting approval on a hundred of these projects meant that first, we needed to do one, and we need to do it right.

Vicki Been: So while I was enthused about all five of them, and no, Bea is very generous to to say that I was a thought partner, Bea was so important on this, but, you know, there was, it’s so, so really, I think Inwood was a proof of concept, right? Can we really work out the needs of the library, work out the needs of affordable housing? Meet other community needs, right? And could we really combine all that, make it work from the different kinds of funding streams that you would need to do a library, to do STEM, to do all of those things and affordable housing, so it was really proof of concept.

Kevin Thompson: I mean that’s a great argument, and that totally resonates with me. But she was the commissioner at HPD; she’s charged with housing for all of New York City. She doesn’t fund libraries. She doesn’t build them. What was the arrangement that led her to even spend a dime on this project? 

Crystal Cooper: As you can imagine, that was difficult to work out. And there definitely was some opposition in parts of City Hall at the time about whether they could actually use the money to combine affordable housing and, well, a library.

Vicki Been: Robin Hood, of course, was very generous in giving a grant that would pay for part of it. But blending the different financing issues to make that happen and to, you know, it was, the simplest part of it, it wasn’t simple, but the simplest part of it was, okay, we have the shell and that, you know, we can pay for because the affordable housing above it, has, you know, rests on it.

And we can justify that that’s part and parcel of the affordable housing, just like, you know, we have first floor retail in some of our affordable buildings, so that was the simplest part, right?

The harder part was the fit out, the maintenance issues, you know, what happens if there’s a leak. All of those kinds of problems were much more difficult to work out, but not impossible if you have people who are really committed to doing it and who are creative, and the team at HPD, not just me, but the entire team was really enthused about doing this, about the future and how many more could be done and showing that it really could be done.

Kevin Thompson: Ok, Crystal, let’s stop right there for a second. I’m not a real estate developer or construction wiz. But we’ve heard this term “fit-out” a couple times now. What exactly is a fit-out? 

Crystal Cooper: I didn’t know that either, but it turns out that the City—actually, HPD—could only provide the shell for the two story ground floor library. So, because these dollars are public dollars, and the City partner here is HPD, the housing agency, they can only spend dollars for housing purposes. So, using HPD dollars to construct the apartment tower, no problem. Using HPD dollars to construct the library, big no no.

Kevin Thompson: Which makes sense because getting the City to use affordable housing money to provide for the fit out for a library, well that’s a bit of a stretch. The City’s housing department can only fund housing projects, not retail space on the bottom floor or something like that.

Crystal Cooper: Exactly. Hence Robin Hood’s role; Robin Hood’s essential role. 

Vicki Been: And so that’s why Bea’s creativity in bringing a grant to do that fit out. We could provide the shell. You know, it all fit together as pieces of the puzzle. But you had to have different sources which, you know, that that’s that’s kind of life in affordable housing finance.

You want to have not just a building, you want to have a community. You want to be contributing to the community. So you want to provide green space. You want to provide retail. You want to provide, you know, daycare or things like that. But it’s always a challenge to put those different sources of funding together.

Affordable housing alone usually involves, unfortunately, you know, six to eight different kinds of money that you’ve got to get to work together. So when you add-on, okay, now we need fit out the that the affordable housing money can’t pay for, or now we need this that the affordable housing can’t pay for it, it just it gets really complicated.

Kevin Thompson: I’m curious how she was able to keep the momentum going over at the city. It’s just been my experience that, for projects like these, anything that can happen, will happen, and on top of that, you’ve got all these different players coming in, not just Robin Hood and the New York Public Library. 

Crystal Cooper: Part of what worked here is that everyone was committed to the vision. They kept incredibly open lines of communication. Nobody, neither the City and its partners nor Robin Hood had any problem calling and saying, there’s a problem, let’s solve it. So, even in the midst of litigation, and the rezoning, and complaints from the community who felt that this was gentrification at its finest… it was the partners agreeing to stay at the table and talk to one another which was critical to keeping everything together. 

Kevin Thompson: What’s impressive to me is that, even with the library opening in June, you know, that’s seven or eight years from the concept and planning to the groundbreaking and then a ribbon cutting. Is this a typical horizon for affordable housing projects? 

Crystal Cooper: Well, unfortunately, it’s not atypical… I’m sorry to say.

Vicki Been: So it had to be rezoned. That, by definition, is a several year project. Then there was litigation, that by definition is another, you know, a couple of years before you work all that out. Right? And then you have to put your financing together. You have to do all the plans. Everything has to be approved. You have to get your permits.

That, unfortunately, is a couple of years. So, unfortunately it adds up. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening, you know, when you face the litigation, the people litigating aren’t taking into account the fact that there are 175 families waiting to move into affordable, quality housing, and you’re holding them up for two years. Two years is a lifetime when you’re not in good housing, right?

Or when you’re worried about being in a community where you can send your kids to school or where your seniors have their health care, you know, being able to be in the neighborhood that they want to be in. And all of these delays, many of which are well-intentioned, right? We want inspections. We want to make sure that the building is what it should be and is safe and well built and all of those things, but that all takes time.

And then when you add on things like community engagement for a rezoning has to be really extensive because you’re asking people to change, you’re asking people to risk change. And it takes a while to build trust. It takes a while for people to think through, well, what is my community need? What do I want it to look like?

Kevin Thompson: This talk of community engagement makes me wonder about the reaction from the community itself. Were Inwood residents necessarily on board with the old library being shuttered up and having a new library slash affordable housing development rise up in the middle of their community? 

Crystal Cooper: You know, this was a bittersweet moment for the neighborhood. Change is scary, and a feeling of uncertainty loomed in the air, that’s unquestionable. But talk about tenacity, there is one advocate in particular who made it his personal mission to ensure politics wouldn’t get in the way of completing this project. And that’s former council member Ydanis Rodriguez, who represented the neighborhoods of Washington Heights, Marble Hill, and Inwood. 

Vicki Been: At the same time, we had a council member, Ydanis Rodriguez, who was really, holding everybody’s feet to the fire about getting this done. There had already been delays because remember, there was litigation over the trying to undo the rezoning. So, there was already delays that we had no control over. So, there couldn’t be any delays that we did have control over, right? We had to keep moving. So, having a great partner in Robin Hood, having a great partner in the council member, it being the fact of a part of the rezoning that people were really looking to see, is this going to happen? Is this promise going to come through?

Kevin Thompson: So, it wasn’t just the rezoning that was a fight, right? People wanted to preserve their beloved library. And we had all of these powerful partners-in-action who believed in the community buy-in process, including the very council member who represented Inwood, on our side.

Crystal Cooper: And if that weren’t enough, another one of the partners involved in this project is from Inwood too, and he just happens to be the President of the New York Public Library.

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Tony Marx: So, I grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan. The library that used to be on this site, was the library I grew up using. I loved it. So this was tough. But, you have to listen to the experts. And the experts were very clear. This library, from the 1950s, beloved as it was, was just way out of date.

It was too small, no community or education space. It just wasn’t working. We could have spent ridiculous amounts of money, I suppose, but it still wouldn’t have worked well. It just was badly designed. So we said we need to get creative here. And you know, we sat around, I kept asking, why don’t we ever use the air above the libraries, and there were lots of answers because the library had just not gotten to that for the course of a century.

So, of course, there were answers, but the question remained. And because it was my neighborhood, I was acutely aware of the needs for affordable housing and other community services in this neighborhood that just was not well served by things that other neighborhoods take for granted. It’s not a rich neighborhood by any means. So, we started exploring what was possible.

Kevin Thompson: That was Anthony Marx, or Tony to everyone who knows him, the CEO of the New York Public Library. So, this really is Tony’s neighborhood. I mean we all move to New York, if we’re not from here, and call our neighborhoods “our neighborhoods” but Tony is actually a native New Yorker, he’s actually a native of Inwood, and, as a kid, actually used to go to the very library we’re talking about? 

Crystal Cooper: Right? You can’t make this up. And even when we were first talking about this from the very beginning—the question of why Inwood should be the first site for New Stories—I can’t think of a better reason than the CEO of the New York Public Library having grown up there. 

Kevin Thompson: But also, what an incredible partner to have, who has all of this real estate potential and libraries that need improvement, that’s not beholden to the bureaucracy that so many other public-private partnerships are bogged down with.

Tony Marx: You know, the library, people don’t realize this about us but this has sort of become one of our specialties. We’re huge, we’re the most visited, most trusted civic institution because we’re in every neighborhood, so our reach is profound.

I mean, Rich and others are, you know, expert in how the City work. They can tell you what a miracle this is. But, you know, once we’ve proven it with a miracle, then we should just be able to keep doing miracles. That sort of, we’re in the miracle business here. 

The obvious answer is, you know, we had to get the communities by and for this, and that was hard. Communities are not always sort of inclined towards change. Right. They’re fearful of it even when they recognize that their current situation is not ideal.

It was going to go, you know, from traditionally just a six-story neighborhood to potentially twice that or more than twice that in, in the case of The Eliza. And I knew that there could be enough noise to kill it just because, you know, that’s how politics works, right? Part of how it works is enough noise will kill things, right? So, of course, I was scared about that because I, I had a pretty strong feeling that this was worth doing and that the neighborhood would love it and embrace it as they have and are once it was done. But getting to “done” meant, you know, bringing people along who might not want to come along.

And God knows that was tricky. And there were a lot of meetings, and, you know, God bless George Mihaltses and his colleagues and, you know, everyone who put in so many meetings, and the one of the things we learned, and this was something we learned and Inwood was an important part of that was when the neighbors, when our patrons, our citizens speak up with concern, the answer is to listen. 

Kevin Thompson: And I have to imagine, because Tony is from this neighborhood, that there was an additional lens he applied to this project; he wanted everyone involved to just listen to what the community was saying. 

Crystal Cooper: Without question. I mean I lived in Inwood for almost 10 years and I have to say that when you have a personal history with a New York City neighborhood, you’re ready to fight tooth and nail for it. And it sounds like Tony shares that sentiment.

Tony Marx: Iit was not that hard for me to imagine that my mother would have joined the protest if you if we’d gotten to that, if she was still living there in well into her 80s, that would have been her thing. 

You didn’t know my mom, but trust me. And again, God bless. Right? I mean, that’s what makes New York, New York. I know it drives everybody crazy trying to get stuff done, but it’s, you know, we’re this amazing, diverse city full of everyone sort of expressing their views.

The single largest thing we heard, which is a lovely thing to hear, was we love our library so much we can’t bear the thought of being without, you know, why would, why would we be unhappy with that statement?

Kevin Thompson: He’s right. Who could be unhappy with that? Libraries are fundamentally a community hub and I think a lot of people forget that. 

Crystal Cooper: So, when you take away a library, you take away an anchor to the community, so of course community members will and should be concerned. But what’s so unique about this project, is that you’re combining a community hub with actual places for community members to live. And with all due respect to the kids uptown, you really have no excuse not to go downstairs to the library to finish your homework now. 

Kevin Thompson: But in all seriousness, this building is an exact physical manifestation of what our donors’ late parents, Joseph and Sheila Rosenblatt, had dreamt of: a place to enable every eager student in New York City to have a unique and quiet space to do their homework and prepare properly for school, and a place to provide affordable housing for all New Yorkers and helping them out of the shelter system.

Crystal Cooper: This really is philanthropy at its best, filling in the gaps, and providing the connective tissue to meet New York’s extraordinary needs.

Kevin Thompson: I couldn’t agree more, Crystal, but this all begs the question: was the Rosenblatt’s family gift the key that unlocked this entire endeavor?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Crystal Cooper: So, you asked if the Rosenblatt family gift was the key to making New Stories happen, and I have to say, from every conversation I had with everyone we talked to—Bea, Vicki, Tony, David—I’d say a resounding yes. 

Kevin Thompson: And why do you think that is? 

Crystal Cooper: Well, I honestly think David said it best when I spoke to him. 

David Saltzman: One of the important roles of private philanthropy, like Robin Hood, is to help government do the right thing, to lever government dollars. Here there were multiple needs, and government couldn’t quite figure out how to meet those needs. There’s obviously a need for housing. There’s obviously a need for a new library in Inwood. But there was no way of connecting those things. 

The Rosenblatt’s extraordinary gift was the lever that was needed to bring together the money for libraries and the money for housing, and create something extraordinary and special that I hope will be the model for dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds and hundreds of other public-private partnerships going forward. 

None of this would have been possible without the genius and the doggedness of Susan Sack, Emary Aronson, Bea de la Torre, my partners at Robin Hood, Wes Moore, Rich Buery, and so many other people who not only are brilliant, but they are unrelenting. You cannot get in their way and stop them. And nothing was going to stop them from doing the right thing for these families that desperately needed housing. 

Kevin Thompson: Crystal, I think everyone at Robin Hood and who partnered with us on New Stories would agree that the success of New Stories is a powerful reminder that we can create meaningful change when we dare to think big and act boldly. 

Crystal Cooper: And I’d agree and even go further in saying that New York’s housing crisis requires innovative, scalable solutions like this that go beyond temporary fixes. And it’s developments like New Stories that represent the bold vision we need for the future of New York.

If there’s one thing I took away from investigating this story, it’s that the stakes are too high, and the need is too great, to let fear of transformation hold us back. We have to push for more projects like New Stories, combining affordable housing with essential community services. 

Kevin Thompson: And, if David Saltzman has his way, and I hope he does, the “New Stories” development in Inwood will be just one of many shining examples of what can be achieved when we work together to ensure that New York remains a city of opportunity for all.

Kevin Thompson: Crystal, your investigative talents never cease to amaze. Thank you!

Crystal Cooper: Thanks, Kevin!

Kevin Thompson: And to anyone listening or if you’re visiting New York, I invite you to hop on the A train and take a ride up to Inwood to visit “New Stories” at 4790 Broadway.

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Kevin Thompson: This episode of “This Robin Hood Moment” was produced and edited by Cory Winter. Graphics by Mary Power. Fact-checking by Chloe Sarnoff. Our theme music is from Epidemic Sound. And special thanks here to Susan Sack, Emary Aronson, and especially our donors—the Rosenblatts—Sam, Sarah, and Jill. I’m Kevin Thompson, joined by the ever-insightful Crystal Cooper, for Robin Hood—New York City’s largest local poverty-fighting philanthropy. Thanks for listening.