Pratt Center Project
Democratizing PlanningBuilding Community Capacity to Shape New York City's Housing Plan
Pratt Center works with a collaborative of four other technical assistance (TA) providers to provide planning, mapping, policy analysis, and advocacy assistance to communities targeted for rezoning as part of the goals set out in Housing New York, Mayor de Blasio’s affordable housing plan. Our TA partners include Hester Street, the Community Development Project at Urban Justice Center, Association for Neighborhood Housing Development and theCenter for Urban Pedagogy.
Our work equips communities to understand the scope and impact of proposals for their neighborhoods and engage them to define community priorities around housing affordability and density, jobs, infrastructure, public services, environmental quality, and more. Informed by findings from community planning processes, we then support our community partners’ advocacy with the Administration to realize goals for a holistic neighborhood plan and to secure commitments that will shape neighborhood development as rezonings move forward.
We are working intensively with partners in East New York, Gowanus, and Bushwick in Brooklyn, Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, and Long Island City in Queens. We have provided more targeted support to partners in East Harlem and Chinatown/Lower East Side, Manhattan, and Bay Street in Staten Island.
The collaborations with neighborhood based partners Faith in New York, CAAAV, Make the Road New York, Fifth Avenue Committee, CASA-New Settlement Houses, Cypress Hills LDC, Community Voices Heard, and all the community partners with whom these groups locally collaborate, create impacts both locally and citywide. The strong organizing, precedents created, lessons learned, and associated citywide campaigns are expanding the right to the city, shaping our collective future, shifting how planning is practiced, and strengthening our democracy.