Hope community Incorporated and Ascendant are two community-based not-for-profit affordable housing organization based in East and Central Harlem. Hope’s mission is to “rebuild the physical infrastructure of East Harlem by creating attractive, high-quality affordable rental and owner-occupied housing. Hope seeks to strengthen the neighborhood's social fabric by assisting in the growth and success of local businesses, by assisting residents to enhance their lives and incomes, and by sponsoring community programs”.
Hope’s Property Management Department services is a Community-Development Corporation (CDC), owns over 1,300 affordable apartments in more than 78 buildings throughout East Harlem (Community District 11). Hope Community expressed the need for evidence-based mapping to understand the exposure to flooding and other risks of their 78 buildings and the people living in them. Following a meeting with a community educator and previous graduate of the New School, one of the main problems seems to be ‘blue sky flooding’, the type of flooding occurring without stormy weather and influenced by high tides and high ground water table. This type of flooding affects basements, which are recurrently flooded, but for which Hope has very little funding for left over after what goes towards regular building maintenance. Moreover, Hope has been receiving a number of
violations from the energy company because it is in the basements that the gas and water readings are stored and because of flooding officers were unable to do a proper meter reading. Because of these violations, Hope has been unable to close housing retrofitting deals with the for-profit-banks they partner with. At the same time Hope has been an early adopter of green rooftops thanks to funding made available by the city, however green rooftops address a different problem: they slow down excess rainfall but they do not slow down water coming from below. An evidence-based large-scale mapping exercise for Hope would then need to make a case for the problems encountered by Hope by visualizing the hidden recurrent costs due to basement flooding as well as regular maintenance costs.