TEXT OF MEMO BY VICKI BEEN, COMMISSIONER OF NEW YORK CITY'S DEPARTMENT OF
HOUSING PRESERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT, SENT TO AGENCY STAFF IN JANUARY 2016
"Our Commitment to Enforcement and Related Staffing Announcements"
Over the decades since Mayor Koch began to use housing to stabilize
neighborhoods, provide better opportunities for the City’s low and
moderate income families, and protect the diversity that makes the City
distinctive, HPD has been instrumental in building or preserving thousands
of homes. Mayor de Blasio has clearly continued and extended that legacy
through Housing New York, which reflects the City’s deep commitment to
building and preserving quality, affordable housing. While HPD is often
judged on how many homes we finance and how many New Yorkers we house, we
all know that the impact of our work in neighborhoods is much more than
unit counts. In fact, our work is hardly done once a deal is closed, and
how we monitor and enforce owners’ compliance with our policies and
program terms is as crucial to our mission as the production of units.
HPD has been blessed by strong teams in Asset and Property Management
(APM), Building and Land Development Services (BLDS), Enforcement and
Neighborhood Services (ENS), and Regulatory Compliance, and by an
unparalleled legal counsel and legal team. Even when budget cuts starved
the agency on basic data management and analytic capacity, we’ve managed
to keep much of our portfolio of homes in good financial and physical
health, and enforce the requirements of our deals effectively. For that,
we owe a huge debt to the professionalism, dedication, and creativity of
so many of you.
The compliance challenges are growing, however. Our portfolio is large and
is increasing rapidly. We are insisting that regulatory agreements
provide even better protections for the taxpayer and for the families that
live in our housing, and we are now working under a microscope because of
the transparency of our data, and the importance of housing to the
political, economic, and social discussions underway in the city. Because
of the critical importance of enforcement and monitoring, we are doubling
down on those efforts, and I wanted to explain some changes we are making
to improve our efforts.
Current efforts to improve compliance functions across the agency
First, over the past year, I have asked many parts of the agency to
evaluate whether our business processes can be improved to better position
our enforcement and compliance monitoring functions. A number of
initiatives are already underway:
•
Development and DTR are re-examining the conversion process to
ensure that construction completion is properly tracked, that projects
effectively convert to permanent financing, and that tenants in
preservation projects going through complex rent-restructurings or Section
8 processes during this time are properly protected.
•
The Labor Monitoring Unit and Regulatory Affairs team are examining
how we can best enforce our expanding prevailing wage, targeted hiring,
and M/WBE commitments.

 •
Legal, Development and Asset and Property Management, along with
TSD, are rethinking the handoff of documents and flagging of enforcement
responsibilities from the closing table to other parts of the agency,
particularly with the help of new tools like HPDWorks.
•
Asset and Property Management are working on a plan for a
comprehensive asset management technology system, while also planning to
expand eRent Roll to cover a greater portion of our buildings.
•
Marketing is working with TSD to solidify the great work they have
been doing to track re-rentals and monitor owner compliance with
restrictions on the use of those apartments. This is in addition to the
creation of a Homeless Placement Services team, which will oversee
placement and compliance with homeless set-asides.
•
Legal, Property Disposition and Finance and Asset and Property
Management are working to bring HDFCs under regulatory agreements and to
enforce the terms of those agreements.
•
Inclusionary Housing, Operations, Asset Management and Strategic
Planning are working with the Cornerstone Partnership consulting group to
re-think the way we monitor our housing stock and the possibility of using
third party monitors more broadly.
As many of you know, we also recently moved the Management Review and
Internal Compliance (Audit) group and the Engineering Audit Division into
the Performance Management and Analytics Division, led by Assistant
Commissioner Meryl Block Weissman. Meryl and her team have done amazing
work to build the agency’s analytic capacity, so we’ve asked her to bring
the same rigor to building our capacity to assess and systematize our
responses to inquiries into our performance and compliance with various
requirements. The new Management Review and Engineering Audit group is
headed by Executive Director, Fe Pacres, who brings extensive experience
in financial, operational and forensic audits in the construction, banking
and government sectors to HPD and this new role.
New resources to improve existing enforcement functions
Second, we are bringing new resources to existing enforcement functions.
We have invested $7 million in technology, under the leadership of Anthony
Thomas, over the past 18 months; a significant portion of this funding
will launch systems that will allow us to improve our compliance
monitoring – from eRent Roll that allows us to better monitor the
financial health of buildings we financed and keep track of re-rentals, to
the launch of a redesign of our online housing lottery to allow us to
better track owners’ and marketing agents’ compliance with our marketing
rules. Further, in the next year, we also expect to provide code
enforcement staff with newer, faster handheld devices that will streamline
the inspection process.
In addition, our staffing needs request to OMB includes a number of new
positions for APM, ENS, and Legal, to focus specifically on compliance and
enforcement related issues.
Restructuring
Third, we are restructuring to ensure that we (and the projects we
finance) are appropriately positioned to address the major compliance

 issues that are introduced by ongoing programmatic changes to tax
incentives and inclusionary housing, as well as the sustained increase in
production overall.
First, the inclusionary housing unit will return to Development. The
recombined incentives unit will be led by Louise Carroll, who will be
promoted to Associate Commissioner of Housing Incentives, and will oversee
tax incentives, tax credits, and inclusionary housing. Louise has done an
exceptional job in streamlining the inclusionary housing application
process and in leading our efforts to craft new inclusionary policies, and
has demonstrated extraordinary leadership skills and vision. Her special
blend of legal training and experience with development and finance make
her uniquely well-suited to lead this team.
The unit will have two divisions for now: Tax Credits and Incentives, and
Inclusionary Housing. Inclusionary housing will be led by a new assistant
commissioner, a position which will be posted soon.
Tax Credits and Incentives will continue to be ably led by Assistant
Commissioner Miriam Colon, who has made tremendous progress over the past
year in building a great team and making major improvements in our
processing of tax incentive applications, including online submissions for
420-c. In all those advances, Miriam’s careful, thoughtful approach has
been key to ensuring that the systems are built to serve the agency well
for the long term.
Miriam also will lead an effort to consolidate all our Article XI
applications under her division. Currently, Article XI applications are
being filed by several different divisions across the agency, which poses
a risk of inconsistencies. Bringing all the applications under Miriam’s
leadership will ensure that we are insisting on the same standards across
all types of development and that we are presenting applications to the
City Council consistently and thoroughly.
In the past, many of the developments using 421-a and voluntary
inclusionary housing bonuses also used low-income housing tax credits or
HPD’s subsidy programs, so that compliance and enforcement efforts on the
projects were led by Asset and Property Management. However, because the
changes we are seeking in the form of a mandatory inclusionary program as
well the provisions we expect from whatever tax exemption comes to replace
the ill-fated 421-a, will result in many more projects that do not involve
other HPD programs, I am asking Baaba Halm to lead a working group, made
up of Louise Carroll, Anne Marie Hendrickson, Miriam Colon, Nancy
Batterman, Matt Shafit and Matt Murphy to examine how best to structure
the monitoring and compliance needs for that growing category of projects.
Please join me in thanking Eric Enderlin, Louise Carroll, Miriam Colon,
Meryl Block-Weissman and Baaba Halm for stepping up to assume these new
responsibilities, and to all those -- particularly General Counsel Matt
Shafit and Deputy Commissioners Vito Mustaciuolo, Anne-Marie Hendrickson,
Anthony Thomas, David Quart and their teams -- who are involved in the
thoughtful and rigorous efforts underway to improve our enforcement
activities. The laser focus on all our enforcement responsibilities may
result in additional changes in the future, but I want to express my

 sincere appreciation and respect for all those who are working so hard to
ensure that we are carrying out our enforcement activities effectively,
fairly, and efficiently.
-Vicki
Vicki Been
Commissioner