What Does 50 Years of Community Development Look Like?

What Does 50 Years of Community Development Look Like?


The Association for Neighborhood Housing & Development, or ANHD—founded in the 1970s to reclaim the growing number of burned and abandoned apartment buildings across the city— turns 50 this year. City Limits sat down with Executive Director Barika Williams to talk about that work, and what’s ahead.

What Does 50 Years of Community Development Look Like?

ANHD

ANHD staff, including Executive Director Barika Williams at center, during the organization’s community development conference in 2023.

The Association for Neighborhood Housing & Development, or ANHD, turns 50 this year. The coalition—made up of dozens of community groups across the five boroughs—has a stated mission of building “community power to win affordable housing and thriving, equitable neighborhoods for all New Yorkers.”

The organization also gave birth to City Limits. Now an independent nonprofit newsroom, City Limits was launched in 1976, two years after ANHD’s founding, as a means for housing organizers to communicate and share resources with one another amid the city’s fiscal crisis, as they sought to reclaim the growing number of burned and abandoned apartment buildings across the five boroughs.

“Private sector investment in New York City housing had virtually dried up, and ANHD members did what they could, with minuscule resources, to fill the void,” former City Limits editors Alyssa Katz and Jarrett Murphy wrote in a 2016 recounting of the newsroom’s history. “Like any group looking to inform and motivate members, ANHD published a newsletter. It was called City Limits.”





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