ROP

Howard Kimmel repairs the world with affordable housing

Karen Rubin
Howard Kimmel, at his apartment in North Shore Towers, looks back at a life devoted to the quest for affordable housing. © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com

By Karen Rubin

Howard Kimmel is the Don Quixote of affordable housing, tilting at the windmills of NIMBYism, politics, and rapacious real estate development.

He could have become a multimillionaire in real estate – like many of his peers whom he inveigled to finance his projects. Instead, Howard plowed $400,000 from selling off property he rehabilitated in Woodmere to create the Anna and Philip Kimmel Foundation, named for his parents and dedicated to promoting affordable housing. The foundation built the most transformative of his achievements, two affordable housing buildings in New Cassel. The buildings, Apex 1 for seniors and Apex 2 for low-income families (now known as Kimmel 1 and 2), revitalized the blighted, crime-ridden neighborhood, triggering economic redevelopment.

Even into the age of 94, he is still looking for affordable housing projects, and continuing to prod and poke mayors, commissioners, town supervisors and county executives.

In an interview, Howard Kimmel began telling his story this way. “There are really three stages to my life. Three stages, but one theme: how to create affordable housing.”

From his 20s to his 60s, from 1949-1989, while working at the New York State Division of Housing, he oversaw the rise of the massive, breakthrough 15,300-unit Coop City in the Bronx, wrote the manual on cooperative management and oversaw all senior housing in the state. In 1982, he formulated a novel strategy to achieve affordability which seems particularly trendy today: sharing. He called it SHOP (Shared Housing Option Program), a concept which, after leaving the state, he implemented in the Apex projects.

Howard’s orientation came as a boy of 7 accompanying his mother, Anna Kimmel, who turned her experience as a 19-year old typist for real estate lawyers into her own real-estate empire, which eventually included 16 buildings in Brooklyn with 300 units. She bought her first foreclosed building in 1932 with money from her father, after Howard’s father, Philip, lost his shoe business in the Great Depression. Howard would ride with her on the trolley from their Bensonhurst home into Bedford-Stuyvesant to collect the rents – she would bring candy for the children and put the rent money into her large pocketbook.

World War II interrupted his studies at Brooklyn College (he was the class of’46, but graduated in 1948 because of the war, and his wife, Sylvia Drucker, was the class of ’47), but he was not drafted because of a childhood heart condition. Nevertheless, after one of his closest friends, Stanley Goldstein (“a genius who was angered that Jews were maligned as cowards”) was killed at the Battle of the Bulge, Howard joined the U.S. Maritime Services and in 1946 served stateside in the U.S. Air Force.

Coming out of the service, he got a job at the New York State Division of Housing. One of his first positions as a young man in his 20s, was overseeing projects of Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father.

The Needle Trades Union, through its United Housing Foundation, was putting up a major housing project on Ocean Parkway near Coney Island that Howard was overseeing. Fred Trump demanded a piece of it.

“Ultimately, probably with political muscle, they split the site in half – about 5,000 units – Fred Trump got half – and Trump Village was created as a result,” he said.

Howard oversaw the Trump Village project for the state for almost four years and recalled that “a kid who was in the trailer with blond hair was Donald Trump.”

He takes delight in having played a role in desegregating one of Trump Village’s notoriously segregated buildings in Brighton Beach in the early 1960s.

“I was chosen to be Newsday’s everyday hero. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller gave me commendation by writing two personal letters, by hand, for things that I had done.”

Collaborative Community

The notion of community and sharing was a constant theme.

After he married Sylvia Drucker, whom he met skating at Park Circle Skating Rink in Brooklyn when he was 17 and she was 16, they lived in an apartment at a friend’s house. When, like so many other young couples at the time, he wanted to buy his own house, he came up with a novel ideal: a collaborative community, Precipia, in which some 25 families would pool their funds to purchase property and build houses on half-acre lots.

It was about more than pooling money to achieve the American Dream of home ownership. The concept was to form a true community. They worked collaboratively for almost two years, holding regular meetings and inspecting more than 50 sites.

Their search brought them to Great Neck. But Kimmel, ever the idealist, didn’t realize at the time he was up against two headwinds: anti-Semitism and McCarthyism, which condemned anything that smacked of “communism.”

But it was the third element that finally was the undoing: human nature. “The collaborative was established so that everyone would live in one amalgamated area. It was a shock – a shanda – when people decided not to do it. Unfortunately, we broke up,” he said.

Howard settled on a much less ambitious plan, buying an oversized lot in the Great Neck village of Thomaston with a house that he renovated and a lot big enough to build a second home that he sold to a Danish family. The owner worked at the United Nations General Assembly in Lake Success.

Howard immediately became active in local civic activities, becoming president of the Thomaston Civic Association and succeeded in accomplishing the rezoning of a mile-long stretch of Northern Boulevard that increased the village’s tax base. Then as president of Great Neck Committee for Community Planning, an umbrella organization for the dozens of civics along the Great Neck peninsula, he began to make real trouble: initiating a coordinated master plan in face of the alarming mishmash of development underway.

Out of that came a proposal to develop a 60-unit, low-income housing project on a 2.5-acre plot in Kings Point abutting Great Neck in the anticipation it would be inhabited by black families.

It was battled back.

“The editor of the Great Neck News – in large-print, three inches high on the front page – wrote ‘Malicious Bleatings of Professional Do-Gooder, Howard Kimmel.’ I still remember the quote,” he said.

The only things that did come out of this effort, he said, “were stop signs and cul de sacs.”

But Kimmel was undaunted. It took 17 years of social activism emanating from Temple Emanuel of Great Neck that finally resulted in the Great Neck Housing Authority’s senior housing building on the former Arrandale School site.

But the Apexes, now called Kimmel 1 and 2, are his crowning achievements. And even at 94 years old, he continues to work for affordable housing, now with Self-Help, the nonprofit founded to resettle Holocaust survivors that took over Apex. Self-Help has some 18 affordable housing projects, including new ones in Wyandanch and Freeport, in conjunction with the Kimmel Housing Development Foundation.

Jon Kaiman, the North Hempstead supervisor at the time, said, “He spoke about this idea for affordable housing he had to build with architect Lloyd Goldfarb. At first, I had a degree of skepticism. A lot of folks come with an ‘idea’ – generally a for-profit enterprise – and want to have us rezone so can build to density to be affordable, and get tax credits. But we need to change zoning.”

He added, “With Howard, there was no personal financial goal. Simply ‘We need housing, we need to do it so people who can’t afford it can find appropriate housing, so they can live with dignity, safety and be part of a community.’ He had this idea of shared living spaces in an apartment. He didn’t quite have the zoning, didn’t quite have the funding, didn’t quite have the design, didn’t quite have the community support. So there was skepticism. I heard him out and said, ‘If the pieces come together, we’ll talk again.’

Kaiman went on to say: “That’s not Howard Kimmel. I heard from him – constantly. He kept moving the pile forward, telling me ‘This person and this person was supporting.’ He had this energy, this hope it would all come together.”

Howard acknowledges that all his work – earning his graduate degree by managing the real estate business his mother built, GFH; assuming leadership positions in civic associations and professional organizations like National Association of Housing & Redevelopment Officials; and teaching housing management at four colleges – was only possible because his beloved wife Sylvia, who was a teacher and then a social worker, took on the main responsibility of parenting their three children. She died in August 2015.

He credits her with the next generation’s success: the oldest, their son Lawrence, became a marketer who is heading an American Jewish Congress global campaign against anti-Semitism; Linda became an engineer who helped design astronauts’ space suits; and Deborah became a psychiatric social worker.  Sylvia died in August 2015.

Howard, who has lived in North Shore Towers for the past four years since selling his home in Thomaston, celebrated what would have been their 70th wedding anniversary by renting out the theater for Larry to present a talk on how AJC is “Fighting Today’s Jewish Battles.”

“I always wanted to do charitable work. The principle of Judaism is to repairing the world… When I had that first opportunity, I asked (brother) Freddie and (sister) Gladys, ‘Do you want to repair the world with me?’

The answer was yes.  They supported his decision to use the gains from the sale of the family’s buildings to create the foundation for affordable housing.

“This is my philosophy,” he says, “Tikkun Olam.”

 

 

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