Keeping Queensview affordable

A resi­dent of Queensview for 23 years, Alicia Fernandez is a life­long cham­pion of afford­able housing preser­va­tion — a calling rooted in her lived expe­ri­ence as a former New York City public housing resi­dent, and later fueled by her expe­ri­ence being mentored by Walter Mankoff. Mankoff made a name for himself as a fierce advo­cate for afford­able coop­er­a­tive housing, through his work with the Coordinating Council of Cooperative, and in his tenure on the board of Penn South Cooperative in Chelsea.

“I feel an oblig­a­tion to keep [Queensview] afford­able, as I grew up in NYCHA, and Queensview afforded my family the oppor­tu­nity to build equity as owner-occu­pants,” Alicia said. ​“It is rewarding to see an increas­ingly diverse, first-time home buyer popu­la­tion be able to do the same.”

In 2016, 13 years into her time at Queensview, Alicia decided to run to join the board. Within five years, she’d taken on the mantle of board trea­surer. In this role, Fernandez’s commit­ment to the finan­cial health of the coop­er­a­tive only deep­ened. Since then, she has built a track record of careful, thoughtful finan­cial plan­ning to fund several building main­te­nance projects, including the suite of projects the building took on between 2018 and 2025 to improve energy effi­ciency and comply with Local Law 97 (LL97). 

Keeping up with the require­ments of the regu­la­tion — and its ever-stricter emis­sions caps — is no easy feat, espe­cially along­side other city-mandated capital improve­ments and Fernandez’s personal mandate to keep the co-op’s finances sound. But Fernandez continues to dedi­cate an immense amount of time to the service of her community.

“It is not by choice, but by neces­sity,” Fernandez stated in an email to Skylight. ​“You cannot fully outsource the finan­cial manage­ment of your co-op if you are truly trying to main­tain affordability.”

Sometimes this has meant making unpop­ular but neces­sary deci­sions, like spear­heading the effort to move Queensview from a limited equity model to a market rate co-op, allowing share­holders to refi­nance and take out home equity loans by freeing up capital that was formerly utilized to buy back outgoing share­hold­ers’s shares. 

Additionally, Fernandez has main­tained trans­parency with share­holders of Queensview’s well-balanced accounts — since making detailed item­iza­tion of the income state­ments allows share­holders to under­stand the need for increases.

Although making the dollars and cents of the energy effi­ciency upgrades work was a big effort, Alicia called it ​“rewarding on both an economic level, due to decreased consump­tion costs, and ecolog­ical level, as we do our part to reduce global warming.”