About Us

In 1963, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund awarded Pratt’s Planning Department a grant to establish an urban extension center that would provide technical assistance, information services, advocacy planning, and leadership training to communities requesting it. One of Center’s first major projects was to help local civil rights leaders in Bedford Stuyvesant evaluate the impact of a proposed urban renewal plan on their neighborhood. The planning model which grew out of that endeavor integrated housing, economic and social planning considerations. This collaborative effort attracted the attention of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and led to the establishment of one of the first Ford Foundation funded community development corporations in the country—the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.

With the goal of empowering everyday citizens to participate in the official planning processes that affected their communities, Pratt Center (initially known as the Pratt Community Education Program) organized community-wide conferences, published neighborhood newsletters, and created The Pratt Planning, Housing & Urban Renewal Guide for New Yorkers. This 300+ page guidebook was designed as an assault on “the complexity, indefiniteness and deviousness of the city's governmental processes.”

Pictured: First edition (1965)

View samples of the 1973 hardcover edition published by Quadrangle

In the 1960’s, to support local organizing and planning efforts, Pratt's Community Education Program conducted research in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which identified hundreds of vacant and abandoned properties. Based on those findings, Pratt proposed a program for vest pocket parks, and Pratt Institute architects and planners collaborated on designs for playgrounds.  

In 1968, Ron Shiffman became director of Pratt Center for Community Improvement. Reflecting the Center’s growing engagement with work promoting clean air and water, recycling, and sustainability, the organization was soon renamed Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, or PICCED.

We built on this experience in the 1970s, fighting successfully to ensure that federal community development assistance was invested in poor neighborhoods amidst the fiscal crisis. As residents of the South Bronx, Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side faced a wave of disinvestment and arson, we launched an architectural practice that worked with neighborhood housing groups to reclaim their buildings. Pratt Center’s architects pioneered the conversion of abandoned tenement shells into safe and decent housing for residents who refused to leave.

Another tool of social change was Street, a magazine, distributed primarily through community-based organizations. The illustrated magazine, put together by Pratt Center staff, Pratt Institute students, and volunteers, was a melange of planning policy, household environmental tips, psychedelic art, urban homesteading how-tos, consumer advice, and news reports about New York City community development. Street was published until 1975, when it merged with the publications of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board to become City Limits, an independent magazine focused on urban housing issues. 

View the Street Magazine Archive

This history from the Fall ’74 issue of STREET Magazine documents Pratt Center’s first decade of pioneering community development work in New York City, noting our focus on “providing communities with tools to fight their own battles more successfully, augmented by the technical expertise of staff, students and faculty members.” We’ve added another five decades to our story, and it's because of the generous, unwavering support of our partners, like those original seed grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that our purpose remains unchanged.

In the 1980s we expanded our community-driven architectural practice, providing technical assistance to numerous CDCs to rebuild and preserve affordable housing in low- and moderate-income communities. We also worked with local groups and local government to secure millions of dollars in public loans to rehabilitate abandoned City-owned buildings as mutual housing co-ops.

Pratt Center began by assessing the likely impacts of the Reagan Administration’s planned switch from direct subsidies of affordable housing to new Section 8 vouchers. We pressed the Koch Administration to adopt an inclusionary zoning program, using fees on new development to finance affordable housing. (That effort presaged the Pratt Center’s successful advocacy on inclusionary zoning two decades later.) It also identified more than $200 million – most of it from fees and taxes already collected by city and state government on real estate transactions – that could be dedicated annually to an affordable housing trust fund. In 1983, Pratt Center completed a report and held a conference, “New York City’s Housing Crisis: Private Development and Public Need,” described as “a working conference on the establishment of inclusionary zoning and a housing trust fund in New York City,” which drew more than 250.

In the early 90’s, with support from the Ford Foundation, Pratt Center initiated an Oral History Project in an effort to educate the broader public on the history, philosophy, achievements and challenges of the community development movement. The project, which documented the work of 19 Community Development Corporations from inception to present, has become an invaluable outreach and training resource for the community development field, and culminated in the production of a documentary, Building Hope, which first aired on PBS in 1994. 

Watch the video

In 2008, we published New York’s Housing Underground: A Refuge and Resource. Our analysis estimated there were upwards of 100,000 tenants citywide living in informal units in basements and cellars across the city, particularly concentrated in low-income, immigrant, and communities of color. The report called for the legalization of basement units and other illegal accessory dwelling units to create more affordable housing opportunities. Today, Pratt Center is a founding member of the Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone (BASE) campaign, which advocates for a legal pathway for converting New York City basements and cellars into safe, healthy, and affordable apartments.

One City/One Future was the product of four years of collaboration between the Pratt Center, the National Employment Law Project, and New York Jobs with Justice, and dozens of other groups in New York City seeking to make economic development programs and policies work to strengthen New York City’s neighborhoods and provide better opportunities for New Yorkers. In the years since, many of the 14 broad recommendations made in this report have come to fruition. The recommendation to Keep the “Public” in New York’s Public Spaces, for example, can be seen in the NYC Plaza Program, which created “neighborhood plazas throughout the City to transform underused streets into vibrant, social public spaces.”

The East New York Basement Conversion Pilot Program, a joint effort by the City of New York and Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, helps low-and moderate-income homeowners in East New York convert their basement or cellar into a safe, legal, and rentable apartment. Pratt Center serves as an advisor in this process, helping participants to understand the complex process. Amid pandemic budget cuts, the pilot program was defunded. However, there is now renewed interest from the city in a new program to help homeowners retrofit their homes to allow for additional dwelling units.