Warrior for Bed-Stuy housing
Reginald Shell started the Neighborhood Housing Services of Bedford-Stuyvesant almost three decades ago to fight redlining and predatory lending practices in that Brooklyn community.
Today, Bedford-Stuyvesant is one of the city's hot neighborhoods, with housing prices rivaling parts of nearby Park Slope, and Shell and Neighborhood Housing Services of Bedford-Stuyvesant are fighting ... predatory lending practices.
But it's not quite the same thing.
Almost 30 years ago, Shell, 59, wanted banks and lenders to offer affordable mortgages so people could buy homes in the mostly African-American and Afro-Caribbean community.
Now, sky-high real estate prices have Shell, an accountant, wary of at least one scenario he has foreseen in his fiscal crystal ball.
More predatory lending.
"My fear is that mortgages are so high, people are getting loans they can't afford," he said. "Folks can buy these homes now, but can they maintain them later on? If they find they can't, the only resource left to them is to cut the rooms up and rent out large parts of their homes."
That was what happened in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after World War II, he said. Showcase brownstones became rooming houses, and big rooms were cut up as owners jumped to make money from laborers working at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard.
"That will bring a larger population of mostly transient individuals who will use more services and overtax the neighborhood's infrastructure," he said. "It's already hard to pay rents in this city, much less a mortgage. I'm afraid that in the future, people who find they can't afford these mortgages will find another way."
Shell is a lifelong Brooklyn resident who was born in Kings County Hospital. His late parents, Jaycee and Gladys Shell, were among the first families to move into the Brownsville projects. Jaycee, a Transit Authority track man and Gladys, a worker in an import brokerage, moved to Bed-Stuy in 1954.
Shell graduated from Boys High and the New York Institute of Technology, where he earned an accounting degree. He received a masters in public administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988.
He has never left Bed-Stuy - Shell's house is four streets away from the house where his parents raised him.
"The great thing about Bed-Stuy is the transportation," he said. "East or west, anywhere you want to go, you can get there fast from Bed-Stuy. It's also one of the highest places in Brooklyn, so you don't get much flooding.
"The community has great homes and great people in it," he added. "I remember the good times we had playing stickball and punch ball in the streets. I still have friends I went to high school with who still live in the neighborhood. It's just a great place."
Some 27 years ago, Shell was one of the founders of Brownstones of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a homeowner group created to "show people that Bed-Stuy was a viable community in which to live and raise children," he said.
The group fought against redlining - mortgage companies would draw red lines on city maps to show the neighborhoods where they would not make loans - and for lenders giving homeowners home equity loans.
"Some people could get mortgages but not home equity loans to fix up the property," Shell said. "These brownstones were over 100 years old. They needed new plumbing and wiring, but people could not get the money to do the work."
So the Brownstones group formed committees, and members would either do the necessary work for each other or help locate affordable contractors to do it. They conducted open-house tours of members' homes - again to show the area was a viable community - and formed a unit that matched people looking to sell homes with folks looking to buy.
People remember that last part.
"I just got a call from someone in California who is looking to buy a home in Bed-Stuy," he said with a laugh. "I got an e-mail from someone in Germany asking if I knew of a house for sale."
Shell said Brownstones joined with Neighborhood Housing Services when that group came to Bed-Stuy 15 years ago.
"They were doing all of the things we'd been doing," he said.
Shell also is executive director of Housing Options of NYC, a group that runs five residences for developmentally disabled adults in Brooklyn and Queens. Many of the residents require full-time care.
Housing Options also runs programs for traumatic brain injury survivors in Manhattan and Westchester, and a training program for the developmentally disabled.
Shell has stayed at the forefront of a variety of issues affecting his community, and makes sure his neighbors do the same.
"I tell them it's not enough to belong to one community group," he said. "You have to go to the community board meeting, your church meetings, the local development corporation meeting. Things are so fragmented, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. You can't be one-dimensional."
Shell describes himself as "one of those people in the background that gets things done, a get-things-done kind of guy."
He earned that reputation by "choosing something you can accomplish, even if you had to do it by yourself. The idea is that hopefully you'll find people who share your vision who will want to participate in it. If you find them, you give them responsibility and authority to get things done as well."
"Reggie Shell is exactly the kind of incredibly talented community activist that makes Brooklyn the greatest borough in this city," Borough President Marty Markowitz said in a press release touting Shell as winner of the Neighborhood Housing Services of New York 2006 Dorothy Richardson Award in June.
For information about Neighborhood Housing Services of Bedford-Stuyvesant, call (718) 919-2100.