We are so heavy hearted as we share that Carol Lamberg, who spent more than three decades as Settlement Housing Fund’s Executive Director, passed away earlier this year. Carol devoted her life to making affordable housing a reality for tens of thousands of New Yorkers in projects that we developed with other organizations starting in1969 and as an owner of our own properties beginning in1989. Many more have benefited from policies Carol championed at the State and Federal levels and throughout her life as the most ardent advocate for the Section 8 housing program. Carol threw herself into her early work in housing policy and community engagement working with Settlement Housing’s founder, Clara Fox, and became our second Executive Director in 1983 until her retirement in 2014.
Carol immersed herself in her work to build, rehabilitate, and preserve affordable housing in neighborhoods across the city, and ultimately convinced our board to become owners with the acquisition of New Settlement Apartments in the Bronx, the St. Johns Place Family Center in Brooklyn, and the Two Bridges Tower as part of a much larger development she oversaw on the Lower East Side. During 31 years at the helm, Carol was a kind and ever-positive visionary who was not afraid of hard work, a complicated pro forma, or tackling any community need she set out to meet. She was most happy knowing that people’s lives were enriched by the programs that were embedded in many of our properties. One of her most ambitious projects was the creation of the New Settlement Community Campus, two public schools and a community center in the Bronx, where thirteen years later, thousands of young people and families have enjoyed a beautifully designed building with state-of-the-art schools, a playground, pool, dance and wellness studios, and a roof garden.
Carol was an inspiration and a mentor to so many people, and her legacy will live on in our work. We will forever be grateful to Carol who stayed active in our field and with our partners, and who was our greatest cheerleader. She chronicled her work in two books, Neighborhood Success Stories and Housing Security: A Section 8 Memoir, in which she wrote:
“I believe that housing is a human right. In the United States, a very wealthy country, there is no excuse for homelessness. Section 8 of the housing act that established public housing was revised in 1974 to create an excellent new program. As originally enacted, this was probably the most flexible, effective housing program in the history of federal housing programs over the past eighty years or so. Even today the program assists 3.4 million families, many of whom might be homeless without the program. While the administration of the program is far from perfect, I wish we had more of it to complain about.”
Photographs of Carol over the years:
