To become resident owners of their buildings, residents of Island House and Westview must navigate an uncertain sea of financing, regulations, arrangements, and negotiations. The Rivercross cooperative, in removing itself from the Mitchell-Lama program, will face similar challenges.

To succeed, they’ll need help from many points of the compass – lending institutions, legislators, lawyers, engineers, City and State government, and RIOC. Those entities will have to be deliberate and determined advocates for the American dream of home ownership that these residents embrace and deserve to enjoy. They will need to set aside political agendas, think creatively, focus on the goal, act selflessly, put ego aside, and accentuate the positive.

The positive in these deals is a more stable village of owners, each an empowered stakeholder in this community of powerful shared values.

The potential downside is grievous to contemplate. Let too many deadlines pass and the rental buildings could wiggle out of Mitchell-Lama control and into the realm of dwellings that are simply unaffordable. Adjust the crossbars on the t’s too repeatedly, re-dot the i’s too many times – and the dream could be dust.

Everybody involved needs to act expeditiously to move things along.

RIOC, for example, should give up a demand that it collect an advance on its legal costs before permitting serious lawyer-to-lawyer discussions of the acceptable terms of a deal and the conditions that will lead to the necessary extension of the leases for the ground under the buildings.

Those concerned deeply about keeping Roosevelt Island housing affordable must recognize that the buildings, in the hands of their residents, are far more likely to stay affordable than if they are sold off to private investors.

Everyone – everyone – has to get behind the worthy goal and difficult process of shepherding these deals to ultimate fruition, finding ways to remove roadblocks, and finding ways to avoid erecting them in the first place.

We reassert that it can be done. Roosevelt Island will be a better place – a better home – when it has been accomplished.

We urge all involved to be the best they can be, nurture the process, and make it happen.

It’s hard to imagine that anybody working at RIOC actually awakes in the morning trying to figure out how he will make residents’ lives less pleasant when he gets to work. Oh, there’s the passive-aggressive clerk or two, erecting roadblocks instead of clearing them away. But, for the most part, we’re prepared to believe that RIOC wants what’s best for this community – as long as other agendas can be satisfied along the way.

The problem, of course, is that they don’t live here, and they don’t easily emphatize with the value system of residents, or think as residents do. So we understand they may be surprised to learn that people here value art over calories and unique mom-and-pop stores over cookie-cutter chains and franchises.

RIOC has capable people, many likely to leave this Island by early next year. We hope that, before they go, they will impose resident values on the legacy they put in place.

DL