Carol Lamberg
Carol Lamberg, an icon in the affordable housing field, died on January 20, 2025 at age 85 years. Before her retirement, she had served as the executive director of Settlement Housing Fund for more than three decades, from 1983 to 2014. Her colleagues there viewed her as a visionary, an inspiration, and a mentor.
Carol devoted her life to making affordable housing a reality for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. She was the leading force that created New Settlement Apartments, a state of the art school and community center in the Bronx, Manhattan Plaza for performing artists, Two Bridges, Semi-Perm, and many more developments that transformed neighborhoods. She was also staff director and then cochair of the NY Housing Conference. Thousands of New Yorkers 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 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 As originally enacted, this was probably the most flexible, effective housing program in the history of federal housing programs over the past eighty years or so.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.”