NYCHA set to lease playgrounds, community centers for luxury high-rises The housing authority hopes to generate nearly $50 million in lease payments that will be used to rejuvenate deteriorating housing projects and close $60 million annual deficit. By Greg B. Smith / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Published: Tuesday, February 5, 2013, 11:32 PM Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2013, 2:30 AM The housing... [more]
NYCHA set to lease playgrounds, community centers for luxury high-rises
The housing authority hopes to generate nearly $50 million in lease payments that will be used to rejuvenate deteriorating housing projects and close $60 million annual deficit.
By Greg B. Smith / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Tuesday, February 5, 2013, 11:32 PM
Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2013, 2:30 AM
The housing authority is planning its very own Tale of Two Cities.
To raise much-needed cash, the agency plans to lease out land to private developers who will then build some 3 million square feet of luxury apartments smack in the middle of Manhattan housing projects.
Internal documents obtained by the Daily News show the planned 4,330 apartments in eight developments are all in hot real estate neighborhoods, including the upper East and West Sides, the lower East Side and lower Manhattan.
Developers will get a sweet deal: a 99-year lease with the lease payments to the authority frozen for the first 35 years.
And they’ll get a big break on property taxes because 20% of the units will be set aside as “affordable,” offered to families of four that make $50,000 or less.
But the vast majority of units — 80% — are “market rate,” and in the neighborhoods chosen by the New York City Housing Authority, that rate is astronomical.
At the Baruch Houses on the lower East Side, where NYCHA seeks 175,000 square feet of new housing, rent in a private building across the street is $3,100 for a one-bedroom apartment.
The high-end units will be built on top of parking lots, community centers, playgrounds and baseball fields within NYCHA developments, according to tenant leaders and elected officials who have been briefed on the plan.
NYCHA expects to pocket $31 million to $46 million in annual lease payments, all of which will go toward fixing up deteriorating buildings. The agency currently has a backlog of 420,000 repair orders and faces a $60 million budget gap annually.
Leasing land for market-rate housing is a first for an agency that has worked with developers to build what has been called moderate-income housing, such as a Chelsea Houses tower with an income cutoff of $167,000 for a family of four. Under the new market-rate plan, however, the units have no income cap.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/short-article-1.1256450#ixzz2KDZL3HH3[less]
NYTimes: Worry in Push to Lease Space Near New York City’s Public Housing
New York is seeking to raise revenue by leasing open land on the grounds of its housing projects, stirring deep concerns among tenants who have been warily eying gentrification.
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Response by jim_hones10
over 12 years ago
Posts: 3413
Member since: Jan 2010
will be a nice upgrade for you and your baby daddy when the improvements are made.
^^ has your case worker let you know whether the citi bike program will accept food stamps so you can keep your man happy with his malt liquor?
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Response by walpurgis
over 12 years ago
Posts: 593
Member since: Feb 2009
Wow - it'll be like "The Jeffersons" meets "Silver Spoons".
Cant wait to see how this'll be marketed - picture it: A beautiful glossy brochure, showing off the new "luxury" tower built atop a parking garage, & proudly emblazoned on its awning, in a flowery, italicized script, "Le Ghetto".
Lovely...
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Response by greensdale
over 12 years ago
Posts: 3804
Member since: Sep 2012
I hear they are also considering this for the C0C0HA.
High and mighty NYCHA: Luxury towers on leased land would 'look down' on projects
Residents outraged by plans that would block the sun and gobble up park space
Comments (6)
By Greg B. Smith / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 11:14 PM
THE CITY Housing Authority’s plan to lease public land for luxury housing gives new meaning to the phrase “looking down on the poor.”
Without fanfare, NYCHA quietly released drawings for the first time Tuesday revealing the size and scope of the huge “market rate” towers the agency wants built on leased space at eight Manhattan developments.
The planned towers rise as high as 50 stories, looming over their public housing neighbors, blocking out sun and eating up parking lots, basketball courts and community centers.
The tallest would be a 700,000-square-foot behemoth at Smith Houses right next to the Brooklyn Bridge — a building that clocks in at an amazing 500 feet tall.
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Response by columbiacounty
over 12 years ago
Posts: 12708
Member since: Jan 2009
se, why?
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Response by nyc_sport
over 12 years ago
Posts: 809
Member since: Jan 2009
Eating up parking spaces???????? HA, HA, HA, HA. No one, absolutely no one, should be able to claim they can't afford to pay market rents or anything close to them, but can afford to have a car in Manhattan, where most of the residents that pay market rates can't afford to have a car. The idea that projects in Manhattan -- and nearly all of them -- have dedicated parking (even taking up parts of the street with perpendicular parking), while the administration has declared war on tax paying Manhattan car owners (or wishful car owners), and for many years prohibited private developers from including parking in new developments, is mind-boggling. If nothing else, use those lots and street parking to store city vehicles.
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Response by pier45
over 12 years ago
Posts: 379
Member since: May 2009
Agreed nyc sport. This would be a great joke if it were funny.
"A total of 621,212 New Yorkers are served by NYCHA’s Public Housing and Section 8 Programs. If NYCHA was a city, it would rank 21st in population size in the United States, with New York City ranked first (as per 2010 U.S. Census). Based upon the 2010 Census, NYCHA Public Housing represents 8.2% of the City's rental apartments...."
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Response by fleebag
over 12 years ago
Posts: 1
Member since: Oct 2007
nyc_sport you are spot on! I cannot believe the prime real estate those parking lots have. It's not even like NYCHA said, "Hey lets at least put up a parking garage that everyone in the neighborhood can use for a fee". This is what happens when the government runs things IMHO.
I wonder what will happen when NYCHA is taken private?!
If realized, the outcome could be worse than the friction between the newly minted haves & existing have-nots as depicted in the classic movie, "Dead End".
Add NYCHA to the ever growing list of people & organizations that have truly lost their minds.
At least now Bloomberg has company!
Up next: Fully taxpayer funded, proposed luxury penthouse mosque atop new World Trade Center draws criticism from local Imam, who feels it should take up the entire building.
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Response by knockitoff
over 12 years ago
Posts: 0
Member since: Jun 2013
People who live in NYCHA are not "have nots". They get an apartment with parking, recreational facilities, free medical care that's better than any private insurance, and they have a retirement plan. It's the middle class people across the street who can't afford a car, pay thousands in rent, and have crap health insurance, but whose taxes pay for the NYCHA apartments and the Escalades that park there who are the have-nots.
Why don't they just convert the projects into affordable housing or affordable rentals for working people instead of having them as free housing for people who refuse to work or have a drug and criminal background?
Standing outside a shiny new red and tan brick building at 401 West 25th Street, indistinguishable from any other late-2000s new construction throughout the West Side, you can catch a glimpse of the future of housing if New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates get their way.
A young woman who works in finance and moved into this building from a “real shithole” in the West Village, a computer programmer from South Carolina, a lifelong New Yorker who moved in from the projects a few blocks south, and a gay couple—one a playwright, the other a social worker—with a son, who moved from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue.
They all found places in a 22-story middle-income affordable housing development in an increasingly unaffordable Chelsea. The Elliott-Chelsea, developed by Artimus Construction, rose on New York City Housing Authority property with the help of an alphabet soup of government agencies. Some of the 168 units in the building are typical low-income units, reserved for families earning under $40,000 a year. But the bulk of the complex is set aside for middle-income earners, a group that this cycle’s crop of Democratic mayoral candidates is eager to court.
Some of these units can legitimately be called middle-income apartments, with half a dozen one-bedroom apartments available to couples earning a combined $64,000 to $101,000 a year. But there are also 45 two-bedrooms that go for $3,421 a month, for households, no matter the size, ranging in income from $119,143 to $190,080. In the world of New York City affordable housing, this is what passes for middle-income.
So-called middle-income housing wasn’t a huge part of Michael Bloomberg’s plan to create or preserve 165,000 subsidized affordable housing units by the end of his term. Of the 147,890 subsidized housing units created (or maintained) so far, only 11,877 are classified as “middle-income,” as defined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Among them: The Acacia, on the gentrifying fringe of Bed-Stuy, aims at incomes from $66,686 to $194,415. Or there’s Washington Mews at 89 Murray Street in Tribeca, which is open to those earning up to $150,325. If the New York City mayoral candidates get their way, there will be a lot more like them.
The pivot toward middle-income housing raises questions about whether the city can really afford to solve its housing program through subsidies—so limited compared with the need that they’re given out by lottery—especially now that the mandate has expanded to cover the vast number of New Yorkers who could plausibly be considered “not rich.”
With a limited pool of money for those in desperate need of housing—the Section 8 waiting list, for example, is completely closed—does it make sense for the city to be subsidizing new Manhattan construction for those who could pay the same in an older building in Park Slope or Yorkville.
It may be hard to see it now, but public and subsidized housing in New York was, in its early heyday, a middle-class effort aimed at shoring up declining neighborhoods. Programs like Mitchell-Lama that subsidized new construction through low-cost mortgages to developers were meant to prevent people who could afford the suburbs from fleeing the city. Rising housing costs weren’t the problem—they were the goal.
Elliott-Chelsea sidebar
But with Americans’ impression of cities, especially big cities, on the upswing, the market demand for the country’s densest urban centers has rendered the housing programs of the ’70s and ’80s obsolete, or at least has radically altered their goals.
Whereas Penn South, a Mitchell-Lama housing complex an avenue away, was built in a declining Chelsea, the Elliott-Chelsea building, which opened last year, was built in a neighborhood where one-bedroom apartments in non-doorman buildings rent for well over $3,000 a month. Especially by the standards of new construction, a $3,421 two-
bedroom is certainly affordable.
At its groundbreaking, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the mayor’s race, heralded the project as “ensuring that Chelsea stays a vibrant and diverse neighborhood.” She hinted at the social engineering aims of such housing—intended not only to help New Yorkers find housing, but also to preserve a modicum of diversity within neighborhoods. Middle-income housing in New York seems to be as much about neighborhoods as it is about people.
In exchange for capping the rents at merely high levels as opposed to astronomical ones, Artimus was lavished with subsidies for the $65 million project. From cheap land (it paid only $4 million, of which more than a million was loaned to the company by NYCHA itself), to tens of millions in bond financing, millions in direct loans and a $1.5 million direct grant from the City Council, the city made significant contributions to the project.
What’s more, not all city-subsidized projects are affordable relative to their surroundings. At the Acacia, the $2,729-a-month three-bedroom units went quickly in a recent lottery. Smaller apartments are still available; when asked about the project, a woman from the neighborhood questioned whether the $1,887 starting rent was really any kind of deal in Bed-Stuy.
Indeed, a report by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development issued earlier this year found that her suspicions were not unfounded: two-thirds of units created through Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan are too expensive for the majority of residents in the neighborhoods in which they were built.
Part of the problem is how “middle-income” is defined. The definition revolves around an all-important number called “area median income,” or AMI, which the federal government calculates based on the greater New York area’s population—an area that includes wealthy suburbs in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey.
“‘Middle-income’ becomes a subset of the top third of all households” in the city, ANHD’s Moses Gates told The Observer. He placed those who qualify for the apartments somewhere between the 70th and 90th percentiles of earners. “It’s upper-middle-income housing.”
So for example, at the Acacia in Bed-Stuy, not only are the units not middle-income by the neighborhood’s standards, but they’re not even particularly middling by the standards of the city’s population.
And there’s no limit to how much tenants can earn once they qualify. “Once you’re in, you’re in,” explained the young computer programmer on Ninth Avenue. (He said it was the first thing he asked.) Even if he or the young woman in finance ends up with a household income over the $190,080 limit, they can keep their subsidized apartments.
The lobby of the Elliott-Chelsea.
The lobby of the Elliott-Chelsea.
In her housing platform unveiled in February, Ms. Quinn promised to create 40,000 new middle-income affordable housing units over 10 years. Anthony Weiner didn’t give a headline number of new apartments, but he wants to turn the city’s 80/20 affordable program into 60/20/20, which would require developers to set aside not only 20 percent of their units for low-income residents in exchange for density bonuses and tax breaks, but also another 20 percent for middle-income renters or buyers.
And neither of the plans—or even Mayor Bloomberg’s, which was far more ambitious—even comes close to replacing the dwindling stock of rent-stabilized units. In 2009, the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University found that 200,000 affordable, mostly unsubsidized apartments were lost to market increases in rent.
With nearly half of the rental units within the five boroughs falling under the rent-stabilization program, it is far and away the largest government effort aimed at maintaining affordability in the city. But with no appetite for strengthening the laws among upstate Republicans, who hold the reins on rent regulation, the prospects of reversing the program’s decline seem slim.
And then there’s the market cure: simply allowing more housing to be built, in the hope that if supply is allowed to meet demand, rents will at least level off. Economists of all stripes tend to agree that New York City’s fundamental housing problem is that not enough new market-rate buildings are allowed to rise.
The city has cemented neighborhoods as they were in 1961, when the modern zoning code was adopted, with only pockets of growth allowed—in Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and the Far West Side today, for example.
“New York has made it so difficult to build that you forget what free and easy supply really does,” said Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser, who co-authored a study a decade ago that found that half of the cost of housing in Manhattan could be blamed on artificial supply constraints. “Chicago remains a vastly more affordable city because Mayor Daley unleashed the cranes on Lake Michigan”—a reference to the Windy City’s far more lenient land-use regulations and commensurate low rents.
When it comes to New York City housing policy, said Mr. Glaeser, “there’s been a funny combination, from an economic point of view, of on one level making it difficult to build housing supply, and then trying to make up for it on a smaller scale by giving a privileged few access to housing.” In other words, those lucky enough to win the housing lottery like the couple at Elliott-Chelsea, who said they’d been applying for 15 years before they won a spot.
For better or for worse, middle-income affordable housing may be the best chance those who are neither poor nor rich have to move to Manhattan south of Harlem. Meanwhile, for those who earn between $73,166 and $150,325 a year, there’s a lottery for a new $2,000 one-bedroom at 89 Murray Street in Tribeca.
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Response by NYCMatt
over 12 years ago
Posts: 7523
Member since: May 2009
"Middle Class" is not $200K.
Not even in NYC.
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Response by notadmin
over 12 years ago
Posts: 3835
Member since: Jul 2008
> "Middle Class" is not $200K.
> Not even in NYC.
it is! at least for young households. when the options are: buying an apartment or saving for retirement, means that long-term subsidized rent stabs are needed. remember that entitlements are going bust and that pensions aren't really there for the young. so their savings needs are much higher, these households should be spending as little as possible in housing imho.
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Response by notadmin
over 12 years ago
Posts: 3835
Member since: Jul 2008
> Why don't they just convert the projects into affordable housing or affordable rentals for working people instead of having them as free housing for people who refuse to work or have a drug and criminal background?
It would be good for this to happen during the regular turn over of tenants in the projects. The issue is, should NYCHA put hard working households on units the agency has already accepted it cannot maintain? It would be best to allow the projects that are in worst shape to empty out instead.
That way NYCHA can use that land as a real cash-cow with developers of mix-income units (as supposed to giving them only the parking lot to develop) and use that $ to save the projects that aren't in dire shape maintenance-wise.
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Response by greensdale
over 12 years ago
Posts: 3804
Member since: Sep 2012
>It would be best to allow the projects that are in worst shape to empty out instead.
City Slows Plan for Market-Rate Units on Public Housing Land
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: August 16, 2013
Facing fierce opposition from tenants in public housing projects, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is slowing down plans to lease land in some developments for market-rate apartments.
Officials with the New York City Housing Authority announced on Friday that instead of requesting formal proposals to build on the grounds of eight housing projects in Manhattan, as previously envisioned, they would first solicit ideas from private developers — so-called expressions of interest — before choosing any construction projects.
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http://nyti.ms/WE6EgO
NYTimes: Worry in Push to Lease Space Near New York City’s Public Housing
New York is seeking to raise revenue by leasing open land on the grounds of its housing projects, stirring deep concerns among tenants who have been warily eying gentrification.
will be a nice upgrade for you and your baby daddy when the improvements are made.
NYC continues to develop!
but first comes Citi Bike:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nycha-residents-33-citi-bike-annual-fee-article-1.1359912
^^ has your case worker let you know whether the citi bike program will accept food stamps so you can keep your man happy with his malt liquor?
Wow - it'll be like "The Jeffersons" meets "Silver Spoons".
Cant wait to see how this'll be marketed - picture it: A beautiful glossy brochure, showing off the new "luxury" tower built atop a parking garage, & proudly emblazoned on its awning, in a flowery, italicized script, "Le Ghetto".
Lovely...
I hear they are also considering this for the C0C0HA.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ky-high-cost-towers-nycha-residents-article-1.1369946
High and mighty NYCHA: Luxury towers on leased land would 'look down' on projects
Residents outraged by plans that would block the sun and gobble up park space
Comments (6)
By Greg B. Smith / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 11:14 PM
THE CITY Housing Authority’s plan to lease public land for luxury housing gives new meaning to the phrase “looking down on the poor.”
Without fanfare, NYCHA quietly released drawings for the first time Tuesday revealing the size and scope of the huge “market rate” towers the agency wants built on leased space at eight Manhattan developments.
The planned towers rise as high as 50 stories, looming over their public housing neighbors, blocking out sun and eating up parking lots, basketball courts and community centers.
The tallest would be a 700,000-square-foot behemoth at Smith Houses right next to the Brooklyn Bridge — a building that clocks in at an amazing 500 feet tall.
se, why?
Eating up parking spaces???????? HA, HA, HA, HA. No one, absolutely no one, should be able to claim they can't afford to pay market rents or anything close to them, but can afford to have a car in Manhattan, where most of the residents that pay market rates can't afford to have a car. The idea that projects in Manhattan -- and nearly all of them -- have dedicated parking (even taking up parts of the street with perpendicular parking), while the administration has declared war on tax paying Manhattan car owners (or wishful car owners), and for many years prohibited private developers from including parking in new developments, is mind-boggling. If nothing else, use those lots and street parking to store city vehicles.
Agreed nyc sport. This would be a great joke if it were funny.
From http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycha/html/about/factsheet.shtml, presented without comment:
"A total of 621,212 New Yorkers are served by NYCHA’s Public Housing and Section 8 Programs. If NYCHA was a city, it would rank 21st in population size in the United States, with New York City ranked first (as per 2010 U.S. Census). Based upon the 2010 Census, NYCHA Public Housing represents 8.2% of the City's rental apartments...."
nyc_sport you are spot on! I cannot believe the prime real estate those parking lots have. It's not even like NYCHA said, "Hey lets at least put up a parking garage that everyone in the neighborhood can use for a fee". This is what happens when the government runs things IMHO.
I wonder what will happen when NYCHA is taken private?!
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NYCHA-Public-Housing-Luxury-Tower-Manhattan-Development-211232041.html
Residents who live in the affected developments say the towers would block out their sun and consume recreational space
If realized, the outcome could be worse than the friction between the newly minted haves & existing have-nots as depicted in the classic movie, "Dead End".
Add NYCHA to the ever growing list of people & organizations that have truly lost their minds.
At least now Bloomberg has company!
Up next: Fully taxpayer funded, proposed luxury penthouse mosque atop new World Trade Center draws criticism from local Imam, who feels it should take up the entire building.
People who live in NYCHA are not "have nots". They get an apartment with parking, recreational facilities, free medical care that's better than any private insurance, and they have a retirement plan. It's the middle class people across the street who can't afford a car, pay thousands in rent, and have crap health insurance, but whose taxes pay for the NYCHA apartments and the Escalades that park there who are the have-nots.
So - what's a parking spot worth? Here's what they are worth in Boston this week
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/06/14/us/ap-us-odd-expensive-parking-spots.html?hp
Why don't they just convert the projects into affordable housing or affordable rentals for working people instead of having them as free housing for people who refuse to work or have a drug and criminal background?
it's "De La Ghetto".
old thread: http://streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/19603-why-is-there-so-much-public-housing-in-nyc?page=3
Alms for the Upper Middle Class: Subsidized Apartments Aim at $200K Earners
http://observer.com/2013/06/alms-for-the-upper-middle-class-subsidized-apartments-aim-at-200k-earners/
By Stephen Jacob Smith 6/18 7:39pm
Standing outside a shiny new red and tan brick building at 401 West 25th Street, indistinguishable from any other late-2000s new construction throughout the West Side, you can catch a glimpse of the future of housing if New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates get their way.
A young woman who works in finance and moved into this building from a “real shithole” in the West Village, a computer programmer from South Carolina, a lifelong New Yorker who moved in from the projects a few blocks south, and a gay couple—one a playwright, the other a social worker—with a son, who moved from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue.
They all found places in a 22-story middle-income affordable housing development in an increasingly unaffordable Chelsea. The Elliott-Chelsea, developed by Artimus Construction, rose on New York City Housing Authority property with the help of an alphabet soup of government agencies. Some of the 168 units in the building are typical low-income units, reserved for families earning under $40,000 a year. But the bulk of the complex is set aside for middle-income earners, a group that this cycle’s crop of Democratic mayoral candidates is eager to court.
Some of these units can legitimately be called middle-income apartments, with half a dozen one-bedroom apartments available to couples earning a combined $64,000 to $101,000 a year. But there are also 45 two-bedrooms that go for $3,421 a month, for households, no matter the size, ranging in income from $119,143 to $190,080. In the world of New York City affordable housing, this is what passes for middle-income.
So-called middle-income housing wasn’t a huge part of Michael Bloomberg’s plan to create or preserve 165,000 subsidized affordable housing units by the end of his term. Of the 147,890 subsidized housing units created (or maintained) so far, only 11,877 are classified as “middle-income,” as defined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Among them: The Acacia, on the gentrifying fringe of Bed-Stuy, aims at incomes from $66,686 to $194,415. Or there’s Washington Mews at 89 Murray Street in Tribeca, which is open to those earning up to $150,325. If the New York City mayoral candidates get their way, there will be a lot more like them.
The pivot toward middle-income housing raises questions about whether the city can really afford to solve its housing program through subsidies—so limited compared with the need that they’re given out by lottery—especially now that the mandate has expanded to cover the vast number of New Yorkers who could plausibly be considered “not rich.”
With a limited pool of money for those in desperate need of housing—the Section 8 waiting list, for example, is completely closed—does it make sense for the city to be subsidizing new Manhattan construction for those who could pay the same in an older building in Park Slope or Yorkville.
It may be hard to see it now, but public and subsidized housing in New York was, in its early heyday, a middle-class effort aimed at shoring up declining neighborhoods. Programs like Mitchell-Lama that subsidized new construction through low-cost mortgages to developers were meant to prevent people who could afford the suburbs from fleeing the city. Rising housing costs weren’t the problem—they were the goal.
Elliott-Chelsea sidebar
But with Americans’ impression of cities, especially big cities, on the upswing, the market demand for the country’s densest urban centers has rendered the housing programs of the ’70s and ’80s obsolete, or at least has radically altered their goals.
Whereas Penn South, a Mitchell-Lama housing complex an avenue away, was built in a declining Chelsea, the Elliott-Chelsea building, which opened last year, was built in a neighborhood where one-bedroom apartments in non-doorman buildings rent for well over $3,000 a month. Especially by the standards of new construction, a $3,421 two-
bedroom is certainly affordable.
At its groundbreaking, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the mayor’s race, heralded the project as “ensuring that Chelsea stays a vibrant and diverse neighborhood.” She hinted at the social engineering aims of such housing—intended not only to help New Yorkers find housing, but also to preserve a modicum of diversity within neighborhoods. Middle-income housing in New York seems to be as much about neighborhoods as it is about people.
In exchange for capping the rents at merely high levels as opposed to astronomical ones, Artimus was lavished with subsidies for the $65 million project. From cheap land (it paid only $4 million, of which more than a million was loaned to the company by NYCHA itself), to tens of millions in bond financing, millions in direct loans and a $1.5 million direct grant from the City Council, the city made significant contributions to the project.
What’s more, not all city-subsidized projects are affordable relative to their surroundings. At the Acacia, the $2,729-a-month three-bedroom units went quickly in a recent lottery. Smaller apartments are still available; when asked about the project, a woman from the neighborhood questioned whether the $1,887 starting rent was really any kind of deal in Bed-Stuy.
Indeed, a report by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development issued earlier this year found that her suspicions were not unfounded: two-thirds of units created through Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan are too expensive for the majority of residents in the neighborhoods in which they were built.
Part of the problem is how “middle-income” is defined. The definition revolves around an all-important number called “area median income,” or AMI, which the federal government calculates based on the greater New York area’s population—an area that includes wealthy suburbs in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey.
“‘Middle-income’ becomes a subset of the top third of all households” in the city, ANHD’s Moses Gates told The Observer. He placed those who qualify for the apartments somewhere between the 70th and 90th percentiles of earners. “It’s upper-middle-income housing.”
So for example, at the Acacia in Bed-Stuy, not only are the units not middle-income by the neighborhood’s standards, but they’re not even particularly middling by the standards of the city’s population.
And there’s no limit to how much tenants can earn once they qualify. “Once you’re in, you’re in,” explained the young computer programmer on Ninth Avenue. (He said it was the first thing he asked.) Even if he or the young woman in finance ends up with a household income over the $190,080 limit, they can keep their subsidized apartments.
The lobby of the Elliott-Chelsea.
The lobby of the Elliott-Chelsea.
In her housing platform unveiled in February, Ms. Quinn promised to create 40,000 new middle-income affordable housing units over 10 years. Anthony Weiner didn’t give a headline number of new apartments, but he wants to turn the city’s 80/20 affordable program into 60/20/20, which would require developers to set aside not only 20 percent of their units for low-income residents in exchange for density bonuses and tax breaks, but also another 20 percent for middle-income renters or buyers.
And neither of the plans—or even Mayor Bloomberg’s, which was far more ambitious—even comes close to replacing the dwindling stock of rent-stabilized units. In 2009, the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University found that 200,000 affordable, mostly unsubsidized apartments were lost to market increases in rent.
With nearly half of the rental units within the five boroughs falling under the rent-stabilization program, it is far and away the largest government effort aimed at maintaining affordability in the city. But with no appetite for strengthening the laws among upstate Republicans, who hold the reins on rent regulation, the prospects of reversing the program’s decline seem slim.
And then there’s the market cure: simply allowing more housing to be built, in the hope that if supply is allowed to meet demand, rents will at least level off. Economists of all stripes tend to agree that New York City’s fundamental housing problem is that not enough new market-rate buildings are allowed to rise.
The city has cemented neighborhoods as they were in 1961, when the modern zoning code was adopted, with only pockets of growth allowed—in Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and the Far West Side today, for example.
“New York has made it so difficult to build that you forget what free and easy supply really does,” said Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser, who co-authored a study a decade ago that found that half of the cost of housing in Manhattan could be blamed on artificial supply constraints. “Chicago remains a vastly more affordable city because Mayor Daley unleashed the cranes on Lake Michigan”—a reference to the Windy City’s far more lenient land-use regulations and commensurate low rents.
When it comes to New York City housing policy, said Mr. Glaeser, “there’s been a funny combination, from an economic point of view, of on one level making it difficult to build housing supply, and then trying to make up for it on a smaller scale by giving a privileged few access to housing.” In other words, those lucky enough to win the housing lottery like the couple at Elliott-Chelsea, who said they’d been applying for 15 years before they won a spot.
For better or for worse, middle-income affordable housing may be the best chance those who are neither poor nor rich have to move to Manhattan south of Harlem. Meanwhile, for those who earn between $73,166 and $150,325 a year, there’s a lottery for a new $2,000 one-bedroom at 89 Murray Street in Tribeca.
"Middle Class" is not $200K.
Not even in NYC.
> "Middle Class" is not $200K.
> Not even in NYC.
it is! at least for young households. when the options are: buying an apartment or saving for retirement, means that long-term subsidized rent stabs are needed. remember that entitlements are going bust and that pensions aren't really there for the young. so their savings needs are much higher, these households should be spending as little as possible in housing imho.
> Why don't they just convert the projects into affordable housing or affordable rentals for working people instead of having them as free housing for people who refuse to work or have a drug and criminal background?
It would be good for this to happen during the regular turn over of tenants in the projects. The issue is, should NYCHA put hard working households on units the agency has already accepted it cannot maintain? It would be best to allow the projects that are in worst shape to empty out instead.
That way NYCHA can use that land as a real cash-cow with developers of mix-income units (as supposed to giving them only the parking lot to develop) and use that $ to save the projects that aren't in dire shape maintenance-wise.
>It would be best to allow the projects that are in worst shape to empty out instead.
What do you think the time is for emptyping out?
Riversider, you must know the answer.
Don't they have a C0C0HA?
Riversider, you fucked up.
Take responsibility.
It must be terribly difficult.
Does Riversider live in C0lumbia C0unty?
Only you would know.
N0body in C0lumbia C0unty would know?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nycha-tenants-fingerprinted-bloomberg-article-1.1428791
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/nyregion/city-slows-its-plan-to-allow-market-rate-units-on-public-housing-land.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
City Slows Plan for Market-Rate Units on Public Housing Land
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: August 16, 2013
Facing fierce opposition from tenants in public housing projects, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is slowing down plans to lease land in some developments for market-rate apartments.
Officials with the New York City Housing Authority announced on Friday that instead of requesting formal proposals to build on the grounds of eight housing projects in Manhattan, as previously envisioned, they would first solicit ideas from private developers — so-called expressions of interest — before choosing any construction projects.
Should Poor Neighborhoods Stay Poor to Preserve Affordable Housing?
http://www.wnyc.org/story/should-poor-neighborhoods-stay-poor-preserve-affordable-housing/
Mayor Bill de Blasio was on the show yesterday discussing (and taking questions on) a number of topics, from Uber to horse carriages. Here's what he had to say about affordable housing: