De Blasio's NY housing plan seen falling short
But his administration insists it's ahead of schedule in providing affordable apartments
New York
WHEN Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, he made affordable housing the centrepiece of his administration, vowing to build or preserve 200,000 units over a decade in New York, where the cost of shelter was rocketing past the grasp of many residents.
Now, despite scepticism from many housing experts and a feud with the governor that has derailed one of the major programs used to subsidise development, the de Blasio administration announced on Monday that it was ahead of schedule in meeting its goals, having financed the creation or preservation of nearly 53,000 affordable apartments so far.
Just in the fiscal year ending June 30, more affordable housing units - 23,284 - had been built or preserved than at any time since 1989.
"This engine is in full gear, financing enough affordable homes for 130,000 people in just 2-1/2 years," Mr de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement on Monday.
"By any measure, the de Blasio administration has blown this out of the water," said Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor for housing and economic development. "We're ahead of schedule and slightly under budget."
Affordable for whom, of course, remains a question. Some housing activists have complained that the administration has not done enough to create homes for the poorest New Yorkers, focusing instead on moderate-income residents. But according to the city's housing commissioner, Vicki Been, one-quarter of the affordable units created during Mr de Blasio's administration are reserved for tenants making less than US$31,100 a year for an individual and US$40,800 for a family of three; of those, half are for tenants who earn less than US$19,050 for an individual or US$24,500 for a family of three.
Nearly a quarter of affordable apartments preserved with city financing last year were in two Manhattan projects, both devoted to middle-class tenants: Stuyvesant Town- Peter Cooper Village, on the East Side between 14th and 23rd streets, and the Riverton Houses, in East Harlem.
Both complexes were built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co for veterans returning from World War II, and both had been sold to investors who sought to rapidly replace existing residents with new tenants at sharply higher rents, only to have their plans upended by the 2008 financial crisis.
The new owners of the complexes got tax breaks and other subsidies from the de Blasio administration to keep apartments affordable. At Stuyvesant Town, 4,500 units are reserved for middle-income families. A family of three earning up to US$128,210 a year, for instance, would pay a rent of US$3,205 per month. At Riverton, in exchange for subsidies worth about US$100 million, 975 apartments will be kept affordable for working and middle-class families for 30 years.
Those projects are far larger than the typical complex in the city's affordable housing programmes.
When it comes to building new units, the mayor's task has been made more difficult by his tense relationship with Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, who has his own ambitious agenda for building housing. This year, when the governor denounced a compromise that would have extended an important city housing programme known as 421-a, which gave developers tax breaks for including affordable units within their developments, the Legislature let the programme lapse.
Still, Ms Glen and MS Been said the administration's housing machinery - technology, programmes, budgets and developers - was now in place, and that the city should begin to feel its effect. Projects approved in 2014, like the Domino Sugar complex in Brooklyn, are coming to fruition.
Eventually, Domino will include 2,800 apartments, 700 of which will be affordable. But in a city where about 58,000 people are homeless, that seems like a drop in the bucket.
"We are pleased to see that the administration has increased the pace of production of housing for low and extremely-low-income New Yorkers," said Barika Williams, deputy director of the Association for Neighbourhood and Housing Development, a non-profit advocacy group. "But the need and demand for that kind of housing has only increased. And it won't be met by the administration's housing plan." NYT
