People's housing plan challenges the mayor's

New York

LAST week, Mayor Bill de Blasio took an early victory lap on his campaign pledge to build and preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing by 2024. City Hall announced that nearly 53,000 affordable apartments were saved or put in the pipeline for construction during the past 21/2 years.

But the numbers aren't altogether rosy. A sizeable chunk of those affordable apartments belong to middle-class Manhattanites in megaprojects such as Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village. An additional 17,400 apartments are to be built or renovated - a relative pittance considering how many hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers need subsidised housing.

Another related bit of news came out of City Hall. Gowanus, a Brooklyn neighbourhood on the cusp of gentrification, is joining East Harlem and six other districts the de Blasio administration will try to rezone to make room for more housing. This announcement won't surprise many residents of Gowanus, where plans for a Superfund clean-up of its notoriously polluted canal creep forward. Anticipating the rezoning, they have been putting together a rede…