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Every Candidate Is for Affordable Housing, Whatever That Means


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In one of America’s most expensive places to live, affordable housing has become a key issue in the 2013 New York City campaign. Every candidate has a plan.

But it’s not easy to decipher what affordable housing means, how candidates’ plans might work and especially where the funding would come from. The devil is always in the details.

“Affordable” means different things to different people. To advocates for people in poverty, it means housing extremely-low income families can afford. For many other New Yorkers, it’s housing affordable to middle income people.

What is “affordability,” anyhow? The government’s definition, from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, says housing is affordable if it costs a family no more than 30 percent of gross income. HUD’s definition includes rent and utilities, but for most programs it’s just rent, which usually doesn’t include electricity.

That means affordability for a fulltime minimum wage earning family is about $375 monthly. For someone pulling in a million dollars a year it’s $25,000 a month.

Income limits for affordable housing programs are calculated using “AMI" — the area median income — adjusted for family size. It’s pegged to a percentage of what the family in the middle of area income distribution, with half the families earning more and half earning less, makes.

Just to get a feel for it, HUD public housing projects and section 8 housing vouchers are typically set for extremely- to very-low income families earning no more than 50 percent of AMI. The city’s Low-Income Affordable Marketplace Program is for households with income up to 60 percent of AMI, or about $36,120 for an individual. Middle-income programs could go as high as 175 percent of AMI, or about $150,325 maximum for a family of four.

“Affordable” is very much in the eye of the beholder. Many New Yorkers make too much for some of the affordable housing programs and too little for others. For some, even the least costly affordable housing projects rent beyond their means.

Those with a robust skepticism about what candidates say at election time might translate “affordable” to mean affordable for people who vote, i.e., not so much for extremely-low, very-low or even just low-income families. They might question any promises if they aren’t tied to the money to pay for them.

With that in mind, we’ll review some of the things leading candidates have said about housing. Some candidates have given numbers.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, once a housing advocate herself, proposed a plan to create 80,000 new affordable housing units over 10 years, and a program to turn existing units into affordable housing. Public Advocate Bill deBlasio, formerly a HUD official, pledges to create or preserve 200,000 affordable housing units over 10 years. Comptroller John Liu promises 100,000 new affordable units over four years. Former Comptroller Bill Thompson pledges 120,000 units over eight years.

No one has a hard and fast way to pay for all the proposed new units, though more money from Washington is a popular, if unlikely, prescription.

Quinn did famously championed programs in Council along with general welfare chair Annabel Palma and Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Mary Brosnahan, to open up more NYCHA housing and federal vouchers for people experiencing homelessness, and backs “permanently affordable” housing.

Running on the theme of “the tale of two cities” (the top 1 percent takes in 39 percent of all income, while “half of the city lives close to or in poverty”), de Blasio named funding of shelter beds for runaway homeless children as the one budget item he’d never cut. He talks about cracking down on “giveaways” to big developers without requiring adequate numbers of affordable units in return.

Thompson wants an inventory of city and other government land to use for development. He’ll lobby Albany for more control over rents.

Liu supports a Section 8-style city housing voucher for up to five years for 10,000 homeless families. Anthony Weiner wants specialized senior housing built on current NYCHA housing projects’ grounds and a “new tier” of affordable middle class housing. Former Councilman Sal Albanese says the Bloomberg administration didn’t create enough affordable housing.

The Democrats favor using mandatory inclusionary zoning and investment of some city pension money to boost affordable housing. They talk affordable housing far more than the GOP candidates. Some Democratic candidates favoring raising revenues from taxes on wealthier New Yorkers with incomes over $500,000, or $1,000,000. All now favor progressive tax raises if needed, though at least one started the campaign with a “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” style approach. But most those revenues are already spoken for in other campaign promises.

Former Borough President Adolpho Carrion, the Independence Party candidate, hypes his Bronx record and wants to work with developers for more affordable housing.

The Republicans, former MTA Executive Joe Lhota, billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis and Doe Fund founder George McDonald, as well as Albanese, all appear to have endorsed a “Housing First” platform proposing 150,000 new affordable units. Lhota, the first on board, made big headlines doing it.

Lhota wants to use current post office property for affordable housing, but housing doesn’t make his website “priority” list at all. McDonald doesn’t necessarily endorse “government” affordable housing, but favors incentivizing developers to build 75,000 new small efficiency units near subway stops. The main Catsimatidis housing proposal so far is posting police officers 24/7 in many public housing buildings to fight crime. No Republican favors city tax hikes to pay for affordable housing.

All the candidates agree New York City has a profound and growing affordable housing problem. Statistics back them up. Thirty-one percent of city renters spend over 50 percent of their income on housing. HUD calls that “severely rent burdened.”

More New Yorkers are finding it difficult to afford city housing. The supply of affordable units isn’t keeping pace with demand. And city rents are increasing far faster than income.

That’s despite the Bloomberg New Housing Marketplace Plan, which promised and is about on target to deliver 165,000 new affordable housing units by fiscal year 2014.

The city constantly touts the plan as “the most ambitious” and “most extensive” affordable housing plan of any city in the nation. They deserve credit for it. But is it really a big deal that the biggest city – with a population nearly equal to the next three largest cities combined – has the biggest program?

Even as we add affordable housing we’re losing older affordable housing units under temporary programs that are expiring. Literally tens of thousands of affordable units are set to terminate during the next four-year mayoral term.

Whoever the next mayor is, whatever his or her commitment to affordable housing, it won’t be easy. Funding sources, especially federal funding, are shrinking, without relief in sight.

NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, one of the best research sources on the subject, recently issued a report noting “if the next administration seeks to expand the city’s commitment to affordable housing, that may also mean spending less on other important city priorities. Candidates should explain not only how many units they will produce or preserve and how much they will spend on housing, but also where those funds will come from.”

Jeff Foreman is policy director for Care for the Homeless. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffForeman.

Great House Party in New York City (But You're Not Invited)


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There's a fabulous house party going on in town — but it's doubtful you're on the guest list. The rich and famous are celebrating the Big Apple housing market. What a boom!

"There's a lot of euphoria" according to Noah Rosenblatt of the Manhattan real estate web site UrbanDigs. New York City real estate news site The Real Deal labeled the luxury market "manic" and reported vacant land in Manhattan selling for up to $800 per buildable square foot, about equal to the square foot price of finished luxury condos just a few years ago. One expert said raw land at $800 a square foot would require apartment prices of $2,500 a square foot. To extrapolate, that's $2.5 million for a not-so-special 1,000 square foot apartment.

Brisk sales and rising prices have fueled residential real estate in the city's outer boroughs. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are just as hot as Manhattan. A townhouse in Queens is under contract for $3 million, a record price in that borough. The Real Estate Board of New York says home sales outside Manhattan rose 13.4% year-over-year in the second quarter.

Across America, Standard & Poor's Case-Schiller index of residential sales reports, prices are up over 12 percent in the last year, and 2.5 percent just in April, the last month numbers are available for.

It's largely driven by supply and demand, the one economic concept we all understand. Available inventory is down — that's supply. Realtor Douglas Elliman, who issues quarterly reports, says supply in Manhattan was down 31.3 percent in 2013's second quarter compared to the same period last year.

Meanwhile, demand is rising.

No lesser authority than Frederick Eklund, star of Bravo's reality show "Million Dollar Listing", says, "You have a $15 million buyer in New York and can't find anything. It's chaotic out there." His co-star Ryan Serhart claims, "In Manhattan there's bidding wars everywhere."

{pullquote}The rich and famous are celebrating the Big Apple housing market. What a boom!{/pullquote}

The New York Times ran an article ("In a Seller's Market, Every Minute Counts") reporting it's a seller's market in New York City where "open houses are packed to capacity, bidding wars and all-cash offers have almost become the norm, and some listing prices actually rise, not drop, after a home is listed."

The Times quotes a broker saying "it's the kind of insanity you live for in this business" while relating the story of a two-bedroom, two-bath condo "aggressively" listed for $1.89 million earlier this year. Within 24 hours he had a flurry of requests to see the listing, so he raised the price to $1.99 million and scheduled an open house. In no time there were multiple offers. The sale finally closed, all cash, for $2.16 million.

The Times offered advice. Move fast. Don't wait for the open house. Forget about getting a deal. Be the first to make an offer. Make a bigger down payment (30 or 35 percent is the new 20 percent). Think about waiving contingencies.

So the law of supply and demand dictates prices rise. Party on!

Last month, Harvard's Research Center published a study with a cautionary title: "A Housing Recovery, But Not for All Americans." Steeped in the kind of detail and methodology you'd expect from Harvard research, the report essentially gave notice to most Americans and certainly most New Yorkers that if you're not already at that party you might not be on the guest list. It's not just that your invite went missing in the mail.

The report says there are 12.1 million extremely low-income renter households in America, but only 6.8 million housing units affordable to them. That's a game of musical chairs where most low-income families come up short.

About 37 percent of American households, 42.3 million of them, spend more than 30 percent of pre-tax income on housing — that's the federal government definition of "unaffordable" housing. Over 20.6 million households spend over 50 percent on housing, the definition of "severely burdened" unaffordable housing. In New York state, 22 percent of households fall in the "severely burdened" category.

The Harvard study documents "severely housing cost burdened" families spend 1/3 less on food, 50 percent less on clothing and 80 percent less on health care than an average family. To be clear, most of these households are working families. Seven of 10 households earning full-time minimum wage are in the "severely burdened" category.

More disheartening, it's getting worse. The law of supply and demand is working against poorer families. Renter households increased by 1.1 million in 2012, roughly equal to the entire growth of all American households, but the number of affordable apartments isn't close to keeping pace. April 2013 was the 34th consecutive month of rent increases averaging 2.5 percent annually. Meanwhile, the number of rental vacancies fell for a third year in a row.

If you don't believe Harvard, you can read the same story in the just published "State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods, 2012," from NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Their annual housing report documents city rents are high and growing. Real estate prices in New York City fell 20 percent during the recession while rents increased by 8.5 percent in constant dollars. New York City's market rate rent in 2011 averaged $1,540.

Furman reports that from 2005 to 2011 median gross city rent increased 10 percent while median household income actually decreased. The average New Yorker's rent burden — the percentage of before tax income going to housing costs — rose from 29.9 percent to 32.5 percent, meaning average New Yorkers were renting unaffordable apartments by federal standards. An astounding 31 percent of New Yorkers spend more than half their income on housing making them severely cost burdened. In New York City, 78 percent of all low-income renters are officially "rent burdened".

Every Sunday many New Yorkers turn to the real estate section to read about "The Big Ticket", the most expensive sale of the week in Gotham. Invariably it's a 6,000 square foot, $28 million, sky-high penthouse with views and terraces. Or it's an historic home on a storied street with its own name at $35 million. There, and in a hundred glass enclosed condo buildings and blocks of brownstones in New York City, the grandiloquent house party is going on.

Most of us can read about it, but we're not really invited. Far more important than an open door, though, would be a commitment to more affordable housing. That would let more people throw a house party of their own.

Jeff Foreman is Policy Director for New York City's Care for the Homeless. Follow him on twitter @JeffForeman2

Op-Ed: Preservation Can Contribute To Affordability


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In July, the Real Estate Board of New York went on a media blitz, touting their latest report blasting landmark preservation in New York City. This is part of REBNY’s ongoing campaign to paint our landmark preservation system, which covers a little over 3 percent of our city’s building stock, as “out of control” and “broken.”

In this latest attack, using Greenwich Village as an example, REBNY claims that landmarking makes New York unaffordable, and pushes the working and middle class out of our neighborhoods.

REBNY should tell that to the residents of Westbeth and 505 LaGuardia Place, Greenwich Village’s two largest affordable housing complexes.

Westbeth is the former Bell Telephone Laboratories, converted to subsidized housing for artists by Richard Meier in 1970. 505 LaGuardia Place, an affordable co-op designed by I.M. Pei in 1964, is part of a pinwheel-shaped trio of towers surrounding a giant Picasso sculpture.

Residents of both complexes are very committed to preserving the affordability of their homes, and both fought long and hard alongside the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation to secure landmark status for them.

In both cases, residents felt landmarking would protect the character of their surroundings and provide a bulwark against schemes to demolish their homes and replace them with something less affordable.

While they recognized that some obligations came with landmark designation, they saw that on the whole landmarking helped protect what they valued about where they lived (it should be noted that as a co-op, the residents of 505 LaGuardia Place are also the owners, who directly bear the responsibilities that come with landmark designation, while the owners of Westbeth, the non-profit board which runs the complex, also supported landmark designation).

REBNY should also run their argument by the residents of First Houses in the East Village. Built in 1936 as the very first public housing development in New York City, First Houses was landmarked in 1974. As in many New York City Housing Authority developments, residents often struggle to get needed repairs and maintenance.

But GVSHP worked with the tenants association to use the complex’s landmark designation to apply additional pressure for long-overdue repairs.

If REBNY was truly interested in examining Greenwich Village’s struggle with affordability, they would have also talked to residents of the far western part of our neighborhood. That part of our neighborhood, which until relatively recently mostly lacked landmark protections, also saw the swiftest rise in housing prices over the last two decades, and the most dramatic transformation from a mixed-use, mixed income community to home of the super-rich.

Quite contrary to REBNY’s assertions that landmark designation undercuts the affordability of our neighborhoods and stifles economic development, that un-landmarked area saw working factories and warehouses employing scores of people torn down and replaced by luxury high-rises that now largely serve as trophy homes for jet-setters who spend little time in New York.

Rather than increasing affordability, as REBNY would have you believe, the lack of landmark protections in this part of our neighborhood helped lead to a wave of ultra-high-end development the likes of which few parts of New York have ever seen.

Of course it might be easy to dismiss any claim by REBNY to champion the cause of affordable housing, since, in addition to dismantling landmark protections, the group has also sought to undermine the rent regulations that guarantee affordable housing for millions of New Yorkers.

And I have to admit, I take some personal umbrage with REBNY’s claim. In addition to serving as executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, I am also an affordable housing advocate, having sat on the board of several of our city and state’s largest affordable housing groups. I grew up in an affordable housing development in the Bronx, and spent most of my adult life in exactly the kind of affordable, rent-regulated housing as well.

In spite of this, I am glad that REBNY is shining a light on the relationship between landmarking and affordability, especially in an election year. I believe that a true examination of this relationship actually shows that landmark designation tends to help, not hinder, the cause of keeping our neighborhoods affordable.

But a true examination does not seem to be REBNY’s goal. In addition to alleging that landmarking causes unaffordability simply because neighborhoods like Greenwich Village are now both landmarked and expensive, REBNY also seeks to play upon the fear that landmarking adds prohibitive expenses to basic property maintenance.

While undoubtedly the extra layer of bureaucracy involved in landmarks regulation can add time and expense, REBNY’s approach is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather than joining landmarks advocates in calling for increased funding for the Landmarks Preservation Commission (the smallest of all New York City’s public agencies) to streamline this regulatory process, REBNY has instead sought to create a climate that would starve the agency and dismantle its portfolio.

In spite of this fear-mongering, the reality is that almost all repair and restoration work to landmarked properties merely requires a staff-level approval from the Commission, which can typically be secured in less than 30 days. And while there are cases where the Commission may require slightly more expensive materials for renovation work, these are often investments which pay off in the long term, with more durability that helps protect buildings from deterioration.

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What landmark designation also sometimes does, however, is create hurdles to developers trying to force long-term tenants in less expensive apartments out of their homes — which may be why groups like REBNY are so opposed to landmark designation.

For example, the East Village has seen a spate of “rooftop additions” where new owners seek to build additional floors on top of buildings while residents are still living there. Tenants frequently claim that the construction is aimed at making life intolerable and forcing them out, and it often succeeds in doing just that. But in landmarked districts, such additions are harder to build, and much less likely to be approved.

Similarly, developers sometimes use the “demolition clause” to get around the rent regulations that allow long-term residents to stay in their homes at relatively affordable rents. One of the few ways in which a developer can remove a rent-regulated tenant from their home is to demolish the entire building. But in landmark districts, such demolitions are rarely allowed.

Listening to REBNY, you would think that developers are regularly thwarted from constructing new affordable housing in places like the Village due to landmark regulations. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

An enormous percentage of our neighborhood’s remaining affordable housing stock is located within its landmark districts, which helps protect it from some of these more unscrupulous practices. And, in my 20 years of working on both landmark and affordable housing issues, I have yet to encounter a single example of an affordable housing development that could not be built due to landmark regulations.

By contrast, I know of many cases of affordable housing conserved or developed within preserved buildings, often using tax breaks and financial assistance available specifically for the re-use of historic buildings. Even without these incentives, re-use of existing buildings is often cheaper and more efficient than new construction, to say nothing of more environmentally responsible.

So while landmark designation may not be the answer to our city’s affordability crisis, it is certainly not the cause of it, as REBNY would have you believe.

Landmark designation provides a means to preserve the character of historic neighborhoods in all five boroughs, many of which currently face tremendous pressure, and in all demographic and socio-economic strata. Landmark designation does not directly regulate affordability, and its application can certainly have different impacts in different circumstances. But more often than not, I believe, landmark designation can help the cause of affordability.

Because it’s not just in the Village that landmarked buildings shelter a diverse range of people and businesses, including long-term residents who have put down roots and aspire to stay permanently in their communities. Landmark designation, in helping to preserve the buildings these residents and businesses call home, give them a fighting chance to stay as well, and can help ward off some of the more pernicious means by which they can be forced out.

Without landmark protections, these buildings are rarely if ever demolished to make way for more affordable housing or cheaper retail space. Instead, they are almost always lost to new luxury housing, usually with retail space for chain or big box stores, not small mom-and-pops.

This is one of the reasons we are seeing neighborhoods clamor for landmark protections throughout the city, from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge, Ridgewood to Richmond Hill, the South Bronx to Staten Island.

They are not doing so because they want to make their neighborhoods unaffordable. They are doing so because they want to preserve and perpetuate what they love best about the communities they call home.

Figuring out how to maintain the affordability and protect the character of our neighborhoods is among the most pressing issues facing our city this election year. Scare tactics and false equivalencies but forward by REBNY that mask hidden agendas are not the way to find solutions to these serious challenges.

A thoughtful examination of the facts is. And I believe the facts show landmarking and affordability are not only compatible, but more often than not, go hand in hand.

Andrew Berman is executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.



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