Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Affordable Housing, with Fewer Subsidies

City's affordable housing goals on track despite budget cuts, but threats loom. Since the onset of the recession, the city’s focus has shifted from building expensive new-construction units to preserving existing affordable housing stock, including the many aging apartment buildings.

Last summer, New York City crossed the three-quarters mark on the way to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal of churning out 165,000 units of affordable housing by 2014.

In his announcement of the milestone, the mayor boasted that the number of New Yorkers ultimately benefiting from the plan will exceed the total population of Miami.

Of course, Bloomberg has never been short of lofty ambitions. But he picked a challenging time to wager a piece of his legacy on real estate development.

In the midst of the financial turmoil over the past few years, few construction projects have made it off the ground. Bloomberg’s proposal, dubbed the New Housing Marketplace Plan, was launched in 2003 to spur the development and preservation of subsidized housing for low- to middle-income New Yorkers through a variety of funding programs and tax incentives. However, it has already been altered to remain viable in today’s climate.

Since the onset of the recession, the program’s focus has shifted from building expensive new-construction units to preserving the existing affordable housing stock, including the many aging Mitchell-Lama apartment buildings scattered throughout the city. Meanwhile, the program’s homeownership component was virtually eliminated in favor of restricted-income rentals, and its original deadline was extended by a year.