As New York Rents Soar, Public Housing Becomes Lifelong Refuge
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There was a proposal need the end of Bloomberg administration to sell project parking lots(!), mostly in Manhattan, to developers that would build market rate housing. The money would then be used for capital repairs. The plan was bitterly opposed by residents who apparently value massively subsidized parking over non-falling-down buildings and/or believe that the money is going to magically appear in some other way. DeBlasio has put out a modified version of the same plan, it involves a mix of "affordable" and market rate apartments being developed on the same parcels. That of course, will mean less money for NYCHA, which means fewer repairs, but I guess he doesn't care.
Personally, I think it makes the most sense to sell outright a few of the most valuable properties and use the money to make the necessary capital repairs on the rest of the system. If enough of those empty apartments can be fixed up, it might not even be a net loss of public housing.
1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/nyregion/new-york-public-h...
That is some highly faulty logic right there. The more money developers pay the more the city gets, but the idea that it'll just magically make its way into fixing apartments for poor people instead of being diverted and shunted off to other city priorities and friends of the political structure is delusional.
Presumably the residents of the public housing properties in question figure what will happen is they will start with buildings with parking lots, and end up with buildings with no parking lots and wealthy developers in the same space who now stand to profit even more from pushing their lower income family out, and the money for repairs having mysteriously evaporated into some sort of budget crisis.
Which, of course, is exactly what would likely happen in real life.
This isn't a very charitable evaluation. After all, these blocks have parking lots because the residents (or a certain number of them) need some place to park! Yes, NYC has a vast public transportation network, and many people don't need to drive, but this transportation network is often weakest in areas of high poverty, and the poor are also especially likely to work in highly inconvenient locations. Presumably these residents hope that if they put up some resistance to having their parking spaces sold to developers, then maybe their elected officials will find a better way of coming up with the money. It's not as though selling parking lots is the only way policymakers have ever devised for raising money, so I'm not sure why you would describe this as "magic."
Look at it another way: these are the people who live in the buildings. If they would rather keep the parking lots than pay for building repairs, shouldn't their preference -- particularly given their privileged access to useful information like how bad the living conditions are and how badly they need the parking -- be entitled to some weight?
All this is not to say that the sale/lease of parking space isn't a good idea--I'm undecided, myself. I'm just puzzled by your tone, which would seem to take for granted, with little evidence, that this is the only possible money-raising plan, and that anyone who doesn't use it to raise the maximum possible amount is an idiot, without taking seriously the proposal's significant effects on residents.
There was a mooted proposal which would have a net effect of sharing a bit of these resident's good fortune with some of the rest of the public housing community. Residents of those buildings would still have apartments in some of the most desirable places on earth, but they wouldn't also get parking there. The money freed up would be used to not only repair their buildings (although the plan did give them first dibs) but also buildings in less desirable areas. As I said it was fought bitterly.
This story is a parable for the entire "affordable housing" movement over the last 70 years. It doesn't aim to put in place policies that make housing more affordable generally, on the contrary it has been a driving policy goal of governments since the end of World War II to do everything possible to ensure that housing costs in general would grow faster than the rate of general inflation in order to give money to homeowners in a way that didn't look like welfare. Instead, the movement is designed to pick a few lucky winners and give them housing. Although there's generally hasn't been an ownership interest transferred to the lucky winners (but see Mitchell Lama Co-Ops) this housing has generally been heritable -- so much so that people today can't even get a lottery ticket because almost all the prizes have long since been issued.
As for as calling the alternatives magic, as someone who has observed NYC, NYS, and US politics for a couple of decades now, I feel pretty confident in labeling the idea that any of those governments is going to come up with $18B out of general funds for NYC public housing capital needs magical thinking. We can't even get a fair share of transportation funds.
But I don't see what any of this has to do with your assertions about the rationality/wisdom of residents who oppose the plan:
> The plan was bitterly opposed by residents who apparently value massively subsidized parking over non-falling-down buildings and/or believe that the money is going to magically appear in some other way.
> DeBlasio has put out a modified version of the same plan . . . [which] will mean less money for NYCHA, which means fewer repairs, but I guess he doesn't care.
This isn't the problem. It's the solution. Those buildings will become uninhabitable within a few decades. They will be torn down. The land will be sold to developers, with stipulations of affordable housing as part of the deal.
Mixed housing actually works. It actually has a measurable effect on the income of those residing in it.
"Projects" don't work and they truly deserve their reputation.
As far as the raw numbers of affordable housing being made available, the city has a lot of leeway in terms of pressuring developers. Virtually every building needs a variance of some sort. They can easily grant those in return for various guarantees.
If that works out anything like it has been in San Francisco, those commitments are extremely soft, and "affordable" is often defined as a household with over $150k of income, while "low income" is literally a household with like 40k that spends its' entire income on housing.
Further, luxury developers don't want affordable or low income units in their buildings, so they pay into a fund for the city to build, while there are incredibly few parcels that qualify, and the city continues to compete with developers to build them.
> "Projects" don't work and they truly deserve their reputation.
Valencia Gardens is a wonderful building with low-income housing in the SF Mission, and many of us would love to see more like it. There are advantages to people of different income levels sharing a neighborhood, and personally I have no problem sharing my building, but developers aren't building to my cultural taste profile.
My argument for SF, and I suspect would hold as much water in NYC, is that if affordable housing is built, _then_ some poorly maintained buildings can _perhaps_ be taken down to build _future_ "market rate" housing, once people living in older buildings have had a chance to rebalance within their affordability guidelines.
All in all, it's pretty insane that esp these two cities are building a disturbing amount of housing which requires two six figure wage earners living together and scraping by. de Blasio has gotten some credit for about 20k new units popping up in NYC, which is about the number we need in the SF Mission, but population wise it would be like saying that the entire Bay Area has increased affordable housing by 20k units, which would be laughable as an accomplishment.
Did you miss the part about the 200,000 family waiting list for public housing?
How about simply adequately funding the Housing authority so under privileged people can live an a decent home?
This isn't even remotely true in the typical case. It is a lottery, to be a certain, but most NYC public housing is not in rich neighborhoods.
Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class.
There are notable exceptions - the projects on the Lower East Side for example were built when the neighborhood was one of the poorest in Manhattan, but in the past ten years has transformed into a playground for the wealthy with shiny new glass skyscrapers going up every which way.
The public housing system in NYC was neither intended as, nor does it generally have the effect of, mixing the poor with the rich. All of the complexes were built on what was at the time land that nobody ever expected would be worth much, the mixing of economic strata was not a major concern - in fact the design of the public housing system was in large part driven by a desire to segregate the poor.
Maybe 10 years ago, but the Jefferson L stop is mega upper class nice at this point. Indoor climbing gyms next to circus themed bars next to coffee shops with zen gardens, all within quick walks to public housing. Hell, I don't make enough money to get a lease off the Franklin Av stop in Crown Heights, at this point...
While this may be true, this is definitely not the only way to talk about public housing in New York (i.e. the whole city, not just Chelsea and other hot areas in Manhattan).
We already went through this a century ago during the last Industrial Revolution. Jacob Riis photographed all the many people living in the tenements. Society decided this was a terrible thing and that we wanted to at least provide a basic standard of living in America's richest cities. Hence public housing came into being.
Unfortunately it was never properly funded. It used cut-rate materials to do a literal poor man's version of Modernist architecture. Exclusionary zoning meant it could never really be co-located with middle-class or even wealthier areas, so the children of these families never got access to the same quality of public services or schools. When the demographic composition of public housing shifted from poor white families to poor black families, public support for it was just decimated.
It's not really "low-wage" if their rents are being subsidized, randomly.
Yes. I think it's important to have disparate classes living together in a dense urban environment, rather than a homogeneity of wealth.
In fact, I believe that attention to this priority is one of the main reasons that NYC is the greatest city in the history of world civilization, versus the bland expanse of stripmalls, chain retail, and cultural drought that defines the American living experience in many other areas.
Well then, go on, argue. :-p
There has been quite a few cities in the last few thousand years...
Even if you aren't a bleeding heart, even if you accept greed as positive virtue, you can't expect to live completely separate from the poor, esp the working poor who actually do jobs in the actual city, and many of whom probably start work earlier than you wake up. Do you really want your trash collector to commute in?
I'd like to see a system where a council house is on a fixed term, say 5 years or 10 years, then it goes to the next person on the waiting list, and you can rejoin the queue at the back if you so desire. That's more than enough time for anyone to make a smooth transition to the rental or homeowner sector.
I believe many new tenancies are "starter" tenancy agreements; a probation period of 12-18 months. There are also fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies.
Tenancies started before 1989 are somewhat controlled by a council Rent Officer. Applications must be made to increase rent. Tenancies after 1989 experience yearly rent increases, capped to CPI I think.
There are also 'affordable rents', basically a way for housing associations to charge more for rent.
Not disagreeing with you, but social housing is quite different to the pre-1989 era.
(Actually, I think they have the option of paying the "contract rent", which is an approximation of the market rate, if that is cheaper for them.)
Unless you are going to legally stop people from moving out, you are going to figure out how much you can keep the factor you apparently need -- rich people -- while letting as many poor people as possible benefit from being in a mixed-income neighborhood.
The article touches on the importance of neighbours. I think we underestimate how important community is in a neighbourhood. People will always come and go in a neighbourhood, but knowing your neighbours (even if it's simply saying 'hello') and knowing that there is a reasonable number of people settled in your neighbourhood makes a big difference to the street or block in which you live.
Research in the UK has shown [1] that many people who rent feel no commitment to the area in which they rent or don't see the point of getting to know the people they share a street with. Longer, more stable tenancies might change this (much like they have in Germany). Or the ability to purchase their own home (if homes were affordable in London).
Property as investment has had an incredibly damaging effect on the London housing market. Do property investors have any interest or concern for the neighbourhood in which they rent out their property?? If buy-to-let comes to dominate a neighbourhood, what kind of effect does it have on that neighbourhood? Can you ever build a community around such a neighbourhood?
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/09/home-ow...
When you can no longer take out an artificially cheap loan to buy property, just to rent it out, housing actually becomes affordable again.
A few things that stand out:
* About 175k families in public housing, with 400k people total (so about 5% of the NYC population).
* Slightly less than half of households have at least one person working.
* Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k?
* Only 11% of families are listed as being on welfare.
* Average time in public housing > 20 years, which supports what the article was saying.
Not necessarily. If "average income" includes pensions and investments, a lot of the income might be in the hands of retirees.
There are ~37% of families with someone over 62, so that section may be drawing social security (assuming that is included in gross income, which it wouldn't for the IRS, but it would make sense to for a housing agency)
[image from Paolo Soleri, on "Archology", cities as ecosystems co-designed] http://alastairgordonwalltowall.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/...
All these megacities have lacked expansion efforts driving up costs of rent to unaffordable levels for most normal people.
As jobs are automated out of existence, and productivity increases, unemployment will continue to increase, the % of the population stuck in poverty level will likely continue to increase. Sooner or later these issues will need to be addressed with long term answers.
It seems like if anyone might actually implement newly designed large scale planned city architecture, it will be China.
Regulation, Zoning and Rent Control cause shortages.
Few folks want poor folk living in their neighborhood.
Rent control, public housing, taxi medallions, street vendor permits, and more, all are things that can be made to sound good but the number of people harmed usually out numbers those helped in the long run.
There should not be any ownership imparted simply because you got there first. This goes for public housing as much as it goes for the medallion system.
I can see how this can be viewed as negative as only those privvy enough to work for the corps who are willing to build would benefit and takes some of the responsibility from the state, this frees up non corporate housing stock for others pushing up the number of units overall.
Corp housing used to be more common in the us but seems to have waned greatly over time. I think people saw it as the employer taking back your money in the form or rent.
Hint: it is one of the many reasons unions exist, and are a good thing.
EDIT: Or to go another way with this - the single worst aspect of the US health system is how your health insurance provider is tied to your job. This is probably one of the greatest shackles towards labor mobility in the US, but since it tends to benefit employers they're mysteriously all for it.
Tying someone's place of residence to their employer is an even more insane, backwards step.
In addition these would be normal units, not some bunk bed operations. They'd be no different from any other housing development in a given locale, likely much better than public housing.
I dont think we can discount it out of hand due to history. Other countries have varying success with these schemes. It's not that far removed from the principle of providing free meals to employees in order to make them more productive by having a shorter commute and one less thing to worry about.
"A 2010 study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development estimated that covering the cost of financing, building, and operating a new apartment building in New York City, including taxes, required a minimum rent for its units of $2,100 per month. To live comfortably with such rent, a family would need an income of at least $86,000. Further, developers become understandably unwilling to construct apartment buildings where they can’t be assured of such rent premiums. The high construction costs result not only in inflated rents in new buildings, therefore, but in an overall shortage of housing, which drives up the price of already-constructed unregulated units.
And it’s New York’s tentacular state and local government that helps make it so wildly expensive to build. The NYU study found a host of government policies that drive construction prices higher. For starters, city agencies responsible for overseeing and regulating building were often openly hostile to new construction, the study discovered. “The Buildings Department is still one of the major drivers of the high cost of housing in New York City, rather than an agency dedicated to reducing expense and facilitating development,” the report observed. Even experienced builders, the study found, now typically employed well-paid “expediters” to move their projects through the city’s foot-dragging approval process, adding an average cost of about $200,000 per building.
Taxes and fees tied specifically to development—many of them rare in other cities—are another factor in Gotham’s sky-high building costs. For example, New York levies a transfer tax on land when a developer buys a plot, and then a mortgage-recording tax when a builder borrows to finance his project. And the builder faces significant sales taxes on construction materials, too. For a hypothetical New York apartment building, going up on a plot of land bought for, say, $5 million, real-estate, mortgage, and sales taxes would add $1.6 million to the development price tag.
New York’s local and state elected officials also write laws and codes that curry favor with various special interests with a financial stake in development, raising prices higher still. Litigation-friendly New York State makes it easy to sue builders and developers, for instance, which benefits construction-worker unions and trial lawyers, two powerful Albany lobbies, but makes insurance on the construction of an apartment building as much as 8 percent to 10 percent of total costs—twice the national average. The Scaffold Law may be the most striking example of this kind of legislation. Unique in the country, it mandates that a developer or contractor is completely liable if an employee gets injured on a job site, even if worker negligence played a role. Even workers found to be drunk on the job have won big judgments.
Another costly government barrier to building is the city’s excessive fondness for historic preservation. Initiated in the mid-1960s as a way of protecting truly exceptional structures—a fallout from the unfortunate demolition of the original Penn Station—the city’s landmarking process has morphed over time into a way for local activists and progressive politicians to stymie development of any new construction in neighborhoods often all but devoid of historic value. Nowadays, notes Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser, nearly 16 percent of buildable land in Manhattan resides in historic-preservation districts, and about half of it is largely off-limits to development. (See “Preservation Follies,” Spring 2010.) In a city desperately needing housing construction, the preservation districts lost an average of 46 units of housing per tract during the 1990s, according to Glaeser’s research. Not surprisingly, the cost of housing in these districts has risen substantially faster than in other areas of the city."[0]
[0] http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_nyc-government.html