The Housing CrunchWhy New York City has something for everyone, except somewhere to live.
What It Means to Have an 'Affordable Housing' Crisis
For more and more people in New York City, the rent is so high that there is hardly any money left for food, child care and transportation, much less anything fun. Want to move to a cheaper apartment? Good luck finding one. New York City does not have enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, and what it does have is increasingly unaffordable for the average person. Consider:
Over the next few weeks, I have an ambitious goal for the Housing Crunch series: to not just explain why New York City's housing crisis is so difficult to solve but also explore what people are doing and want to see done about it. How we got here
In the 1970s, as an economic crisis gripped the city, hundreds of thousands of residents moved away. Scores of buildings were abandoned and in states of disrepair. Today, the city has a different problem, as demand to live in New York City is overwhelming its housing stock, leading to soaring rents and gentrification. How did we get here? New York City bounced back and became a very attractive place to live, with good jobs, cultural amenities and public transit. But housing growth has lagged behind job growth and population growth over the last few decades, making the limited housing options ever more expensive. The crunch is hitting working families hard. I asked the Service Employees International Union how it is affecting its members. Rosanna Glasgow, 37, who earns $19 an hour working in the security line at Kennedy International Airport, lives with her mother and her brother, a welder, in the Rockaways in Queens. They pay $2,600 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. The heat doesn't work in their building, and they can't get the landlord to make repairs, Glasgow said. To end a dispute with the landlord, she agreed to move out by next February. She has been looking for months for a place to move but cannot find any comparable apartments that cost less than $3,600. "I don't know what's going to happen," she said. The meaning of 'affordable'The government considers an apartment to be affordable when the rent is less than 30 percent of the renter's gross income. That is not the same as "affordable housing," which mostly refers to housing that is subsidized by the government and is typically aimed at people with low and middle incomes. Sometimes the subsidy is money a developer receives directly or in the form of a tax break in exchange for making some units affordable for people at specified income levels. Let's say your family is the typical New York City renter household, earning about $70,000 a year. Most market-rate rents are too high, so a savvy first step is to check the city website for affordable apartments, known as Housing Connect. One of the first developments listed is Lumen LIC, which is expected to open in the spring. It's in Long Island City in Queens, near eight subway lines, and has about 280 apartments listed as affordable housing. How affordable, you wonder? The two-bedroom apartments — ideal for you, your partner and your child — cost $4,434 a month, meaning you would be spending at least half of your income on housing. Maybe you can squeeze everyone into a one-bedroom? Most cost $3,695 a month. These apartments are not affordable to you or most renters. This is common in New York City. In fact, it's probably true for most of the "affordable housing" units built over much of the past decade. How and why did this happen? How does the government decide the rent?This is probably the most technical part, so bear with me. Nearly every affordable housing program relies on something called the "Area Median Income," or the A.M.I., to set rents. Using the A.M.I. helps ensure that affordable housing goes to the people who need it most. A program designed to subsidize apartments for low-income people, for example, might say those homes can only go to people who make up to 60 percent of the A.M.I. Here's the problem: In New York City, the A.M.I. has little to do with people's actual incomes. Put as simply as possible, the pricey rents in New York City trigger a federal scheme called the "high housing cost adjustment," so the A.M.I. is calculated based on rents, not incomes. The goal is to allow more people to qualify for affordable housing programs, though that can be counterintuitive. Imagine for a moment that the A.M.I. was actually the same as New York City's median household income of $77,000. Half of the city's households would qualify for an affordable apartment restricted to those who make up to that amount. But the adjusted A.M.I. in 2024 in New York City is $139,800 for a family of three — almost double the actual median. Many more households earn up to that limit, so more people qualify for the affordable apartment. The consequence, though, is that the rent considered to be "affordable" also goes up. Now, $3,495 for a two-bedroom counts as affordable for anyone who makes up to the A.M.I. Even if you earn less than $139,800, the rent you have to pay for this "affordable" apartment is the same. Sometimes affordable housing programs set rents that are a little more realistic for lower-income households. But some programs also raise the bar, offering rents based on 130 percent of the A.M.I., or more than $180,000 for a family of three. In practice, it can make "affordable housing" seem laughably out of whack with what the average person can actually afford. The philosophical juggling actIt may seem that this is a problem of semantics. But the terms we use to think about affordability matter, especially when politicians create policies designed to address the overall issue. One takeaway: What people might actually consider affordable is relative. Cheap rents farther out from business districts or the city core and its subway lines may also mean higher transportation expenses if you end up needing a car. Someone with a high income and no student loans may be able to easily spend 50 percent of their earnings on rent. Another person who has to be a caretaker for a sick family member might find it difficult to spend even 30 percent of their income on housing. The term "affordable housing" fails to take into account all these nuances. That makes solving New York City's housing crisis all the more difficult. Throughout this series, we'll return to these issues from different vantage points in a way that will aim to give you an understanding that is as nuanced and layered as the crisis itself.
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Borough Bio: ManhattanManhattan, with nearly 1.6 million residents, is New York City's most expensive borough and home to the city's highest earners, with a median income of about $101,000. Last year, its median monthly rent was $2,150, up from about $1,500 a decade before, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A quarter of the city's roughly 3.7 million housing units are here, and it has a higher share of studio and one-bedroom apartments than any other borough, according to a city housing survey. More than half the homes were accessible from the sidewalk without steps or stairs, according to the survey. (The Bronx has the next highest share, at 38 percent.) The high cost of housing, according to borough president, Mark Levine, is Manhattan's "biggest crisis." "Skyrocketing rents are forcing out the very people who make Manhattan run — the teachers, nurses, artists, and even our kids," he said. "We're losing the next generation of Manhattanites because they can't afford to live here when they grow up. This can't continue."
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N.Y. Today: What ‘affordable housing’ really means
November 13, 2024
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