the quest for affordable housing in NYC

pitu

a pretty meaty piece on the quest for affordable housing in NYC, with a tidy history of housing development
in the Sunday NYT Metro section
(where you might not notice it below the fold from a giant picture of a pit bull :roll: )

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/nyregion/07housing.html?em&ex=1168318800&en=321c28278bd11e8c&ei=5087

JANNY SCOTT in the NYTimes wrote:
As Prices Rise, Housing Groups Face the Need to Alter Tactics
Published: January 7, 2007

Much of the rebirth of New York City neighborhoods in recent years can be traced to a force that many New Yorkers barely know exists: a sprawling network of community-development corporations and other homegrown nonprofit groups, which developed some 100,000 moderately priced apartments out of the ashes and abandonment of places like the South Bronx, central Brooklyn and parts of Harlem.

Now those neighborhoods are flourishing; private developers are back, and rents are rising. The city has exhausted its supply of properties taken in tax foreclosure, which were passed on to nonprofits to make into apartments that people of modest means could afford. As a result, the country’s largest network of community development organizations is at a crossroads: The groups can retool themselves or fade away.

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escap

Interesting article, thanks. I think the efforts of these types of non-profits are commendable, and there are many housing programs that the city and higher levels of govt fund that are critical and worthy of our support (obviously price controls are not one of them). I am, however, still confounded by people's insistence on making new units low cost. It's the overall supply of housing that counts, not just the supply of new units. So it doesn't really matter if there are 100,000 new "affordable" units created, because that just means that higher income people will be forced to compete over the other units, driving those prices higher. Similarly, if 100,000 luxury units were built, higher income people would bid for those and leave the units that they would have otherwise bid for alone, and therefore prices on those units would drop. Of course this is a bit simplistic, but ultimately the thing that matters most is the overall level of supply, so if our primary goal is reducing housing costs (and btw maybe this shouldn't be our primary goal, but that's a different argument), then the aim should be at increasing the number of units. Furthermore, it seems obvious to me that the higher the quality of these new units, the better (not that luxury=quality, either, btw), so we should embrace high quality, large scale development (if our goal is affordability). There are plenty of ways to achieve increased quality supply, including tax benefits, rezoning and reduction of bureaucratic obstructions, and many more. And for profit developers would rush to lead the way.

Another twist on the affordability issue is that public subsidies for poor people amount to a de facto corporate subsidy. As is often pointed out by affordable housing advocates, there is a huge demand among employers for low-skill jobs such as maids, janitors, secretaries, cashiers, and store clerks. If people who were willing to work these jobs could not afford to live in or near the city, employers would be forced to increase their wages up until the point where they could. There are many examples in other high-priced, crowded cities around the world of companies routinely paying for the housing and transportation of their employees. Wouldn't we all prefer shareholders rather than taxpayers to foot those kind of expenses? If these higher costs stifled business, then the economy would slow down, leading to--you guessed it--lower housing prices! You cannot replicate this kind of flexibility in City Hall.