At $3,700 a Month, 'Affordable' Apartments Go Begging

Friday, November 17, 2017
Ginia Bellafante
New York Times

In any given week, the housing crisis in New York City reveals itself through new but familiar anecdotes of deprivation, in fresh sets of grim statistics, in staggering contradictions. Several days ago, residents of the notoriously beleaguered Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York section of Brooklyn rallied to protest a lack of heat and hot water in the buildings, a recurring condition, they said, that left children sleeping in parkas and hats and getting sick. Not long after, a report from the city’s Department of Investigation revealed that over a four-year period beginning in 2013, the Housing Authority failed to conduct mandatory lead paint inspections in its apartments but then falsely certified to the federal government that it had, potentially jeopardizing the health of young children of more than 4,000 families. Overcrowding in apartments of all kinds is escalating as well.

Among the poor, those with housing are the fortunate. During the past year the homelessness rate has been stagnant — more than 62,000 people sleep in shelters each night. Earlier this month, a study from the Citizens’ Committee for Children indicated that the number of families with children who had entered the shelter system between 2012 and 2016 increased by 22 percent and the average length of a shelter stay went up during the same period.

Throughout his campaign for re-election, Mayor Bill de Blasio directed our attention again and again to his housing initiative, one committed to preserving and building 200,000 affordable residences by 2022 with an additional 100,000 units targeted for completion by 2026. Three hundred thousand units would, as his administration has pointed out, supply enough housing for the entire population of Boston or Seattle. But housing advocates have been concerned all along that the plan provides insufficiently for those facing the most severe financial challenges.

In response to this criticism, the mayor, earlier this year, committed an additional $1.9 billion in capital funds to ensure that a quarter of the housing stock under the plan would go to New Yorkers with “extremely low” and “very low” incomes. Ten percent of the apartments are meant for those with “extremely low” incomes (a family of three earning about $26,000 a year or less, for instance) and about 15 percent are for those in the second category (a family of the same size with an annual income in the range of $26,000 to $43,000). This leaves a vast majority of “affordable” apartments in the hands of those who earn anywhere from 51 to 165 percent of the median income for the metropolitan area, or from $43,000 to upward of $141,000 for a family of three. Advocates maintain that the balance ought to be shifted to those further down the income chain and that the greatest need exists among those families making about $35,000.

The fate of a building at 535 Carlton Avenue in Brooklyn, would suggest that they are right. The building was developed with all 300 of its units designated as affordable and available to prospective tenants through a city housing lottery. Half the apartments, though, were slated for middle-income occupants, and although the lottery received more than 93,000 applications, an inadequate number of qualified tenants in the highest income brackets has left 80 apartments empty. The developer, Greenland Forest City Partners, is now advertising them via StreetEasy, social media and so on.

As it happens, 535 Carlton delivers a lot in terms of Instagram friendliness. Designed by CookFox Architects, whose work includes luxury condominiums in the West Village, it looks like the kind of place where everyone is supposed to arrive by Dutch cargo bike and ascend to well-stocked kitchens to make momentous decisions about whether or not tonight’s grain salad ought to be topped with a poached farm egg or something more adventurous. There is a gym, a playroom and a lounge, but using those spaces requires additional fees, which is likely to leave most residents getting their cardio by running up and down the stairs from the lobby. To qualify for a currently available three-bedroom apartment — the rent for which is $3,716 a month — a family of five would have to have a household income of between $129,000 and $170,000.

Logic, or perhaps a pleasant knowledge deficit about the mechanics of New York real estate, would tell us that to fill the vacant spaces, the remaining apartments should simply be offered to people making a lot less money. (The city faced a similar predicament with Gotham West, an affordable development in Hell’s Kitchen that did not attract enough qualified high earners through a lottery; in that case, 224 of 432 middle-income apartments were leased through conventional means.) The way that these public-private partnerships are structured and underwritten, however, the revenue from more expensive units helps offset the rents of those apartments intended for lower-income tenants (some one-bedroom apartments at 535 Carlton, for example, cost as little as $589 a month). Developers can’t just lower the rents to accommodate demand and keep the projects financially viable.

Clearly there need to be more low-income units. In Brooklyn an overload of luxury rentals already exists downtown. As Adem Bunkeddeko, who is running for Congress in Brooklyn on a housing platform, put it, there is a glut of apartments for people making $80,000. As a member of Community Board 8’s housing committee, he has listened to people bemoan the structuring of 535 Carlton. “The main gripe is ‘this is absurd; who is this affordable for?’” he said. “Even the folks who came in as the first wave of gentrifiers can’t swing it.”

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