
Lander cited several factors contributing to a "broad housing crisis": a "broad shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy," along with "substantial immigration leading to rising population," all pressuring a constrained housing supply.
Polarized economy
After World War II, the city had more than one million manufacturing jobs, many of them unionized, but now fewer than 250,000, and a nonunion service economy. (In his 1993 book, The Assassination of New York, Robert Fitch argued that the shift from manufacturing to office space was not merely a result of national trends, but pushed by property owners seeking higher value for their land. Of course, in the last decade, the shift has been from manufacturing to housing.)
Over the last quarter-century, New York City has lost middle-class families but gained wealthy and poor families. The city gained more than a million people since 1980 and may gain another million, so supply canāt keep up with demand.
So land has been rezoned from manufacturing to residentialāLander cited the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront and Atlantic Yards, though of course the latter was not a rezoning. Meanwhile, some neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens have fought overdevelopment with downzoning, essentially freezing density.
Worrying trends

From 2002 to 2005, tenant incomes went down, almost 6%, while median rents rose more than 8%, and the number of households paying more than 50% of their income for rent nearly doubled. The definition of affordability is 30%. āThis matches the statistic that [academic] Lance [Freeman] mentioned that in those gentrifying neighborhoods, lower income households tend to pay something that is astronomical.ā (I wrote about Freeman's work yesterday.)
Where are the people going? āSo, some set of people are being displaced," Lander noted. "An enormous set of people are paying much more of their income for rent, which obviously has all kinds of consequences. People are crowding much moreā-that, actually we donāt have stats here, but the crowding stats are up dramatically. Or, some kind of public policy is mitigating their need to moveā¦."
Lander suggested that the statistics provide "really good evidence that rent regulation in New York City enables people in gentrifying neighborhoods to stay in those places.ā He also cited the presence of public housing or subsidized housing like buildings in the Mitchell-Lama program.
Targeting neighborhoods
Government policies for affordable housing have typically addressed poor rather than gentrifying neighborhoods, but the advance of gentrification has led to new, now familiar tactics: āinclusionary zoning which lets people build more and more market rate housing if they include affordable housing, tax increment financing, tax incentive programs, and on specific projects, community benefits agreements which could bring in the inclusion of affordable housing and accountable development standards on those projects.ā
During a February 2006 debate between Bertha Lewis of Atlantic Yards advocate ACORN and Candace Carponter of AY opponent Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, Lander observed that āequity advocatesā accept more market-rate housing if it brings benefits, while ālivability advocatesā want less development because it inflicts less environmental harm.
"It sets up a painful and challenging conflict," he mused. āMaybe other land use procedures--ones that put planning earlier and up front wouldnāt lead to this dynamic, but we wind up in it an awful lot of the time."
What can be done

Indeed, as Jerilyn Perine of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council has pointed out there's been a significant dropoff in federal subsidies.
But there's more that the city could be doing, as critics from both the left and right argue, and I'll address that shortly.
Who loses?
The housing squeeze is significant, as shown in the State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods 2005 report, issued in June 2006 by New York Universityās Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
A 6/16/06 Times article headlined Housing Tighter for New Yorkers of Moderate Pay reported that the number of apartments affordable to some 40% of New Yorkers, households earning about $32,000 a year, or 80 percent of the cityās median household income, dropped by 205,000, or 17 percent between 2002 and 2005. The median rent for unsubsidized apartments went up 20 percent while household income declined.
"The market will work through this, but there are people who really lose," said Chris Mayer, director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at the Columbia Business School.

Much of that construction has been fueled by the 421-a tax break that subsidizes market-rate construction and only belatedly has been up for reform. (We're still waiting for a revision to be put before Gov. Eliot Spitzer.)
The pressure continues
The most recent Furman Center report, issued April 11, the State of New York Cityās Housing and Neighborhoods 2006, showed that the median home sales price in New York City rose by 68 percent from 2000 to 2005, adjusting for inflation, but that fewer than 5 percent of home sales in 2005 were affordable to New Yorkers earning the Cityās median income ($43,434). Thatās a significant drop from 11 percent in 2000.
The report painted a picture of a city deeply divided, but some press coverage focused on the positive news it included. In a 5/27/07 article headlined In a City Known for Its Renters, a Record Number Now Own Their Homes, the Times reported that one in three households now own their dwellings. Only well down in the article did the newspaper discuss the growing rate of foreclosures and the fact that only a tiny fraction of homes are affordable to average households.
In an upbeat 4/15/07 Real Estate section article headlined A Most Exclusive Club, the Times praised āthe unsung heroes of the effervescent Manhattan real estate market.ā
Lower in the article, the Times shifted gears and cited the Furman Center report, noting, āBut unfortunately, not all New Yorkers can contribute to this high end of the real estate market.ā Those New Yorkers, it's safe to say, are not looking for housing in the Sunday New York Times.
Comments
Post a Comment