From "Intractable Democracy": Tom Angotti on "No More Affordable Housing Scams"

In Intractable Democracy: Fifty Years of Community-Based Planning, a new collection of articles and interviews by and with people associated with the Pratt Institute City and Regional Planning Program, there's an interview with former Chair Tom Angotti, now a professor in the Hunter College Department of Urban Affairs and Planning.

Angotti, who writes pungently in Gotham Gazette about planning issues, including Atlantic Yards, and served as a consultant for the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, tells his interviewer:

I've co-organized a conference that's coming up in a week called "No More Affordable Housing Scams." It comes out of a lot of dissatisfaction that what we fought for--and Pratt was really instrumental in this too--was inclusionary zoning, but that's not what we got. What we got was a very poor stepchild; it's not mandatory, and it's not truly affordable, because it uses the area-wide AMI--area median income--instead of using the median income for local neighborhoods. So it's been the Trojan horse that brings luxury housing to communities like Harlem's 125th Street, the Lower East Side and so forth, and people are looking for an alternative, looking for a way out of these "scams."

The issue of AMI also applies, of course, to the subsidized housing destined for the Atlantic Yards site. As officially planned, only about half of the 2250 units would go to families at 80% of AMI, the upper bound for the category the Daily News defined as "the real Brooklyn."

And it could be far more skewed for the first tower, which, under five of the six scenarios contemplated, would have 60% to 80% of the units at 165% of AMI.

I didn't go to the conference Angotti mentioned, but the announcement is below.

No More Affordable Housing Scams Poster