Skip to main content

Featured Post

Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park infographics: what's built/what's coming/what's missing, who's responsible, + project FAQ/timeline (pinned post)

An affordable housing estimate: 800,000 units needed by 2050!

On Bisnow, 9/14/17, the article Building Affordable Housing In New York Keeps Getting Harder contained a hard number:
"I do not believe anybody has actually stated how many affordable housing units are needed in New York City," said Jonathan Rose, the CEO and founder of his eponymous firm. "My guess is about 800,000." Most of the numbers surrounding the idea of meeting affordable housing needs in New York are astronomical. The city has added about 50,000 jobs every year since the Great Recession, driving up demand for market-rate units even in the outer boroughs. Construction costs are higher in New York than just about any city in the world, which makes it impossible to build new affordable buildings without heaps of government subsidies.
Keep in mind that Mayor Bill de Blasio's much-vaunted Housing New York Plan, announced in 2014, involves 200,000 units over ten years, but 60% of that, or 120,000 units, is preservation.

So 80,000 new units is just ten percent of the total, and Rose seems to recognize that:
Getting to 800,000 affordable units "will take a long time, so I’m calling for a 2050 affordable housing strategy, knowing it will take decades to do," Rose said. "It would be really interesting if consensus could be developed about what is needed. I think it’d be really useful for that number to be known so we could track how well we are doing in achieving it."

Comments