If you are middle class, rent will likely cost you more than half your income. You will live in a much smaller place than your relatives from other parts of the country. When they come to visit you, they will look at where you live and tell you that you are crazy.
The city of New York has tried for many years to come up with affordable housing for the poor and the middle class, without much effect. Here are some stories about recent and past efforts that do not seem to have made much of a dent in the situation.
Micro Housing
In 2012, Michael Bloomberg, then the city mayor, sponsored a competition to build very small apartments at a location on 27th Street. The winning submission is now being constructed in modules. A layout below shows an example of the 55 units, each described as slightly larger than a college dormitory room. They are designed to accommodate one to three people.
I believe this apartment measures about 300 square feet. Others in the project were smaller.
When the building opens next year, 20 of the units will be set aside for low- and middle-income people who will pay rents between $940 and $1,870 per month. Rents will be higher for the full-pay tenants.
So, this project will generate 20 "affordable" homes, very little homes. Perhaps it will be repeated on different sites.
Bloomberg is a generous man and not a bad person, but he is a billionaire with ll homes worldwide, including a sumptuous townhouse on the Upper East Side. Watching him promote such itty-bitty apartments on a television news program was a bit disorienting.
Sugar Hill
This new building in North Harlem, designed by a famous British architect, has just been opened to receive tenants. Seventy percent of the units were designated for families with incomes between $13,000 and $43,000. Twenty-five apartments were set aside for people who had been living in homeless shelters.
More than 48,000 families applied for the lottery that allocated its 124 units. If the city could replicate the same project 387 times, all the applicants could be housed.
A local newspaper caught up with a family as it moved in recently. The father, who worked as a building doorman, said that he and his wife were moving out of a smaller apartment where they shared a single bedroom with their two daughters. Their new apartment has two bedrooms.
"It's like winning the Mega Millions," the man told the reporter.
Rent Control
Actually, the man above didn't really win the lottery. The New Yorkers who could more appropriately claim that distinction are the estimated 38,000 people who have rent-controlled apartments and the million or so others with rent-stabilized apartments.
Rent-controlled apartments are the best deal, but the renters have to have been in place in older buildings since 1971. This cohort is dying off.
Rent-stabilized leases also are highly prized. These tenants can stay in place until their incomes reach above $200,000, and their rents are only deregulated when the regulated rate reaches $2,500 a month, which rarely happens. The average rent-stabilized apartments costs about $1,2000 a month with city-mandated increases of about two percent annually. This is a very attractive rate in New York.
A New York appellate court decision this week affirmed that rent stabilization is a public benefit, not a personal asset.
The case is interesting. A widow in her 80s, who had been living in the same rent-stabilized apartment for 50 years, declared bankruptcy. She'd kept up with her rental payments but had run up $23,000 in other debts.
Her landlord stepped in and offered to pay the full $23,000. He agreed that the woman could keep her rent-stabilized apartment for the rest of her life, but he wanted her to agree that the apartment would be vacated at her death and not passed to her 50-plus year-old-son, who lives with her.
The bankruptcy trustee accepted the offer, but the widow challenged it in court, claiming that she feared eviction. In fact, renters of rent-regulated apartments have statutory rights to renew their leases, and there are extra protections for people over the age of 62.
City bureaucrats lined up on the woman's side. She won. The woman's right to pass the apartment to her son was found not to be an asset that could be used to pay off her debts but instead a generational public benefit to be passed to an heir.
So she -- and, after her, her son -- get to keep a $703 two-bedroom apartment in the fast-gentrifying East Village. At current market rents in the neighborhood, such an apartment could fetch a minimum of $4,000 a month. Probably more.
This is good for her. It is also good for the rest of the million inhabitants of rent-regulated apartments. But it may not be good for all the other non-wealthy people looking for reasonable rents for their own families.
If those million apartments were offered at market rate, there might be a little competition among landlords for tenants, and overall rental rates might ease a bit. Retired people who had benefited for decades from below-market rents might seek housing in less expensive areas. Poor and middle-income workers might not have to spend decades on waiting lists for subsidized housing. Young people might arrive to invigorate the local economy in knowledge-based industries other than finance.
This will never happen, of course.
Instead, the city will continue to require developers to build lesser numbers of affordable units when putting up dwellings for very rich people. Worthy small efforts like micro apartments and the Sugar Hill building will be praised and received happily, but they will never catch up to demand for housing that normal people can afford.
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