It’s been almost two years since the de Blasio administration launched Housing New York 2.0, a plan to combat the city’s affordable housing crisis by creating or preserving 300,000 affordable homes by 2026. Since 2014, when Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, his administration has financed a total of 135,437 affordable homes.
But with the city in the grips of a deepening affordability and homelessness crisis, advocates are questioning the effectiveness of those efforts.
A new report by Coalition for the Homeless charges that instead of addressing those intertwined issues, the city’s housing plan in fact exacerbates the city’s divided housing market. In 2017, for instance, there were around 560,000 more households in need of low-rent apartments than there were affordable ones on the market. Between 1999 and 2017, the city lost more than one million apartments renting for less than $800/month. (The study does not specifically define what “affordable” means; researchers for the group used $800/month or less as a threshold because it’s the lowest figure recorded by the 2017 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey).
The chart below shows the gap between households with an annual income below $34,000/year (the poverty threshold in NYC for a two-adult, two-child family is $32,402/year) versus vacant or occupied apartments renting for $800/month or less.
The report also claims that while the housing market lost low-rent apartments, the number of what the coalition considers high-rent units, costing more than $2,000/month, increased significantly, which resulted in “vastly different market conditions for low- and high-income renters.”
In 2017, the analysis found, apartments renting for $800/month or less had a vacancy rate of 1.15 percent, while apartments renting for more than $2,000/month had a vacancy rate of 7.42 percent, showing an excess supply of those high-priced units.
During a rally at City Hall, advocates from several organizations including Coalition for the Homeless held signs that compared NYC’s homelessness numbers—in June, around 60,849 homeless people slept in the city’s shelter system each night—to the total populations of several cities in the U.S., including White Plains, New York, which has 58,111 residents.
“[Mayor Bill de Blasio] is spending billions of dollars on a housing plan that will only exacerbate this crisis, it will continue to feed the glut of high-rent units in New York City and do nothing to bridge the gap between stagnated wages and increasing rents,” Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, said during the rally.
Routhier added that there are 17,887 single adults living in shelters and only 16,480 apartments for rent at the CityFHEPS—the city’s rental assistance voucher program— subsidy level for studios.
“We cannot voucher our way out of this crisis,” Routhier added. “We need new construction, we need to expand the housing supply—without action we will continue to see ever-growing homelessness.”
Advocates called on the city to build 24,000 new apartments specifically for homeless New Yorkers and preserve affordability of 6,000 already-occupied ones, as part of the Housing New York 2.0 plan. This, according to the report, would allow thousands of families and individuals to leave shelters each year, move into permanent housing, and “put the City on a trajectory to actually reduce homelessness for the first time in 15 years.”
At the rally, activists spoke about their experiences looking for affordable housing in the city while experiencing homelessness.
“I went on Housing Connect only to find out that I didn’t have enough money, at my full-time job, to qualify for affordable housing,” Camee Lee, a Neighbors Together advocate, said. “We need to focus on New Yorkers living below the poverty line.”
A spokesperson for the de Blasio administration stood by the city’s Housing Plan and what it has accomplished since it was launched.
“We have been building homeless housing at a faster rate than ever before, and this year we’ve produced a record number of homes for some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” Avery Cohen, deputy press secretary for the Office of the Mayor, told Curbed in a statement. “Between unprecedented investments in legal services, rental assistance and rehousing programs, we’re laser focused on getting the maximum number of families out of shelters and into homes.”
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