6 ms·

As New York Rents Soar, Public Housing Becomes Lifelong Refuge

36 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

nugget 11y ago
I have no problem with public housing but let's call it what it is: a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live in areas they could not otherwise afford. A lottery with much better odds than a multi state powerball, no doubt, but the same concept, with the winnings being distributed as low (heavily subsidized) rent. If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas, then great - maybe this is the best way to make that happen. Some folks just a tad too well off for the lotteries, who otherwise could have squeezed in, will then be priced out. Winners and losers. Reframing the discussion in these terms will at least make it an honest debate.
- potatolicious 11y ago
  > "a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live among the upper class and rich" This isn't even remotely true in the typical case. It is a lottery, to be a certain, but most NYC public housing is not in rich neighborhoods. Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class. There are notable exceptions - the projects on the Lower East Side for example were built when the neighborhood was one of the poorest in Manhattan, but in the past ten years has transformed into a playground for the wealthy with shiny new glass skyscrapers going up every which way. The public housing system in NYC was neither intended as, nor does it generally have the effect of, mixing the poor with the rich. All of the complexes were built on what was at the time land that nobody ever expected would be worth much, the mixing of economic strata was not a major concern - in fact the design of the public housing system was in large part driven by a desire to segregate the poor.
  - santaclaus 11y ago
    > Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class. Maybe 10 years ago, but the Jefferson L stop is mega upper class nice at this point. Indoor climbing gyms next to circus themed bars next to coffee shops with zen gardens, all within quick walks to public housing. Hell, I don't make enough money to get a lease off the Franklin Av stop in Crown Heights, at this point...
- ics 11y ago
  > If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas While this may be true, this is definitely not the only way to talk about public housing in New York (i.e. the whole city, not just Chelsea and other hot areas in Manhattan).
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  If I owned property in those well off neighborhoods I would be -pissed-.
- ktothemc 11y ago
  What birth lottery did you win?
- ktothemc 11y ago
  No, but seriously, cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function. Ever-rising land and housing costs keep accelerating beyond their marginal wages and compensation. We already went through this a century ago during the last Industrial Revolution. Jacob Riis photographed all the many people living in the tenements. Society decided this was a terrible thing and that we wanted to at least provide a basic standard of living in America's richest cities. Hence public housing came into being. Unfortunately it was never properly funded. It used cut-rate materials to do a literal poor man's version of Modernist architecture. Exclusionary zoning meant it could never really be co-located with middle-class or even wealthier areas, so the children of these families never got access to the same quality of public services or schools. When the demographic composition of public housing shifted from poor white families to poor black families, public support for it was just decimated.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    > cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function It's not really "low-wage" if their rents are being subsidized, randomly.
- CPLX 11y ago
  > If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas, then great - maybe this is the best way to make that happen. Yes. I think it's important to have disparate classes living together in a dense urban environment, rather than a homogeneity of wealth. In fact, I believe that attention to this priority is one of the main reasons that NYC is the greatest city in the history of world civilization, versus the bland expanse of stripmalls, chain retail, and cultural drought that defines the American living experience in many other areas.
  - Frozenlock 11y ago
    > NYC is arguably the greatest city in the history of world civilization (...) Well then, go on, argue. :-p There has been quite a few cities in the last few thousand years...
    - CPLX 11y ago
      You raise a good point. I haven't been able to think of any other contenders either. I've edited my post accordingly.
- justizin 11y ago
  Who do you expect to work construction building housing only for the rich? To work at bars and restaurants? Basically anything other than jobs that can be done sitting in your underwear at home? Even if you aren't a bleeding heart, even if you accept greed as positive virtue, you can't expect to live completely separate from the poor, esp the working poor who actually do jobs in the actual city, and many of whom probably start work earlier than you wake up. Do you really want your trash collector to commute in?
  - bradleyjg 11y ago
    Many construction jobs in NYC are highly remunerative, more so even than many jobs that "can be done sitting in your underwear at home". It seems a trend recently to conflate truly low wage jobs -- for example bar back or nursing home aid -- with perceived low status jobs, that nonetheless pay somewhere between pretty and very well -- for example MTA bus driver or union crane operator.
- gaius 11y ago
  Here in the UK, once you're in social housing (which we call council housing) you're in for life - which leads to situations like the late Bob Crow earning £150k/year (probably $250k/year equiv) and yet getting his rent paid by taxes levied on people earning a fraction as much. This, he was fond of saying, was in accordance with his socialist principles. I'd like to see a system where a council house is on a fixed term, say 5 years or 10 years, then it goes to the next person on the waiting list, and you can rejoin the queue at the back if you so desire. That's more than enough time for anyone to make a smooth transition to the rental or homeowner sector.
  - switch007 11y ago
    (Social housing covers local authorities and private housing associations) I believe many new tenancies are "starter" tenancy agreements; a probation period of 12-18 months. There are also fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies. Tenancies started before 1989 are somewhat controlled by a council Rent Officer. Applications must be made to increase rent. Tenancies after 1989 experience yearly rent increases, capped to CPI I think. There are also 'affordable rents', basically a way for housing associations to charge more for rent. Not disagreeing with you, but social housing is quite different to the pre-1989 era.
  - bradleyjg 11y ago
    I'm a pretty strong critic of NYC's housing policies, but when I read about "Right to Buy" in the UK, I had to conclude that we may be far from the worst!
  - hollerith 11y ago
    In the US, tenants in subsidized housing pay 30% of their income as rent, which avoids the specific policy failure you describe. (Actually, I think they have the option of paying the "contract rent", which is an approximation of the market rate, if that is cheaper for them.)
- beatpanda 11y ago
  We do want disparate classes of people living close together, as there is evidence that this is a highly effective means of alleviating poverty: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/ http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
  - danielweber 11y ago
    How many poor people can you stick next to the rich people before the rich people leave for a place where they aren't part of your social experiment?
    - beatpanda 11y ago
      Not sure, but rich people don't seem to have a problem when the process runs in the opposite direction
      - danielweber 11y ago
        I don't understand what this means. They don't mind when poor people move out? Of course they don't. Unless you are going to legally stop people from moving out, you are going to figure out how much you can keep the factor you apparently need -- rich people -- while letting as many poor people as possible benefit from being in a mixed-income neighborhood.
bradleyjg 11y ago
NYCHA has a huge capital shortfall -- to the tune of $18B.^1 Neither the city, the state, nor the federal government looks interested in putting in that kind of money. As it is a significant fraction of the total number of apartments are being held empty because of needed repairs, at some point in the not too distant future entire buildings are going to be uninhabitable if repairs aren't made. There was a proposal need the end of Bloomberg administration to sell project parking lots(!), mostly in Manhattan, to developers that would build market rate housing. The money would then be used for capital repairs. The plan was bitterly opposed by residents who apparently value massively subsidized parking over non-falling-down buildings and/or believe that the money is going to magically appear in some other way. DeBlasio has put out a modified version of the same plan, it involves a mix of "affordable" and market rate apartments being developed on the same parcels. That of course, will mean less money for NYCHA, which means fewer repairs, but I guess he doesn't care. Personally, I think it makes the most sense to sell outright a few of the most valuable properties and use the money to make the necessary capital repairs on the rest of the system. If enough of those empty apartments can be fixed up, it might not even be a net loss of public housing. 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/nyregion/new-york-public-housing-faces-crisis-as-demands-and-deficits-grow.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/nyregion/new-york-public-h...
- CPLX 11y ago
  > That of course, will mean less money for NYCHA, which means fewer repairs, but I guess he doesn't care. That is some highly faulty logic right there. The more money developers pay the more the city gets, but the idea that it'll just magically make its way into fixing apartments for poor people instead of being diverted and shunted off to other city priorities and friends of the political structure is delusional. Presumably the residents of the public housing properties in question figure what will happen is they will start with buildings with parking lots, and end up with buildings with no parking lots and wealthy developers in the same space who now stand to profit even more from pushing their lower income family out, and the money for repairs having mysteriously evaporated into some sort of budget crisis. Which, of course, is exactly what would likely happen in real life.
  - 11y ago
evanpw 11y ago
Some interesting demographic data here: http://www1.nyc.gov/html/nycha/downloads/pdf/CAFR_2013.pdf http://www1.nyc.gov/html/nycha/downloads/pdf/CAFR_2013.pdf (page 136). A few things that stand out: * About 175k families in public housing, with 400k people total (so about 5% of the NYC population). * Slightly less than half of households have at least one person working. * Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k? * Only 11% of families are listed as being on welfare. * Average time in public housing > 20 years, which supports what the article was saying.
- cperciva 11y ago
  Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k? Not necessarily. If "average income" includes pensions and investments, a lot of the income might be in the hands of retirees.
- cowsandmilk 11y ago
  > * Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k? There are ~37% of families with someone over 62, so that section may be drawing social security (assuming that is included in gross income, which it wouldn't for the IRS, but it would make sense to for a housing agency)
Shivetya 11y ago
To be honest I think I am more offended that the housing authority can charger higher rents to some residents all the while not maintaining the buildings. Why aren't housing authority management dragged up before the cameras, if not into court. Money from rents should first go to the building the rent is derived from and only spent elsewhere if all that buildings needs are met. Rent control, public housing, taxi medallions, street vendor permits, and more, all are things that can be made to sound good but the number of people harmed usually out numbers those helped in the long run. There should not be any ownership imparted simply because you got there first. This goes for public housing as much as it goes for the medallion system.
nosuchthing 11y ago
The more I read about what's going on in NYC, SF, London, I have to think of the visions from utopianist architects like Paolo Soleri and Buckminster Fuller who foresaw the over population of cities and not just the economic side effects, but the lifestyle and chaos inherited from the haphazard design of entire cities. [image from Paolo Soleri, on "Archology", cities as ecosystems co-designed] http://alastairgordonwalltowall.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/arcology-4.jpg http://alastairgordonwalltowall.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/... All these megacities have lacked expansion efforts driving up costs of rent to unaffordable levels for most normal people. As jobs are automated out of existence, and productivity increases, unemployment will continue to increase, the % of the population stuck in poverty level will likely continue to increase. Sooner or later these issues will need to be addressed with long term answers. It seems like if anyone might actually implement newly designed large scale planned city architecture, it will be China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
design-of-homes 11y ago
Many of the housing issues that New York faces seem similar to what's happening in London: shortage of housing supply, soaring rents, property at ridiculously over-inflated prices. The London market is overun with buy-to-let investors chasing after the same properties as first-time buyers (guess who's more likely to be snapping up those properties and chasing up prices). The article touches on the importance of neighbours. I think we underestimate how important community is in a neighbourhood. People will always come and go in a neighbourhood, but knowing your neighbours (even if it's simply saying 'hello') and knowing that there is a reasonable number of people settled in your neighbourhood makes a big difference to the street or block in which you live. Research in the UK has shown [1] that many people who rent feel no commitment to the area in which they rent or don't see the point of getting to know the people they share a street with. Longer, more stable tenancies might change this (much like they have in Germany). Or the ability to purchase their own home (if homes were affordable in London). Property as investment has had an incredibly damaging effect on the London housing market. Do property investors have any interest or concern for the neighbourhood in which they rent out their property?? If buy-to-let comes to dominate a neighbourhood, what kind of effect does it have on that neighbourhood? Can you ever build a community around such a neighbourhood? [1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/09/home-ownership-young-people-falling http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/09/home-ow...
- philrapo 11y ago
  It's funny, but people in NYC rarely get to know their neighbors, regardless of rent vs. own. Cultural thing I guess. Maybe it helps ignore the extremely crowded population density.
- dublinben 11y ago
  The root of this problem is very clearly absentee landlords. If the (oftentimes long term) occupants of these buildings owned them, then all these problems would significantly go away. When you can no longer take out an artificially cheap loan to buy property, just to rent it out, housing actually becomes affordable again.
mc32 11y ago
One solution which has some popularity in other places is corporate housing. So, if you work for ssamsung, for example, then you get to rent from them. I can see how this can be viewed as negative as only those privvy enough to work for the corps who are willing to build would benefit and takes some of the responsibility from the state, this frees up non corporate housing stock for others pushing up the number of units overall. Corp housing used to be more common in the us but seems to have waned greatly over time. I think people saw it as the employer taking back your money in the form or rent.
- dcole2929 11y ago
  We've tried this before (coal mining towns are a great example). It was in most cases an unmitigated disaster. Besides the fact that it means essentially tying your entire family's living conditions to the fortunes of a corporation you don't control, it also opens the most vulnerable to abuse. Even in public housing, if I lose my job I can get another one and not have to uproot my entire family. This means a layoff while painful doesn't make me homeless. And because companies know you are depending on their housing you become dependent on them. Good luck turning down "voluntary" overtime when you're housing depends on not getting let go. That blatant violation you would normally report? Not gonna happen if you are literally depending on a company for house and home.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Wow. Please go read up on what the outcome has been literally every single time this has been tried, many times in the USA's recent history. Hint: it is one of the many reasons unions exist, and are a good thing. EDIT: Or to go another way with this - the single worst aspect of the US health system is how your health insurance provider is tied to your job. This is probably one of the greatest shackles towards labor mobility in the US, but since it tends to benefit employers they're mysteriously all for it. Tying someone's place of residence to their employer is an even more insane, backwards step.
  - mc32 11y ago
    I understand; however, we see cities dedicating or subsidizing housing for teachers and other personnel. Also, companies while they are in business will carry that housing capacity thus taking that load off the city or town which isn't building enough stock. In addition these would be normal units, not some bunk bed operations. They'd be no different from any other housing development in a given locale, likely much better than public housing. I dont think we can discount it out of hand due to history. Other countries have varying success with these schemes. It's not that far removed from the principle of providing free meals to employees in order to make them more productive by having a shorter commute and one less thing to worry about.
tosseraccount 11y ago
Let's face facts. Regulation, Zoning and Rent Control cause shortages. Few folks want poor folk living in their neighborhood.
SovietDissident 11y ago
There is a limited supply thanks partly to public housing and rent control (people never leave and developers basically can't touch it), and also it's incredibly expensive to develop in NYC: "A 2010 study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development estimated that covering the cost of financing, building, and operating a new apartment building in New York City, including taxes, required a minimum rent for its units of $2,100 per month. To live comfortably with such rent, a family would need an income of at least $86,000. Further, developers become understandably unwilling to construct apartment buildings where they can’t be assured of such rent premiums. The high construction costs result not only in inflated rents in new buildings, therefore, but in an overall shortage of housing, which drives up the price of already-constructed unregulated units. And it’s New York’s tentacular state and local government that helps make it so wildly expensive to build. The NYU study found a host of government policies that drive construction prices higher. For starters, city agencies responsible for overseeing and regulating building were often openly hostile to new construction, the study discovered. “The Buildings Department is still one of the major drivers of the high cost of housing in New York City, rather than an agency dedicated to reducing expense and facilitating development,” the report observed. Even experienced builders, the study found, now typically employed well-paid “expediters” to move their projects through the city’s foot-dragging approval process, adding an average cost of about $200,000 per building. Taxes and fees tied specifically to development—many of them rare in other cities—are another factor in Gotham’s sky-high building costs. For example, New York levies a transfer tax on land when a developer buys a plot, and then a mortgage-recording tax when a builder borrows to finance his project. And the builder faces significant sales taxes on construction materials, too. For a hypothetical New York apartment building, going up on a plot of land bought for, say, $5 million, real-estate, mortgage, and sales taxes would add $1.6 million to the development price tag. New York’s local and state elected officials also write laws and codes that curry favor with various special interests with a financial stake in development, raising prices higher still. Litigation-friendly New York State makes it easy to sue builders and developers, for instance, which benefits construction-worker unions and trial lawyers, two powerful Albany lobbies, but makes insurance on the construction of an apartment building as much as 8 percent to 10 percent of total costs—twice the national average. The Scaffold Law may be the most striking example of this kind of legislation. Unique in the country, it mandates that a developer or contractor is completely liable if an employee gets injured on a job site, even if worker negligence played a role. Even workers found to be drunk on the job have won big judgments. Another costly government barrier to building is the city’s excessive fondness for historic preservation. Initiated in the mid-1960s as a way of protecting truly exceptional structures—a fallout from the unfortunate demolition of the original Penn Station—the city’s landmarking process has morphed over time into a way for local activists and progressive politicians to stymie development of any new construction in neighborhoods often all but devoid of historic value. Nowadays, notes Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser, nearly 16 percent of buildable land in Manhattan resides in historic-preservation districts, and about half of it is largely off-limits to development. (See “Preservation Follies,” Spring 2010.) In a city desperately needing housing construction, the preservation districts lost an average of 46 units of housing per tract during the 1990s, according to Glaeser’s research. Not surprisingly, the cost of housing in these districts has risen substantially faster than in other areas of the city."[0] [0] http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_nyc-government.html http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_nyc-government.html

36 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

I have no problem with public housing but let's call it what it is: a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live in areas they could not otherwise afford. A lottery with much better odds than a multi state powerball, no doubt, but the same concept, with the winnings being distributed as low (heavily subsidized) rent. If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas, then great - maybe this is the best way to make that happen. Some folks just a tad too well off for the lotteries, who otherwise could have squeezed in, will then be priced out. Winners and losers. Reframing the discussion in these terms will at least make it an honest debate.

potatolicious 11y ago
> "a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live among the upper class and rich" This isn't even remotely true in the typical case. It is a lottery, to be a certain, but most NYC public housing is not in rich neighborhoods. Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class. There are notable exceptions - the projects on the Lower East Side for example were built when the neighborhood was one of the poorest in Manhattan, but in the past ten years has transformed into a playground for the wealthy with shiny new glass skyscrapers going up every which way. The public housing system in NYC was neither intended as, nor does it generally have the effect of, mixing the poor with the rich. All of the complexes were built on what was at the time land that nobody ever expected would be worth much, the mixing of economic strata was not a major concern - in fact the design of the public housing system was in large part driven by a desire to segregate the poor.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  > Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class. Maybe 10 years ago, but the Jefferson L stop is mega upper class nice at this point. Indoor climbing gyms next to circus themed bars next to coffee shops with zen gardens, all within quick walks to public housing. Hell, I don't make enough money to get a lease off the Franklin Av stop in Crown Heights, at this point...
ics 11y ago
> If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas While this may be true, this is definitely not the only way to talk about public housing in New York (i.e. the whole city, not just Chelsea and other hot areas in Manhattan).
sergiotapia 11y ago
If I owned property in those well off neighborhoods I would be -pissed-.
ktothemc 11y ago
What birth lottery did you win?
ktothemc 11y ago
No, but seriously, cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function. Ever-rising land and housing costs keep accelerating beyond their marginal wages and compensation. We already went through this a century ago during the last Industrial Revolution. Jacob Riis photographed all the many people living in the tenements. Society decided this was a terrible thing and that we wanted to at least provide a basic standard of living in America's richest cities. Hence public housing came into being. Unfortunately it was never properly funded. It used cut-rate materials to do a literal poor man's version of Modernist architecture. Exclusionary zoning meant it could never really be co-located with middle-class or even wealthier areas, so the children of these families never got access to the same quality of public services or schools. When the demographic composition of public housing shifted from poor white families to poor black families, public support for it was just decimated.
- danielweber 11y ago
  > cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function It's not really "low-wage" if their rents are being subsidized, randomly.
CPLX 11y ago
> If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas, then great - maybe this is the best way to make that happen. Yes. I think it's important to have disparate classes living together in a dense urban environment, rather than a homogeneity of wealth. In fact, I believe that attention to this priority is one of the main reasons that NYC is the greatest city in the history of world civilization, versus the bland expanse of stripmalls, chain retail, and cultural drought that defines the American living experience in many other areas.
- Frozenlock 11y ago
  > NYC is arguably the greatest city in the history of world civilization (...) Well then, go on, argue. :-p There has been quite a few cities in the last few thousand years...
  - CPLX 11y ago
    You raise a good point. I haven't been able to think of any other contenders either. I've edited my post accordingly.
justizin 11y ago
Who do you expect to work construction building housing only for the rich? To work at bars and restaurants? Basically anything other than jobs that can be done sitting in your underwear at home? Even if you aren't a bleeding heart, even if you accept greed as positive virtue, you can't expect to live completely separate from the poor, esp the working poor who actually do jobs in the actual city, and many of whom probably start work earlier than you wake up. Do you really want your trash collector to commute in?
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  Many construction jobs in NYC are highly remunerative, more so even than many jobs that "can be done sitting in your underwear at home". It seems a trend recently to conflate truly low wage jobs -- for example bar back or nursing home aid -- with perceived low status jobs, that nonetheless pay somewhere between pretty and very well -- for example MTA bus driver or union crane operator.
gaius 11y ago
Here in the UK, once you're in social housing (which we call council housing) you're in for life - which leads to situations like the late Bob Crow earning £150k/year (probably $250k/year equiv) and yet getting his rent paid by taxes levied on people earning a fraction as much. This, he was fond of saying, was in accordance with his socialist principles. I'd like to see a system where a council house is on a fixed term, say 5 years or 10 years, then it goes to the next person on the waiting list, and you can rejoin the queue at the back if you so desire. That's more than enough time for anyone to make a smooth transition to the rental or homeowner sector.
- switch007 11y ago
  (Social housing covers local authorities and private housing associations) I believe many new tenancies are "starter" tenancy agreements; a probation period of 12-18 months. There are also fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies. Tenancies started before 1989 are somewhat controlled by a council Rent Officer. Applications must be made to increase rent. Tenancies after 1989 experience yearly rent increases, capped to CPI I think. There are also 'affordable rents', basically a way for housing associations to charge more for rent. Not disagreeing with you, but social housing is quite different to the pre-1989 era.
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  I'm a pretty strong critic of NYC's housing policies, but when I read about "Right to Buy" in the UK, I had to conclude that we may be far from the worst!
- hollerith 11y ago
  In the US, tenants in subsidized housing pay 30% of their income as rent, which avoids the specific policy failure you describe. (Actually, I think they have the option of paying the "contract rent", which is an approximation of the market rate, if that is cheaper for them.)
beatpanda 11y ago
We do want disparate classes of people living close together, as there is evidence that this is a highly effective means of alleviating poverty: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/ http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
- danielweber 11y ago
  How many poor people can you stick next to the rich people before the rich people leave for a place where they aren't part of your social experiment?
  - beatpanda 11y ago
    Not sure, but rich people don't seem to have a problem when the process runs in the opposite direction
    - danielweber 11y ago
      I don't understand what this means. They don't mind when poor people move out? Of course they don't. Unless you are going to legally stop people from moving out, you are going to figure out how much you can keep the factor you apparently need -- rich people -- while letting as many poor people as possible benefit from being in a mixed-income neighborhood.

bradleyjg 11y ago

NYCHA has a huge capital shortfall -- to the tune of $18B.^1 Neither the city, the state, nor the federal government looks interested in putting in that kind of money. As it is a significant fraction of the total number of apartments are being held empty because of needed repairs, at some point in the not too distant future entire buildings are going to be uninhabitable if repairs aren't made. There was a proposal need the end of Bloomberg administration to sell project parking lots(!), mostly in Manhattan, to developers that would build market rate housing. The money would then be used for capital repairs. The plan was bitterly opposed by residents who apparently value massively subsidized parking over non-falling-down buildings and/or believe that the money is going to magically appear in some other way. DeBlasio has put out a modified version of the same plan, it involves a mix of "affordable" and market rate apartments being developed on the same parcels. That of course, will mean less money for NYCHA, which means fewer repairs, but I guess he doesn't care. Personally, I think it makes the most sense to sell outright a few of the most valuable properties and use the money to make the necessary capital repairs on the rest of the system. If enough of those empty apartments can be fixed up, it might not even be a net loss of public housing. 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/nyregion/new-york-public-housing-faces-crisis-as-demands-and-deficits-grow.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/nyregion/new-york-public-h...

CPLX 11y ago
> That of course, will mean less money for NYCHA, which means fewer repairs, but I guess he doesn't care. That is some highly faulty logic right there. The more money developers pay the more the city gets, but the idea that it'll just magically make its way into fixing apartments for poor people instead of being diverted and shunted off to other city priorities and friends of the political structure is delusional. Presumably the residents of the public housing properties in question figure what will happen is they will start with buildings with parking lots, and end up with buildings with no parking lots and wealthy developers in the same space who now stand to profit even more from pushing their lower income family out, and the money for repairs having mysteriously evaporated into some sort of budget crisis. Which, of course, is exactly what would likely happen in real life.
- 11y ago

evanpw 11y ago

Some interesting demographic data here: http://www1.nyc.gov/html/nycha/downloads/pdf/CAFR_2013.pdf http://www1.nyc.gov/html/nycha/downloads/pdf/CAFR_2013.pdf (page 136). A few things that stand out: * About 175k families in public housing, with 400k people total (so about 5% of the NYC population). * Slightly less than half of households have at least one person working. * Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k? * Only 11% of families are listed as being on welfare. * Average time in public housing > 20 years, which supports what the article was saying.

cperciva 11y ago
Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k? Not necessarily. If "average income" includes pensions and investments, a lot of the income might be in the hands of retirees.
cowsandmilk 11y ago
> * Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k? There are ~37% of families with someone over 62, so that section may be drawing social security (assuming that is included in gross income, which it wouldn't for the IRS, but it would make sense to for a housing agency)

Shivetya 11y ago

To be honest I think I am more offended that the housing authority can charger higher rents to some residents all the while not maintaining the buildings. Why aren't housing authority management dragged up before the cameras, if not into court. Money from rents should first go to the building the rent is derived from and only spent elsewhere if all that buildings needs are met. Rent control, public housing, taxi medallions, street vendor permits, and more, all are things that can be made to sound good but the number of people harmed usually out numbers those helped in the long run. There should not be any ownership imparted simply because you got there first. This goes for public housing as much as it goes for the medallion system.

nosuchthing 11y ago

The more I read about what's going on in NYC, SF, London, I have to think of the visions from utopianist architects like Paolo Soleri and Buckminster Fuller who foresaw the over population of cities and not just the economic side effects, but the lifestyle and chaos inherited from the haphazard design of entire cities. [image from Paolo Soleri, on "Archology", cities as ecosystems co-designed] http://alastairgordonwalltowall.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/arcology-4.jpg http://alastairgordonwalltowall.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/... All these megacities have lacked expansion efforts driving up costs of rent to unaffordable levels for most normal people. As jobs are automated out of existence, and productivity increases, unemployment will continue to increase, the % of the population stuck in poverty level will likely continue to increase. Sooner or later these issues will need to be addressed with long term answers. It seems like if anyone might actually implement newly designed large scale planned city architecture, it will be China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

design-of-homes 11y ago

Many of the housing issues that New York faces seem similar to what's happening in London: shortage of housing supply, soaring rents, property at ridiculously over-inflated prices. The London market is overun with buy-to-let investors chasing after the same properties as first-time buyers (guess who's more likely to be snapping up those properties and chasing up prices). The article touches on the importance of neighbours. I think we underestimate how important community is in a neighbourhood. People will always come and go in a neighbourhood, but knowing your neighbours (even if it's simply saying 'hello') and knowing that there is a reasonable number of people settled in your neighbourhood makes a big difference to the street or block in which you live. Research in the UK has shown [1] that many people who rent feel no commitment to the area in which they rent or don't see the point of getting to know the people they share a street with. Longer, more stable tenancies might change this (much like they have in Germany). Or the ability to purchase their own home (if homes were affordable in London). Property as investment has had an incredibly damaging effect on the London housing market. Do property investors have any interest or concern for the neighbourhood in which they rent out their property?? If buy-to-let comes to dominate a neighbourhood, what kind of effect does it have on that neighbourhood? Can you ever build a community around such a neighbourhood? [1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/09/home-ownership-young-people-falling http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/09/home-ow...

philrapo 11y ago
It's funny, but people in NYC rarely get to know their neighbors, regardless of rent vs. own. Cultural thing I guess. Maybe it helps ignore the extremely crowded population density.
dublinben 11y ago
The root of this problem is very clearly absentee landlords. If the (oftentimes long term) occupants of these buildings owned them, then all these problems would significantly go away. When you can no longer take out an artificially cheap loan to buy property, just to rent it out, housing actually becomes affordable again.

mc32 11y ago

One solution which has some popularity in other places is corporate housing. So, if you work for ssamsung, for example, then you get to rent from them. I can see how this can be viewed as negative as only those privvy enough to work for the corps who are willing to build would benefit and takes some of the responsibility from the state, this frees up non corporate housing stock for others pushing up the number of units overall. Corp housing used to be more common in the us but seems to have waned greatly over time. I think people saw it as the employer taking back your money in the form or rent.

dcole2929 11y ago
We've tried this before (coal mining towns are a great example). It was in most cases an unmitigated disaster. Besides the fact that it means essentially tying your entire family's living conditions to the fortunes of a corporation you don't control, it also opens the most vulnerable to abuse. Even in public housing, if I lose my job I can get another one and not have to uproot my entire family. This means a layoff while painful doesn't make me homeless. And because companies know you are depending on their housing you become dependent on them. Good luck turning down "voluntary" overtime when you're housing depends on not getting let go. That blatant violation you would normally report? Not gonna happen if you are literally depending on a company for house and home.
XorNot 11y ago
Wow. Please go read up on what the outcome has been literally every single time this has been tried, many times in the USA's recent history. Hint: it is one of the many reasons unions exist, and are a good thing. EDIT: Or to go another way with this - the single worst aspect of the US health system is how your health insurance provider is tied to your job. This is probably one of the greatest shackles towards labor mobility in the US, but since it tends to benefit employers they're mysteriously all for it. Tying someone's place of residence to their employer is an even more insane, backwards step.
- mc32 11y ago
  I understand; however, we see cities dedicating or subsidizing housing for teachers and other personnel. Also, companies while they are in business will carry that housing capacity thus taking that load off the city or town which isn't building enough stock. In addition these would be normal units, not some bunk bed operations. They'd be no different from any other housing development in a given locale, likely much better than public housing. I dont think we can discount it out of hand due to history. Other countries have varying success with these schemes. It's not that far removed from the principle of providing free meals to employees in order to make them more productive by having a shorter commute and one less thing to worry about.

tosseraccount 11y ago

Let's face facts. Regulation, Zoning and Rent Control cause shortages. Few folks want poor folk living in their neighborhood.

SovietDissident 11y ago

There is a limited supply thanks partly to public housing and rent control (people never leave and developers basically can't touch it), and also it's incredibly expensive to develop in NYC: "A 2010 study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development estimated that covering the cost of financing, building, and operating a new apartment building in New York City, including taxes, required a minimum rent for its units of $2,100 per month. To live comfortably with such rent, a family would need an income of at least $86,000. Further, developers become understandably unwilling to construct apartment buildings where they can’t be assured of such rent premiums. The high construction costs result not only in inflated rents in new buildings, therefore, but in an overall shortage of housing, which drives up the price of already-constructed unregulated units. And it’s New York’s tentacular state and local government that helps make it so wildly expensive to build. The NYU study found a host of government policies that drive construction prices higher. For starters, city agencies responsible for overseeing and regulating building were often openly hostile to new construction, the study discovered. “The Buildings Department is still one of the major drivers of the high cost of housing in New York City, rather than an agency dedicated to reducing expense and facilitating development,” the report observed. Even experienced builders, the study found, now typically employed well-paid “expediters” to move their projects through the city’s foot-dragging approval process, adding an average cost of about $200,000 per building. Taxes and fees tied specifically to development—many of them rare in other cities—are another factor in Gotham’s sky-high building costs. For example, New York levies a transfer tax on land when a developer buys a plot, and then a mortgage-recording tax when a builder borrows to finance his project. And the builder faces significant sales taxes on construction materials, too. For a hypothetical New York apartment building, going up on a plot of land bought for, say, $5 million, real-estate, mortgage, and sales taxes would add $1.6 million to the development price tag. New York’s local and state elected officials also write laws and codes that curry favor with various special interests with a financial stake in development, raising prices higher still. Litigation-friendly New York State makes it easy to sue builders and developers, for instance, which benefits construction-worker unions and trial lawyers, two powerful Albany lobbies, but makes insurance on the construction of an apartment building as much as 8 percent to 10 percent of total costs—twice the national average. The Scaffold Law may be the most striking example of this kind of legislation. Unique in the country, it mandates that a developer or contractor is completely liable if an employee gets injured on a job site, even if worker negligence played a role. Even workers found to be drunk on the job have won big judgments. Another costly government barrier to building is the city’s excessive fondness for historic preservation. Initiated in the mid-1960s as a way of protecting truly exceptional structures—a fallout from the unfortunate demolition of the original Penn Station—the city’s landmarking process has morphed over time into a way for local activists and progressive politicians to stymie development of any new construction in neighborhoods often all but devoid of historic value. Nowadays, notes Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser, nearly 16 percent of buildable land in Manhattan resides in historic-preservation districts, and about half of it is largely off-limits to development. (See “Preservation Follies,” Spring 2010.) In a city desperately needing housing construction, the preservation districts lost an average of 46 units of housing per tract during the 1990s, according to Glaeser’s research. Not surprisingly, the cost of housing in these districts has risen substantially faster than in other areas of the city."[0] [0] http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_nyc-government.html http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_nyc-government.html