An editorial from the New York Times:
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Can New York Be Affordable Again?
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The New York of the 1950s and early ’60s, for all its grime and problems, was far more hospitable than today’s city to working-class and middle-class families, full of stable and affordable neighborhoods where they could live and strive.
That disappearing New York seemed to lie at the core of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s State of the City speech on Tuesday. He said reclaiming it through affordable housing would be his main mission for 2015, the start of an all-out effort and a building boom on a scale unseen in generations.
It is a timely and exciting mission. Too-slow growth and gentrification have shrunk the supply of affordable housing while greatly increasing New Yorkers’ anxiety about what their city is becoming. Mr. de Blasio’s answer is this: Build aggressively and densely, and demand that a significant portion of new units be permanently affordable. Use all means possible to protect what’s there, including strengthening rent regulations and tripling, to $36 million a year, the amount the city spends to protect tenants from greedy landlords in housing court.
The skeptics hit back almost instantly. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office pronounced one of the mayor’s ideas — a plan to create 200 buildable acres from thin air on a deck over the Sunnyside rail yards in Queens — dead on arrival. And residents in some neighborhoods where Mr. de Blasio hopes to build, worried that they were doomed to be overwhelmed by a tide of soaring rents and evictions, asked the million-dollar affordable-housing question: affordable for whom?
The success of the plan, laid out by the administration in a 116-page book of policy prescriptions, will depend on several factors. One is toughness: mandatory inclusionary zoning, stronger rent laws, an army of Legal Aid lawyers, stricter code enforcement against landlords who let properties decay.
Another is persuasion. Mr. de Blasio will have to convince New Yorkers that the huge construction binge he wants — including 160,000 new market-rate units plus 80,000 affordable ones — and years of noise and inconvenience will be for their benefit. And this, in turn, involves making the difficult argument that even though only a fraction of the new units will be affordable — 20 percent or 30 percent or more, depending — this will be enough to build a city within the city that is within a regular New Yorker’s financial reach.
