Here come the legalized cellar apartments

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made the shortage of housing for lower-income New Yorkers a top campaign issue, is promising to build or preserve 200,000 affordable units over 10 years. In setting such a goal, Mr. de Blasio is seeking to do more than either Mr. Koch, whose effort yielded more than 190,000 units over 13 years, or Mr. Bloomberg, whose push saved or added 165,000 units over 12 years.

It is a lofty goal, experts said, and Mr. de Blasio and his aides said it must be, given the pace of change washing over the city. Apartments affordable to people with low or moderate incomes are being lost to deregulation faster than units can be created or preserved. With federal housing funds diminishing, the city housing authority is struggling to maintain many of its 334 projects, and it has no plans to add more. And much of the new residential construction in the city is not being built with poor New Yorkers in mind.

Housing was central to Mr. de Blasio’s tale-of-two-cities electoral campaign, and he has promised aggressive measures. He said he wanted to steer $1 billion of city pension funds to the construction of lower-rent units. He said he would raise taxes on vacant land to close a tax loophole and spur development. He favors legalizing some illegal basement and cellar apartments.

And in one of the biggest departures from his predecessor’s approach, Mr. de Blasio said he would require, rather than encourage, developers to set aside new units for low- and moderate-income renters in major residential construction projects.

This is more about allowing his scummy landlord supporters to profit by destroying low-density neighborhoods than it is about creating affordable housing. "Affordable housing" is a smokescreen for allowing overdevelopment.

I'd like to hear his plan for improving infrastructure to support all these additional units.