Inclusionary zoning won't actually create that much affordable housing

From Capital New York:

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday backed off his campaign estimate that mandatory inclusionary zoning would create 50,000 units of affordable housing.

Speaking at an unrelated press conference, the mayor simply said the policy — which he recently unveiled and will officially introduce for consideration next month — would be a "crucial building block" in his overall goal of building 80,000 affordable units and preserving another 120,000 over a decade.

"We are going to get to 200,000 units," he said. "Mandatory inclusionary zoning, if passed as we hope it will be, will be an important contributing figure. We'll be able to better hone that number in the process — the legislative process and the city planning process. But either way you slice it, we're getting to the grand total."

When he was running for mayor in 2013, he said such a policy would spur development of 50,000 units of affordable housing in eight years — a figure that was met with skepticism at the time.

Since then, an organization pushing for the plan, the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, has sharply reduced its own estimate of how many units it would create, from between 25,000 and 50,000 over eight years to 13,800, according to a recent report.