City Limits
Christina Saldana’s 9-year-old daughter Hailey plays with a brown doll in the crawl space between the family’s sofa and the wall. She has a small pink box of toys crammed in the corner, and another next to the hot pink twin bed that the family of three shares most nights.
Saldana and her two daughters are cramped for space in their 650-square-foot studio apartment in the Bronx.
“The only door that I have right now is the bathroom,” Saldana, 27, says. “If I want to have a few minutes to myself, I would have to take a bubble bath.”
Saldana pays $1,100 for the studio in Parkchester, where the family has lived for four years. With her salary of $40,000, she wants to buy her girls more space as they get older. But she says there’s nothing she can find on the market that fits her needs.
New Yorkers have long lived in cramped quarters, from multiple generations of immigrants to large Orthodox families. But the rising rents that accompany gentrification in certain neighborhoods has caused even four-person families to squeeze into small spaces.
The price of a two-bedroom apartment in historically poor neighborhoods like Mott Haven in the Bronx has jumped 14 percent in the last year to a median of $1,850. Many working-class families are forced to make do in one bedrooms and studios. The city’s affordable housing program has tried to compensate for this in the last five years, building far more one bedroom and two bedroom affordable apartments than larger units. But some advocates say this in turn leaves larger families without options.
Of the 156,000 units of affordable housing built or preserved since 2014, over 100,000 units had two or fewer bedrooms, according to New York City’s OpenData. Almost 43,000 were two bedrooms. In comparison, only 14,700 three-bedrooms were built or preserved in the same timeframe, as were only 1,500 four bedrooms.
Developers in the city tend to favor studios and one-bedrooms, with over 25,000 units newly built since 2014, compared to just over 2,000 three-bedroom units built and only 88 four-bedrooms. On the other side, the city preserved over 30,000 two-bedroom units, over 27,000 one-bedrooms and only about 12,000 three-bedrooms.
In a neighborhood like the South Bronx, once known for its row houses that hosted generations of families, there are now predominantly apartments with two or fewer bedrooms. Data from the American Community Survey shows that the neighborhood lost about 400 units from with three or more bedrooms 2010 to 2017. It gained 4,311 with two or fewer bedrooms. And over a thousand of those were studios.
Overall, the city lost over 23,000 apartments with four bedrooms or more.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan, Housing New York, largely mirrors the trends in the market when it comes to apartment size. The plan, which was released in 2014, focuses on housing needed by a growing demographic of one to two person households. The report cites 1.9 million one- and two-person households residing in the city in 2012 (more than 60 percent of all the city’s households), but only 1.25 million studios and one-bedroom apartments.
7 comments:
That's what we get for having a city full of illegals. The illegals can afford these high rents because they stick 4 men in a 2 bedroom apartment and they all work. The government does absolutely nothing to regulate how many people can fit into an apartment. The landlords can care less as long as they are getting paid their rent. By them stacking up on people, they make the rents higher because the government "thinks" that people have no problem paying a certain price but meanwhile you have many people who are actually splitting the rents. The government really has no clue to how much an actual working citizen with a family can actually afford it seems.
One reason developers and landlords have favored studio and 1BR is they know these tend to have higher turnover stemming from people wanting to start families.
Because of the loopholes created in the 1997 stabilization fiasco, this has allowed more rapid rent increases.
The law just signed by Cuomo is supposed to close off some of these abuses, but we'll see.
The damage done by the November 1994 election of Potaki, lingers-on.
Rob in Manhattan
It is not a human right to have a large family, low income, and live in a dense, expensive city like NYC. Families with means (not necessarily rich) used to depart for the suburbs upon the arrival of kid #2. A single parent of 2 children making $40k a year? Trying to live in NYC? That's rough. But is it my fault? Yours? The mayor's?
Landlords don't like 3 bedroom apartments because once you take in a family unit tenant with a baby or kids enrolled in school you can not get them out in court when they can no longer afford it.
Now you’re talking a whole floor of zero income for near 3 years, utilities and heat may also be forced on you.
No sheriff will do an eviction with kids in school because there are no shelters to take them. The court judges always side with the tenants.
You then have 2 choices
1 - Put up with it and fight in court for years
2 - Take a section 8 check, and your home becomes a sec 8 housing forever, you have no more rights NOTHING! The city even gets rights to come inside your home.
The system gives landlords no protection and actually wants landlords to sign on and take a section 8 check or broke paying for the deadbeats themselves.
June-September I will only do an air-BNB to a couple I choose, air-BNB and houseguests have references, pay cash, stay short then GO HOME!!
My neighbors don't complain because I help them fix their houses and 2: I don't rent to assholes.
In short the reason the city has no more 3 bedrooms is due to its hostility on landlords. Renting a 3 bedroom unit is too high a risk; a single hipster renting a studio is easier to get out if they become deadbeat.
Converging evidence has revealed that growing up in the city doubles the risk of developing psychosis later in life. (Meyer-Lindenberg, Sariaslan, Gruebner) It has now been revealed that tort lawyer casuistry misconduct is the cause of this and has been fraudulently concealed by their trade association as a trade secret for over a century because such insanity only promotes their profession despite countless warnings. Past lawyer-induced insanity cases have resulted in compensation for medical costs, lost wages, future medical costs and pain and suffering. Each case is unique and must be considered separately but some cases have resulted in settlements or awards which reach into the hundreds of thousands or more.
It is high time we started tearing down apartment buildings and subways like they did in the 1950s. Tweeders want to build a city the size of Seattle inside New York to block bust our votes. It is time we didn't just protest the buildings, but brought down all the blight projects and put two family private homes there. Resembling soviet collectives, union teachers parade their students in the halls, imploring residents to vote their way. Leonidas and his 300 Spartans begat the agrarian warrior glory of western civilization while Huntington’s Clash put Athens in the Islamo-Soviet zone. Sparta colonized Sicily hence begat Rome, while Athens colonized Scythia hence begat Russia. Alexander’s dad choked Athens by grabbing Besant to choke Scythian wheat. Athenians are the source of all leftist ideas like globalist commerce, Delian central banking, cowardly philosophers and socialist taxation.
Now imagine she gets fired from her job... who is going to support her? This is why its easy to be homeless in Nyc. Once you go broke the chances are miniscule to get back up.
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