Public housing condos and affordable luxury studios now available for lottery applications

 

YIMBY

 The affordable housing lottery is now open for 45-57 Davis Street, a nine-story mixed-use development in Long Island City, Queens. Designed by J Frankl/Charles Mallea and developed by Solomon Feder of Velocity Framers USA, the 145,000-square-foot will yield a total 158 units in a mix of studios and one-, two-, and three-bedroom units. Available on NYC Housing Connect are 48 apartments for residents at 130 percent of the area median income, ranging in eligible income from $73,920 to $183,300.

 At 130 percent of the AMI, there are 12 affordable studios with a $2,156 monthly rent for incomes ranging from $73,920 to $118,300; 23 one-bedrooms with a $2,245 monthly rent for incomes ranging from $76,972 to $133,120; 12 two-bedrooms with a $2,710 monthly rent for incomes ranging from $92,915 to $159,640, and one three-bedrooms with a $3,122 monthly rent for income ranging from $107,040 to $183,300.

 The YIMBY stenographer forgot to mention that the lucky gentrifier, I mean tenant is responsible for paying the electric bill to go along with the "affordable" rent.

The lying monument of de Blasio's "Affordable Housing" program

 

 Impunity City

As everyone is aware now, Mayor William de Blasio Wilhelm has resuscitated his Housing New York program to provide way overdue affordable housing for your city’s most lower income earning residents in the niche, upper upper class towns of Soho and Noho (the latter of which is about 4 square blocks tops). Actually, only about 25% of 3200 apartments that are projected to be constructed will be earmarked for them. Which still doesn’t correlate with the hundreds of thousands of people who live check to check with 50 to 60% of that check going to rent and the near 70,000 people who don’t have a home at all.. 

But that’s going to be for the next post in process here. What this post is about is basically a spoiler alert for it and what de Blasio’s HPD plans will actually accomplish. Because this is unbelievable.

The building on the right from a picture taken in April last year is on 111 Varick St., which is also in Soho. Last year it gained local news attention when a construction worker got killed by a massive 7 ton concrete structure that snapped off a crane and crushed and dismembered his body while working in the early morning hours. For months it laid dormant because of building and worksite violations. Then passing by there back in January there was a peculiar site. A big banner for de Blasio’s HPD’s Housing New York was draped over the scaffolding. 

 

 

 

Three-bedroom apartments in this city are like an endangered species

 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.