Downtown Ranks Dead Last in the Borough Over Last Ten Years
A statistical analysis by an urban planning expert indicates that Community District 1 (CD1), which encompasses Lower Manhattan, ranks dead last in the number of affordable housing units created or preserved in Manhattan since 2014.
A team from George M. Janes & Associates, a planning consultancy with expertise in zoning, statistics, and quantitative modeling, appeared at a recent meeting of the Land Use, Zoning & Economic Development Committee of Community Board 1, and shared their findings that of 61,087 income-restricted housing units preserved or created in Manhattan between 2014 and November 2024, only 299 are located within CD1, a catchment bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge. These 299 come to four tenths of one percent of all the affordable units in the borough, which rounds down to zero percent.
The next lowest tranche is in Community District 2 (which covers Canal to West 14th Streets, west of the Bowery and Fourth Avenue), which has more than double to corresponding metric, with 623 affordable units. The highest total for Manhattan was found in Community District 10 (the far Upper East Side of Manhattan, between East 96th and East 138th Streets, between Fifth Avenue and the Harlem River). In that area, the City has preserved or created 13,129 units of affordable housing during the decade that ended last November.
When the Janes & Associates team narrowed their focus to include only new construction, they found similar results, with CD1 creating only 212 affordable units during the same time period. This also ranks Lower Manhattan last in the borough, where the overall creation of new income-restricted homes ran to 13,026 units in the period after 2014. (CD1’s proportion of this total was slightly less than two percent.)
At the CB1 meeting, Mr. Janes said, “you had four projects over the past eleven years that produced those 212 units. And none of them were 100 percent affordable housing. They were all between 20 and 30 percent [affordable].” He continued, “the City of New York puts enormous public subsidies into creating and preserving affordable housing, but it puts hardly any of that subsidy to work in your community district.”
Mr. Janes noted the apparent incongruity between these metrics and the goals of Where We Live 2025, an initiative recently announced by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, which (Mr. Janes explained), “is a fair housing plan to ensure that both new construction and preservation of affordable homes extend to all the City’s community districts.”
Community Board 1’s most recent Statement of District needs notes that Lower Manhattan “is not adequately stocked with existing affordable housing, nor does it have many opportunities to generate new affordable units…. There are simply not enough emerging units for area residents who are being pushed out of their homes as buildings exit older affordability programs such as Mitchell-Lama or other tax-levied conveyances.”