Mamdani’s Citywide Housing Plan is Challenged by Lower Manhattan
New York City’s first ever Fair Housing Growth Strategy, recently published in draft form by the Mamdani administration, applies to the five boroughs, but offers striking insights into the state of housing and affordability (as well as the prospects for both) in Lower Manhattan.
Two metrics about the community – defined here as falling within the boundaries of Community Board 1, a patchwork of neighborhoods comprising 1.5 square miles, bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge – will serve as confirmation of widely shared perceptions, rather than surprises. First, because its housing inventory expanded rapidly over the last decade, Lower Manhattan is identified as a “high-growth” area. And second, it is also characterized as a “limited-affordability” district. This label denotes areas with “the fewest available… rentals that have low enough rents to be affordable to median-income New York City households.”
Perhaps more surprising is that City Hall targets Lower Manhattan for still more growth, proposing that between now and 2030 the area accept 5,760 additional housing units, or an expansion of 12.5 percent over the existing local inventory of 46,080 homes. Among these, 1,440 units (or exactly the legally required minimum of 25 percent) are slated to be affordable units, with 430 of those homes categorized as “deeply affordable,” and 215 dwellings set aside for formerly homeless people.
Community Board 1 chair Alice Blank said, “Lower Manhattan has seen tremendous housing growth, with the number of homes more than doubling since 2002 and more than 5,000 permitted units in the pipeline. But too little of that growth has been affordable to the people who work here and the families who want to stay. A citywide plan for more housing is needed, but applying the same 25-percent affordability target to every district ignores how little affordable housing already exists here and how much has been lost. The City should take every opportunity to prioritize projects in CB1 with more affordable housing than the 25 percent baseline.”
According to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which commented on the City’s plan as a whole, “roughly three-quarters of the total new housing units the administration aims to create would be market rate, and less than half of the ‘affordable’ units would serve those below 60 percent of Area Median Income,” a federally determined metric used by housing advocates and policymakers to compare the costs of living in various parts of the nation. “This is an alarming approach from an administration focused on affordability.”
At its September meeting, CB1 enacted a resolution criticizing the Fair Housing Growth Strategy, arguing, “simply put, [Lower Manhattan’s] 25 percent affordability target is inadequate and should be increased,” and calling for “well-resourced districts with less affordable housing like [Lower Manhattan] to produce a higher share of affordable housing relative to market-rate units. This would expand socioeconomic diversity and access to opportunity in unaffordable [communities].”
The same measure urged that “the methodology for calculating affordable housing production targets should be adjusted to prioritize affordability, particularly in districts that are unaffordable like [Lower Manhattan].”