Lower Manhattan Goes from Worst to Meh on Affordability
Lower Manhattan has gone from a dead heat with one other City Council district for the worst annual record of affordable housing production to the middle of the pack, according to the “NYC Housing Tracker Report 2025,” a new study issued in October by the New York Housing Conference (NYHC), a nonprofit affordable housing policy and advocacy organization.
City Council District 1 (an aggregation of neighborhoods mostly below Canal, Houston, and Delancey Streets) produced 341 units of affordable housing in 2024, and an additional 345 rent-protected homes in the first six months of this year, according to NYHC. These tallies (combined with 1,830 such dwellings created in the decade between 2014 and 2024) rank Lower Manhattan 21st among the 51 City Council Districts in the five boroughs for the overall rate of creation of affordable housing
In 2024, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams created or preserved 27,620 units of affordable housing citywide, which makes the share (341 units) allocated to Council District 1 slightly more than 1.2 percent of the total. Almost all of the 345 affordable units created in Lower Manhattan this calendar year appear to be attributable to a single project: the new apartment tower at 25 Water Street, where 330 of the 1,320 units are rent-restricted.
But even this picture may be too optimistic. A statistical analysis compiled earlier this year by urban planning expert George M. Janes indicated that Community District 1 (a slightly smaller area than Council District 1, bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge), ranks dead last in the number of affordable housing units created or preserved since 2014. This analysis found that of 61,087 income-restricted housing units preserved or created in Manhattan between 2014 and November 2024, only 299 were located within Community District 1. These 299 units come to four tenths of one percent of all the affordable units in the borough.
A separate analysis from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), an umbrella organization of 100 non-profit affordable housing and economic development groups that serve low- and moderate-income residents in all five boroughs of the City, provides further context. The 2025 edition of ANHD’s annual roundup, “How Is Affordable Housing Threatened In Your Neighborhood?” cites Community District 1 as one of the ten most threatened throughout the five boroughs, when measured by the number of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units that will expire between now and 2029.
ANHD’s report says 945 such units will lapse out of LIHTC protections within Community District 1 over the next 50 months. This total will absorb the entirety of 620 planned affordable units announced by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams for the community in June, and leave an additional local deficit of 325 affordable homes. Moreover, few (if any) of the planned 620 affordable units are likely to be open before 2029, by which point the larger number of rent-protected homes will have disappeared.