One perverse boon arising from the pandemic coronavirus (and the economic slowdown that it triggered) is a slight—but significant—uptick in housing affordability in Lower Manhattan. A new study from the online real estate database company, StreetEasy, finds that the inventory of apartments in Downtown’s eight residential zip codes that are eligible for New York Citys’ housing voucher program has expanded, as asking rents across all categories of apartments have dropped. This has, in a handful of cases, brought rental units within range of the maximum payments allowed under the voucher program.
The study was authored by Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy, who uses data science and econometrics to publish original research on the New York City housing market. Its upbeat title, “Pandemic Rent Drops Double NYC’s Voucher-Accessible Housing,” refers to a City-wide trend, but for residents of Lower Manhattan (or people who aspire to live here), this optimism is tempered by statistics and market dynamics at the local level.
Ms. Wu’s research indicates that almost 300 apartments have been rendered “affordable” by the convergence of falling rents with maximum voucher payments. The bulk of these, some 280 apartments, are located in the combined Financial District and South Street Seaport neighborhoods. A relative paucity are found in Tribeca (five units) and Battery Park City (two apartments).
But the increases in these metrics are still striking. By this gauge, in 2019 (before the pandemic began), there was not a single apartment available in the FiDi/Seaport area for which the rent was low enough to qualify for payment by vouchers. Battery Park City was similarly home to not one voucher-eligible apartment. And Tribeca had just one such unit in 2019.
That noted, considerable hurdles remain for anybody wishing to use a City-issued voucher to rent a home in any of these neighborhoods. Chief among them is that if you do not currently possess such a credential, you are unlikely to obtain one anytime soon. As Ms. Wu points out in her report, the City, “stopped accepting voucher applications back in December 2009. Many who applied in time are still on the waiting list. As of May 2018, there were 148,000 households on the waiting list.”
Another challenge, as Ms. Wu notes, is widespread income discrimination on the part of landlords, which frequently has the effect of blocking applications by prospective tenants who hope to pay their rent with vouchers, even when they find a unit the program will enable them to afford.
And finally, there is the math. The maximum rent allowed under the voucher program varies by neighborhood throughout the five boroughs. For seven of the eight residential zip codes in Lower Manhattan, these guidelines permit maximum rents in a range between $2,851 (for a studio) and $4,212 (for a three-bedroom unit). The lone exception is zip code 10013 (northern Tribeca), where top allowable rents dip to a range between $1,998 (studio) and $2,948 (three-bedroom apartment).
Even in a soft market, however, finding apartments at these prices in Lower Manhattan is exceedingly difficult. A sampling of StreetEasy’s database of available rental apartments in Lower Manhattan found a handful of studios for which the asking rent is below the City’s maximum threshold (for most of Lower Manhattan) of $2,851, and slightly fewer that meet the cut-off for one-bedroom units, of $2,916. But as the search was refined to focus on two- and three-bedroom apartments, the number of available units that meet the City’s criteria (of $3,326 and $4,212, respectively) dwindled to zero.
Matthew Fenton
