Analysis Finds that Lower Manhattan Lags on Affordability
A report from housing and planning expert George Janes to Community Board 1 (CB1) on the results of a year-long analysis of affordable housing in Lower Manhattan found that the area is uniquely distressed.
Using rent-stabilized apartments (meaning those where increases are limited by the City’s Rent Guidelines Board, which has approved hikes at an average annual rate of approximately 2.5 percent since 1996) as proxy for affordability, Mr. Janes documented that in the half decade between 2020 and 2025, Manhattan as a whole notched a slight gain of 2.1 percent in the total number of rent-stabilized dwellings (growing from 255,083 units to 260,656). But during this same period, Lower Manhattan (defined here as within the borders of CB1, an area bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge) suffered a 21.2 percent decline in the local inventory of rent-stabilized apartments, shrinking from 9,597 units to 7,556.
Moreover, he noted, “traditional rent stabilization applies to multiple dwellings built before 1974, and has no expiration date. But where there are rent-stabilized units in CB1, they are usually the result of a regulatory agreement that will expire, or must be renewed.”
Mr. Janes pointed to three large developments were once citadels of local affordability: Battery Park City’s Gateway Plaza (with 1,712 apartments), Tribeca’s Independence Plaza (1,328), and the Seaport’s Southbridge Towers (1,641 units).
Gateway Plaza was subject originally to a regulatory agreement that conferred rent stabilization on all of its tenants. But this was narrowed to cover only existing tenants in 2009, which meant that by 2015, only about 850 units were subject to limits on rent increases. By the time this agreement was renewed earlier this year, that tally had been halved again, to just 430 apartments.
Independence Plaza and Southbridge Towers were built under the State’s Mitchell-Lama affordability program. But both opted out of this program (the former in 2004; the latter a decade later), removing nearly 3,000 more homes from the rolls of rent stabilization. The story is similar at a succession of smaller Lower Manhattan buildings. In the five-year period ending last December, Ten Hanover Square went from 489 to 35 such units. The building at 254 Front Street dropped from 40 to two. And 70 Battery Place went from 209 to 43.
As of 2026, just 15.5 percent of all rental units in Lower Manhattan are rent stabilized, the lowest proportion of any community other than the Upper East Side, Mr. Janes noted.
A second proxy for local affordability is the total number of income-restricted units, which are set aside for tenants making no more than a mandated percentage of the 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). Among Lower Manhattan’s inventory of apartments, 1.8 percent are income restricted, also a lower ratio than any area of Manhattan apart from the Upper East Side.
A third yardstick for gauging affordability is the creation or preservation of income-restricted units. “Since 2014,” Mr. Janes noted, “Lower Manhattan has created or preserved 848 income-restricted units, while the same metric for Manhattan as a whole showed an increase of 72,504 such homes.” This means that CB1 received just 1.2 percent of the total for all of Manhattan.