Downtown Affordability Crisis Documented by New City Comptroller
In one of his final acts as outgoing Manhattan Borough President, Mark Levine (who was sworn in as the new City Comptroller on January 1) issued an update to his “Housing Manhattanites” report, which documents that while the borough as a whole saw the creation of 10,322 new affordable housing units since 2023, Lower Manhattan got just 63 of these, or roughly six-tenths of one percent. (Lower Manhattan is defined here as within the boundaries of Community Board 1, delineated by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.) The only one of Manhattan’s 12 Community Boards to fare worse was CB2 – bounded by Canal and 14th Streets, west of the Bowery – which received no new affordable housing units during the same period.
Mr. Levine’s “Housing Manhattanites” is ongoing project that seeks to identify sites for new affordable housing while building public support for creating these units. The original 2023 report found that since 2014, only 212 units of affordable housing were created in CB1, the second-lowest number in Manhattan. In particular, the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Program heavily pushed by the administration of then-Mayor Eric Adams produced no affordable units in Lower Manhattan.
For that report, Mr. Levine focused on three publicly owned sites within CB1, which were (and are) are legally able to accommodate 100 percent affordable housing. The parking lot at 37 Chambers Street (between Broadway and Centre Street) is owned by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and can accommodate up to 187 apartments. The two-story building at 350 Canal (photograph above, on the corner of Church Street) is owned by the United States Postal Service and is zoned for up to 233 apartments. (The historic Art Moderne facade of the 1937 Church Street Station, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, would be preserved and incorporated into the new structure, Mr. Levine noted.) And the now-shuttered federal correctional facility at 150 Park Row is zoned for 131 units.
The 2023 edition of “Housing Manhattanites” also recommended further study of two publicly owned sites that have room for so many new apartments as to create entirely new communities. The first of these, 56 Greenwich Street, occupies the entrance and exit ramps for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a State agency. The site presents “significant engineering and logistical challenges,” Mr. Levine acknowledged, but has the zoning to produce up to 2,967 units of housing.
Even larger and more transformative would be the development of housing at Pier 6, on the East River waterfront near Broad Street. “With a lot area of 510,025 square feet, its location in a C4-6 zoning district means that it could produce up to 9,000 units of housing,” Mr. Levine said. Standing in the way of this idea is the projected reconfiguration of the busy heliport on Pier 6, part of the FiDi-Seaport Master Plan that aims to protect this stretch of East River waterfront with new coastal resilience infrastructure.
But the zoning that covers Pier 6 “allows development rights to be transferred throughout its boundaries,” Mr. Levine noted. “A zoning text and map amendment could allow the development rights from Pier 6 to be realized in other sites that are deemed appropriate for housing development.”
Since 2023, there has been no movement to create affordable housing at any of these five publicly owned sites. But a gauge of official enthusiasm for using public land for affordable housing may be gleaned from a plan to develop the City-owned parcel at 100 Gold Street, alongside the Brooklyn Bridge ramps. Not long after Mr. Levine issued his original “Housing Manhattanites” report, the administration of former Mayor Eric Adams designated Lower Manhattan as one of 12 communities across the five boroughs where affordable housing is sufficiently scarce to qualify for a new program designed to jumpstart the creation of moderately priced homes. The program, called the Mixed Income Market Initiative (MIMI), aimed to spur the development of multi-family rental projects that will be 30 percent market rate and 70 percent affordable. In the event, however, Mr. Adams designated a developer for 100 Gold in December 2025, settling for terms that were the converse: 70 percent of these 3,700 new homes will be market rate and 30 percent affordable.
Mr. Levine’s most recent update to “Housing Manhattanites” notes that 52 new affordable units are planned for a proposed residential tower at 22 Cliff Street, and another 37 rent-protected dwellings are slated for a new building at 14-26 South William Street.
“The numbers are astounding,” Mr. Levine says. “Average rents in Manhattan are now over $5,400 a month. Our vacancy rate sits at just over two percent. More than 100,000 people are in shelters across the City. Thousands of tenants are facing threats of eviction. This is what a full-blown affordability crisis looks like – and it’s the worst in our City’s history.”