How is Affordable Housing Threatened in Your Neighborhood?
A leading housing advocacy organization has compiled a detailed profile of affordability in every community in the five boroughs, which yields a striking demographic portrait of Lower Manhattan.
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, has published the 2024 edition of its annual roundup, “How Is Affordable Housing Threatened In Your Neighborhood?”
The first indicator speaks to the earnings of local residents. Affordable housing advocates and policymakers use a federally determined metric, labelled “area median income” (AMI), to compare the costs of living in various parts of the nation. This can be effective in terms of gauging differences in affordable rents between say, Los Angeles and Omaha, but loses much of its precision at the neighborhood level, because it ignores disparities between, for example, the Upper East Side and the South Bronx. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says that the AMI for all of New York City (as of 2022) is $133,400 for a household of four people. But the ANHD analysis breaks down incomes by the neighborhood level, and finds that the local median income (within Community District 1; roughly Manhattan south of Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge) is 163 percent of the HUD figure for New York as a whole. This indicates that a Lower Manhattan resident must earn $217,442 to live in roughly similar terms to a representative New York City resident earning $133,400 elsewhere.
The same study finds that 37.5 percent of Lower Manhattan residents are “rent burdened,” meaning that they pay 30 percent or more of gross income towards monthly rent, and that 21.4 out of every 1,000 rental units (or slightly more than two percent) were the subject of eviction proceedings in the last year.
The analysis also tracks the number of new apartments that came online in Lower Manhattan in the prior 12 months, divided into two categories. The first category is market-rate apartments (those with no income restrictions) and those with only a “light” restriction allowing tenants who earn up to 80 percent of AMI (labelled “moderate income”). This cohort grew by 133 new units last year. The second category is apartments with significant income restrictions, set aside for tenants who earn below 80 percent of AMI (termed “low income), under 50 percent of AMI (“very low income”), or under 30 percent of AMI (“extremely low income”). The tranche containing all three levels expanded by 21 units in 2024.
By one indicator, ANHD ranks Lower Manhattan as one of the ten worst communities anywhere in New York for affordable housing: there are 780 local apartments currently subsidized (and thus made affordable) by Low Income Housing Tax Credits, but these tax credits will expire between now and 2028. The residential tower planned for Five World Trade Center, which will not open until after affordability protections have lapsed at these 780 units, is slated to contain 400 affordable apartments. This means that even with a coming infusion of subsidized homes, Lower Manhattan will lose almost twice as many affordable dwellings as it gains over the next few years.