Report Says Lower Manhattan Will Lose More Affordable Homes Than It Gains
The commitment earlier this week by Mayor Eric Adams and City Council member Christopher Marte to building 620 new, income-limited and rent-protected apartments in Lower Manhattan was welcome news for local advocates of affordable housing. But a new report 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 context that may temper the enthusiasm surrounding this development.
ANHD recently published the 2025 edition of its annual roundup, “How Is Affordable Housing Threatened In Your Neighborhood?” This analysis cites Community District 1 (which encompasses Lower Manhattan) as one of the ten most threatened among the 59 such zones throughout the five boroughs, when measured by the number of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units that will expire between now and 2029.
LIHTC is a federal program that confers income-tax credits upon housing developers in exchange for a promise to set aside a subset of the units they create as rent-restricted apartments for lower-income households. By law, LIHTC benefits expire after 30 years. At that point, the owners of such properties have three options: to apply for a new round of tax credits (while maintaining affordability protections), to continue operating the property as affordable housing without new subsidies, or opting out of the program and repositioning the former LIHTC property as market-rate housing. Historically, the first of these options is common in areas where rents are flat or declining, the second is nearly unheard of, and the third is most prevalent in communities where rents are trending upward, such as Lower Manhattan.
ANHD’s report says 945 such units will lapse out of LIHTC protections within Community District 1 over the next 48 months. This total will absorb the entirety of the 620 units announced by the Mayor and Council member Marte on June 23, and leave an additional local deficit of 325 affordable homes. Moreover, few (if any) of the 620 affordable units are likely to be open before 2029, by which point more rent-protected homes will have disappeared.
This ongoing (and apparently worsening) dearth of affordability comes against the backdrop of a statistical analysis by George M. Janes & Associates, a planning consultancy with expertise in zoning, statistics, and quantitative modeling, which found that among 61,087 income-restricted housing units preserved or created in Manhattan between 2014 and November, 2024, only 299 are located within Community District 1. These 299 come to four tenths of one percent of all the affordable units in the borough, which rounds down to zero percent, and ranks dead last in the number of affordable housing units created or preserved since 2014.
Community Board 1’s most recent Statement of District needs notes that Lower Manhattan “is not adequately stocked with existing affordable housing, nor does it have many opportunities to generate new affordable units…. There are simply not enough emerging units for area residents who are being pushed out of their homes as buildings exit older affordability programs such as Mitchell-Lama or other tax-levied conveyances.”
City Council member Marte noted at a recent meeting that “developers have taken away affordable housing from this community at a faster rate than they have created it. As a result of gentrification, this community has lost more affordable units than any other in the entire State.”