De Blasio’s housing plan is flawed

By Kristin Hart

Earlier this month, our new mayor announced an aggressive affordable housing plan. The plan: build everywhere and build big. This makes some community activists, including me, extremely nervous.

Why? Because, here in the Bronx, we know firsthand the danger that large-scale experimental policies pose to our communities. We were ground zero for Robert Moses’ “urban renewal” and we are still dealing with the devastating consequences in our neighborhoods. 

We know that healthy communities grow organically. We know that scale and community input matter. We know that offering massive municipal bond deals and easy up-zones (never a good blanket solution) to the big developers who fund our local elections is a terrifying prospect unlikely to yield much social good.

Yes, we know there is a housing crisis. The Bronx is the “other city” in the “tale” the mayor keeps telling. 

We know too many of our neighbors spend too much of their income on rent. But Mr. de Blasio’s plan does not address the fundamental absurdity of his predecessor Michael Bloomberg’s affordable housing policy — which actually drove rents up in some areas — or the corruption it seems to naturally cultivate.

“Affordable housing” has become a cruel joke: the apartments are tiny and they aren’t affordable. Many of the enormous, brand-new “affordable” buildings that have sprung up in a stunning, taxpayer-funded building boom throughout the Bronx have advertised apartments that are higher than area market rents, for apartments that are smaller than the original housing stock. 

And people get out of them as quickly as they can, further destabilizing neighborhoods.

The explanation for subsidized buildings that are not affordable to their communities lies in how the city calculates affordability. It uses the same “area median income” (about $80,000) everywhere, regardless of the staggering wealth differences that play out in our communities.