MIH? ZQA? No way!

You’ve heard it before. Unless you’re very rich, you’re being priced out of New York. According to Rentjungle.com, as of August 2015, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the city was $4,031. With a generally accepted benchmark of one-third of family income budgeted for housing, a family would have to earn more than $145,000 to afford that rent. 

If you’re lucky enough to find a vacant two-bedroom in Riverdale, you’ll be getting a bargain. Real estate ads are currently showing rents — many of which are rent stabilized — around $2,300. That’s still a stiff jolt to the wallet of a young, striving professional family, let alone a household headed by a low-skilled worker.

In the northwest Bronx, as throughout the city, many apartments protected by rent stabilization laws lose that protection once their rent reaches the threshold of $2,700 per month. According to the Rent Guidelines Board, although the trend has abated, the city lost more than 100,000 rent stabilized units in the last decade.

So, it’s no surprise that a self-proclaimed progressive mayor like Bill de Blasio would make it his business to do something to increase the proportion of affordable housing in the city. But the political and economic climate make it all but impossible for his administration to spend significant amounts of public money on housing construction. 

Instead, the mayor and the Department of City Planning (DCP) have proposed an ill-conceived grab bag of zoning changes in hopes of spurring private developers to take up the slack. Some of their ideas would do little, if anything, to bring real affordable housing to the market. Others would be downright harmful to stable communities — like ours.

During the Bloomberg years, every community board in the city was asked to put a lot of work into studying local zoning and make proposals that would help to shape the face of its neighborhood for — it was expected — generations to come. 

No one worked harder than our Community Board 8 to gather input from every stakeholder and prepare a thoughtful document — known as a 197-A plan — that recognized the character of the northwest Bronx with its varied mix of housing types, its steep hills, sweeping vistas and unique natural features.  The “River to Reservoir” plan, which restricted development in a number of sensitive locations, was debated and overwhelmingly approved by the community, the community board, DCP and, ultimately, the mayor and city council. 

In fact, in October 2003, DCP gushed, “Emphasizing the city’s commitment to supporting community-based planning, Amanda M. Burden, Director of the Department of City Planning, today announced the approval of Bronx Community District 8’s ‘197-a Plan’ entitled River to Reservoir Neighborhood Preservation Strategy. The plan, approved unanimously at today’s meeting of the City Planning Commission, incorporates the community board’s recommendations for preserving the district’s low-density residential neighborhoods. DCP has committed to implementing rezonings of eight areas proposed by the community, strengthening Special Natural Area Districts and helping the board find ways to tackle remaining concerns which were beyond the scope of a community-based plan.”

Now the city has turned its back on community-based planning. In presentations to CB8’s Land Use Committee, DCP’s Bronx Office Director Carol Samol emphasized that the provisions of its rules for Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) and Zoning for Quality and Affordability (ZQA) would be applied top-down and applied universally, with no consideration for a neighborhood’s unique characteristics.

For instance, developers would no longer be required to provide parking spaces for senior housing or for affordable housing in defined areas near public transit. DCP’s MIH map doesn’t take into account the burden of climbing steep hills in, say, Kingsbridge Heights in defining its transit zones. And it ignores the fact that we are on the border of the city with limited transit options to reach shopping areas we often visit in White Plains, Eastchester or Yonkers. Fuhgeddabout getting across the Bronx.

Moreover, the housing that the city wants to encourage will be only slightly less expensive than market-rate units. In examples touted by DCP, in a building where 70 to 75 percents of the units cost $1,950 per month, rent for the mandatory “affordable” units will cost $1,150 to $1,550. Why go through all this trouble when the savings for New Yorkers will be so paltry?

Though DCP disingenuously insists it is not changing underlying zoning, ZQA even includes a text amendment specifically written to give the Hebrew Home at Riverdale a way to thumb its nose at its neighbors and circumvent R-1 zoning, plunking apartment towers in the midst of single family homes. 

For months, residents had been negotiating in good faith with the home about the size and density of the project. Nothing but ill will can come of the back room deal that included this property in the ZQA.

Ominously, DCP admits that it is considering doing further damage to the community as its working group reconsiders the protections of our Special Natural Area District. 

The proposed zoning text amendments are many, and too varied to list here. We urge our readers to visit www.nyc.gov/dcp/ahousing to familiarize themselves with their provisions and come to the next CB8 Land Use Committee meeting on Monday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m. at IN-Tech Academy.

We applaud the mayor’s goals, but his plans will take us in the wrong direction. Last year, when a consortium of government agencies made a hash of creating a much-desired Hudson River Greenway in Riverdale, we emphatically made them go back to the drawing board. Now is the time for the residents of this district to speak with one voice and demand that DCP do the same.