Campaigning For Permanent Affordability

Most current affordable housing programs only require temporary affordability, often expiring in less then 30 years. This is a clearly inefficient use of public subsidy, and contradicts Mayor Bloomberg’s call in his PlaNYC 2030, to build infrastructure that will support the one million new residents expected in NYC by 2030. Yet, most of the housing being build under the Mayor’s ambitious New Housing Marketplace plan will have lost its affordability by 2030.

Irregardless, ANHD continues to maintain a commitment to deep affordability, resulting in a major policy victory in 2010 when the city announced that over 3,019 new units will be permanently affordable. All of these units are being built on city owned or controlled land. The recognition that development on public land should trigger permanent affordability is an important first step toward ANHD’s overall goal. The task before us remains to formalize this commitment into a consistent, comprehensive policy.

The primary mechanism under consideration for achieving permanence at these developments is the “automatic extension” of affordability restrictions if all or some portion of the building’s property taxes continue to be abated. In fall 2010, ANHD released a white paper, Leveraging Tax Abatements to Achieve Permanent Affordability, demonstrating the cost effectiveness of incentivizing owners to maintain affordability restrictions by renewing abatements rather than having to replace these units.

ANHD released a major policy report in 2010, A Permanent Problem Requires a Permanent Solution: New York City’s Next Affordable Housing Expiring- Use Crisis and the Need for Permanent Affordability. The report finds that 294,402 units were created or preserved with city subsidy between 1987 and 2007. However, 169,561 of these units may be at risk of losing their affordability between 2017 and 2037 due either to expiring affordability restrictions or deferred maintenance. The number of at-risk units closely parallels what will be created or preserved under Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, clearly undermining the affordable housing legacy.