THE City Council is to vote today on the city Housing Authority’s controversial proposal to build a small number of market-rate units in order to pay for far more subsidized – or “affordable,” in the current euphemism – housing. The right vote is “yes.”
The idea is to fit two new mixed-income buildings onto underused Housing Authority land on the West Side of Manhattan (which now holds a parking lot and cheerless playground and basketball court) at Harborview Terrace on West 55th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.
The developer, Atlantic Development, will pay some $15 million for the right to build a 14-story building holding roughly 125 units for seniors and families earning up to 80 percent of the city’s median income and a second 15-story building with 194 units mixing moderate-, middle-income and market-rate households.
No more than 65 units will be market rate. The rest will be “affordable.”
The project is far from perfect, but the precedent of letting Housing Authority land be used for mixed-income housing is immensely important for the future of the city and its neighborhoods.
The less important reason is that the New York City Housing Authority faces serious financial problems – NYCHA simply can’t keep going without new sources of income, and the cash plainly won’t be coming from the city, state or federal governments anytime soon.
More important is the urgent need for economic diversity – rather than economic segregation – in subsidized-housing projects.
New Yorkers believe in diversity of all kinds – and economic diversity is one of the most crucial. It is in part economic segregation that has allowed so many public-housing projects to become breeding grounds for crime, drugs and despair – the very opposite of our social goal of upward mobility for all.
Yet NYCHA’s plan faces daunting political opposition from elected officials and activists. For example, City Council Member Inez Dickens (D-Harlem) warned at Monday’s planning subcommittee hearing on the proposal that “having nonaffordable units in NYCHA developments, I fear, sets a precedent this administration will use in the future.”
New Yorkers should hope so.
At that meeting, only one member of the public, Jerilyn Perine of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council, spoke in favor of the proposal – noting that the market-rate housing is essential to cross-subsidizing the project. When another council member challenged her support of market rents on city-owned property, she answered, rightly, that “there is no funding for public housing going forward.”
Several witnesses urged the city to increase its subsidy for this project from $40,000 per unit to $90,000 so that market rents wouldn’t be needed. Apparently, those witnesses haven’t noticed that New York already faces multibillion-dollar deficits in the years ahead. Anyway, why should city taxpayers be expected to take on this burden when a simple market-rate solution can do the job better?
The local Community Board (CB4) has consistently and unanimously voted against the project. Some of its legitimate complaints were corrected during negotiations, but not all. Anna Levin, chair of the board’s land-use committee, has the most fundamental complaint: Doing this project will earn Atlantic Development the right to build (or sell the right to another developer) some 400,000 square feet in affordable housing elsewhere in the neighborhood, dooming the chances for future privately developed subsidized-housing projects in Clinton.
What’s more, this project retains some of the worst vestiges of old-time public housing, including ground-level parking garages in both buildings to meet federal mandates. Could anything be uglier or more hostile to the streetscape?
In the future, the Housing Authority needs to get around (or find better ways to comply with) such destructive federal policies – and do so before a development moves too far along to be modified.
But the project is nonetheless a critical step ahead for public housing – a chance to break free of the deadly isolation of the past. For the good of New York, let’s hope the City Council dares to embrace that better future.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.