BLAS KEEPS GETTING MUGGED BY REALITY
BILL de Blasio won City Hall by attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg on housing. Two years later, as Ed Koch might say, how’s he doing?
Well, de Blasio’s reallife housing plan looks like Bloomberg’s: It’s focused on middleclass housing. That’s because the realities of building housing in this city just don’t support new housing for poor people — whether you’re a radical leftist or a billionaire pragmatist.
Think back nearly three years — to the first of dozens of mayoral debates, this one on housing. All six candidates told the potential voters that they’d build new apartments and take care of the lowincome housing we have. But de Blasio was the most aggressive. “The mayor doesn’t care about the people who live there,” he said about publichousing residents.
When de Blasio promised to build tens of thousands of “affordable” new apartments, the implication was that the apartments would be affordable to the people in the audience — mostly poor black women.
Fastforward to last week, when the mayor unveiled his plan for 6,000 apartments in East New York, Cypress Hills and Ocean Hill. The plan would allow developers to put up taller buildings in return for making some units “affordable.” But how affordable? Subsidized developers must set aside a quarter of their apartments for families of three making an average of $46,620, or a third of their apartments for families making $62,150 (the city will decide the mix). The city may allow for a third option, allowing developers who don’t want subsidies to set aside 30 percent of units to people making an average of $93,240.
As advocates for the poor have delicately pointed out, this isn’t poor.
“No real victory will be within reach unless it is absolutely clear that real affordable housing will be preserved and created for the . . . lowest income and homeless New Yorkers,” said Maritza Silva-Farrell of Real Affordability for All, a housing and union coalition.
The group notes that only 132 new units would be for people making less than $25,000. It wants much more, and it wants union workers to build the housing.
At the city’s existing lowincome housing, it’s the same situation. De Blasio once clobbered Bloomberg for his plan to sell vacant land on publichousing sites to developers in order to use the money to cover costs at public housing.
But now, de Blasio is doing the same thing. Why does he hate the poor?
He doesn’t — but he knows (or someone in his administration knows) that building new housing for the poor saddles the city with permanent operating costs. It’s one thing for the city to help pay to build housing for workingclass and middleclass New Yorkers. Once the housing’s built, the renters can pay enough, or almost enough, to maintain the buildings.
It costs about $800 a month to maintain an apartment in Brooklyn — that is, to pay the landlord for water, heat, handymen and insurance. But that doesn’t take into account the mortgage on a new building, which costs at least several hundred more dollars a month, even with city financing subsidies and cheap construction.
A tenant paying $600 a month — the most a family making $25,000 or so a year can afford — simply can’t pay these costs. That means other tenants must pay their neighbors’ costs as well — putting pressure on their own rent.
Building 50,000 apartments for poor New Yorkers using union labor would cost the city a good half a billion a year — forever. We already have this problem with public housing, where the average rent is below $500 a month.
We can’t create more of these permanent liabilities — especially when the demand for the cheapest housing is limitless. That’s especially true if our new city policy, being unwittingly pushed by the right, is that no one should live on the street, or in a miserable shelter: that is, that anyone just off the bus is entitled to a nice apartment.
De Blasio, then, is doing what he can — which is nowhere near enough.
And that means he’ll face a challenge from the left — unless ambitious members of the city’s political class realize that affordable new housing for all is an impossible lie, and are willing to wait their turn.