... 40 Riverside will have 219 expensive, river-facing condos to sell to people who are in a position to buy them and 55 street-facing places to rent to sad sacks who earn 60 percent or less than the median income....
July 21, 2014
"Fancy Upper West Side Building Will Have a Separate Door for Poor People."
Part of the "Inclusionary Housing Program, which gives developers tax credits and other perks in exchange for creating some affordable units alongside their less affordable ones":
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20 comments:
Why would anyone pay yuppie prices to have ghetto neighbors? Doomed to fail.
Do they share walls? I sure as hell wouldn't want to hear poor people noises.
Sorun, good point, or smell poor people smells.
"Sad sacks", indeed.
More like winners of the NYC real estate lottery. The City requires the developer to include a number of "affordable housing units" -- in English, that means give-aways -- in a building in which ordinary buyers will pay millions to live. At 60% of the NYC median income, those "sad sacks" will have an annual income of (maybe) $40,000 or so, and yet will live in a new, fancy building in a new, fancy development. Alas, the indignity of a separate entrance is unbearable, but only for the pols and not the "sad sacks" who will line up in hopes of winning this lottery.
Welcome to the socialist utopia of the Upper West Side, where "what's mine is mine and what's yours is subject to negotiation" is more than just a slogan.
The big question is 60% of the median national income or 60% of the median income of Manhattan or NYC or NY state?
If it's 60% of the national or state median, why would you want to live on the Upper West side, where everything else but your rent is priced out of your range? Manhattan isn't a pleasant place to be lower middle class or poor.
Sorun said...
"Do they share walls?"
Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe it's said that they got off with quite a haul
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts.
The Rupert housing, mentioned in the post just above, is also economically integrated. So far as I know everyone gets along fine. It was built during the Lindsay years when such social engineering was in vogue. The Battery Park housing was built during the Koch years, and no such allotment was made for the poor. All the tenants paid full market price, and that included several costly assessments to pay for structural flaws. The Koch argument was that the taxes on the Battery housing would pay for many units of new housing for the poor in the Bronx. .....You can argue either position convincingly. It's one of those season to taste items, but people argue their positions with high moral dudgeon. I'm with Charley Brown. Feeling wishy washy is the correct moral response to such vital moral issues.
Nothing new here. When I was at Columbia Law School (Class of 1968), the University proposed to build an athletic facility in Morningside Park, that would include facilities for the neighboring residents (Spanish Harlem, on the east side of the Park). There was a lot of uproar about making the poor folk use the back door, but the University argued that it made sense because that entrance was close to where the poor folk lived. To use the "front" door, they'd have to walk a long way up a steep hill. The Park was public land, however, so that was a factor.
To me, it seems silly for poor people to object when rich people provide a desirable place for the poor people to live that the poor people couldn't pay for themselves, just because they're asked to use a different entrance. This building wouldn't be built if you couldn't count on hundreds of rich people paying millions for Riverside Drive frontage, thereby subsidizing the cost of building "affordable" housing on the "land side". That's what "affordable housing" requirements are intended to do: Make the rich buyers subsidize the poorer renters. It's one of the reasons that many cities tend to be populated only by the rich and the poor; the middling folk, who aren't subsidized, can't afford to live there.
Will there be barbed wire?
Old story to planning commissions.
They gonna share elevators?
They've been trying to build an entire planned community here in Seattle for some time now, and the money has to come from somewhere...so follow the money at the end of the centrally planned yellow, green, and red brick road.
We joke that you don't get your food rations if you don't see the social planner every other Wednesday.
I smell some De Blasio on this.
Whole thing is a mess. NYC has high rents because supply can't keep up with demand, and the first question is "why can't supply keep up?" The answer is rent control, zoning restrictions, and licensing and approvals, all of which make the prospect of building and expanding properties to accommodate what the market will bear into a losing proposition.
Idiotic schemes like this--forcing builders to include "affordable housing" or any similar restrictions--only make the other rents go up for those who are not in the rent control lottery. Only when all these restrictions are relaxed and developers have the incentive to build and expand will we see more of the demand be met and prices stabilize or fall.
"Sorun, good point, or smell poor people smells."
I don't know whether it was necessarily poor people, but it seems every apartment building I've lived in there's always that one place that stinks up the hall with cooked onions or some mysterious stink food. Fortunately the smell never went beyond the hall, but it was oppressive.
The real issue perhaps is what makes for a good place to live. It isn't necessarily the view, or the height of the ceilings, or the size of the rooms.
Housing projects have been from luxurious, yet they were (physically) far better than the market-priced housing available to the poor. At least, the ones I saw were far better (physically) than anything I could afford to rent. Yet most housing projects become hellholes. A reasonable conclusion might be that it's not architecture that makes a place a hellhole, but the dominant culture of the residents?
The theory seemed to be that if poor people are placed in middle-class (or better) housing then they'll acquire middle-class values. Especially if they're also placed among middle class people. To implement this theory (for example), NYC built a few large housing projects in residential Coney Island, just a few blocks from the oceanfront. With predictable results: these projects became crime-ridden slums, and the middle-class neighbors fled.
Of course, some poor already have middle-class values. But many don't, and there's zero evidence that physically better housing, or the presence of non-poor neighbors, will change that. If the problem is really the quality of the residents' culture and not the quality of the housing, then this costly focus on providing better housing is sure to fail. Again.
And hiding the cost in the price of market-priced housing (by making developers provide free/reduced-price units) instead of raising taxes to pay for it is just deviously dishonest. If government wants something, why shouldn't government just pay for it? At least that way citizens can see what it actually costs.
There are 2 major reasons there is no affordable housing in New York City without government subsidies.
First, housing is too expensive to build. Years ago, I remember reading that in a certain Queens neighborhood, a developer had to go before 23 different boards to get approval, each with the ability to kill the project. You know how many bribes that adds up to?
Second, foreign money. The poor and middle class are not just competing against New York's rich, they are competing against the world's rich. Some neighborhoods have as much as 30% of housing sitting empty because the owners bought it strictly for investment and don't even bother to rent it out.
Generally, I support people who have earned a certain lifestyle wanting to be segregated from the people who haven't. On the other hand, I wonder if the former in this case are the sorts of people who dream up and vote for the social engineering policies that prevent decent people lower down the food chain from maintaining the pleasant and orderly environments that they've also worked hard to achieve.
Perhaps it's my flyover prejudices, but "Upper West Side voter" does suggest someone who's all for forcing their less well-heeled fellow citizens to live on terms of strict integration with "people who can't afford this neighborhood/apartment without a subsidy".
Do poor black people have to use the separate-but-equal-entrance?
Why don't cities build more low income housing themselves and leave the private sector out of it? Isn't that the most direct, obvious solution to the low income housing issue? Why force the issue onto the private sector?
FYI: in Seattle, The High Point development is considered to be a successful project in terms of mixed housing:
http://www.seattlehousing.org/redevelopment/high-point/
Having toured the place with one of the members of the development team, I was struck by how proud they were of HOW LONG it took to get this project built...12 years or so if my memory serves. And maybe that answers my first question...
Thomas Sowell covers the rent-control-means-less-housing theme very well.
Thomas Piketty covers the other side of the issue poorly.
Boris Pasternak illustrated the outcome very well.
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