Folks ask me all the time to explain why it's so hard to retain affordable housing in a City full of regulations. I've read literally dozens of articles on the topic over the years. But I've never seen a better explanation of the perplexing complexities of the problem that this one from the NY Times a couple days ago.
NY TIMES ON THE HOUSING CRISIS: PART I
PART II: Eviction Machine
PART III: 69,000 Crises
(Tip: If you don't have a Times subscription, just clear your browser of cookies in settings. That resets the number of articles you can read for free)
Everything that you'll read in that article is happening or has happened on my street. I'm pretty certain fate is telling me to write a book on my block alone. There's the townhouses w/legal and illegal apartments, approaching $2 million. There's the half-stabilized half-coop buildings. There's the old mostly Section 8 building that went condo. There's the Victorian teardowns. There's the two new big apartments buildings being built. There's new ownership of old mostly stabilized buildings, and the "churnover" that typically accompanies the rush to profits.
And then, of course, there's 60 Clarkson. Not three years ago it was mostly homeless families, with a slumlord making bank off the backs of miserable homeless and stabilized tenants. Now, he's charging $2500 for two-bedrooms, only to gleefully watch those tenants quickly move out because they can't handle the neighbors and the squalor all around their overpriced cheaply renovated apartments. It's heartbreaking to see the stream of in and out at that building. No one's happy. Not the new tenants paying top dollar, not the old tenants getting squeezed, not the precious few homeless families hanging on for dear life. And the landlord gets to add 20% to the rent on each turnover, taking his apartments out of the life-saving rent stabilization program altogether.
If the plight of NYC renters could be expressed in one sentence?
No one's happy.
Please, read the article. It'll make such a difference to your experience of the suffering all around us.
2 comments:
Some readers don't have subscriptions to the NY Times, which means those links to the articles are useless.
Meanwhile, the problems in NY City real estate are primarily a function of government intrusions into the real estate markets. One half-baked move after another, leading to a hodge-podge that's good for almost no one. However, real estate investors are prepared to buy-and-hold. Eventually, things will break in the direction of new construction.
It's way past time for the city to re-acquire Floyd Bennett Field and turn it into Floyd Bennett City. Where else could the city build a massive number of housing units on land that might be available cheap?
No Slappz - it's easy to work around the article limit per month. Just wipe your browser clean and your free articles start over. Now run over to Floyd Bennett Field and stake your claim.
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