The Department of Housing Preservation and Development last week released a report on who is living in housing units that were completed in fiscal year 2006 under the New Housing Marketplace Plan, which began in 2003 and aims to build or preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing by 2013. The survey follows a similar study of units that were completed in fiscal year 2004. Taken together, the two reports – commissioned, HPD says, to allow better tracking of the actual performance of the housing initiative – depict the complex and changing dynamics of the Bloomberg program.
Of the more than 13,000 units built or preserved in 2006, 75 percent went to low-income people – those making less than $56,700 a year for a family of four, which is 80 percent of Area Median Income. That's well above the 68 percent target for low-income people in the mayor's plan. But it's also down from 2004, when 80 percent of units went to low-income households. Who took up the slack? People of "moderate income" (ranging from $56,700 to about $85,000 for a four-member family) fared about the same over the two years, accounting for around 12 percent, but "middle income" households making more than $85,000 doubled their share to about 13 percent in 2006.
The downward trend in lower-income units "is a shift that we fully expected," HPD Commissioner Shaun Donovan told reporters at the release of the report Aug. 8. Unlike Mayor Koch's Ten-Year Plan, which almost exclusively targeted low-income people, the Bloomberg housing initiative has aimed to address the growing need for housing help among people with somewhat higher incomes, while still devoting more than two-thirds of its units to low-income residents. The low-income share was expected to start high and then fall to the target. That, said Donovan, is just what's happening.
At least, it's what's happening among renters. The overall success of low-income households under the plan is largely due to their dominance of the rental units, occupying 93 percent of those units completed in 2006, down slightly from 95 percent in 2004. Homeownership numbers tell a different story: The portion of homeownership units that went to low-income people soared from 35 percent to 58 percent between 2004 and 2006, but that was still short of the 65 percent target.
HPD says the overall change in the income mix from 2004 to 2006 reflects a shift in the programs that housing developers have used—from those favoring low-income residents to others targeting higher earners. That trend will continue as the city exhausts its supply of tax-foreclosed properties, which moved from more than 100,000 in past years to below 1,000 parcels in June. As that property dries up, affordable housing developers will have to buy land, driving up costs and rents. And as the supply of city-owned buildings dwindles, there'll also be have to be more new construction, exposing HPD to rising construction costs—which the spring issue of City Limits Investigates identifies as a potential threat to the mayor's plan.
