Credit: Crain's New York
In the recent New York City election, voters approved a slate of ballot propositions intended to speed up the construction of affordable housing. Proposition 2 states that affordable housing applications will be fast tracked in “the community districts that produce the least affordable housing.” This map shows which Community Districts produced the least affordable housing and will be impacted by the ballot proposition.
I analyzed how much affordable housing each Community District constructed compared to its total housing stock. The results show: 2 CDs in Staten Island, 1 in Manhattan, 3 in Brooklyn, and the remaining 6 in Queens. I was a bit surprised by the results, expecting more Manhattan CDs. But the Queens districts in the eastern and southern parts of the borough are more suburban so that makes sense.
The difference between the twelfth-ranking CD and the next few down was pretty close, so the results could still change. Interestingly, a map published by City Limits in July shows several of the CDs have changed as a result of more data being released.
The decision to pick the bottom 12 seems pretty arbitrary, and some districts are just barely going to miss the cut while some will just make it. Perhaps there could have been a better and more mathematically involved way to calculate how to prioritize affordable housing under the proposition.
Also, the rates aren’t influenced by the percentage of housing that is reserved for extremely low-income, very low-income and low-income — only the total amount of affordable housing. What qualifies as affordable is skewed by the way Area Median Income (AMI) is calculated for New York City.
For example, for a single-person household, the AMI is $113,000, which is way higher due to the calculation including the wider metro area. As a result, a lot of housing earmarked as affordable is going to people who are relatively well-off. The households with the lowest incomes rarely find relief in this system. The odds of winning the affordable housing lottery in 2019, for example, was 1 in 592.