City Hall Targets Lower Manhattan for Affordable Housing Intervention
The administration of Mayor Eric Adams has designated Lower Manhattan as one of 12 communities across the five boroughs (three of which are in Manhattan—the other two are Murray Hill and the Upper East Side) where affordable housing is sufficiently scarce to qualify for a new program designed to jumpstart the creation of moderately priced homes.
The program, called the Mixed Income Market Initiative (MIMI), aims to spur the development of multi-family rental projects that will be 30 percent market rate and 70 percent affordable, with the latter tranche allocated to a wide range of household incomes, from low and extremely-low to moderate, along with a 15 percent set aside for formerly homeless individuals. These units would be aimed at working families, older adults, households with children, and recipients of supportive services.
“By including market-rate units,” the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) says in a statement, “this new financing model leverages market-rate rentals to help finance affordable housing development, while increasing housing choice and household mobility in parts of the City where there are fewer low-cost homes available.”
MIMI would seek to entice private-sector developers with promises of taxpayer subsidies, but at the same time would almost entirely reverse the math used by housing builders in recent decades, when such government largesse (in the form of tax abatements) required only 20 percent affordable units in buildings that were 80 percent market rate. And by deliberately layering multiple bands of income within a single building, the program aims to avoid the segregated concentrations of affluence and poverty created by earlier public housing programs.
While the degree of success that MIMI will achieve in drawing interest from developers is difficult to predict, local demographics attest to the need cited by the Adams administration in designating Lower Manhattan as one of the program’s target zones. For the purposes of this analysis, Lower Manhattan is defined as Community Districts 1 and 2, which means roughly the area south of a jagged line formed by 14th Street, the Bowery, Canal Street, and the Brooklyn Bridge. This catchment includes the West Village, Soho, Tribeca, Battery Park City, the Financial District, Greenwich South, the Civic Center, and the South Street Seaport. (For devotees of data, the zone corresponds to Public Use Microdata Area [PUMA] 3810, as designed by the U.S. Census.)
According to the City’s online database, the Equitable Development Data Explorer, PUMA 3810 contains 57,025 rental units, among which 60 percent are deemed affordable only to middle-income and high-income households, and only 23.6 percent are within reach for the bottom three income bands. Almost exactly the same proportion of units (23.2 percent, or 18,831 apartments) within these boundaries are rent stabilized. The zone also contains no public housing at all, and only 633 homes that are covered by income restrictions, or other affordability requirements. As of 2022, the last year for which data are available, there are 633 people in the City’s Department of Homeless Services shelter system whose last address was within PUMA 3810.