Lower Manhattan is Tied for City’s Worst Record on Affordable Housing Creation
Lower Manhattan is in a dead heat with one other City Council district for the worst record of affordable housing production in 2023, according to the “NYC Housing Tracker Report 2024,” a new study from the New York Housing Conference (NYHC), a nonprofit affordable housing policy and advocacy organization. Both City Council District 1 (an aggregation of neighborhoods mostly below Canal, Houston, and Delancey Streets) and City Council District 5 (the Upper East Side) received zero new affordable homes in the last calendar year. They were the only districts anywhere in the five boroughs to achieve this distinction in a year when, the report notes, the City created more than 14,000 new units of affordable housing. For comparison, the same research finds that City Council District 17 (the South Bronx) received 1,266 affordable homes.
For the decade ending in 2023, City Council District 1 ranks 23rd in the City, with a total of 1,489 new affordable homes, according to NYHC. But even this picture may be too optimistic. A 2023 analysis from Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, “Housing Manhattanites: A Report on Where and How to Build the Housing We Need,” documented that “since 2014, just 212 units of affordable housing were built,” in Community District 1 (which is largely coterminous with City Council District 1), a total Mr. Levine described as “the second-lowest number in Manhattan.”
The “NYC Housing Tracker Report” notes that the preponderance of new affordable housing creation takes place in City Council Districts with high rates of poverty, and where demographics skew towards people of color. In some respects, this trend is straightforward, because locating affordable units where there is the greatest apparent need makes intuitive sense. It also is easier, in fiscal terms, to acquire land for such homes where property values are lower. But this policy can also be a double-edged sword. More affluent districts tend to offer services like better schools, more abundant transit option, more numerous parks and libraries, and higher levels of public safety. These benefits are thus denied to residents of affordable homes when such units are directed exclusively to distressed communities. And locating new affordable units only in struggling neighborhoods can have the unintended effect of increasing racial and economic segregation, while also geographically concentrating poverty.
There is also a perverse incentive under which decision makers are tempted to reserve publicly owned land in upscale districts for development plans that will fetch the highest possible price, thus boosting government revenue without the political burden of raising taxes. Critics of this approach often note that such deals regularly reward well-connected builders, some of whom are prodigious campaign contributors.
Lower Manhattan’s total of affordable homes is slated to increase slightly in the next few years, because the residential tower planned for Five World Trade Center is now slated to contain 400 affordable units. But while that project has yet to break ground, a slew of former office buildings in Lower Manhattan are now undergoing conversion to residential use, and are projected to bring several thousand new units of market rate housing to the community. None of these projects has announced any commitment to affordability.
City Council member Christopher Marte noted at a recent meeting that, “developers have taken away affordable housing from this community at a faster rate than they have created it. As a result of gentrification, this community has lost more affordable units than any other in the entire State.” In an indication of his opposition to market-rate development, Mr. Marte recently derailed a plan by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams to sell a City-owned building in Tribeca to the highest bidder, insisting instead that it be put to a use that would benefit the community. Mr. Marte responded to this development by saying, “we have to utilize what public land we have left to meet the urgent needs of our City — especially our affordable housing crisis.”