An annual report on housing affordability in New York has sketched a revealing demographic profile of Community Board 1 (CB1)—the Lower Manhattan neighborhoods encompassing 1.5 square miles, bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), an umbrella organization of 100 non-profit affordable housing and economic development groups that serve low- and moderate-income residents in all five boroughs of the City, has published the 2023 edition of its annual roundup, “How Is Affordable Housing Threatened In Your Neighborhood?”
ANHD’s analysis finds that the tally of apartments in CB1 where rents are regulated by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program (which offers developers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit on affordable housing), but where such protections are slated to lapse in the next five years is 228 such dwellings. A second metric, the number of newly built non-affordable homes built in the previous calendar year, closely mirrors the first: 297 units.
The same report documents that 33.6 percent of Lower Manhattan households are “rent burdened,” meaning that they spend more than one-third of their gross monthly income on rent, and that 20.7 out of every 1,000 rental units were the subject of eviction proceedings in the last year.
In ANHD’s report, Lower Manhattan ties with Community Board 2 (Greenwich Village and SoHo) for the highest incomes in the City, with 170 percent of the “area median income.” (This is a regional metric determined by the federal government, which for New York as a whole translated in 2021 to $119,300 for a four-person household.) Slightly more than 30 percent of persons living in CB1 self-identify as people of color. Four percent claim limited proficiency in English.
In terms of local health markers, ANHD finds that the Covid vaccination rate for Lower Manhattan residents is 89 percent (among the highest in the five boroughs), while the death rate from Covid for the community was 0.9 per 1,000 residents (among the lowest). Downtown also has the third-lowest prevalence of residents who lack health insurance, at 2.7 percent.