Affordable Housing For Rent: Fill & Download for Free

New York is an amazing city—quite possibly the most amazing in the world—but like with Spiderman, with greatness come great challenges.While NYC has more billionaires than any other city in the world, it also has a lot of citizens living below the poverty line. The city is home to enormous wealth, but that wealth is far from equitably distributed. Somehow, someway, this needs to change.New York has some of the most expensive and iconic homes in the world, but the public housing owned [and theoretically maintained] by the New York City Housing Authority is in shocking disrepair, with multiple billions of dollars in deferred maintenance, and scandals about lead paint that make Flint, Michigan look good.At the same time, NYC has the most extensive rent control laws in the US which have been in place for more than half a century, but rather than ease the city’s chronic housing shortage they have dramatically exacerbated it. With Progressive-led City Council and state legislature, recent changes have disincentivized development, while the lack of affordable housing is one of New York’s biggest issues.After a court ruling several years ago that forced virtually all patients with long-term mental illnesses to be de-institutionalized, NYC has had an escalating problem with homelessness. The city’s shelter system is problematic, its long-term support system underfunded, and its mental health resources for the homeless inefficient. The result is an escalating homeless population that is tragic from every perspective.With the largest public education system in the country, New York struggles to combine equal opportunity for all with much needed support for students outside the ‘normal’ range. In taking an impassioned hatchet to the traditional system, the current mayor has terminated all programs for gifted students and has been single-mindedly attempting to ‘equalize’ the city’s vaunted specialized high schools.Finally, for a city that is majority minority, New York has never done a good job in dealing with systemic racial inequality that affects everything from housing to policing to street cleaning. Rectifying this fundamental, long-term, endemic issue will be a major job for the new mayor.Combine all of these foundational challenges with the horrific toll of the Covid pandemic on the City’s physical and economic health, and the next mayor will have the hardest road facing him or her than at any time in New York’s history. That is why he or she truly needs to Fix New York.

Not all that easy. (Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, very, very tough.)The first thing you need to do, however, is define what you mean by “affordable housing”. While it might sound simple on its face, there are actually four very different things that the term could describe:Housing that a typical employed Quora user who has chosen to live in New York City might be able to afford on a typical middle class salary for the region.Housing that has been created under one of a number of special NYC programs, where developers of newly constructed, market rate residential apartments agree to set aside 20% of the units as “affordable”.Publicly-owned rental apartments operated by the New York City Housing AuthorityPrivate housing made “affordable” by federal housing subsidies under the Section 8 program, which limits rent to 40% of your income.Case #1 is obviously achievable, because many milions of people can afford to live in New York City. But since high housing costs are perhaps the single biggest problem facing the City, there are going to be serious trade offs. The current average market price for renting an apartment in Manhattan is $4,000 per month. Using the old rule of thumb that you should try to spend no more than 25% of your income for housing, that suggests you would need an income of $192,000 to afford an ‘average’ Manhattan apartment. Since most people would probably not consider that “affordable”, one would likely need to consider sharing housing with roommates, looking in the outer boroughs, considering smaller apartments, and paying more than 25% of your income, in order to get down to something that most people could truly afford. So, for this type of affordable, “not that hard, but it will take some work”. To look for market rate listings, see NYC Apartments for Rent on StreetEasy.Case #2 is where the City and others are devoting most of their current efforts. The idea is that in exchange for zoning and other bonuses that let developers build apartments that sell for as much as $100 million, the developers need to commit to creating 20% of the number of units they build as apartments defined as “affordable”, meaning that a person or family with an annual income of 60% of the median income for the area should be able to afford the rent by paying no more than 30% of their income. The catch here is that these are privately owned and managed, really nice new apartments, and the developers want to rent them to the absolute best tenants they can. Given that their only limitations are (1) the legal maximum income, (2) normal housing anti-discrimination guidelines, and (3) certain required percentage set-asides for neighborhood applicants, people with certain disabilities, municipal employees, etc., they can be—and are—incredibly selective of their tenants. In practice, this usually means having an income within a relatively narrow band (roughly $30k–$50k, although a few projects go up to $80k or even $100k), and being selected for one of a few dozen apartments from up to 90,000 (!) other applicants in a series of lotteries (separately for each project). As such, this is “doable, but very long odds against you”. You can apply for these apartments at NYC HOUSING CONNECT.Case #3 is public housing (the kind of thing that would be called ‘council estates’ in the U.K.), the 180,000 apartments built and owned by the New York City Housing Authority. These units are much less nice than the new “affordable” ones, but also have no minimum income requirements: your rent will be 30% of your income…even if your income is $0. Rather than having lotteries, these apartments are made available in order of application based on borough and the type of apartment. The only problem is that the waiting list currently stands at 260,000 people. Bottom line: “you really wouldn’t love these units, but that won't be a problem because you’ll be a great grandparent by the time your name comes up”. But if you want more information, you can find it at NYCHA Frequently Asked Questions.Finally, Case #4 is the federally subsidized housing program known as Section 8. Here, the US government (through a local agency such as NYCHA, NYHPD, et al.) works with private participating owners to subsidize your rent. You pay 40% of your monthly income to the landlord, and the government pays the rest. Maximum income limits are in the same $30k–$40k range as the others, and there is no minimum income required. The problem here is that so many people wanted the subsidies that they closed the waiting list eight years ago. Prognosis? “Not gonna happen.”Welcome to the world of Affordable Housing, New York City’s Achilles heel.

Because housing is scarce in New York City—relatively speaking it always has been and always will be—there is no question that someone would be prepared to live in any NYC apartment at some cost. As such, there will never be an abandoned, uninhabitable apartment…Instead, the questions will be:Who loses the money?How will the occupancy be structured?When a real estate developer builds a building intending to sell the completed apartments as condominiums, everything about the development is structured and designed for that purpose: from the finish levels and layouts of the apartments, to the financing of the construction which is planned to be repaid from the condo sales.Therefore, if the units don’t sell at the asking prices, the developer is in a pickle and has to make one of two choices:Re-price the condos and sell them at whatever price people are willing to pay, even if those prices are less than the cost to create them…in which case the developer takes a [sometimes enormous] financial loss. OrDecide not to sell the condo apartments, but instead rework the building as a multi-family rental property, absorbing losses today (because the rents will not bring in enough money to cover the development and operating expenses) in the hope of eventually going back and reselling the [slightly used] apartments as condominiums at some point down the road when the market improves.For a building designed for rental apartments, the developer is in a pickle and has to make one of two choices:Rent the apartments at whatever price the market is willing to pay, taking a current financial loss in the hopes that eventually the market will improve and the rents can be raised; orSell the whole building at a loss to someone else, who is willing to bet on future rent increases…or the long-term potential of going the other direction and converting the property into a co-op or condominium.There have been a few rare points in NYC history where owners in certain neighborhoods with very old, deteriorated housing stock could not find renters or buyers at any price. In those cases the owners simply walked away from the properties without paying the annual real estate taxes that were due to the City, causing the City itself to end up as the owner of these abandoned old properties through a program known as In Rem housing foreclosure. Because the City had, and has, no interest in being a landlord, it does whatever it has to do to get the property back into the free market and once again paying taxes, including selling it to developers willing to risk a free market project, ‘urban homesteaders’ (aka squatters) if they are willing to fix up the building, or not-for-profit organizations that will use government subsidies to develop affordable housing.The most dramatic example of this was in some neighborhoods in The Bronx and Brooklyn during the late 1970s when New York City was in economic trouble. This photo shows properties on Charlotte Street in the South Bronx, where all the property owners had walked away, leaving the City owning the properties.Here is the same site a few years later after a not-for-profit organization redeveloped the land as single family homes sold to working class owners.(Fun fact: my wife was the Director of Housing for that organization, and we actually spent some nights living in those homes during construction because the organization couldn’t afford security guards!)