Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put out the biggest housing pledge City Hall has made in years, and the headline number is enormous. The fine print is where it gets complicated: only half of the newly financed apartments he is calling affordable are reserved for the lowest-income New Yorkers, and to qualify for the deepest-affordable tier you have to earn under about $45,810 for a family of three.
The plan, called Block by Block, pledges to create 200,000 new affordable, rent-stabilized homes and preserve 200,000 more over the next decade, backed by a $22 billion capital investment over five years. The 112-page plan also commits $5.6 billion to NYCHA, which the administration calls the largest such investment in the housing authority in recent history. The near-term production target is about 8,000 new affordable apartments a year, a 35 percent jump over the last two years, plus 1,000 new senior homes a year.
Now the word doing the heavy lifting: affordable. Of the units the city finances, 30 percent are set aside for extremely low-income households earning under 30 percent of the area median income, and 20 percent for very low-income households at 31 to 50 percent of that median. That leaves the other half aimed at higher income bands. In hard numbers, out of roughly 8,000 apartments a year, only about 2,400 are targeted at households at or below 30 percent of median income and 1,600 at the 31-to-50-percent band.
And 30 percent of the area median income is a specific, low number. The plan pegs it at about $45,810 for a family of three, or no more than $50,880 for a family of four. Households at that level would pay a quarter of their income on rent, down from the usual 30 percent, which is a real improvement for the people who get one of those apartments. The catch is how few of the units are reserved for them, in a city where affordable-housing lotteries routinely list apartments that require a six-figure salary to qualify.
Then there is the question of whether the city can build any of it. A Manhattan Institute critique argues the plan says nothing about how rezonings will produce mixed-income housing in weak-market neighborhoods where new construction does not pencil out even with tax breaks, because market rents there are too low. The Real Estate Board of New York argued the plan’s wage and other requirements make projects more expensive to build at the exact moment the city needs to maximize output. And transit-and-housing advocates note the plan mentions parking minimums only once, barely touching one of the known constraints on building more.
So the plan is both ambitious and narrower than its headline. Two hundred thousand is a big promise. Half of the new units going to people who are not low-income, a deepest tier capped at incomes most renters would not call comfortable, and open questions about whether 8,000 a year is even buildable, are the parts that decide whether it changes anything for the people priced out of their own neighborhoods.
If you want to see what affordable actually means in dollars for a specific apartment, the city posts every income-restricted lottery, with the exact income bands and how to apply, on NYC Housing Connect. And because the targets and the financing run through the City Council and the budget, the Council’s housing hearings are where the numbers in this plan get locked in or pushed higher.
Featured image: Metropolitan Transportation Auth / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
