East Harlem on Monday night joined the growing citywide revolt against Mayor de Blasio’s affordable housing plan.
That neighborhood’s Community Board 11 voted to reject two centerpieces of de Blasio’s proposal. They shot down a requirement that 25% of apartments in all new private rental developments be affordable units. And they gave a thumbs down to zoning changes that would permit construction of taller buildings by developers who agree to produce more affordable units.
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El Barrio’s Community Board 11 thus joined dozens from East New York in Brooklyn to every corner of the Bronx and Queens who have soundly rebuffed the mayor’s plan in recent weeks.
It is “affordable” in name only, the community critics say.
As currently structured, they say, the plan will fuel higher rents in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and speed up the displacement of long-term tenants — the very trends de Blasio says he wants to prevent.
The mayor, though, is vigorously defending his approach.
“We still have to attract development to the city,” he told the Daily News. “If we don’t create a viable financial offer, then they will just walk away.”
His plan, de Blasio said, gives the city the tools “to lean even heavier (on developers) to have more low-income housing.”
But veteran housing advocates see City Hall’s definition of affordable rent as too high for most residents of the neighborhoods being targeted.
“We are against the mayor’s luxury housing plan because it favors large companies and rich landlords,” said Maria Mercado, of Movement for Justice in El Barrio, a tenant group whose members packed Monday’s meeting.
De Blasio’s overall goal of preserving or building 200,000 units of affordable housing is quite laudable.
“We have got to build affordable housing on a massive scale,” he said. “We stopped doing that in the 1970s after Co-op City and after Starrett City.”
So why isn’t the mayor listening to the man who spearheaded those developments, the man who conceived and ran the most successful public housing project of them all — Battery Park City?
His name is Charles Urstadt.
For several years now, Urstadt, a longtime Republican, has been telling politicians of both parties that the Battery Park City Authority is a gold mine right under the nose of City Hall.
Every year, the authority produces more than $130 million in surplus.
That money was originally earmarked to subsidize low- and moderate-income housing, but since Albany controls the appointments to Battery Park City’s board of directors, the state has at times raided the surplus to fill its budget gaps.
“What they’re doing is tapping the honey pot,” Urstadt said.
But ever since 1983, the city has had the power to take control of the land under Battery Park for a mere $1.
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By doing so, the city could use the annual revenue stream to fund up to $3 billion in bonds, Urstadt says, and all of it could be used for the original goal — building low-income housing.
“We’ve had 25 years of bad public policy on this issue,” Urstadt says.
With the city’s population exploding, and private developers refusing to build low-rent housing unless they get big government subsidies, you need bold housing plans for the city’s working and middle classes.
De Blasio’s plan, though well-intentioned, is not enough.
That’s what neighborhood leaders are saying. That’s what housing experts like Urstadt say.
Change your plan, Mr. Mayor, or risk the ire of the very people you say you’re defending.
