The Times’ sprawling cover story in the real estate section yesterday took a look at how thousands upon thousands of middle-income New Yorkers apply for lotteries every year that result in a handful of them winning the right to buy a below-market-rate home. Brooklyn examples include a professor who was able to buy a 3-story Slope townhouse for $460,000 (600 people entered the lottery for it); the 42 affordable condos at Fort Greene’s 150 Myrtle, which range in price from less than $300,000 to around $500,000 (more than 10,000 applications came in for those); and the 4,500 applications the Fifth Avenue Committee received for its 60-unit development in Red Hook. Most of the housing (the majority of which receives some form of city subsidies) is only available to people who make between 80 and 200 percent of the area’s median income for a family of four—in Fort Greene, for example, 195 percent of the median income is $138,255. The article is ultimately about that perennial hot-button real estate issue in New York: How do you go about preserving the city’s middle class when more and more middle-income properties (especially Mitchell-Lamas) are being privatized and the bulk of new development affordable housing is geared toward low-income earners? Is the current lottery-based system, where one woman among hundreds of applicants gets a ridiculously cheap Slope townhouse, the best we can do? Is this the fairest way to allocate public funds? And, if it’s not, what’s better?
Winning That One in a Million [NY Times]
Photo by gretchl2000.