When The Music's Over, Turn Out the Lights

Linclon Limestone;

Your post caused me to come back to this forum, as it is just amazing to me. The fact that you differentiate between “market rate” and “affordable” housing speaks volumes about the housing situation in NYC. Why should there be a differentiation between the two? If I go to poor neighborhoods, and look for shoes, I go to a discount store that sells market-rate merchandise that is affordable to the residents of that neighborhood. Why should housing be different?

I believe that one of the reason is the huge distortion of the marketplace that takes place in NYC, due to a variety of reasons: too much government interference, too much NIMBYism, too much mob influence in the construction industry, too many “affordable housing professionals” who are motivated preserve a distinction between “market rate” and “affordable housing”.

One place we can see this is Preservationista’s showcasing of the nice-looking row houses recently built in Harlem and East NY. I agree that these are nice-looking houses. It’s the least we should expect, given that they were heavily subsidized by the City, in the form of free land, low-interest loans and free utility infrastructure. This is not “low cost” housing. It is actually high-cost housing that is subsidized to make it “affordable”.

Why can’t NYC have a private sector that is able to produce market-rate, affordable housing?

Benson

Being an affordable housing professional with experience in all national regions, I can say that these properties have nothing to do with this classification of housing. These are market rate properties.
Posters above, please don’t confuse these homes with affordable housing. Our industry has come a long way in the past 20 years with most agencies and developers figuring out that intelligent design doesn’t have to be expensive, and that good design is good business. The developers of the projects above clearly missed the mark, especially in light of the comparable housing stock in Brooklyn.

Ok, hardly the point of the post, but thanks for the correction.

Preservationista

Aren’t central A/C systems built into the ductwork and other HVAC systems already going into the home? If you are putting it in during construction, how much more expensive can it be? The expense of central A/C seems to be in retrofitting it to existing homes.

Most people having a serious conversation about truly affordable housing, specifically row houses, do not advocate recreating a 19th century brownstone. Those are for the 2 sentence bon mots tossed across the internet.

There are plenty of examples of aesthetically pleasing row houses that are being built here and elsewhere that are specifically marketed to lower and middle income people. They are still 3 families, adhere to code, and are contextural to the neighborhoods and block. I’ve seen them in Harlem, and on the East New York/Crown Hhts border, for example. It can be done.

These houses shown here, are especially awful, in part because they are plopped down on single lots in the middle of a block of 19th c. houses, and no effort whatsover is made to have them blend in, or at least not be spectacularly awful. Even the remuddled brownstones in the photo on the left have more contextural sense, in spite of siding and other changes. The one on the right is just a lost cause all together. Instead of picking House # 105 from their roster, a good developer could have better suited it to the site, but we all know that the people who build in these communities could care less about what the houses look like.

Taste is not an exclusive luxury reserved for the rich. Everyone wants to live in a neighborhood where they can point to their home with pride, and say this is mine. People might live in both of these, because they need a place to live, but that doesn’t mean they approve of it, it just makes it necessary.

Preservationista