Affordable Housing NYC Boerum Hill Tenants Fear Market Rate Units Brooklyn

Tenants of Wyckoff Gardens reacted negatively to the city’s announcement last week of plans to build a new half-market-rate, half-affordable apartment building on two parking lots at the Boerum Hill project, reported the Daily News. Though tenants received a prerecorded call from NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye on Wednesday evening in advance of the official announcement, Wyckoff residents felt that the call left out some salient details.

The recording did not explain that a new apartment tower would soon rise on Wyckoff grounds, or that the building would contain roughly 300 market-rate units and an equal number of affordable ones. Tenants learned the details of the development from the media and drew their own conclusions.

“How are you going to have people here paying $200, $300 rent, then you’ve got tenants in a brand new building paying $1,500, $2,000?” one Wyckoff Gardens resident told the Daily News. “I think they’re trying to force us out.”

Wyckoff Gardens is in a gentrified area of Boerum Hill bordering on Carroll Gardens and Gowanus. NYCHA selected the site precisely because it will be able to charge higher rents for the market-rate apartments.

But tenants fear that adding even more people to the neighborhood will further skew amenities toward the wealthy and away from what current residents could reasonably afford.

[Source: Daily News]

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What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. Yeah – I know a woman who lives in one of the BH housing project with her mother and two children. She pays well over $1,000 rent and works three jobs to support her family. I don’t think $200-$300 is the norm, probably the old timers.

  2. “Community groups are really the only thing we as citizens have to force governments and developers to build responsibly” REALLY? LOL. I have yet to see any community group, or even CB to “force” developers to build responsibly.

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