
Amazon deal will disrupt plans for affordable housing on Long Island City sites - jakelazaroff
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2018/11/15/amazon-deal-will-disrupt-plans-for-affordable-housing-on-long-island-city-sites-700784
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matchbok
Ugh, fine with me. The whole "affordable housing" racket needs some real
solutions. The current ones cost way too much money and provide far too few
apartments. The solution to high and rising rents for _everyone_ is not to
start a lottery system for a few thousand subsidized apartments. That doesn't
address the problem at all.

What's worse - a lot of these programs mandate things to private developers,
thus raising prices for the market-rate middle class units. Double whammy.

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d4mi3n
Do you have sources for these claims? I always figured some low income housing
is better than none, but if these programs are not effective I’d like to know
why and how they fail.

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danielfoster
I also have not seen any data pointing that these programs are effective.
Given all the variables involved and the difficulty in collecting data or even
determining measures of success, it's very easy to argue in one way or the
other.

This has been my experience with affordable housing as a New Yorker:

1\. Units don't necessarily go to those who need them most. A percentage are
always set aside for city employees (public data) and when evaluating
applications, developers tend to pick the applicants with the highest credit
scores and most stable backgrounds. These people tend to be the ones who need
the housing the least (source: real estate friend.

It's also not common for recent graduates with low incomes but wealthy parents
to get the housing (source: people I know who did this).

2\. You're allowed to keep the housing forever, even if your income
skyrockets.

3\. Affordable housing is often built in the wrong locations. It doesn't make
sense to put a $800 / month apartment in a luxury neighborhood where residents
can't even afford to buy coffee, but this is often what happens.

4\. Continuing the point above, developers usually design affordable units in
exactly the same way as luxury market-rate units. This raises costs that the
developers must recoup from the market-rate units. Do subsidized renters
really need marble countertops?

5\. The affordable units built are really just a trickle in a waterfall of all
the high-end housing coming to market.

The best solution would be to encourage the building of quality, affordable
apartments directly in the neighborhoods where people need them most. Even
better, the city should improve transportation infrastructure so that the free
market can fix the affordable housing issue on its own.

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skybrian
I don't see why affordable housing shouldn't be given to public employees. The
city (and indirectly, taxpayers) have an interest in making sure its workers
can live close by. Even if it were entirely for public employees, would that
actually be bad? I don't think it's obviously better or worse than a lottery
or market-rate housing.

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ng12
City employees have good pensions, benefits, and job security. Even if their
salary is average or slightly below they're not really an "at-risk"
population.

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WillPostForFood
_" The absolute difference between us and San Francisco is we believe in
economic diversity, we believe in ensuring there's a vast supply of affordable
housing,"_

I think the bigger difference is the commitment to effective mass
transportation in the whole tri-state area, which is a huge help in mitigating
the affordable housing problem.

