NYC is including extra reasonably priced flats than ever. However who’re they meant for?

If you earn just over $80,000 a year in New York City and are looking to apply for the city’s affordable housing lottery, your options are slim.

Since the start of 2022, new affordable housing development is targeting divergent ends of the income spectrum, according to a Gothamist analysis of city housing data. The number of apartments reserved for the poorest residents is about on par with the number built for people earning six-figure salaries — up to $130,000 a year for a single person or $165,000 a year for a family of three, the data shows.

But apartments for people earning what the city considers “moderate income” make up just 5% of the 24,000 newly added subsidized apartments, and account for the smallest slice of the newly built affordable housing stock. Some data suggests that middle-income New Yorkers are fleeing the five boroughs in droves because housing is too expensive and hard to find — just one manifestation of a growing affordability crisis.

Gothamist’s analysis of affordable housing development comes as state lawmakers in Albany are negotiating a new tax break meant to fuel development, including some units with rents capped based on household income. A previous version of the tax break faced criticism for creating too many purportedly “affordable” apartments that priced out the vast majority of low- and middle-income New Yorkers and expired without renewal.

The city’s affordable housing lottery lists newly added apartments that receive local subsidies or state tax breaks. To qualify, prospective tenants have to prove they meet certain income thresholds.

While just a sliver of the new affordable housing is geared toward people earning about the median amount of money for the region, the city is increasing the number of units for New Yorkers earning less than $50,000 a year, who have the fewest housing options. The increase is earning praise from low-income housing experts.

“A lot of us wanted to see more focus on the affordability levels that the private market will never build on its own, the units that will get people out of homeless shelters, so that’s exciting to see,” said Sam Stein, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Community Service Society who studies city housing production.

Still, Stein and others criticize the volume of new affordable housing development underway for people earning well above the local median income.

Nearly 8,200 new homes are reserved for renters at the highest income level in the city’s affordable housing lottery: single adults making up to $130,000 a year and families of three earning around $165,000 a year.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development said the apartments are located in buildings receiving a tax break known as 421-a, which traded the abatement for some affordable housing. Developers rushed to get their projects started before the tax credit program expired in 2022, and state lawmakers declined to renew it, fueling the high concentration of “affordable” units where monthly rents can exceed $4,000.

A 2022 report by NYU’s Furman Center found most “affordable” units created with the 421-a tax break were priced at that highest income level.

All told, the city has added or financed close to 24,000 new income-restricted apartments since the start of Mayor Eric Adams’ tenure in January 2022. Most of them are studios or one-bedrooms and few are located in low-density sections of the city, Gothamist previously reported. Adams has touted the figure as a record high.

“In the midst of a historic housing crisis, it is our goal to build as much housing as possible while using every tool at our disposal to create homes for the lowest income and most vulnerable New Yorkers,” HPD spokesperson Ilana Maier said.

She said the city added more new supportive housing apartments and units specifically reserved for formerly homeless New Yorkers than ever before last year.

The city subsidized more than 8,000 units — about a third of the total — for New Yorkers earning less than $50,000 a year.

Another 6,262 units are reserved for people considered “low-income” because they earn no more than 80% of the area median income, or about $79,000 a year for an individual.

Just about 1,300 units are being added for people earning between $80,000 a year and $119,000 a year — a range straddling the region’s median income of $98,900 a year as defined by the federal government.

Homes for the middle class

Future development likely depends on legislation in Albany, where state lawmakers are negotiating the contours of various housing proposals, including a replacement for the 421-a program. The outcome of a housing deal could have a big impact on people like Liat Kaplan, who recently scored an affordable apartment through the city’s lottery.

Kaplan, a 28-year-old nonprofit worker, moved into a one-bedroom unit in a brand new building at the Greenpoint Landing complex last week after applying for about two dozen other lotteries over the past three years. She said she makes around $80,000 a year, equal to about 80% of the area median income, and is now paying $1,828 a month on rent.

It’s a decent income, but doesn’t go so far in New York City.

Kaplan said she never would have landed a place like her new apartment without the housing lottery. For one thing, the floors are level, and the walls and windowsills aren’t coated with layers of thick whitewash paint nicknamed the “landlord special.”

“I had just resigned myself to the super-crooked, fourth-floor walkup where the landlord didn’t ever fix anything because that was as good as it was going to get for me at that point,” Kaplan said.

The city’s most recent housing survey shows that even people who make decent salaries are finding it hard to get an apartment they can afford. Less than 1% of apartments priced below $2,400 a month were vacant and available for rent during last year’s survey period. Over half of all New Yorkers are rent-burdened, meaning that they spend at least 30% of their income on rent.

Boosting low-income housing

The situation is even worse for the lowest-income New Yorkers, for whom the affordable housing lottery can be transformative.

Karim Walker was living in a shelter following an eviction six years ago. But he won a housing lottery in 2020 and moved into a top-floor apartment in a seven-story building overlooking the L train tracks and rooftops of Central Brooklyn.

Walker said he applied for at least 50 places before getting picked for the one-bedroom in Van Sinderen Plaza on the border of Brownsville and East New York.

Walker, who works for the homeless rights-focused Safety Net Project, said the selection changed his life.

“I don’t know if there’s a word in the English language [for] how relieved and the way excited I used to be to get picked,” he mentioned. “The day I moved in, I simply did not wish to exit. I did not wish to go anyplace. I simply needed to remain in.”

However the demand for these flats is barely rising.

Eight in 10 residents incomes incomes under the federal poverty line pay at the very least half their revenue on lease, in keeping with metropolis knowledge. And lotteries for the lowest-cost flats constantly entice tens of hundreds of candidates.

Throughout an look on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Present” in January, Adams mentioned an reasonably priced housing lottery for a brand new constructing in Inwood that drew 80,000 purposes for 174 items — or about 460 purposes per residence.

“What does that say?” Adams mentioned. “It’s saying that we do not have sufficient inventory.”

Brooklyn safety guard Wykeisha Mitchell is aware of this firsthand.

Mitchell was staying in homeless shelters earlier than renting a room in a YWCA close to the Barclays Middle in Brooklyn. She mentioned she’s utilized for at the very least 80 housing lotteries since 2015 and has alerts arrange on her cellphone to inform her when a brand new one opens.

“I apply for them like clockwork,” Mitchell mentioned. “Each time it comes up on my cellphone and my revenue meets the residence I apply for it.”

She added that she earns about $40,000 a yr, that means she must spend not more than $1,000 a month on an residence for it to be thought of “reasonably priced.” Mitchell mentioned that’s principally not possible.

“I don’t wish to dwell in a basement,” she mentioned. “I don’t wish to be struggling. I wish to pay my lease and do one thing I wish to do. That’s why I’m making an attempt so laborious to get a lottery constructing.”