NYC mayor inflates numbers on affordable housing progress

Projects begun under predecessors counted toward the city’s provided totals.

By Howard Husock

Mayor de Blasio’s plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years ranks as one of his signature initiatives. As the late Mayor Ed Koch might have asked, “How’s he doing?”

Indeed, there is reason to conclude the mayor is exaggerating his accomplishments to date — by counting a fair number of projects initiated by his predecessor.

There is no doubt that the city has been well-organized in pushing for and publicizing progress toward the goals.

Housing New York, as the plan is known, has, it asserts, “financed 77,651 affordable homes since January 2014, including the highest three-year streak of affordable housing production in the city’s history.”

Although these include some 9,700 units priced for middle-income families (earning up to $141,000 annually), rents for a large majority are set, through subsidies for the private developers who own the buildings, for those earning less than $68,000, including 11,000 units for those earning less than $25,000.

There is more — or less — to all this than is apparent, however. A review of housing starts claimed by the administration on the NYC Open Data site reveals that a significant number appear to have been in the pipeline before the mayor took office…

Read the full piece at New York Daily News.

Howard Husock is vice president of research and publications at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor for City Journal.