Does NYC have a shortage of three or more bedroom apartments?
Note: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in which they share their work and thought process. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
Mayor Bill de Blasio boasted 34,000 units of affordable housing in 2018, but many say that the city’s new additions to residential development exclude families. Advocates say developers, who receive varying tax credits for participating in de Blasio’s affordable housing program, unfairly favor studio and one bedroom apartments.
I reported on de Blasio’s press conference presenting his affordable housing program last fall. Being skeptical, I spoke with some housing advocates in the South Bronx, and they told me about this shortage of three or more bedroom apartments. The more I reported on issues with Housing Connect (the city’s affordable housing portal) though, the more I realized that there’s a shortage of multi-bedroom apartments OVERALL, not just in the low income housing.
So I found an NYC Open Data set of all of the apartments built in the last five years to find out how many had three or more bedrooms, what neighborhoods have a greater concentration of new family housing and how this has changed over time.
The more I reported on issues with Housing Connect (the city’s affordable housing portal) the more I realized that there’s a shortage of multi-bedroom apartments OVERALL, not just in the low income housing.
I don’t know if it was a testament to my rusty excel skills, or just an overambitious plan, but I went in and out of Excel, Google Sheets, and OpenRefine to analyze this data.
First, I just wanted to see how many three-bedroom, four-bedroom, five-bedroom, etc., units there were within all the new apartments built in the last five years (there were 154,003 apts. built in total). So I did a pivot table in Excel and found that there were about 14,000 three-bedroom apartments built, which was significantly smaller than the one and two-bedrooms which both totaled over 40,000 respectively. But the number dropped off even further after that. There were only about 1,500 four-bedroom apartments built, 67 five-bedroom apartments built and a whopping 18 six-or-more-bedroom apartments built.
In total, there were over 100,000 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments built. And developers built about 16,000 apartments with three bedrooms or more.
I wanted to see if this discrepancy is getting worse. The gap is obviously huge over the five year period. But is it getting wider, or narrowing? I did another pivot table to see the bedroom numbers per year. When I put the numbers into DataWrapper and made a line graph, I could see that the number of three-bedroom units has actually gone up in the last five years. But one and two bedroom units also increased, and the gap largely remained the same.
I was told this was a big issue in the Bronx. And I’ve actually seen a lot of listings of three-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn. So I was curious to see what boroughs and neighborhoods developers built the most three-or-more bedrooms. In Excel, I condensed the three-bedroom, four-bedroom, five-bedroom and six-or-more bedrooms into one column. I took this column, and then a column that listed the community board of each housing development and I went to OpenRefine to cluster the number of units for each community board. Then I put the numbers in DataWrapper and made a choropleth map.
Eventually I want to look at this housing data more specifically in terms of income. I didn’t have time to do a more thorough cross comparison. But I did make this graph of how many apartments built in the last five years were listed as extremely low income, very low income, low income, moderate income, etc. Most of the new units (over 52,000) were listed as low income.
I looked up what that actually means money-wise and realized that the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development classifies low income as $36,501 to $58,480 for one person and $60,501 to $96,800 for a six-person family. The median household income in the South Bronx is $36,593, so this still excludes a great number of people from housing.
Stay tuned! I’m writing a story about this issue. I’m speaking to advocates, developers, council members and families who live in studios because there are no three-bedroom apartments available.
Here’s where I got the original data set.
And here’s my cleaned data set.
*Rachel Rippetoe is a freelance journalist and graduate student in the class of 2019 at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She specializes in urban journalism, and covers housing and development for the Mott Haven Herald and Hunts Point Express.
