Housing Expert Condemns City’s “Affordable Housing” Plans
By Phyllis Eckhaus
Housing expert Ron Shiffman condemned the current “affordable housing” agenda as a “Trojan horse” benefiting real estate developers, a stealth strategy that actually results in luxury condos, higher rents, and displacement of low-income renters. The longtime city planner — who co-founded the pioneering Pratt Center for Community Development — spoke at a July 22 webinar co-sponsored by groups including Village Preservation, the Greenwich Village historic preservation group, and the City Club, the citywide civic group.
Shiffman contended that relying on for-profit developers to lead the way in the financing of supposedly affordable housing is an inherently problematic, backwards approach. “We have to reframe the debate,” he declared, arguing that housing should be seen as a crucial component of a larger goal. “How are we building a viable community?… A strong community has to have day care centers. It has to have schools. It has to have a social and economic and physical infrastructure that supports that housing.” Today’s narrow reliance on for-profit developers, he said, results in building luxury units for investors who may not even live in them.
“Affordable housing” as a gentrification tool
Shiffman noted that “affordable housing” is a federal term that encompasses units with rents far out of reach for moderate- and low-income New York City renters. By federal “affordable housing” standards, a three-person family with a $152,700 household income is middle-income and eligible for affordable housing — yet the core need in New York City is housing for families whose household income is $50,000 or less.
He explained that when for-profit developers are responsible for financing affordable housing, their juggling act to achieve tax breaks and maximum profit may include constructing the most expensive so-called affordable housing alongside the most potentially profitable ultra-luxury housing. This results in “affordable housing” that’s not affordable to people in the neighborhood, which becomes “whiter and wealthier.”
Shiffman noted that when he helped invent the concept of “inclusionary zoning,” the goal was to promote diversity and desegregation. Now the concept has morphed into a tool for financing real estate development, and is instead increasing gentrification: “A lot of the Latino families who used to be in Bushwick and elsewhere in Brooklyn are now going all the way to Pennsylvania, and we’re beginning to see a drop in the African-American population of New York City, and many of the working class and union members.”
The costs of privatizing “social housing”
Shiffman called public housing and publicly-supported affordable housing “social housing” and described the costs of relying on for-profit entities for financing. For example, when social housing is not directly subsidized by government, the developer’s borrowing costs are passed on to tenants.
Shiffman suggested that we can choose to do better. “In one day in Iran,” he said, we spend “enough money to build 1,400 units of public housing in New York City, debt-free, where the only cost of running the buildings would be the maintenance of the operation.”
And even without federal help, he suggested, we have options. One option he advocated was the return of an already-on-the-books New York state tax ─ the stock transfer tax ─ which charges one tenth of one percent on financial transactions. Collected from 1905 to 1981, the tax is today “instantly rebated.” Shiffman estimated that reinstating it would raise $18 billion a year in state revenue.
Quantity at the expense of quality and community planning
Schiffman noted that when for-profit real estate developers gain control of housing development, community planning ─ encouraged by the city charter ─ repeatedly goes by the wayside. Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation, launched in 2003, and demanding $700 million in additional public subsidies, is proposing to shoehorn “affordable housing” into a 70-story tower at the already-dense juncture of Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth avenues — a plan that would not be completed until at least 2040. Noting that tower living is inhospitable for children, Shiffman decried the focus on housing quantity and not quality.
He also condemned the recent approval of mostly-luxury tower housing in Bushwick Inlet, overriding previous community planning. This project uses public land that is currently a feeding and nesting ground for birds, where there were plans for a museum to commemorate the USS Monitor, the revolutionary ironclad Civil War battleship that was built there.
A purely quantitative approach to housing development imperils other goals such as economic development. Shiffman cited the contested Brooklyn Maritime Terminal waterfront housing plan, which he described as not only costly from an environmental and climate-change perspective but also a short-sighted rejection of “the Blue Highway,” a plan to transform the waterfront into an active shipping route, replacing trucks in moving goods downstate from upstate New York.
Shiffman contrasted the mayor’s inclusionary vision to his actions. “He wants to serve the people of the City of New York, every ethnic group, every economic group and we need to…hold him accountable to that rhetoric.” The mayor’s “neoliberal” tactics, Shiffman suggested, were at direct odds with his vision. Still, the longtime planner expressed hope, characterizing the administration as full of “capable people.” Singling out Deputy Mayor for Housing Leila Bozorg, he said, “She understands housing. She’s doing the wrong thing, but if you forced her, she’d know how to do the right thing [if you…] provided her with the resources.”
The webinar, available on Village Preservation’s YouTube channel, is part of the group’s continuing series on housing policy, Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus.
