Posted on August 21, 2019 by Valeria Ricciulli in Curbed New York Curbed New York, By Valeria Ricciulli It’s been almost two years since the de Blasio administration launched Housing New York 2.0, a plan to combat the city’s affordable housing crisis by creating or preserving 300,000 affordable homes by 2026. Since 2014, when Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, his administration has financed a total of 135,437 affordable homes. But with the city in the grips of a deepening affordability and homelessness crisis, advocates are questioning the effectiveness of those efforts. A new report by Coalition for the Homeless charges that instead of addressing those intertwined issues, the city’s housing plan in fact exacerbates the city’s divided housing market. In 2017, for instance, there were around 560,000 more households in need of low-rent apartments than there were affordable ones on the market. Between 1999 and 2017, the city lost more than one million apartments renting for less than $800/month. (The study does not specifically define what “affordable” means; researchers for the group used $800/month or less as a threshold because it’s the lowest figure recorded by the 2017 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey).
