New York's 'Affordable Housing' Isn't Always Affordable

By most measures, the New Housing Marketplace plan, an affordable housing development program put into place during the Bloomberg administration, has been a great success. Since (fiscal) 2004, the plan has created or preserved more than 140,000 affordable units throughout the city — about 85 percent of its goal of 165,000 units. The city considers the initiative "the largest municipal affordable housing effort in the nation's history" [PDF].

As a new report points out, however, the plan is far from perfect. After studying about 124,000 units developed through (fiscal) 2011, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development concluded that Bloomberg's plan falls short in several ways. Its chief failure, writes the ANHD, is that the affordable housing being developed isn't actually affordable to the people living near it [PDF]: