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138 UNITS ARE NOT ENOUGH: THE CASE FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING CONSTRUCTION INNORTHERN MANHATTANBYCOMMUNITY UNITED FOR TRUE AFFORDABLE HOUSING
The Ofce of Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, The Ofce of NewYork State Senator Adriano Espaillat, The Ofce of Assembly MemberHerman D. Farrell, Jr., The Ofce of New York State AssemblyMember Guillermo Linares, The Ofce of NYC Council MemberRobert Jackson, Community Board 12, Community League of theHeights, Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, UnionCommunal, Barack Obama Democratic Club, RENA, New York CivicParticipation Project, Centro Altagracia de Fe y Justicia, InwoodAdvocates Coalition for Tenants Rights, Las Asociación de MujeresProgresistas
 
Community District 12 in NorthernManhattan is facing an affordablehousing crisis.
When community leaders are looking to attract jobs and services to a neighborhood, housingremains a pre-condition, a basic concern that mustbe addressed before any other need can be lled.In 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg acknowledgedthis, calling for
 
165,000 affordable housing units tobe either built or preserved in New York City.However, as of 2010, only 1% of these actionswere taken in Northern Manhattan. The disparityis even greater in new constructions, with thearea only receiving 138 units over the sameperiod, out of more than 40,000.The lack of affordable housing in NorthernManhattan can be linked to a nearly 9% drop inpopulation over the past decade, the secondbiggest decrease of any area in the entire city.These numbers translate into friends, families andneighbors forced to leave their homes andcommunities, permanently altering the face of theneighborhood. However, there may still be hopefor those remaining in the area: the Mayor hascommitted to constructing or preserving another35,000 affordable units during the remainder of his tenure. In light of the need, and the relativeinattention paid to the area up to this point,Northern Manhattan should be a focus of this development. The bottom line? Washington Heightsand Inwood have not received their fair share.The Mayor's affordable housing distribution has been grossly uneven, as seen in statistics provided bythe Department of Housing, Preservation and Development regarding the borough of Manhattan.From 2004 to 2010, 36,271 affordable housing units were built or preserved in Manhattan, but morethan two-thirds of this construction was concentrated in just three of Manhattan’s twelve communitydistricts. Northern Manhattan, meanwhile, received less than 4% of the actions taken to construct orpreserve housing over that time period. As compelling a picture as the raw housing paints, thereremain many other concerns that we in Northern Manhattan face with rising rents, overcrowding, andthe quality of existing housing stock that compound the problems created by an inadequateinvestment in housing.Foremost among these concerns, the residents of Washington Heights and Inwood face a risingand signicant rent burden. Our families spend more of their income on rent than those in EastHarlem, Central Harlem, or Chinatown, those neighborhoods which each have reaped 20% or more of the new affordable housing construction. The median percentage of income that went to housingacross CD 12 was rmly above the 30% mark that qualies a household as nancially burdened.
 
This
 
means a majority of our residents face all of the other challenges that accompany such anunsustainable portion of their income being spent on rent. This adversity is augmented by the alreadyhigh levels of poverty in the neighborhood. The median income in Community District 12 is 46%below the New York City average, and
 
42.3% of CD 12's residents received some form of incomesupport in the form of cash assistance, SSI or Medicaid in 2009.
 
When all of these measures are takeninto account, it becomes clear that nearly half of residents in the area would qualify for some kind of affordable housing.
 
These nancial issues are compounded by a woefully inadequate existing affordable housingstock. Our tenants live in the most overcrowded households in New York City. In 2000, CD 12 had2.85 residents per household, nearly twice that of CD 5 in Midtown. There is very little available space:the area rental vacancy rate is 1.5%. There is no question that there is a citywide housing crisis, butour rental vacancy rate ranks 55
th
out of the 59 community districts in all ve boroughs. There issimply not enough affordable housing to support the residents of Washington Heights and Inwood.To make matters worse, the physical condition of existing rent regulated housing units is oftendeplorable. Serious housing code violations are on the rise in CD 12. In 2010, a study found 147.9“immediately hazardous” violations per 1,000 units of rental housing, a higher rate than those of EastHarlem, Central Harlem and Chinatown combined. Despite this, rent continues to climb.Gentrication is in part responsible. As people start to recognize the attractiveness and vibrancy of Washington Heights and Inwood, landlords hope to attract tenants from higher income brackets.Property owners make just enough improvements to raise rent beyond the means of longtimeresidents and merchants. This problem is aggravated by frequent illegal rent increases on rent-stabilized properties which often pass unchallenged bythe New York State Division of Housing andCommunity Renewal.Not surprisingly, therefore, long-time residentsare increasingly being forced to relocate to otherneighborhoods or out of the city entirely. Between2000 and 2010, over 18,000 people moved away fromNorthern Manhattan. Though there have been alimited number of quality, local jobs in WashingtonHeights and Inwood, that cannot be cited as thedeciding factor: many of these residents went to areasof the Bronx where there are comparable levels of unemployment. Crime, furthermore, is lower than ithas been in decades. The mass population movement isa direct result of the fact that residents cannot affordtheir rising rents and cannot nd other affordableoptions in the neighborhood.Northern Manhattan already possesses anumber of viable sites for development. Vacant lotsthroughout the neighborhood could be transformedinto housing, and some of them are already owned bythe city. In these cases there would be an easydevelopment process and no cost of property
Possible Sites and their DevelopmentPotential
CITY-OWNED9
th
Avenue between 202
nd
St. and 203
rd
St.-140 units9
th
Avenue between 203
rd
St. and 204
th
St.-140 units9
th
Avenue between 204
th
St. and 205
th
St.-80 units9
th
Avenue between 203
rd
St. and 204
th
St.-80 units2262 Amsterdam Avenue-50 units654 West 158
th
Street-180,000 buildable square feetPRIVATELY OWNED3816 9
th
Avenue-85 units465 163
rd
St.-8,500 square foot vacant lot446 & 448 167
th
St.-83 units
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