How New York’s affordable apartments compare to neighborhood incomes

Since its inception in 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Housing New York plan has built or preserved 87,557 affordable housing units across all five boroughs, putting the city on track toward its goal of adding 300,000 affordable units to the city’s housing stock by 2026. In an effort to be more transparent about that process, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) recently released an interactive map that shows every building with units that count toward this plan.

While providing a clear picture of where the city has secured affordable housing, the map is less clear on who can afford these units. The omission is notable, since only New Yorkers whose incomes fall within certain ranges (as dictated by the area median income, or AMI) are eligible to apply for certain affordable apartments.

We’ve previously looked at how AMI—which is calculated using a formula that takes incomes from non-city residents into account—can create a gap between so-called “affordable” apartments and what residents in NYC neighborhoods can actually afford. Since HPD’s map does not clearly show whether units are affordable on a local level, we did our own data analysis to fill in the gaps.

Quantifying “affordability”

Every affordable unit in the city specifies a particular income range—extremely low, very low, low, moderate, or middle income—that dictates who can apply to live there and what rent they will pay. Those ranges change quite a bit depending on how big your household is. For example, a family of three needs to earn between $65,250 and $97,920 to apply for a moderate-income unit, when a family of five must earn between $78,300 and $117,480, according to 2016 metrics from HUD.

To see which units were affordable on a local level, we looked at both income and household size. Using HPD’s data, we mapped every building that counts towards the Housing New York goal. For each building, we compared the number of units earmarked for each income range to the median household income of the community district (PUMA approximation), repeating the analysis for each household size (one-five). The most recent data that separates incomes by household size comes from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), so we used 2016 income ranges to match.

Thus, the map below shows how many units per building a typical median-income household from the neighborhood could actually afford. (Use the menu in the upper right to toggle between household sizes.)

The results

As seen on the map, many units that count as affordable under the Housing New York plan fail to offer local affordability, based on median incomes for community districts. Citywide, 30 percent of units are unaffordable to a local two-person household; 24 percent are unaffordable to three-person homes; 25 percent are unaffordable for four-person homes; and 28 percent are unaffordable to a five-person household.

Most notably, a whopping 62 percent of units are unaffordable to one-person households. But this tracks with census data: across New York City, two-, three-, four-, and five-person households have median incomes between $66,000 and $80,000, but households of one have a median income of about $35,000.

The city does adjust income requirements by family size, but their adjustments do not go far enough to handle this gap. For low-income apartments, a two-person family needs an income above $36,250 to qualify, while a one-person family needs above $31,750. That’s well below the city median for two-person families, reflecting the low-income requirement, but it’s quite close to the median for a single person. On a community level, median income for single-person households falls below this requirement in most community districts (33 out of 55).

Meanwhile, some buildings have “affordable” units priced so high that only a narrow top margin of households in the area can live there. Take the Sand Castle apartment complex in Far Rockaway, which sold to new management last November through an affordability requirements agreement with the city. The development offers 917 middle-income units: 569 studios, 312 one-bedrooms, and 36 two-bedrooms. A household of one would need to earn between $76,201 and $104,775 a year to be eligible to live here (by 2016 metrics). According to the most recent data, the median income of one-person households in the “Far Rockaway, Breezy Point & Broad Channel” district is $25,580 a year, which means someone must earn roughly three times the typical annual salary of this area to qualify for a home at Sand Castle. And these 917 units all count as part of Housing New York’s affordable apartment tally.

One thing to note: While accounting for income and household size, this analysis misses a fairly crucial piece of the puzzle—unit size. Our map may list a building as “100 percent affordable” to a typical five-person household in the area, yet that building may only offer studios and one-bedrooms, which don’t serve households of that size. So while our analysis may capture eligibility, it does not show the availability of units for different household sizes.

Larger households seem to fare better according to our map, but data shows that there may be a shortage of affordable places for them to live under De Blasio’s plan. About half (50.3 percent) of units secured through Housing New York are labeled as studios or one-bedrooms, while only 12 percent of them are three-bedrooms or larger.

An ongoing debate

When asked for comment, a spokesperson from HPD stated that comparing affordable units to local incomes is a “gross oversimplification of the work [they] are doing to address the affordable housing crisis,” as the city strives to build “equitable, diverse, and integrated neighborhoods.” The agency also notes that establishing housing just for local neighborhood incomes may lead to a lack of economic diversity.

Housing activists, however, have criticized the Housing New York plan for not creating enough homes for those who most need it. The Community Service Society released a report last September that says the Housing New York plan may actually be “further entrenching segregation” through its focus on development in low income communities, where locals are at risk of displacement and affordable units are often out of reach.

Despite the city’s focus on low income neighborhoods, only 15 percent of Housing New York units—13,276 units to date—serve the extremely low income band; citywide, 516,000 of those households are rent burdened. And data shows that about 81 percent of Housing New York’s units to date are located in low-income communities, where the median income of one-person households is below 80 percent AMI.

“The city should make every effort to serve the population that is experiencing the greatest difficulties finding affordable apartments: low-income New Yorkers,” Oksana Mironova, who co-authored the Community Service Society report, told Curbed. “To achieve this, the city should target tax breaks, subsidies, and public land to create permanent housing for New Yorkers earning below 50 percent AMI.”

About the data: Spatial data for the interactive map comes directly from the NYC Open Data portal. ACS Income data corresponds to PUMA regions which approximate community districts. Target income ranges were generated using HUD’s 2016 AMI value for households of one, two, three, four, and five in the New York metro area. Out of 87,557 units total, 892 “confidential” units (1.02 percent of total) were listed without location data and were excluded from the analysis. The dataset also lists 458 “other” units (0.52 percent of total) that are set aside for superintendents and do not specify income range; these units were excluded from the “percent affordable” calculations for each building. Note that units priced below median income are labeled as “affordable,” yet a median-income family may not actually qualify to live there because their income is too high.

Special thanks to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development for their assistance in analyzing our data methodology.