into middle-class neighborhoods, richer into poverty spots
The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan — placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots.
Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city.
“We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday.
“That means that in some neighborhoods that have mostly middle or upper-income housing, that we would need to put affordable housing at the very lowest income,” she said.
“But in some communities where we have a great deal of poverty . . . we would try to bring more moderate (-income housing) into those neighborhoods, to try to achieve the kind of diversity that we want,” Been said.
De Blasio’s executive budget boosted the housing department’s capital cash to $3.1 billion, up from $1.9 billion in his January preliminary budget, to help pay for the ambitious proposal.
Been said the emphasis would be on two groups traditionally overlooked in city affordable housing programs — the very low income and the middle class. The city will quadruple the number of apartments geared to the poorest New Yorkers, who make less than $25,000 for a family of four, and increase by 50% the number for those making $68,000 to 103,000.
Exact locations where housing developments will be built have not yet been chosen.
Council housing chairman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn) hailed the proposal, though he said he anticipated some resistance both from affluent New Yorkers unhappy about low-income developments in their neighborhoods and from residents of poorer areas who don’t want to be surrounded by housing that’s out of their reach.
“I do think there will be some concern in certain communities,” he added. “We will have to explain to people why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
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