Mar
12
Blog Post #7
March 12, 2015 | Leave a Comment
I’m a little confused by the article where it says landlords will give a cheaper price to current tenants but raise the price for new movers. I don’t get why they would do that – wouldn’t that just deter people from renting, and cause a loss of money? The recent movers are probably the low-income people too, since they might be constantly moving to look for better living arrangements. The fact that they have to pay a higher amount compared to the curent tenants makes everything even more pitiful.
I completely misunderstood figure 3.6 at first, and thought it was a positive thing, where it showed that there were 120% units available for people. However, going back and rereading what was written, I realized it wasn’t such good news after all. Once again, the people with lower income (30%, 50%, 80% of AMI) are hit hardest. And throughout the years, the available affordable units has only been declining, for every percentage group.
Figure 3.8 presented some hope that there was a lot more rental units that were being made available. However, again after reading further into the article, many rental units were also converted into market-rate or rent stabilization. It’s as if we make some progress, but then also lose progress as well. Also, the housing quality has also improved, so that’s another positive side. Although the housing quality has seemed to be slowly increasing, hopefully it will become even better because 184 violations per 1000 households still doesn’t seem like that good of a number.
I read another article that gave possible reasons for why the rent is too high, and one interesting point was about less crime. If the crime was decreasing, then more people would be willing to live in cities, which could make rent increase. This also supports the fact that Manhattan’s rent increased the most, although that could also simply be because Manhattan is generally more expensive anyway. Another interesting reason was about how the more well-off people would live in cities with high rents, such as NYC and San Francisco, which would make all the rent increase. This just goes back to how education is very important in allowing the lower income people have a chance at surviving in NYC.
I’m surprised that there was only about 4% of severe crowding, considering the lack of affordable housing. I would have expected much more than a single digit percentage of people splitting the costs. Another article talked about how new neighborhoods could be created and old/empty warehouses and barely used areas could be turned into areas for housing. I think those are interesting solutions, and would definitely help with the (small) severe crowding amount, and it would hopefully lower the rent price.
-Margaret Wang
