Throughout the years, it seems as if the line between gentrification and neighborhood improvement has become thinner and thinner.  No person wants to live in an area plagued by crime, pollution, and poor funding.  However, the problem of stripping the culture and affordability of a neighborhood exists if these neighborhoods are seen through the corporate lens of big businesses.

The question of what is the proper solution to not crossing the line into gentrification exists, and Jake Blumgart discusses a possible solution in “Affordable Housing’s Forever Solution”.  During the 1980s, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative convinced the city that it could steward and revitalize its surroundings and did so using a community land trust (Blumgart 2015).  Through their land trust, they took possession of most of the dozens of vacant lots in the area by purchasing them from private owners or obtaining them for almost nothing from the city. DSNI then removed the properties from the private market as well, insuring that if someone sells their home, it’ll go to someone of a similar income (Blumgart 2015).

Unfortunately, not all areas are so fortunate to have this kind of control.  In May 2014, de Blasio released his plan to build and preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. The ambitious outline introduced two new policies: mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH) and zoning for quality and affordability (ZQA). MIH requires developers building in certain areas to make a share of new housing units permanently affordable. ZQA is the problem, as it alters the city’s zoning map to create areas where developers can build bigger buildings with the catch being that they will have to include affordable units within the new large buildings in the rezoned area (Abello 2016). Essentially, the city only gets the affordable housing it needs if developers build big units.  Even though nearly every community opposed vehemently against this, de Blasio’s plan was still passed in 2016 and the new issue of upzoning East Harlem was soon put in place. A resident of the area even states in the article, “’They cannot come in our neighborhood and build and we’re not going to benefit from it. Where are we going? We’re going in the [homeless] shelters? That’s what’s happening now,’” (Abello 2016)

Upon reading both articles, it is quite evident that the discussion of affordable housing comes in part from a lack of discussion in the first place.  Patrick Sisson states this in his Curbed article, stating that “…we’re in the middle of an affordability crisis. According to the Urban Institute, for every 100 extremely low-income households in need of an affordable apartment, only 29 units are available, and researchers at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that 38.9 million households are cost-burdened, paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing.” Instead of accepting this fact, cities like Denver have worked hard to counteract this statistic.  The Mile High city has been a topic of conversation for many in the discussion of how to approach the issues associated with affordable housing. In early 2016, Denver established a $10 million Revolving Affordable Housing Loan Fund for affordable housing projects.  A new $500,000 property tax increase, paired with new development impact fees, will raise $156.4 million over the next decade for affordable housing (Sisson 2017).

The FasTracks program seeks to build future affordable housing near stops on the city’s new light-rail line to provide residents with easy travel.  In addition, the mayor announced a pilot “buy-down” program that would turn vacant high-end apartments into affordable units (Sisson 2017). By tapping into the newly created housing fund, the flexible program can cover the difference between market rate and affordable rent and quickly add more attainable units to the city’s housing supply.

 

Works Cited

Abello O. 2016, “How East Harlem Wrote Its Own Development Plan.”  Next City.  https://nextcity.org/features/view/east-harlem-neighborhood-plan-upzoning-affordable-housing

Blumgart J.  2015, “Affordable Housing’s Forever Solution.”  Next City.  https://nextcity.org/features/view/affordable-housings-forever-solution

Sisson P. 2017, “Solving affordable housing: Creative solutions around the U.S.”  Curbed. https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/25/16020648/affordable-housing-apartment-urban-development