Public Housing in New York City faces various problems. From the flawed approach of the affordable housing plan by Major Bill de Balsio, that combines Robert Moses and Bloomberg’s approach to housing projects, to the funding deficit New York City Housing Authority faces. The affordable housing plan, is supposed to be better than Robert Moses and Bloomberg by including inclusionary zoning. However, the three main problems that arise from Bloomberg’s model, is that it hasn’t produce much low cost housing, it fails to match population growth, and the rising inequality of income. New Yorkers must deal with the lack of affordable housing, due to it being based off of the area median income, and they must deal with terrible living conditions if they living in affordable housing due to the budget cut for the NYCHA. Many tenants face living in apartments filled with mold and water damage, most of which goes unrecorded and unenforced.

Question: What are the housing models, that other cities use? What are the housing problems other cities face?

In Ritchie Torees and David R. Jones’ article, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has been pointed out has having lost investment over the past few decades. It is noted that many of the residents who are in need of public housing are also facing issues like water leaks, broken elevators, cracked wall and faulty locks. The authors then state that the main support for housing is given by Washington. Although there is a great need for more affordable housing, the article seems a bit leery of any actual expansion of the network, calling it “ambitious.” I think that the most important point the article makes is that affordable housing should be expanded especially in the private sector. Having a home that is private can make a large difference in more personal decisions and may dramatically influence how people end up pursuing the rest of their lives. With all the poor and at times dangerous living conditions described, it is more important than ever to make sure that housing is well-maintained for human use.

Question:

How can we open up more housing using methods other than calling on eminent domain? Or is is not possible?

“De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan” by Samuel Stein, as published in the Jacobin, was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The structure of the piece is very reader-friendly as Stein guides the reader through a series of proposed solutions to De Blasio’s plan. This structure imitates the complexity of NYC’s housing problem, as answering yes/or no to question A (as proposed by Stein) may lead you forward to step B or send you back to A.

The first chapter of “The Neoliberal City” by Jason Hackworth introduced the reader to the philosophies of classic liberalism, egalitarian liberalism, and Keynesianism. At the end of this chapter, I felt as if I had learned a lot but I failed to see how this information applied to contemporary social issues. Chapter three seeks to address this problem, by putting the previously mentioned philosophies into perspective. Towards the conclusion of the piece, I was especially interested in the grants awarded to individuals PHAs for demolition of the most “severely distressed” housing units. During Nixon’s War on Drugs, a similar practice was used to reward police precincts that carried out the most profitable police raids. If one parallel were not enough, the “One Strike and You’re Out” program is similar to the “three strikes” law, which feeds mass incarceration in the USA.

Question: What is the chain of ownership in a community land trust? What is a relevant example of a community land trust? How many community land trusts are there in NYC?

New York City is dominated by a capitalistic economic system. It is the motivating factor of most, if not all, of the building developments. It only follows then that low-income housing will not be built in the numbers that they should be. Rather, companies will build housing for middle to high income residents- regardless of the low income families then displaced from their homes. Neo-liberalist subsidizing of housing would certainly ease the housing crisis, but it is simply not a viable action in a city so dominated by capitalistic landlords and housing developers. As we’ve already seen, homeless shelters, which are common throughout the city and which do offer living situations to the poor, are not a particularly helpful solution. Ideally, more housing would increase supply, thereby driving prices downward, but it has become clear that simply building new housing is not an effective plan to combat the housing crisis as long as a capitalistic market continues to cater to the wealthy. Can simply putting pressure on building developers to build low-income living really ease the housing problem?

In the first article Hackworth talks about neoliberalism and the opposing view of Keynesian economics, or theory. Neoliberalism is the belief that the government should have very little involvement in the economy and many aspects of people’s lives. Its sole role is to protect the rights and wishes of the people. Keynesian theory believes that the government should become involved in certain situations, such as economic failure. When it comes to housing, I agree with the neoliberalism approach. It is evident that affordable and public housing is in desperate need of government funding; however, recent New York City mayors have been doing a terrible job in coming up with an appropriate funding plan. DeBlasio’s plan is basically a revamped version of Bloomberg’s plan, which did not improve affordable housing at all. Also, NYCHA’s facilities are falling apart. Perhaps the government should allow the people and non-profits to come up with a plan.
Question: What exactly is neoconservatism? I didn’t understand that part of the article.

*The Wall Street Journal article required a subscription in order to read it.

Question: why even allow such a board—the NYCHA’s governing board— to be considered an “independent ‘paragovernmental entity’”? Anyone can foresee that allowing such an institution to work without a “check and balance” system could lead to a corrupt and totalitarian entity. And something similar is happening with the New York Housing Authority, which doesn’t surprise me if they don’t have to “comply with the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure”. I do agree with the three main changes that must occur in order to start solving the problem. But again, a mandatory audit, an increased budget and the change of ‘paragovernmental’ status, should only be the beginning of a larger plan. Another part of this recovery project should include a raise in salaries to make “affordable housing” even more “affordable”. Eventually, this could allow people to, not only be able to rent a house or an apartment, but also own one and still be able to safe money for retirement. But if nothing gets done at this point, then the living conditions of thousands of New Yorkers is only going to keep getting worse.

Before reading these pieces and even before watching Uneven Growth, I had no idea of the extent of the housing crisis. It is absolutely heartbreaking that this city is becoming a place where only the rich can thrive; to me, this goes against the very fiber of New York City’s being. New York City is facing a threat that just keeps growing, yet it is addressing these issues with woeful inadequacy. According to the Jacobin article, De Blasio’s inclusionary zoning will not only fail to remedy the housing crisis, but it will worsen it. This is because, the Jacobin article posits, the city government is reluctant to put people before profit. If this is true (this source is openly biased, admitting it offers a leftist perspective, so the reader should be critical) it is a downright shame, especially because low-income workers far outnumber the wealthy. Quite frankly, I think NYCHA needs to get it together. The NY Daily News article shed some light on the major challenges it faces. It seems like Mayor De Blasio has his work cut out for him – hopefully NYCHA reform will restore the Authority’s effectiveness.

In reading, “De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan,” I was first taken aback by the fact that a “minimum wage earner would have to work 139 per week” (Stein) to afford the average apartment in New York. I find myself agreeing more with the article and less with the ideas of inclusionary zoning because with an AMI so high, very few people will be able to afford said housing. This sounds more to me like a tactic for it to appear that the poorer people are being helped while still appeasing the upper class. As one man told me whilst speaking on the sidewalk the other day: “You don’t have a voice unless you have money, because money is power.” Even so, with the main problem being that there are so many homeless individuals, why would it make sense to provide housing of about $61,000? This seems counterintuitive; it won’t help those people who need it most. Is public housing the answer to these dilemmas or are the problems in that just not being discussed?

The difficulty with the homeless question is that there is no easy answer. Some of the solutions that were vilified in the Criminalising Homelessness and Hidden City readings (such as searching for family with which people could stay and bussing them out to other locations) are measures being considered in my hometown to deal with homelessness there. In that case, though, it might be an effective solution, given the cities’ differences. The problem in NYC seems to be money. Advantage seemed to work, but it crumbled under the weight of no funding. But given the successes had with subsidising rent – even in a plan that slowly phases out governmental burden – and more affordable housing, providing it may lower the number of homeless people. If they do, however, the city needs to commit to the program on a level where it won’t collapse should the state pull out. There are options out there, as Picture the Homeless has outlined, and the people interviewed in Hidden City seem to have ‘client responsibility’ in spades. Now it is to be seen what they do with it.

Question: What did you think of the measures to counteract homelessness in Criminalising Homelessness? Do you think there is an answer to the homeless question that could work across the board? What would you suggest be done?