Affordable housing seems to be an inevitable result in the end for many neighborhoods in Brooklyn and of all in New York city. With rising rents and a stagnating median household income, it has become difficult for many Brooklyn tenants such as the ones in Crown Heights to afford comfortable means of living. Residents also face “lazy or greedy” landlords who are rumored to plan on removing unwanted lower and working-class for those in middle class or young and affluent who can afford a much higher rent. These frustrated tenants experience several days without heat, and irritating phone conversations with landlord who don’t respond quickly to the problems. In order to secure the future of their living quarters with a better standard of living and treatment, tenants have come together, forming Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU), to dissolve their dissatisfaction. The efforts to contact the landlord politically prove the power of tenants, and may satisfy some immediate issues such as a hole in the ceiling or heating. However, those housings in the end need to be renovated completely as these buildings are already well over 50 years old. Rising rent costs and stasis median income of renters call for affordable housing as increasing numbers of households will be left rent-burdened while the demand for affordable housings continue to increase.
First, I believe that affordable housings need some sort of a manager who will receive complaints and concerns from the tenants. This person in charge should be available at least six days a week and must respond in some form of communication within two days about what will be done about the situation. Even if the issue will take a long time to resolve, the response should ensure the tenants that it will be fixed as quickly as possible. It seems that the tenants in Crown Heights does not trust the landlords that they will listen to them. And thus, in this fashion tenants of the affordable housings should be given assurances that they are being heard and something is being done about it. Second, creating commercial areas on the ground floors of affordable housings will make streets livelier and more attractive. They should also figure out some ways to put people into work, such as constructing stores that can hire workers. As seen in mayor De Blasio’s ten-year plan for five boroughs’, rent has been increasing for the past decade while median household income has stagnated. This result of rifting economic inequality and from the great recession caused numerous people out of work. Most of the money that people make are sucked up to the top 1%. Although affordable housing provides safe haven for hundreds of thousands, it is only temporally until something is done about the inequality. Last thing that I will propose in affordable housing is aesthetics. The old red-brick no longer appeals to many. By overlaying with “skins” that give a modern feel, tenants will hold pride in their living spaces and take better care of it.
Yes, many people will be dissatisfied by the construction of affordable housing, such as CHTU. Tom Angotti quotes Jacques Proudhon in this book that gentrification is like property theft. Afraid to lose what they have, people who’s about to lose their property fought back and declared, “we won’t move.” People like CHTU believe that they will lose their living spaces to someone else if something isn’t done about it. They also are afraid that construction of affordable housing will only displace them even more. In my opinion, this is simple distrust of the towns people to the government. They should have some faith that the city government is doing something good with affordable housing, instead of adding another skyscraper to the skyline. If anything, the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Program will require developers to build permanent affordable housings available at various income levels. One disadvantage of affordable housing is that it will create denser neighborhoods. This means more children, and more children means overcrowded schools. In order to provide proper education, perhaps building more schools might be a good idea too. There are so many interconnecting issues and causes that it is difficult to fix one problem without compromising another. There needs to be a lot more extensive research done on this topic to make a stronger proposal.
