City Council Launches Affordable Housing Task Force
New York City is hemorrhaging affordable housing, and the City Council is creating a task force to stop it. Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito will head up the 14-member Affordable Housing Preservation Task Force, which will work with residents, landlords and local nonprofits to ID buildings on the verge of becoming market rate. Here's the issue: from 1994 to 2012 around 250,000 affordable apartments became market rate. This problem will only get worse as units created during the Koch administration start to expire, beginning in 2017, Crain's New York reports. From that point on, the city will lose about 11,000 affordable apartments per year, on top of rent-regulated apartments, where the landlord can only raise the rent by a certain percentage. What's more, because of poor recordkeeping, the city has a hard time knowing when some landlord agreements expire. Enter the task force. By interacting directly with tenants and landlords, it can get a better idea of where the city should focus its resources. [CNY]
