‘You Can’t Lease Them Anyway’: The Most Common Affordable NYC Apartments Struggle To Find Tenants The rent is too damn high for a lot of tenants in New York City — even in many of its income-restricted apartments. Developers have lamented that the expiration of the 421-a tax abatement program has prevented them from building new housing, but the majority of the income-restricted units developed under the most recent iteration of the program have been difficult to fill, developers and city officials say. “One of the real truths that's been spoken is that the affordability that was provided under the 421-a that we had is too high,” Tricia Dietz, assistant commissioner for housing incentives at the NYC Department for Housing Preservation and Development, said at Bisnow’s Multifamily Development and Investment conference last month. 
Nearly two-thirds of the income-restricted units built between 2017 and 2020 using the Affordable New York program, 421-a's successor, were reserved for those making up to 130% of the city's area median income, according to a 2022 report from city Comptroller Brad Lander. That means those units… Read the full story here. | 
