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May 22, 2007
CITY LIMITS INVESTIGATES HOUSING: HIGH COSTS INTERFERE WITH PLAN
In its inaugural issue, CLI examines how fiscal realities are shaping the city's affordable-housing buildout. This synopsis points to some of the ways new units' size, quality and genuine affordability could be affected.
By Jarret Murphy
This article was summarized in yesterday's edition of amNY (link and our comments here).
In December of 2002, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his first affordable housing plan, the new Yankees and Mets stadiums existed only in the dreams of owners George Steinbrenner and Fred Wilpon. A walk along the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront would show plenty of development potential – but no new high rise apartment buildings. The phrase "Atlantic Yards" had yet to enter the city's popular lexicon. And it wasn't until eight days after the mayor unveiled his five-year, $3 billion, 65,000-unit housing plan that the first designs for the Freedom Tower were released.
...affordable housing developers, designers, and analysts say that, coupled with swelling land prices, the rising cost of construction threatens the Bloomberg plan. "Construction costs are killing us," says Paul Freitag, an architect with Jonathan Rose Companies, a builder developing several affordable housing projects in Harlem and the Bronx. "I think it's particularly tough in the case of affordable housing where you're looking for public subsidies to fill the gap."
NoLandGrab: "Atlantic Yards" is not only entering the popular lexicon, it has become the prime example for nearly everything bad and bloated in the current wave of development in NYC.
Forest City is known in the industry as one of the few development companies that can wait out unfavorable market conditions. A large majority of Atlantic Yards's affordable housing component remains in Phase II of the development, making it vulnerable to substantial delays.
Posted by lumi at May 22, 2007 9:28 AM