High-Rise Anxiety in New York

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/opinion/high-rise-anxiety-in-new-york.html

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Mayor Bill de Blasio is racing to save New York as a reasonably affordable city to live in. It’s a hard enough job as it is, made harder by two significant obstacles — two unpredictable, hard-to-manage phenomena.

Call one of them anxiety, and the other Andrew.

“Anxiety” may be too mild a word for the feeling across the city — better call it dread — that gentrification and displacement are unstoppable forces. The mayor’s big idea is to rezone neighborhoods and require developers to include permanently affordable apartments as part of the deal. That plan, combined with strong rent regulations and tenant protections, should be enough, Mr. de Blasio argues, but many people fear that he’s wrong.

The City Council passed the mayor’s mandatory inclusionary housing plan, strongly endorsing that principle. But projects in Council members’ backyards are apparently another story: A Council committee has unanimously rejected the first development proposed under the plan, for Inwood, in Upper Manhattan. Half of its 355 apartments would have been affordable for moderate-income families. But the local councilman, Ydanis Rodriguez, opposed it, siding with constituents who feared that its rents were too high for the neighborhood and that it would hasten gentrification. The Council deferred to Mr. Rodriguez.

Which was too bad, because now the developer will be able to put up a building on the same lot with no affordable apartments. Left to itself, gentrification finds a way.

That result does not bode well for a small but 100 percent affordable development in Sunnyside, Queens, proposed by the city’s oldest nonprofit developer. Though still in the early stages of public review, the project has run into the not-in-my-backyard buzz saw of Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who has pre-emptively denounced it.

Mr. de Blasio makes a sound argument that the city must try to build its way to affordability, but he has not persuaded everybody. He and his aides may have a handle on policy, but in mastering the political art of calming fears and building consensus, they have a long road ahead.

Then there is the challenge of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who last year torpedoed the mayor’s deal to extend a long-term tax-abatement program called 421-a, which the city used for years to build thousands of affordable apartments. Mr. Cuomo refused to support it because it didn’t require developers to pay union-level wages. The program expired in January, and has not been replaced.

Now there is a possible deal to revive it, outlined in a one-page memo drafted this month after secret talks between Mr. Cuomo’s office and representatives of developers and construction unions. It says developers of affordable housing projects have to pay construction workers $65 an hour in Manhattan below 96th Street, and $50 an hour in prime waterfront areas of Brooklyn and Queens. That $50 wage would be made possible by something very strange: a direct state subsidy of $15 an hour. It’s not clear how that would work or where the money would come from, or why hard hats’ wages deserve a public subsidy that no other industry gets, or how this would strengthen unions, which was the reason Mr. Cuomo upended 421-a in the first place.

Mr. Cuomo said last week that there was no deal yet to revive 421-a, despite “a number of ideas floating around.” The state of limbo is his fault, not Mr. de Blasio’s. New York City has made admirable progress on the mayor’s plan to build or preserve 200,000 units over a decade. To keep up the pace, Mr. de Blasio is going to have to make a better case to win over worried New Yorkers in gentrifying neighborhoods and to overcome the objections of prickly Council members. He could also use some constructive cooperation from the governor.