A new report shows wide disparities in the amount of affordable housing built in different New York City Council districts — with more going up in predominantly lower-income Black and Latino neighborhoods.
The third annual NYC Housing Tracker from the advocacy organization New York Housing Conference found that the city produced 14,227 units of affordable housing last year, which was the highest yearly number in recent decades. But it also revealed similar patterns as the first two reports did, including a small number of communities bearing the brunt of producing enough units to relieve the city’s housing crisis.
Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference, said the report seeks to hold city councilmembers accountable for how they use their approval powers over land use decisions. She said proposed housing projects were rejected based on the principle of councilmember “deference,” where local lawmakers effectively have final say over whether projects advance.
“We thought it was important to start tracking who’s saying yes to housing and who’s saying no,” said Fee. “It’s very clear that some neighborhoods are doing a lot and others have really been left off the hook for years of not producing any affordable housing. And it’s no surprise that the disparities in affordable housing production also track with pretty big differences in income and race by district.”
The top 10 districts that built the most affordable housing each produced 600 or more new units in 2023, according to the report. Those include Brooklyn Councilmember Shanaha Hanif’s District 39, which came in 10th with 622 units, and Queens Councilmember Francisco Moya’s District 21, which came in second with 1,031 units.
Last year’s top-producing districts were located in Central Brooklyn, the Bronx, Northern Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn and Queens near the waterfront, and eastern Queens. On average, their populations were more than 70% Black or Latino, while those of the 10 least-producing districts were less than 30% Black or Latino. The average median income for the top 10 districts was about $67,000 a year, or $20,000 less than that for the bottom 10 districts, the report found.
Additionally, the least-productive districts built less than 10 affordable units each last year, according to the New York Housing Conference. Some of those districts were in high-density areas with little available land, such as Manhattan’s core, while others were in low-density areas, including in Staten Island, Northern and Central Queens and Southern Brooklyn.
Council District 6 on the Upper West Side recorded negative housing production, losing more housing as a result of merged units, the report found.
Councilmember Rafael Salamanca, who represents District 17 in the Bronx, had the top-producing district citywide. More than 1,260 affordable units were built there last year, as many as the bottom 28 districts combined, per the New York Housing Conference.
Salamanca said he’s made approving new affordable housing projects a priority from the start of his tenure.
“There’s NIMBYism throughout communities not just in the Bronx but in other parts of the city, and I think those councilmembers have to just push back [on] that noise,” he said in an interview.
The report includes recommendations for how the city can build more affordable housing, such as by increasing capital funding to subsidize more units and creating tax incentives for developers. It found that most of the new affordable housing built last year relied on the now-expired 421a tax break, which Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature recently replaced with a new tax break.
Also recommended were zoning changes, especially in low-density districts where more land might be available for future residential use.