Why ‘Affordable Housing’ in New York City Can Still Cost $3,500 a Month
The New York Times
Soaring rents and few options have made it hard for average people to live in the city. Even “affordable” units often cost too much.
This is The Housing Crunch, a five-part series on New York City’s affordable housing crisis.
For more and more people in New York City, the rent is so high that there is hardly any money left for food, child care and transportation, much less anything fun. Want to move to a cheaper apartment? Good luck finding one.
New York City does not have enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, and what it does have is increasingly unaffordable for the average person.
Consider:
Over the next few weeks, I have an ambitious goal for the Housing Crunch series: to not just explain why New York City’s housing crisis is so difficult to solve but also explore what people are doing and want to see done about it.
In the 1970s, as an economic crisis gripped the city, hundreds of thousands of residents moved away. Scores of buildings were abandoned and in states of disrepair. Today, the city has a different problem, as demand to live in New York City is overwhelming its housing stock, leading to soaring rents and gentrification. How did we get here?
