STATISTICS
New York City
Population
1990: 7.32 million
2000: 8.01 million
2010: 8.18 million
2020: 8.34 million
Number of Homeless People in New York City Shelters Each Night
1990 (Jan): 20,995 total, including 11,806 persons in families and 6,747 children
2000 (Jan): 22,955 total, including 16,053 persons in families and 8,863 children
2010 (Jan): 39,066 total, including 31,103 persons in families and 16,346 children
2020 (Jan): 62,679 total, including 43,669 persons in families and 21,886 children
However, the US Department of Housing and Development believes this number to be closer to 80,000, which reflects the number of people staying overnight in the city’s emergency shelters every day.
How many people in the city are considered to be living below the poverty line by local standards?
1990: 1.38 million New Yorkers, or 19.3%
2000: 1.67 million New Yorkers, or 21.2%
2010: 1.54 million New Yorkers, or 18.8%
2019: 1.48 million New Yorkers, or 17.8%
Unemployment Rates
1990: 5.4%
2000: 4.5%
2010: 8.6%
2019: 3.9%
2020: 10.1%Over the course of the NYC fiscal year 2020, there were 122,926 different homeless adults and children sleeping in the New York City municipal shelter system. This includes more than 39,300 homeless children.
Ownership Rate in the Housing Market
2018: 33% (in the five boroughs)
Average Buying Price per Square Meter in 2020
Manhattan: $1,657 per ft2 (€15,323 per m2)
Average Annual Income in 2020
Per household: $63,900 (€55,200)
Per individual: $39,800 (€33,900)
Under Section 42 of New York’s Social Services Law, a person deemed homeless is defined as “an undomiciled person who is unable to secure permanent and stable housing without special assistance.”1
Every night in New York City, 83,000 men, women, and children—enough to fill a building four times the size of Madison Square Garden—find themselves on the streets, in shelters or other city-funded, nonpermanent housing. But of the city’s homeless population of 83,000, only 4,000, or approximately 5 percent, live on the streets, most while dealing with significant health or mental health issues.2 While less visible, people in shelters make up the majority of New York City’s homeless population. According to a report by the Coalition for the Homeless, of the 55,500 people 3 who sleep in shelters each night, 62 percent are families and more than 30 percent are children. Data from the NYC Department of Education show that as many as 130,000 school-age children experienced homelessness at some point during the 2018–19 school year,4 representing more than one in every ten children in the city. How is it acceptable that, each day, 18,000 children wake up in a shelter in one of the wealthiest cities in the United States?
In February 2021, New York City shelters housed 40 percent more New Yorkers, including 70 percent more school-aged children, than ten years ago. The NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS) directly attributes this steep rise in homelessness to the city’s affordable housing crisis5—the result of increasing rents, decreasing wages, a significant loss of existing rent-stabilized apartments, and a lack of creation of new rent-stabilized apartments. While housing is considered affordable if a third or less of a household’s income is applied to rent, affordable housing in New York City is developed by calculating a geographic region’s Area Median Income (AMI), which is based on the area’s income distribution. In 2021, the AMI for the New York City region was reported as $107,400, a number out of reach for a majority of New York City households. According to HUD, in 2016 “a family of three ... could afford to pay approximately $613 per month in rent and utilities—a figure well under half of the city’s 2015 median gross rent of $1,317.”6 Today those numbers have diverged even more as rents continue to climb, with median rents hovering around $3,249 per month in Manhattan, $2,704 per month in Brooklyn, $2,700 per month in Queens.7
Eviction moratoriums put into effect during the coronavirus pandemic protected many families from losing their housing during the crisis, leading to a significant decline in the percentage of families in shelters. However, the looming expiration of these moratoriums could have a catastrophic impact on the city’s homeless population: 33 percent of New York metro area renters with children state that they have not paid or have deferred rent payments in recent months, and 66 percent of low-income renters with children report slight or no confidence in making their next rental payment on time. The impact of this impending situation is not just the imminent loss of housing for families; research8 also shows that individuals who experience homelessness as children are significantly more at risk of reentering the homeless system as adults.
In conjunction with rising real-estate prices citywide, New York City’s housing crisis is aggravated by the loss of formerly affordable housing stock. Between 1994 and 2012, the city suffered a net loss of approximately 150,000 rent-stabilized apartments. Today, approximately one million rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments remain. New legislation has sought to manage the rate of rent increases in rent-stabilized apartments, while also including a provision that increases the availability of these units to those in need; tenants whose income grows to exceed the threshold of the benefit are allowed to stay without penalty or increase in rent outside the permitted annual percentage. Furthermore, affordable units created through the city’s 421-a program, which gives real-estate developers tax exemptions for including a certain percentage of affordable housing in new construction, do not create permanent affordability due to the existence of fifteen- to twenty-five-year rent control limits. Finally, as owners age and seek to capture high returns on New York City real estate, condos and co-op boards throughout the city increasingly opt out of their tax-incentivized, limited-equity status.
The scale of New York City’s homelessness crisis is vast but, despite a homeless population the size of a small American city, those experiencing homelessness are largely hidden from view. The city’s “right to shelter” policy, the reluctant result of consent decrees reached between 1979 and 2008, has created a patchwork system of hotels, privately owned residential buildings, and Tier II New York State-certified shelters9 run either by nonprofits or the city itself. In 2018, nearly $2 billion of the city’s homeless services budget of $3 billion went toward these impermanent solutions—approximately $16,000 per shelter occupant per year. These temporary housing alternatives and additional supportive programs are not enough to help stabilize families or reduce homelessness—more than half of the individuals entering DHS shelters in 2019 had experienced a prior episode of homelessness before. Initiatives that prioritize immediate “shelter” over long-term “homes” result in programs that have effectively transformed temporary stay facilities into de facto temporary houses, as hotels and shelters have become many families’ place of residence for eighteen months on average.
Meanwhile, incentive- and market-driven proposals by the state, the city, and private developers have resulted in the construction of alternative housing projects that exclude homeless families, instead creating residences that are more akin to hotels and shelters than actual homes. Alternative housing models, including single-room occupancy units, co-living apartments, and micro-housing have been introduced into New York’s rental market with no significant impact on rising housing costs and with no concern for the most vulnerable and at-risk population: families with young children. To make matters worse, the NYC Housing Authority’s limited public housing stock is plagued by the concentration of poverty and by substandard living conditions across its properties. Citywide voucher programs, which encourage long-term dependability on government assistance, have found success with seniors but less with other groups of people experiencing homelessness. Furthermore, when families gain access to this form of assistance, they are often unable to find landlords who are willing to accept their housing vouchers, pushing them back to the shelter system once again. In seeking to address the growing and interrelated crises of affordability and homelessness, New York City and State agencies acknowledge the challenges created by a large number of units leaving the affordable housing pool as more cooperatives convert to market rate and properties built with 421-a tax credits begin to reach the term limits of their affordability restrictions. This exodus includes units created by the single most successful long-term family-oriented housing policy the country has ever seen: New York State’s 1955 Mitchell-Lama Program, which financed the development of more than 150,000 affordable units between 1955 and 1978. Today, the units that remain are the last bastion of affordable home ownership in New York City. And it is not a far-fetched idea to revive and modernize family-oriented housing programs that provide housing security to low-income New Yorkers. The city certainly has the resources to do so.
Alternative Equity Models in the Development and Preservation of Long-Term, Deeply Affordable Housing
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) stated in 2020 that one out of every four people experiencing homelessness in the United States did so in either New York City or Los Angeles and stated that a majority of New York City’s homeless population were people in families with children.10 This situation has the potential to be exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken a heavy toll on a city where, even before the pandemic, as many as 1.5 million people lived below the poverty line. City programs, aimed at addressing the “right to shelter,” create a fragile and imperfect safety net of temporary shelters for those without permanent stable housing but do not address the greatest contributor to homelessness in the city: long-term affordability.
In recent years, the city has attempted a variety of models to address affordability, including the development of affordable housing, tax-based financial incentives, voucher programs, and a bevy of alternative housing models that attempt to reimagine our collective understanding of comfort under the misguided notion that square footage drives the cost of housing in NYC. Yet, scattered throughout the city are the remnants and legacy of the single initiative that had the greatest impact on sustainable affordable housing in the city: the Mitchell-Lama Program. Conceived as a limited profit program, Mitchell-Lama combined and directed many of the same tools that the city and state have access to and deploy to less effect today: low-interest loans, tax abatements, and direct subsidies. The result of this program was the creation of more than 150,000 long-term affordable housing units between 1955 and 1978, many of which remain affordable more than sixty-five years later.
Mitchell-Lama’s success, like that of the Limited Dividend program of the 1920s,11 was based on the program’s ability to create an economic model that disincentivized the utilization of housing as an investment tool by stabilizing costs and returns for both the homeowner and the developer. The program resulted in limited equity co-ops, a resale-restricted homeownership model where a small down payment and a monthly service charge afford residents the rights of shareholders who, when they move out, sell their unit back at the same price or at a marginally adjusted price, ultimately creating stable homes and communities.
Two such projects, Co-op City and Twin Parks, each in the Bronx, have remained bastions of affordability in the city. A two-bedroom apartment in Co-op City for income qualified applicants costs only about $24,75012—roughly half of the approximately $48,000 the city spends on housing a three-person family in its shelter system. By taking the cost of shelter out of the equation, co-op residents can focus on building community, earning an education, developing careers, and saving toward retirement—all factors that can help keep them from entering or reentering homelessness in the future.
A modern version of Mitchell-Lama could allow existing buildings to opt in to the program, with similar incentives for bonds, tax breaks, access to low-interest loans for renovations, and direct subsidies for maintenance or housing assistance. The program could work at a smaller scale, adjusted to buildings with as few as four units to spur community-led and resident-owner-led infill development. It could work through the support of alternative lenders, including nonprofits and crowd-sourced investment vehicles, and it could reframe land ownership through the use of long-term leases, in lieu of land dispositions for city-owned properties, as a way to ensure permanent affordability. Together, these policy mechanisms could offer a pathway to expanding affordable housing across the city through preservation, conversion, and development. The question, then, becomes: What role do planning, urban design, and architecture play in supporting these initiatives?
From 1966 to 1973, the most ambitious of New York City’s cooperative developments, Co-op City, rose on undeveloped marshland along the Hutchinson River in the Bronx. A tower-in-the-park complex comprised of thirty-five megaliths ranging from twenty-four to thirty-three stories, Co-op City consists of 15,300 apartments housing more than 50,000 people. The towers, in the form of chevrons, Xs, and combinations of Xs, allow for a variety of unit types, supporting a broad and diverse community. The cruciform floor plans, favored by the architect Herman Jessor and reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, also make for highly livable apartments with a window to every room—a blessing for many families arriving from dark and airless tenements. Building footprints occupy only 20 percent of the overall site, the remainder of which takes the form of green spaces, athletic fields, buffers, paths, and streets. The buildings, pulled back from the streets and indifferently oriented to the open spaces, lack a human scale but also offer an ambiguity of ownership that supports a reading of the project as truly open and public.
Contemporaneously built, Twin Parks explores a radically different approach to the creation of affordable housing in the Bronx. Its 2,250 units were developed throughout multiple noncontiguous parcels in the early 1970s. The infill strategy pursued by the New York State Urban Development Corporation engaged the services of rising architects in the city, including Richard Meier, James Polshek, and Lo-Yi Chan, among others. The developments managed to integrate small-scale, multiunit buildings, typically less than six stories in height, into the neighboring community context, while introducing new neighborhood amenities including commercial spaces, gardens, and courtyards.
Both approaches have had their challenges. Co-op City met its critics in Jane Jacobs and the thousands of daily commuters along I-95 who have mischaracterized the project as an example of urban renewal or slum dwellings. Meanwhile, the success of the infill strategy employed in Twin Parks was jeopardized by the management of its public spaces, which were neglected in the late 1970s and early 1980s, succumbing to the same pressures felt by the rest of New York City: the destabilization of economic, social, and demographic equity. Yet, each project has offered a glimpse of the long-term opportunities made possible and sustained by the Mitchell-Lama program.
In mid-2020, The New York Times noted that, “since 2013, there have been more than 25 million applications submitted for roughly 40,000 [affordable] units,”13 meaning that less than one in 600 qualifying applicants will have access to affordable housing through the city’s lottery system. The pandemic has further exposed a mounting crisis of housing affordability in New York City, one that, if left unabated, could plunge millions into homelessness. It is time we look back to the ambitions and successes of the Mitchell-Lama program to build a framework of housing with proven long-term affordability.
Images:
“Our Homeless Need Housing Now”: marchers at the protest outside the Republican National Convention, New York City, 2004
“Housing Is a Human Right”: protest banner outside the Republican National Convention, New York City, 2004
Twin Parks, a social housing project within a “community context”
The New York State Senate, Legislation, Section 42 of the Homeless Housing and Assistance Program, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/SOS/42 (all URLs accessed in August 2021).
The Bowery Mission, “The Bowery Mission,” https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/.
The numbers of estimated homeless per night (83,000) and the numbers of homeless accounted for in the NYC shelter system (55,000) are different as the shelter system numbers do not include those individuals who are on the streets, doubling up in temporary housing situations, or otherwise unable to receive housing in the shelter system.
Advocates for Children of New York, “New Data Show Number of NYC Students who are Homeless Topped 100,000 for Fourth Consecutive Year,” October 28, 2019, https://www.advocatesforchildren.org/ node/1403; David Brand, “NYC Has a Family Homelessness Crisis: Who are the Families?,” City Limits, December 10, 2019, https:// citylimits.org/2019/12/10/nyc-has-a-familyhomelessness-crisis-who-are-the-families/.
NYC Department of Homeless Services, “Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City,” https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dhs/about/tide.page.
The City of New York, “Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City,” 2017, https://content.manhattan.edu/csfe-files/turning-the-tide-on-homelessness_mayordiblasios_plan_march-2017.pdf.
Sarah Paynter, “Here’s where NYC’s real estate market stands right now,” New York Post, July 20, 2021, https://nypost.com/article/nyc-real-estate-market-housingprices/.
Family Homelessness Coalition, “Facts about Homelessness,” https://fhcnyc.org/the-facts/.
Tier II shelters are those which have been certified by New York State and which also provide on-site social services to occupants. These shelters are typically run by nonprofit organizations in privately owned buildings and operate under contracts with the city or are directly run by the city itself. See “The Dynamics of Family Homelessness in New York City,” https://www.icphusa.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/07/Shelter-DynamicsFinal07819.pdf.
" The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “The 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress,” January 2021, https://www.huduser.gov/ portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2020-AHARPart-1.pdf.
A precursor to the Mitchell-Lama program, the Limited Dividend Company Act, as utilized by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), pioneered the concept of cooperative housing.
Co-op City, “Real Estate Advertisement Co-op City,” https://coopcitynyc.com/img/apply/apartments_residential_sales_ad.pdf.
Matthew Haag, “25 Million Applications:The Scramble for N.Y.C. Affordable Housing,”The New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nyc-affordable-housing-lottery.html.