State of City Address: Full of Ambition, but Light on Details

In the current context, "Affordable Housing" built for New Yorkers suffering from income inequality won't be affordable for many of them.

Di Blasio's plan will destroy the city with hideous, over-scaled high rises. It is exactly the wrong model. He doesn't know what he is doing, he is just listening to the self-serving advice of Big Real Estate. It is a destructive vision. He needs to articulate a vision of beautiful mid-rise neighborhoods of dense 5-7 story housing, not just the ugly visions of Co-Op City and Astoria Cove.

Mayor de Blasio's grand plans remind me of the saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Several of his ideas are worthwhile, but will likely not be implemented to the degree he desires.

One of these ideas for expanding affordable housing is to put a superstructure on top of the Sunnyside Rail Yards to supply 1/8 of his stated goals for 80,000 new low-income units. This proposal was shot down only hours after the mayor's speech by Gov. Cuomo, saying it was not available for that purpose. The mayor's housing aide admitted afterwards that no feasibility study had been done yet concerning Sunnyside Yards.

This shows de Blasio's persistent problem with political messaging. For him to propose a grand housing plan without talking with Gov. Cuomo about it first, or studying the matter beforehand, is bad politics, something the mayor has demonstrated considerable ability in practicing in his 13 month tenure. His aides are clueless re his liabilities.

Once many of his plans are in tatters, he may say that he was misunderstood, and that the media defeated him. This is the man who complained of a new McCarthyism by the press after he reluctantly had to fire Rachael Noerdlinger, his wife's very expensive assistant, who had severe image problems of her own. Wow.

I believe he will be lucky to finish out one term without a major scandal, much less the 2 or 3 it would take to implement even 1/4 of what he proposed yesterday.

Amazing for this ex-hippie (circa 1969) to hear the mayor of the largest city in the country boasting of a 65% DROP in marijuana arrests.

Until the archaic and unfair rent control and stabilization laws are removed from the books, NYC will continue to have a housing crisis. Unfortunately, nobody has the political will to touch that sacred cow. Poor Joe Bruno was the only one who even tried. Meanwhile, wealthy long termers continue to lie about their income and true residency to hang on to regulated apartments while living lavish lifestyles in second homes. Granted, there should be rent protections for low income tenants and seniors, but these laws are full of so many loopholes, the cheats are making it bad for everyone else.

The same I'm notified that my NYC property tax is going up $290 to over $5k/ year (on a small 1-fam house) Robin Hood deBlasio announces his grand housing scheme. At least now I know ho he is stealing from - the NYC homeowner.

Rich people unfortunately do not want others in their community. Just look at the Brooklyn Library Proposal for condos in the Heights starting at 1.5million wrapped in 114 units of affordable housing "somewhere in community board 2"
The poor door in this proposal is in another neighborhood and is a model that must not happen.

Follow the money

Delta used to run a shuttle boat from the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia to Manhattan about 20 years ago. It was awesome, but few people used it. I think that the city should revive and expand this service. When you consider that a taxi to Midtown can easily run between $30 and $50 depending on traffic, the city could run the service for $25/pp without having to subsidize it to much. Passengers get to enjoy a fabulous water view and now worries about traffic.

When Deblasio was Public Advocate he ignored ALL HPD complaints. It's embarrassing that he didn't address this? How many new HPD buildings have scaffolding around them? How many HPD new coops or condos have construction defects? Why was the buildings dept. outed in his address, but not HPD? Is it because nobody knows how HPD picks their developers?

Let's note that buildings has to be the gate keeper because there are codes that need to be enforced & rules & regulations. If buildings didn't do that that and follow regulations the real estate industry would do what ever they want.

As the city has prospered we need to build all types of residential housing as possible otherwise affordability will disappear with a healthy city as well

Why doesn't the mayor look at the equalizing the property tax burden? Has anyone else noticed that a Brooklyn Brownstone that sells for millions often has a far smaller property tax compared to homes selling in Queens or the Bronx for a fraction of the Brooklyn property. So middle/lower income homeowners are in fact subsidizing Brooklyn millionaires with what is a regressive property tax.

Still trying to figure out why NYCHA project dwellers get private parking spaces while I shovel out on Riverside Dr. Please answer that one Bill.

After Michael Bloomberg's regime, why would anyone trust the Mayor or the Department of Housing and Preservation? All of the rezoning of neighborhoods that took place under Bloomberg in Brooklyn are filled with hipster condos and their ilk. Affordable housing is the last thing on anyone's mind when it comes to Brooklyn or anywhere in New York City. Community Boards and residents from East New York, the South Bronx and the north shores of Staten Island need to fight this administration's efforts to rezone their areas. RESIST!

It's too bad that builders don't join together and refuse to build subsidized housing in order to build in NYC. With the archaic rent rules currently in place why would any sane builder want to mix luxury tenants with subsidized tenants. If I'm going to charge over $ 1,000,000 for an apartment why would I want the apartment down the hall to be "given" to a family on Welfare as a precondition to development. Crazy.
Also, DeBlasio and his ilk need to remember, visitors come to NYC to see its cultural institutions and not tenants who are being subsidized heavily by market rate tenants. End rent control and see a burst of housing activity as market rates do down for all. And for those previously rent-regulated tenants now facing market rates, it's about time that you are paying your fair share of rent.

"Economically diverse" is liberal code for more subsidized housing in neighborhoods that the renter could not otherwise afford to live. It equates with the Democrat push by Barney Frank and Frank Dodd to force banks to provide mortgages to home buyers who could not afford the homes. The result was the great recession of 2008. Don't be fooled by this socialist nonsense. It will only result in more neighborhoods turned into housing projects.

I think that it's good that de Blasio cares about the lower classes, which was hardly ever the case for either Bloomberg or Guliani. All they did was invite so much gentrification that it kicked out a number of hard working families and individuals that had been living there for generations until the prices went up and that they could no longer afford to live there. What de Blasio is doing is welcoming back such people. Does every inch of NYC have to be a playground for the rich? How about everyone who thinks that it's easy to afford market rate apartments and houses try living the life of those that need either affordable housing or rent stabilization, and then you will see why there is a need for more of this rather than less. I never did buy into this getting rid of rent control and rent stabilization would make it lower, because I hardly find that to be true let alone another theory that hardly holds any grounds for support. Many of those that live in either the affordable housing or rent stabilization aren't on the high end of the ladder, and many of them are working very hard jobs to help make ends meet in which most of it to help pay for where they live. Wouldn't you rather have them live closer where they work just like the rich, who do have that convenience? The reason why NYC still has of their housing projects when other cities took down most of theirs' is mainly because there is still a demand for them.

The mayor knows, or should, that 'poor' in NYC does not represent the same as 'middle class'. We don't need more subsidized housing for the poor; we need affordable housing for the middle class who can't afford luxury apartments and whose incomes are considered too high for the current lottery, etc. options.

Yes, once upon a time, it was possible to come to NYC, and with hard work and determination, a family could buy a small house in one of the boroughs. It can still happen to some, but not families that bought into the dream, who spent their savings paying for college tuition for their kids, who remain working in what used to be called 'blue collar' jobs in order to give their kids a step up. That's who is being left out and deserves some decent attention.

NY doesn't need more large-scale, dense housing projects, we have plenty of those for the poor; and a few that originally were meant for the middle class but have been bought &/or privatized so that rents have soared beyond middle class affordability. Unless de Blasio wants to revive Mitchell-Lama complexes; otherwise, this sounds like another bone thrown to developers, under the guise of meeting his housing goals. I don't trust it, and I think a lot of New Yorkers will feel the same.

He calls for 11k units over Sunnyside Yards to be "permanently affordable"... Exactly how? Building over rail years are very very expensive. We've already seen in other large complexes like that - money for capital improvements goes lacking... I've seen this movie before.

The mayor will discover, if he has not done so already, that it is impossible to build "enough" subsidized housing. The more that is built, the greater the demand will be in the future, and idea of increasing density without planning for infrastructure and related services is at least questionable. As another comment states, "It is a bottomless pit."It seems that Mr. DeBlasio does not think that John Lindsay did enough in the 1960s to help bring New York to its knees and perhaps the current mayor thinks that he needs to finish the job.

As a child and adolescent growing up in the Rockaways, I began to see the results of dumping large amounts of public housing in a community without the political power to either resist it or to mitigate its effects. This building and increase in density provided a drag that it has taken literally decades to begin to recover from.

I hope that some in city and state government will come to their senses about proposals such as these, but I find as I grow older that I am never disappointed in underestimating governmental accomplishments.

Mayor de Blasio pays $2,900 in annual property taxes on his Park Slope townhouse, which is assessed for $1.4 million. His tax rate is 0.22%.

In The Bronx, a property owner of a typical house that is worth $350,000, pays around 1% of the market value (almost 5 times higher than what the mayor pays), or $3,500. Talk about unfair.

If the mayor really cared about "fairness," he would call for a reassessment of all 1-4 family houses in New York City. To mitigate the shock of the increases, there could be a 10-year phase-in.

Have not heard from him on this issue. I guess he doesn't want to pay 1% of his property value ($14,000), which is the same rate as the guy in The Bronx.

I assume the mayor knows (or maybe he doesn't) that the vast majority of rent-stabilized tenants pay very close to market rent. In some instances, the legal rent is higher than the market rent, so the landlord charges the legal rent but reimburses the tenant for the difference.

For every Crown Heights, where rents are soaring, there are dozens or hundreds of neighborhoods in The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, where they are not.

And rent control virtually brought New York City to to its knees in the 1970's and 1980's with decay, abandonment and arson of rental apartment buildings because the landlords' expenses exceeded income. But I'll save that for another day.

Really? Hundreds of thousands MORE apartments, resulting in "denser" neighborhoods?

That sounds awful.

Surely there must be another way. I don't think this is what any of us wanted, not even the most progressive among us. I'm not sure what the answer is, but density is one of the biggest assaults on quality of life that New Yorkers have to deal with. I had hoped the exit of Bloomberg and his pro-development cronyism would signal a relief from this relentless obsession with growth for the sake of growth, at the expense of quality of life. Now it looks like we are going to have relentless growth for the sake of diversity. And the results will look just as bad if not worse.

I don't need, want, or approve of the "transformation" of my neighborhood. I moved here because I like it the way it is. My only misgiving is that the density continues to increase. Please don't mess with it anymore.

Considering all the problems facing the city, focusing on housing and Rikers is revealing. The problem of housing needs attention, but it's a bottomless pit. Rikers needs attention but spend billions and it will still be a violent place as there are a good number of naughty people there. When you focus on making a dent in unsolvable problems you have become a lame duck.

no one can afford the housing prices in NYC any more. Those of us who bought a long time ago are lucky. If I were starting my career now, I would relocate somewhere else. I would have no choice. Have you looked at the prices for the smallish units in some of these new buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn? Even the budgets of the 1% would be stretched. Pure insanity. And as a bonus you get free of charge a decrepit transit system that rarely runs normally on weekends and goes into shock on cold or snow days like today.

Affordable housing is middle-class warfare. Take from the slightly-have-more's and give to the slightly-have-less's. All this will do is flatten the middle class completely and have no effect on the two extremes: the very rich and the very poor. When combined with the federal government's stealth tax system where Mitt Romney pays a 14% income tax rate and almost half of the country pays nothing, affordable housing plans are just one more assault on the upper-middle class.

deblasio should enjoy his remaining 3 years in office. If New Yorkers want him they can have him. He'll make the city what it was before Mayors Guilani and Blomberg- a jungle. His views on how a city should be are passe, and bring troubles. Instead work to get more businesses and jobs, then the people can make their own decisions. you wanted him and you got him. Maybe he could run for president in 2020 and make the entire country his utopia.

I love the plan but... I own two four family homes in the East New York Section of Brooklyn. We have been subjected to double digit increases on all our tax bills. I simply can't keep raising my tenants rent can I? The small property owner is struggling and nobody seems to have a plan to help. I just question where the Mayor thinks he is going to get all the money he needs for all his great ideas. I can assure you that small property owners are very nervous all over the city wondering what kind of increases we will see.

As part of his call for stronger rent regulations, will Mayor de Blasio reduce the rent on his luxury house, currently pocketing him close to $5,000 per month?

Instead of doubling down on the decades old, emergency price control system - one that ignores the fundamental rules of supply and demand - perhaps the mayor should endorse a universal tax to fund an affordable housing program. Just like Medicare, food stamps and the like, all - including tenant advocates and renters - should be required to help pay so that their fellow citizens can enjoy the right to housing.

Ending these WWII era price controls would free millions of dollars from the city's and state's budgets currently dedicated to oversight and enforcement. That, along with the commensurate rise in property values (and taxes) from reform, would allow thousands of new affordable units to be built each year, if the city allows it.

Mandatory inclusionary zoning has failed to increase affordability, or even supply of housing, everywhere it has been tried, including for decades in San Francisco. All such regulations do is create a small number of "lottery winners," and the housing it does encourage is, obviously, at the high-end, as it must be to subsidize the "lottery winners."

De Blasio is right to support increased density all over the city, however ultimately his reflexive anti-development instincts will get the better of him, and nothing much will happen.

The Times is also right to point out that NYC really doesn't have a functioning housing market, with half or so of the apartments rent-controlled or stabilized. Obviously, this creates two things: higher market prices and poorly maintained buildings.

The only approach that will work is the least likely to be enacted - massively increased development, relaxing of the rent-control laws or their outright repeal, and possibly higher taxes on non-owner occupied, higher-end condos. Precisely zero of that is likely, so rents will just keep going up, it seems.

This will be a major NIMBY fight. The rich and wealthy may not want low income housing in their neighborhoods (unless there is a special entrance to the neighborhood). Of course, the working middle class gets squeezed, too rich to get the affordable housing, too poor to afford to pay market rates. So the middle class working people are forced to move out of the City to find affordable housing and decent schools. And the tale of two cities continues.