I saw this paragraph stuck in an interesting story about how the city will save some of the most decrepit of the public housing buildings;
New York City public housing includes some 178,000 apartments in 340 projects made up of 2,600 buildings. It comprises 2,500 acres of real estate, a city within the city. The city itself has valued it at a staggering $4.3 billion.
The author, Howard Husock then goes on to make a good point about Mayor Bloomberg\’s new public-private partnership to save some of the buildings:
It is foolish to adopt an ironclad policy freezing all that real estate in place — especially when much of the city\’s public housing stock is under-occupied (more bedrooms than tenants who need them) and many of its sites stand on valuable real estate, to which private commercial developers might be drawn.
We don’t need any more “public-private” partnerships where private companies get the profit and the public gets the shaft.
You wouldn’t happen to be, or to work for, a real estate developer, would you, Lorenzo?
No, I don’t work for a real estate developer nor do I happen to be one. I am, however, suspicious of anyone who would condemn all developers, as if being called a developer was a dirty word. There are many, many examples of where New York has been enhanced by the work that developers do.
What I am concerned about is affordable housing. But the disappearance of affordable housing is not solely the work of developers. In many cases, the prospect for building affordable housing is squashed by the mountain of rent and building laws that make those projects impossible without government assistance.
What are they talking about “more bedrooms than tenants who need them”? Every single person I know who lives in public housing has a relative in their living room or has their kids (teenagers, even) sharing a room. Not to mention there is a ten year wait list to get into public housing.