LMDC To Help Fund Construction of Downtown Housing

By JULIA LEVY Staff Reporter of the Sun

July 22, 2003

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will allocate $50 million in federal funds to building new, affordable housing downtown, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday.

The money will allow private developers to build about 1,500 market-rate apartments and about 300 "affordable" apartments, which will be rented at sub-market rates to families earning between $50,000 and $85,000.

"This program will make it easier for hundreds of hard-working New Yorkers who want to settle downtown to find an affordable place to live, build a bright, stable future for their families, while simultaneously rebuilding and revitalizing Lower Manhattan," Mr. Pataki said.

Mr. Bloomberg called affordable housing "fundamental to New York's prosperity," and said, "The investments we are making today will help to create the kind of Lower Manhattan we want * a vibrant and diverse 24/7 community for people to live, work, and play in."

Part of the $50 million will come from money left over from the LMDC's residential grant program, and the rest will come out of the approximately $1.2 billion left from the Department of Housing and Urban Development's community block grant to the LMDC.

The money will subsidize affordable housing tied to the Liberty Bond program, which is jointly administered by the state and the city and provides tax-exempt bonds for the construction and renovation of commercial and residential buildings.

The director of Good Jobs New York, Bettina Damiani, said "nobody's going to argue with funds to help create affordable housing in Lower Manhattan," but she said it's too little, too late. "It seems there's a lot of slapping each other on the back about what a great job they're doing, but there's so much more that needs to be done," she said, calling the 300 or so units that would be created under the plan "not even a drop in the bucket."

Not everyone thought the program was insufficient.

The director of New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, Michael Schill, said the initiative would help diversify Lower Manhattan.

He said the program is a good first step toward fulfilling the mayor's goal to build 10,000 new housing units in Lower Manhattan. He said the city should work on "fulfilling the plans that are already on the boards" instead of launching new affordable housing initiatives.

A Manhattan Institute scholar, Howard Husock, who is generally skeptical of affordable housing programs, said this program is "not a normal, standard affordable housing program" in that the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan is full of symbolism and emotions.

But he said the program is not like the residential grant program the LMDC successfully used to convince jittery New Yorkers to move back to the neighborhoods around ground zero after September 11, and called it "somewhat ill-advised."

"There's frankly a kind of central planning quality to that that seems well-intentioned but impractical," he said. "I think this is symbolic politics and not good planning policy."