One of Christine Quinn’s signature pitches as she runs for New York City mayor is a housing plan that would create 80,000 new low-cost apartments with prices that potentially could stay below-market rate forever.
The City Council speaker’s proposal for so-called permanent affordable housing is attracting resistance from many low-cost housing advocates, who say it would make some types of buildings harder to finance and result in fewer units overall. But one of the groups has become the plan’s most active supporter. The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development has lobbied city officials on the issue and produced a series of reports warning of the dangers of losing cheap apartments, laying out the benefits of permanently affordable housing.
Jerilyn Perine, executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a nonprofit group, said Ms. Quinn’s plan could result in fewer below-market apartments and would hurt for-profit developers that build units that are all or mostly affordable because they may not be able to get as much financing. She and others said it could end up costing the city money if banks invest less money and refuse to pay for repairs to aging infrastructure.
“For a lot of developers, they’ll say, ‘Great, I won’t put any of my money in. I’ll just keep going back to the government.’ I don’t know if that’s really what we want,” she said.
Read the full article in Wall Street Journal.