Who Will Make Social Housing Affordable?

Affordable housing is supposed to be a win-win situation. Landlords get incentives to rent out some or all of their units at rent-stabilized prices. At first, everything is fine. Then time marches on, and the buildings start to need repairs. Social housing landlords, who collect less money in rents than landlords who rent out their units at full market price, do not have enough money to make all the necessary repairs, so they must pick and choose which ones to make. As a result, everyone, landlords and tenants alike, is stressed out about the deteriorating conditions in the building, and no one has enough money to fix the situation. As a result, New York’s public housing developments live up to their reputation as miserable places where the residential units are barely inhabitable and where landlords and tenants openly antagonize each other. A recent opinion piece on the City Limits website describes the problem and outlines possible ways to make social housing affordable for both landlords and tenants. If you want to contribute to New York’s supply of social housing but do not want to be forced into the role of a slumlord, contact a Bronx real estate attorney.

Welcome to the Unaffordable Housing Treadmill

In a recent editorial on the City Limits website, Howard Slatkin and Sarah Watson describe the dismal state of social housing in New York City. Even in rent-stabilized units, rents increase more quickly than tenants were prepared to handle, and even with the increased rents, landlords cannot afford the routine maintenance the buildings need, and they certainly cannot afford the major upgrades that keep decades-old buildings livable. These major upgrades usually require the landlords to fund them with loans, and the landlords cannot always afford these loans.

The authors believe that the problem lies in the initial plans for these social housing developments. The developers conceive the projects, and the city approves them, based on short-sighted plans. The whole enterprise seems financially sustainable for the first decade or two, and at first the tenants can afford the rents, and the units remain in satisfactory condition. Eventually, though, the cracks begin to show, but the managers of the enterprises just keep kicking the problem down the road, postponing the repairs and loan applications so that it can be the job of future managers to deal with them. Slatkin and Watson recall the period in the 1970s, where numerous public housing landlords abandoned their projects, leaving a dystopia of derelict buildings that entered the popular imagination as the urban jungle of New York in the 1970s.

A popular approach to the problem has been nonprofit ownership of public housing projects, but most of these cannot afford proper upkeep either, because of shortsighted plans. The authors propose that the solution is better planning of social housing projects from the outset, and the preservation of federal programs such as Medicaid and SNAP that free up tenants’ funds to pay rent.

Schedule a Confidential Consultation With a Bronx Real Estate Attorney

A real estate lawyer can help you if you are struggling financially as a social housing landlord.  Contact Cavallo & Cavallo in the Bronx, New York to set up a consultation.

Source:

citylimits.org/opinion-nycs-antisocial-housing-problem/