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affordable housing

Finding Affordable Housing Becoming a "Creative" Challenge

Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 04:51pm
Submitted by Jonathan Sills

Gorilla Coffee at Fifth Avenue and Park Place in Brooklyn's Park Slope is filled day and night with hipster-looking folk sipping weapons-grade java and tapping away peacefully on their mac laptops in spite of the noisy, punk-rock soundtrack. On the very rare occasion that we are both in Park Slope during the day and at liberty to stroll around, my wife and I often wonder what all these people do for a living in order to spend their lives sitting in a coffee shop. Many, we figured were trust-fund babies, the others, we thought, must be self-employed, you know, "creative types."

Well, figures in an article titled Brooklyn's 'Creative Crescent' In Danger of A Drought in today's New York Observer, prove us to have been right, well, partially anyway. Apparently, "Park Slope ranks the No. 1 most creative neighborhood in the borough with 3,500 independently employed designers and independent artists in residence..." ahead of Williamsburg and BoCoCa (Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens). These people are so prevalent in fact, that the Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation (BEDC) refers to northern and eastern Brooklyn as the "Creative Crescent."

However, the point of the article was not point out just how many people work out of the borough's coffee shops, but that seeing them all there all day everyday tapping away may become a thing of the past, and soon. Understanding that artists and other self-employed people are often at the vanguard of colonizing new areas for residential uses, like parts of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the BEDC is concerned that rising property values and prices in northern and eastern Brooklyn will force these people to move elsewhere in the city to find affordable living and working accommodation.

The article quotes one performance artist who says, "I used to live in Cobble Hill, then I was priced out and moved to Fort Greene. Now, I've been priced out again so I'm moving to Bed-Stuy."

The issue of affordability and a diverse mix of uses, building types, populations and retail in a neighborhood was certainly one that Jane Jacobs understood well, and it is an issue that is becoming serious in the minds of many New Yorkers today also as property prices, for both purchasing and renting, continue to increase, or at least, remain high compared to salaries.

Do you think that the city government has a responsibility to make sure New Yorkers of all types, working in all kinds of industries can still live in the city, or is it an individual's responsibility to make sure they make enough money to afford accommodation whatever it costs, or is it both? What do you think?

Developers, Not City, Being Too Successful in New York

Thursday, November 29, 2007, 04:09pm
Submitted by Jonathan Sills

Sewell Chan asks in yesterday's New York Times Can New York Be Too Successful?. His article is a summary of Tuesday nights' Municipal Art Society panel discussion titled "The Oversuccessful City, part 1: Developer's Realities". He says that no-one on the panel argued that the city, or any city, can be too successful, but that this was unsurprising given that it was a "panel of developers."

Chan summarizes the main discussion points as affordable housing, out-of-scale development and the power of the city government to be forward-looking in its approach to provision of housing for current and future New Yorkers. Other issues included the decline of manufacturing in New York and the conversion of former industrial zones on the waterfront into high-rise luxury condominiums.

Many of the questions from the audience on the night also referred to affordable housing and if and how the city should mandate a certain percentage of all new housing construction to be affordable. The question of how to provide affordable housing for the city's middle classes was also raised, but was ignored by the panelists. The sense one was left with at the end of the Q&A session from the considerable ire of some of the audience was that the city was proving to be overly successful for those in real estate and construction, and very much less so for those making low and middle incomes.

Many of these points are debated further in the comments section below the article on the Timeswebsite, but if you attended the program and want to tell us what you thought of the discussion, feel free to comment below.

Difference of Opinion
For more on the panel, and a different interpretation of the feeling of the audience. Check out Norman Oder's take, at AtlanticYardsReport.com.

Program Audio Available

If you were unable to attend on Tuesday, or just need a reminder of what was said, you can listen to the full audio recording of the program here.