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New York City Housing Push Should Aim at Poorest, Report Says

The New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, is recommending that the city focus its affordable housing efforts on the most burdened residents — those in households making $40,000 or less a year — and also invest in “stabilizing” a crumbling public housing system that has risen in importance as fewer low-income New Yorkers can afford to live in private apartments.

Mr. Stringer lays out what he called “the state of play” on housing issues in a report to be released on Wednesday that analyzes census and housing survey data from 2000 to 2012. The report, which he said he had shared with Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democrat, comes as the administration is drafting a multibillion-dollar housing plan to help reach the mayor’s goal of adding and preserving 200,000 affordable apartments over the next 10 years.

In an interview, Mr. Stringer said numeric goals were not enough. He noted that the Bloomberg administration spent $5.3 billion of city money and leveraged another $18.3 billion to both create new affordable units and preserve existing housing — for a total of 165,000 units over 12 years — yet the city today is still grappling with record homelessness and the loss of low-rent housing.

“What did we get for it?” Mr. Stringer said. “To me, whether it’s 165,000 units or 200,000, that’s not the only number we should be thinking about. We have to dig a little deeper and look at housing that’s problematic to replace.”

(Median rents rose 75 percent from 2000 to 2012 while incomes rose only 26.7 percent during the same period, the comptroller’s report said. The increases were the largest in Brooklyn. )

And the increases were the harshest for lower-income New Yorkers. Households with earnings of $20,000 to $40,000 a year had the biggest rent squeeze compared with the previous decade: They spent 41 percent of their income in rent in 2012, up from 33 percent in 2000, well above the federal affordability standard of 30 percent.

“Although most New Yorkers probably feel that housing in the city is too expensive, it is primarily those earning less than $40,000 who literally may not be able to find an apartment they can afford,” the report said.

Researchers from the comptroller’s office said that one of the factors driving the rent stress was the loss of apartments charging $1,000 or less a month. During the period studied, the report said, there was a net loss of 400,130 apartments renting for $1,000 or less.

Rising rents partly reflect neighborhood improvements, the researchers noted, but housing experts say the loss of cheaper units is largely driven by annual rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, whose median rent is already over $1,100, and the deregulation of units.

Mr. Stringer said the task ahead was daunting. Building for lower income levels, housing experts say, is financially challenging because the tenants cannot pay enough rent to cover the operations of the building without some form of assistance.

There is consensus about the rising importance of public housing and the need to preserve every single one of the New York City Housing Authority’s roughly 178,000 units, but thousands of apartments await major repairs and languish unoccupied because of dwindling federal capital budgets. And most rent regulation is in the hands of the state government, not the city.

But Mr. Stringer said that any plan should include aggressive efforts to secure more federal funds for the Housing Authority and to wrestle control from Albany legislators. “That speaks to the political will of the mayor and elected officials,” he said.

Some housing advocates welcomed the report as more support for making affordable housing the administration’s priority.

“He lays out the agenda but we need to wait for concrete solutions,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, which works on behalf of low-income tenants.

The mayor is expected to unveil the details of his housing plan by May 1.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Report Says City Housing Push Should Aim at Poorest. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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