NYT Reports Mayor Bloomberg’s Housing Plan is Delayed

The New York Times reports that New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to create or preserve 165,000 units of housing for low- and moderate-income families by 2013 has been pushed back one year because the economic recession has stifled the financing of low-cost housing.

The one-year extension is the first major setback for one of the mayor’s oldest and most ambitious initiatives: his 10-year, $7.5 billion effort to build or preserve housing affordable to 500,000 low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. It officially began in 2003 and had progressed five years later to the point that in September, Mr. Bloomberg and city housing officials celebrated reaching the halfway mark on schedule, with 82,500 units financed.

But Mr. Bloomberg announced the extension in December during a speech and in one of his weekly radio addresses, neither of which received much attention beyond housing advocates.

Seth Donlin, a spokesman for the city’s housing agency, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said in a statement last Wednesday that the mayor’s goal of creating or preserving 165,000 units remained unchanged and that “only the timeline is altered.” He said that the delay affected less than 10% of the overall plan and that “we continue to close on new developments at a time when many others are having to abandon their plans.”

Advocates and developers of low-income housing described the one-year extension as a reasonable concession in uncertain and difficult economic times, though some believed the plan could stretch not just to 2014 but perhaps 2015.

Many of the projects in the plan rely not only on government subsidies but also on private financing from lenders, a stream of money that has tightened in recent months. Another factor that has slowed development of so-called affordable housing is the drop in price of low-income housing tax credits. The sale of the federal tax credits to investors helps finance the building of housing for low-income families.

Mr. Bloomberg, during his weekly radio address on Dec. 14, spoke about the challenges facing his housing plan. “Now, with the economy stalling and even the most qualified developers having a hard time getting credit, we know we can’t keep that pace up,” Mr. Bloomberg said, according to his prepared remarks. “So we’re stretching out our schedule for completing the second half of our housing program to six years instead of the five years we’d planned for at first.”

A spokesman for the mayor, Marc LaVorgna, said the extension was tied to the mayor’s announcement in May that he would stretch a four-year construction plan for the city to five years amid signs of a declining economy, delaying a number of projects involving not just housing but also transportation and school construction, to save money.

Mr. Bloomberg first announced the New Housing Marketplace Plan in 2002 and it had a goal of 65,000 units by 2008 and was expanded in 2006 to 165,000 units by 2013. It is the largest housing plan of its kind in the country, with enough units to house the population of the city of Atlanta. It relies on a number of strategies to reach the 165,000-unit goal, including zoning changes, financing incentives for developers and the identification of land that city and state agencies own but no longer use. Nearly 57,000 units of the 82,500 financed have been rental housing, and the rest have been homeownership units, including single-family homes and condo units.

SS