By Vik Sohonie
In 2010, Isaac Luna, a longtime East Harlem resident, stretched his income to move into a small $1200-a-month studio with his brother on East 101st Street. With their rent increasing annually by $100, the apartment quickly became unaffordable.
Luna, 31, who now has a wife and year-old son, moved to the Bronx, where he pays $1,250 for a three-bedroom and commutes to his job as a waiter and bartender at El Paso Restaurante Mexicano.
Despite being forced to pack up and leave, Luna remains pragmatic. “You take it if you can; if you can’t, you move,” he says.
The city touts its success in producing its goal of an ample amount of affordable housing units and is on track to fulfill a promise Bloomberg made in 2010 — of 165,000 new units — but in East Harlem, affordable housing remains in short supply and is priced steeply for its intended market, surpassing its residents ability to pay.
Across much of East Harlem, luxury developments have risen rapidly. “There’s a glut of properties being bought,” says Holley Drakeford, 64, an associate broker for the Giscombe Realty Group and a member of Community Board 11.
The Tapestry complex at 245 East 124th Street, for example, rents one-bedroom apartments for about $2,475 per month and offers amenities like cold storage for grocery deliveries. According to Citi Habitats, a real estate brokerage, monthly rents for two-bedroom units in East Harlem range from $2,500 to nearly $4,000.
“High end luxury development has been an economic development strategy of the Bloomberg administration,” says Barika Williams, policy director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.
But such properties, and the prices they command, are inconsistent with the grim economic reality. The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s online calculator determines the income necessary to pay rent in a given state. Assuming that tenants pay no more than the widely accepted ceiling of 30 percent of their paychecks, someone would have to earn $48 an hour, or $100,000 a year, to live in a one-bedroom apartment at the Tapestry.
And in East Harlem, where the poverty rate stands at almost 30 percent, according to the association’s latest report compiled from a multitude of government and academic sources, median household income is less than $31,000.
As developers attempt to blur the line between the Upper East Side, home to the largest concentration of wealthy residents in New York, and El Barrio, as East Harlem has been colloquially known, the area is gentrifying quickly, leaving displacement in its wake.
“If there’s a housing crisis in West Harlem, there’s a 10 times greater housing crisis in East Harlem,” says Malcolm Punter, executive vice president of the Harlem Congregation for Community Improvement, a non-profit organization that has preserved 5,000 affordable housing units across Harlem. “There’s been aggressive development in East Harlem; families of 30 years can’t meet market demands.”
Jeff Foreman, policy director of Care for the Homeless, a health care provider for New Yorkers without housing, agrees that “there’s a great degree of displacement” in East Harlem, and throughout Harlem.
The latest development to promise affordable housing, the Harlem River Point complex, occupying a whole block of Park Avenue and East 131st Street, will offer about 172 units, 35 of them designated as affordable housing, plus retail space. It’s part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, the city-wide initiative to build and preserve 165,000 affordable units.
![Bartender Isaac Luna moved to the Bronx because of rising rents in East Harlem. (Photo by Max Saffer)](http://theuptowner.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/photocrop.jpg)
Bartender Isaac Luna moved to the Bronx because of rising rents in East Harlem. (Photo by Max Saffer)
As of this year, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development says it has met 95 percent of its target – about 157,000 total units, including 47,553 in Manhattan.
“The city and the mayor’s administration will definitely meet their target of 165,000 units,” says Williams. In East Harlem, according to data collected by the association and New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, the city built or preserved 2,135 affordable housing units in 86 buildings since 2010, “but only eight percent would be affordable to your average local household,” Williams said.
And, since 2000, according to a 2012 report entitled “The State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods” by the Furman Center, buildings housing families of five or more appreciated in value at the second fastest rate of the city’s five community districts.
So while the city has made good on its promise, whether affordable housing is economically within reach remains a key issue. “It all depends on who’s giving you the data,” says George Gallego, chairman of Community Board 11’s housing committee.
The federal definition of “affordable housing” uses the area median income, a calculation that incorporates the greater New York area, including wealthy suburban counties like Westchester. As a result, the 2013 median income for a New York family of four stands at $85,900 and $60,200 for an individual. “Localities have to follow the dictates of the federal government,” says Punter.
Harlem River Point’s affordable housing scheme, for example, allocates units to those earning 40 percent of the median – about $35,000 a year. But the association places median household income for East Harlem at $30,900, a drop from the Furman Center’s 2012 estimate of $31,500.
“They are building affordable housing that’s anchored in the federal definition and there’s a difference on the ground,” says Williams. “Middle income in East Harlem is vastly different from the $92,000 income in the Upper East Side, which is just a neighborhood away.”
According to the association’s evaluation of the Bloomberg housing program, roughly 80 percent of the so-called affordable housing units in East Harlem remain unaffordable to the average household.
Moreover, points out Foreman of Care for the Homeless, “every year, we fall farther and farther behind” in demand for affordable housing. “The supply and demand doesn’t match.”
Developers have little incentive to build housing that’s truly affordable, however. “Real estate is an absurd money maker,” says Williams. “It isn’t financially sound to build an entire building for 30 percent of the AMI.”
Consequently, local groups are looking for new ways to providing affordable housing to long-term residents. Community Board 11 last month decided to explore a community land trust, modeled after the successful trust in lower Manhattan’s Cooper Square.
But some in the community, like Drakeford, don’t see the gentrification of East Harlem as “necessarily a bad thing,” because the economics of change can work in the residents favor. “Changes in jobs in the area mean better salaries, better benefits, more entrepreneurs, better schools, and less crime,” he says.
Meanwhile, community leaders hope the next mayor will continue the city’s commitment to affordable housing, but redefine the term to reflect economic reality. “The city drives the hard bargain that should be helpful, constructive on what’s needed and wanted, getting the best deal they can,” says Williams. “The next mayor should drive that hard bargain.”
As for Luna, East Harlem will always create a sense of belonging. “You miss it a little bit, because my family is here,” he says. “But otherwise, you’re only working for the rent.”
(Featured photo of Harlem River Point by Vik Sohonie)