Apartments in New York. Visions of walking around one in the evening after work. Backdrop to a phone call: gassing while stomping around a moodily lit open plan thing, miles up and on a corner, with windows on two sides. All those millions of lights clustered into skyscraper shapes outside in the dark. Standing at the window at dusk and pretending you’re flicking joggers and cabs into oblivion.
Or lower down: small and shaky buildings, all interior doors with fanlights over them (just so that you can never mentally shut the door, not really) and out in the hall echoes harshly with the noisiest motherfuckers you’ve ever heard. Sash windows looking out onto alleys filled with shipyards’ worth of steel (all those sawtooth fire escape stairs) and there’s sash windows opposite to look right back at ya. Proximity. You have the best conversations – what comes out when you’re that relaxed and comfortable. Neighbours as school mates.
The federal standard for rent affordability is 30% of people’s incomes. Nearly a third of renting households in New York pay over 50%.
I guess like anything that looks good on TV Manhattan’s always going to be at the pricier end of the American experience ($1 million car parking spaces, etc.). And while the crown probably shifts around a bit (Atlanta was ‘top’ in April) New York currently has the greatest level of income inequality in the US:
“The recovery seems to be going to those at the top, much more than those in the middle, while those at the bottom may even be losing ground.” - Andrew A. Beveridge, sociologist at City University of New York.
There are more than 50,000 people homeless in New York. In January last year 21,000 of these were children. These are unprecedented highs – 41,000 was the high-water mark in 2011. People do help: New York has one of America’s largest food banks; the Doe Fund has a ‘help not hand outs’ back to work ethic; the Ali Forney Center houses homeless LGBT youths (they make up nearly 40% of America’s young homeless); and there are many others.
What does New York’s inequality look like? Apart from setting utterly gorgeous lives where peoples’ high earning/spending cycles rival small country’s economies beside people sleeping in subway stations, that is. According to US Census Bureau data released on 18th September, “The top 5 percent of households earned $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent.”
Bringing the two together is One Riverside Park, a luxury apartment building in the Riverside South area (a fun bit of real estate value context for the zip code here). Luxury in this instance means a 24-hour concierge service (the kind that’s more like a PA), a private pool, bowling alley, cinema, gym, climbing wall… (Strange how ‘rich’ now looks like a supposedly cool, more exclusive and fully-lived version of working class life).
Riverside Park offers $2000-per-square-foot condos for private buyers and rental apartments for people on sub $50,000 incomes (less than 60% of the NYC Area Median Income: $35,280 to $50,340 a year, with the upper amount needing a four person household to be eligible). There are separate entrances for the two (the rental entrance has been dubbed a ‘poor door’) and the above amenities aren’t available to renters.
Obviously there are lots of arguments: People who are paying more should get more (and the converse). Renters are lucky enough to be able to live in certain areas of New York, compared with other low earners’ experiences. Offering facilities to renters would cause problems if they were entitled to rent reductions if things later had to be closed (an argument citing the amenities’ transience is an awkward one for developers to shout about – especially when they say that they provide the facilities to entice new buyers, who have high expectations when paying market price).
Despite all the arguments, some of the case studies are hard. People who’ve lived in a building for thirty years, using the rooftop garden the whole time, get a little upset when a developer tarts it up and says they can no longer ‘use’ the roof.
The argument runs on and on as to whether these case studies speak to wider, terribly unjust segregation in NYC housing…
…or a pragmatic step in the right direction.
And a pragmatic answer is perhaps the best people will get for the moment. As with Britain, people who come up on the authorities’ rent books are under closer scrutiny these days – when taxpayer dollars are contributing to your ability to live in a certain home it is possible for you to be ‘overhoused.’ You’ve just got too much damn residence to justify to the public, particularly when budgets battle deficits. The Section 8 housing voucher programme has seen cuts (currently no new applicants are being accepted), and some people have found that the home they were housed in last year is too big for them this year.
Again like Britain, ‘public housing’ is not given the priority it once was in the States, with private developers now ostensibly making up the gap.
Back in May New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $41 billion 10-year housing plan to build and maintain 200,000 affordable units. Part of this plan was a requirement that developers include affordable housing in their constructions. In exchange developers get to erect larger buildings than they would have been allowed. Schemes like this were around during the previous Bloomberg administration, though voluntary.
“New York and other cities use a variety of tax breaks, subsidies and additional incentives to encourage developers to build affordable housing. In the case of 40 Riverside [yeah, the address is confusing people], the developer, Extell Development Company, is using a program called inclusionary housing, which allows it to build more square feet than the zoning code would otherwise allow in exchange for a certain number of lower-rent apartments.”
Mireya Navarro ‘‘Poor Door’ in a New York Tower Opens a Fight Over Affordable Housing’, New York Times, 26th August 2014
But have you ever really thought (US or UK) about what having the term ‘affordable housing’ says about us? Apart from the housing provided, subsidized, for the lowest income workers, everything else on the market is beyond affordable – taking too big a chunk of people’s paycheques for them to be able to live properly on their salaries. Part of their property’s value isn’t necessary, and has some level of status tacked onto it. It’s buried behind features, location, size… but it’s actually status. Because everything else is not affordable, not to everyone.
Conspicuous consumption’s like an ironic in-joke people make when they’ve just been kinda enjoying it. But the idea that the official term, in policy and law, for cheaper housing is ‘affordable’ – it’s like it’s unselfconsciously mandated that price inflation to allow everything up to uber exclusivity in property is just dandy. We just have to allow for a small percentage of reality – just for those who can’t afford to buy something that’s priced up to exclude others. And that’s ‘affordable’ - anything more expensive is then supposedly unaffordable? Ridiculously priced? Priced not at its real value, but as a way to keep the numbers accessing it down. So you ‘buy’ the exclusivity.
Spend a bit more and the neighbours and lifestyle get nicer – obviously there’s going to be a scale like that, reflecting earnings, but the idea that the cheapest housing is ‘affordable’ is terrifying.
“In an ideal universe, progressive leaders would possess marketing skills so profound that they could alter and recast our definitions of status, so that we might see the aggressive and intimate mixing of disparate populations as having its own cachet and appreciable value. Gentrification, when it doesn’t result in wholesale displacement, accomplishes this to some degree. Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and Boerum Hill in Brooklyn have both witnessed significant surges in real estate prices in recent years, though both areas are home to vast public housing complexes. Multimillion-dollar brownstones and apartments are in immediate view of buildings that house the very poor.”
‘On the Upper West Side, a House Divided by Income’ New York Times, 25th July 2014
Finally, something that popped up in a Morse episode unexpectedly once:
“What sort of life do we offer our young people, Lewis? School, (if you’re lucky) college, then marriage, a ‘starter home,’ then children, a two-bedroomed semi. If you do well you’ve just about got to four bedrooms when your kids leave to buy starter homes of their own. […] This British home-owning democracy we’re all so proud of – it’s really a form of slavery. […] Man was born free, but everywhere he’s in the property chain.”
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