affordable housing

Affordable housing and public-school overcrowding took the forefront at Thursday evening’s Community Board 9 meeting, as the board focused on issues surrounding the rezoning of 125th Street before passing several resolutions.

Community Board 10 voted in favor of a proposal to develop a series of lots on Frederick Douglass Boulevard into a high-rise condominium Wednesday night, ending a series of disagreements and negotiations between board members and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development that have dragged on for months. The proposed development, slated for the 2282-2284 Frederick Douglass Boulevard lots in West Harlem, will have 12 stories and 89 condos, 18 of them classified as “affordable housing units.”

The New York City Pension Funds agreed Thursday to abandon investments deemed to negatively impact affordable housing, according to a press release from City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr.

Columbia’s policies have not been a contributing factor—they have been the major cause for the critical shortage of low and moderate income housing in the area between 110th and 125th Streets, a pattern that the current plans will replicate northward beyond the immediate expansion zone.

With a new initiative against needlessly vacant properties, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is leading an effort to fight housing shortages in upper Manhattan.

While faculty panelists and student hunger strikers may be commended for their idealism and public spirit, it should also be noted that their demands are not necessarily appreciated by those who actually live in the Morningside Heights and Manhattanville area, and whose opinions of Columbia’s proposed expansion are shaped by their actual experience of these neighborhoods.

Four years into Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, considerable progress has been made toward creating affordable housing that will allow many New Yorkers to remain city residents, according to a new report by the Independent Budget Office.