Last week, the New York City Council passed a number of changes to the city's zoning code, including a mandatory inclusionary housing provision that will require new private housing developments built in the city to permanently include units for low-income renters. The changes were proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio as part of his administration's affordable housing initiative, and are intended to ease the city's affordable housing crisis. The administration describes the housing plan as "a pioneering initiative to make affordable housing mandatory and permanent wherever new housing capacity is approved through land use actions," and touts it as "the strongest and most flexible policy of its kind in the country."
There's no doubt that housing costs are out of control in New York City and in other cities around the country. A reportreleased last fall by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that, in 2013, almost half of all renters in the United States were "cost-burdened" (meaning they devote over 30 percent of their income to rent), and over 25 percent were severely cost-burdened (which the report defined as "paying more than 50 percent of income for housing"). And it's no longer just the poorest of the poor who are struggling to pay their rent—the trend is increasingly affecting moderate-income households as well.
[For more of this story, written by Dwyer Gunn, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...x-its-housing-crisis]
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