Brewer on affordability negotiations and workforce housing
Brewer details the fight for additional workforce housing beyond MIH requirements, settling for 1.25% additional permanent affordable units (12-13 units) after extensive negotiation, and the importance of rent stabilization.
Then of course there's the issue of affordability.
By law, as you heard from the chair, 25% to 30%, depending on option one or option two, are mandated to be affordable and to be low income.
That's based on law and based on the state.
Community Board 4 has always advocated, unlike other boards, what I call workforce housing, which is basically higher
income, teachers, firefighters, police, et cetera.
And we wanted to add another 5%, so it would be 30% total.
We started to compromise at 2.5%, meaning 165% AMI, workforce housing, make it,
additional to what was there MIH mandated.
But we ended up, after much nickeling and diming, is what I would call it, with one and a quarter percent, maybe 12 to 13 units additional, but they are permanent.
The owners wanted to have
just housing that would be affordable for the life of the property tax abatement, which is usually 35 to 40 years.
But having been around for 35 or 40 years, I've seen housing disappear and become market in some of the buildings on the Upper West Side.
So it's less units.
They do mirror and track with the other units in the building.
You cannot build all studios.
You have to be consistent with the one, two, three studios and one bedrooms with the rest of the buildings.
So it can't be on the ground floor.
It has to be moved around in the other buildings, and it has to track the same size.