Millionaires Living in "Middle-Income" Housing

March 14, 2016 — Two recent developments highlight the maddening difficulty of preserving affordable housing in New York City.

Last week the City Council’s Affordable Housing Preservation Task Force introduced three bills to tighten requirements on low-income HDFC co-ops, in an effort to keep them affordable. The bills would require HDFCs to report on shareholder income, resale prices, monthly maintenance and tax arrears. Since some HDFC apartments have recently sold for more than $1 million, a cap on resale prices may also be in the works.

On the heels of that development, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has come out with an audit showing that there were 230 tenants earning $250,000 a year or more in the city’s subsidized “middle-income” Mitchell-Lama co-ops in 2012, the New York Post reports. One resident earned $1.4 million, another earned $1.1 million. The Mitchell-Lama program was inaugurated in 1955 to provide housing for people who didn’t qualify for public housing but couldn’t afford market rates.

Some Mitchell-Lama residents who initially met income limits have seen their incomes rise sharply over the years. Vickie Been, the department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) commissioner, notes that Mitchell-Lamas provide affordable homes for 100,000 New Yorkers, and she insists that the number of residents earning more than $250,000 is “quite small.”

But large enough to illustrate why it’s so difficult to find affordable housing in New York City.