I’ve long been fascinated by the Affordable Housing racket. Josh Barro writes in the NYT:

Abington House, at 500 West 30th Street near the High Line in West Chelsea, is a new luxury residential building and, like a lot of new luxury developments in Manhattan, it’s extremely expensive. The cheapest two-bedroom apartment now listed there rents for $5,850 a month. That gets you only one bathroom; a two-bed, two-bath can run as high as $8,695. But 78 apartments in the building, or 20 percent of the total, are set aside as affordable housing under New York City’s “inclusionary zoning” program. That means 19 two-bedroom apartments are priced from $687 to $873 — about a 90 percent discount to market rents. Those apartments were granted to 19 households that make from $25,612 to $42,950 a year and won a housing lottery the city held last year.

So that’s a discount of about $75,000 per year or so, presumably for many years. After all, how anxious would you be to move if you were getting $75,000 per year, tax-free, each year for staying in your luxury apartment? So, what’s the net present value of being chosen for an affordable housing unit in this building? A million dollars? What would you do to win a million dollar gift? (I mean, not you, personally, of course, but other people, those dishonest swine.)

The link goes to a Curbed article and the link to the city lottery appears to now be dead. But that’s still the least opaque process I’ve ever come across for handing out these affordable housing goodies.

I’m remind of when I applied my son to a charter school founded by his old teachers. They set up lots of hoops to jump through to apply for the lottery such as parents having to drop off applications in person and find out if he was chosen in person. I show up to find out if he was chosen in the lottery, all nervous, and the man with the clipboard of winners, who used to teach my son math, doesn’t even bother to look at it when he tells me my son got in. I asked him to check just to make sure my son is in, and he laughs at my naivete: of course my son, who got a 5 on the Biology AP in 7th grade, is in. What do the founders of this charter school look like, idiots?

I’ve never seen an article about who gets affordable housing units in the best new buildings. I think we are supposed to believe they routinely go to single welfare mothers from the South Bronx. But if you were paying $100,000 per year for an apartment, how happy would you be about riding the elevator with the single mom’s boyfriends?

Somehow, I suspect affordable housing apartments are more likely to go to, say, the nephew of a City Commissioner of Building Safety or, say, the daughter of another real estate developer who is an adjunct instructor of creative writing at NYU for $3,800 per class, or somebody else whom the paying tenants won’t complain about.