The share of recently-available housing that would be affordable to people classified as low- and moderate-income has dropped precipitously since 2000, the analysis found. | Flickr NYU report describes city in housing affordability crisis

In the high-octane world of New York City real estate, billionaires parking cash in exclusive Midtown condos and co-op boards interviewing dogs only reveal part of the picture.

An NYU Furman Center report released Thursday portrays a city in crisis: Population growth has outpaced the increase in housing supply, while a rising rate of financially strapped residents pay a growing share of their incomes in rent. At the same time, the stock of housing available to low-income renters has been falling, according to the report, which evaluated 16 years of data.


As a result, there is not enough supply to mitigate climbing prices caused by increased demand, the report found.

The report found that between 2000 and 2016, the housing stock grew by about 8 percent, while the adult population went up nearly 11 percent. Jobs were up more than 16 percent, another sign of the rising demand for housing in the city.

One of the signs that the new supply of housing is not enough to moderate pressures on rents and housing prices is that more renters are living in overcrowded units, while the city’s vacancy rate hovers around 3.6 percent.

Meanwhile the share of recently available housing that would be affordable to people classified as low- and moderate-income has dropped precipitously since 2000, the analysis found.

Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s push to increase affordable housing, the percentage of new units available to people who earn 80 percent of the area median income was 40.5 percent in 2016, down from 64.4 percent in 2000.

At the same time, median rents have gone up by about $300 since 2000, while the median income of a renter household increased less than half of that — $145 per month.

New rental units are also responsible for driving up prices, the report found. In 2000, the difference between rental units built over the past 10 years and all others was $50. Sixteen years later, after high-end supply flooded the market, the gap had widened to $400.

“If you think about the lower-income people, why they are paying a higher percentage of their income on rent — part of it is just there aren’t that many apartments available at price points that would be affordable to them,” Vicki Been, faculty director at the Furman Center, said in an interview.

Been also worked as de Blasio’s housing commissioner for the first three years of his mayoralty, overseeing his plan to build and preserve 200,000 rent-regulated homes over 10 years. The mayor has since elevated the goal to 300,000 units over 12 years at roughly twice the cost — $13.5 billion in city subsidy alone.

Been and other city officials took heat for funding some apartments that would be rented to middle-income tenants, rather than aiming for fewer new homes for an exclusively low-income population.

She believes mixed-income development will help poor residents access better city services, while market-rate units help pay for the rent-regulated ones.

“We certainly need more housing at lower rents, and you can get that either by things eventually filtering down to be lower rents or you can get it by building at lower rents,” she said. “I think it’s pretty clear we need to build at lower rents, which is of course what Mandatory Inclusionary Housing requires.”

The two-year-old policy mandates that developers benefiting from a city-issued rezoning set aside at least one-quarter of their new housing, provided it is more than 10 units, to tenants who qualify for subsidized apartments.

“There’s a need at a wide variety of price points, from the very lowest up to the moderate- and middle-income households,” Been added. “Where we’re building, we need to build for a range of incomes, instead of just building at the very top.”

Neighborhoods that underwent rezonings during the Bloomberg administration, including the West Side of Manhattan and Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn, have been home to the most dramatic increase in housing supply since 2000.

One of the neighborhoods that has seen little growth is Inwood, which the de Blasio administration is currently seeking to rezone to allow for more than 4,300 new homes over 15 years.

Read the report here.