The woke have seized control of NYCs affordable housing

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met last week with real-estate-industry leaders, he said, to discuss “the importance of us reducing the timeline of getting New Yorkers into affordable housing.”I want New York City housing to be affordable, too.But I want it to be affordable to working- and middle-class people who pay taxes and respect the civic order.

I don’t want the municipal treasury milked to provide cozy quarters for the drug-addled and insane who usually (as Mamdani is going to swiftly discover) prefer life on the street.Unlike Mamdani’s fellow travelers in socialist sophistry — like former City Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, who two years ago torpedoed plans for a large Harlem housing project for not being 100% “affordable” — I want rental apartments to be affordable to people who’ve earned them.And to a surprising extent not sufficiently acknowledged, many already are.Let’s be clear: The word “affordable” as it’s commonly kicked around is entirely ideological.

President Trump’s dismissal of the issue as a “hoax” and a “Democrat scam,” although not altogether baseless, missed the larger issue.“Affordable,” as Merriam-Webster defines it, means simply “able to be afforded.”By that definition — the one that matters in the real world — New York City has objectively enjoyed great success in creating new rental apartments for the kinds of people I want as my neighbors.NYU professor of urban policy and planning Mitchell L.

Moss notes “affordable” once applied to “housing that middle-income households can afford.” Now the term is in service of the agenda to put up street thugs and lunatics at developers’ and taxpayers’ expense.An astounding 331,430 new homes — the vast majority priced for middle-income tenants — were created in the five boroughs during three different mayoral administrations from 2010 through 2024, per the Department of City Planning.Rezonings, tax incentives and office-building ...