Call for ‘affordable housing' to be affordable

Advocates of affordable housing in Queens have called on the City to lower the cost of up to 5,000 apartments planned for 24 acres of the property in Queens West.
Currently, the apartments, which will range in rent from $1,200 to $2,500 a month, are being geared toward families earning between $60,000 and $145,000 per year. However, the median income for the Queens households in 2005, as reported by Queens College demographer Andrew Beveridge, Ph. D., ranged from $43,000 to $52,000 among all racial groups.
&#8220You can't call a housing development in Queens ‘affordable' if most Queens residents can't afford it,” said Queens Congregations United for Action President Pastor Lancelot Waldron at a recent rally by the Queens for Affordable Housing (QFAH) coalition.
According to an analysis by the Pratt Center for Community Development, 60 percent of Queens households, including New York City police officers and firefighters who live in a household with a single salary, would not be able to afford an apartment in the City's portion of the 74-acre Queens West development, which is mostly devoted to luxury apartments.
At the rally, organizers called for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who announced the sale of the property by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to the City for $146 million, to reserve half of the proposed 5,000 units to Queens residents making the borough average, and 20 percent to low-income residents who make less than $25,000 per year. Rally organizers also called for the City to guarantee to keep the apartments within the budget range for low-income and middle-class residents in the future.
According to the Pratt Center analysis, about 200,000 households - 25 percent - of 800,000 in the borough earn less than $25,000 per year. About 34 percent earn between $60,000 and $150,000, which is the amount suggested by the City as affordability guidelines for the new Queens West apartments.
&#8220Despite the talk about creating affordable units on the Queens West site, the reality is that nearly 500,000 households in Queens earn less than $60,000 and will not be eligible for the new units,” said Brad Lander from the Pratt Center for Community Development. &#8220In other words, a half a million Queens residents - the equivalent of the State of Wyoming - will not be able to afford housing on one of the largest public sites in New York City.”
Lander said that should the City decide to include low-income housing in its plans for Queens West, tax-exempt bond financing could be used to help pay for the project.