Harlem is being priced out of Harlem, and the housing New York calls “affordable” isn’t stopping it.
Senator Cordell Cleare, who represents Harlem, spends much of her time fighting to fix state and city housing projects one at a time. Her bill with Brooklyn Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, the Permanently Affordable Social Housing for New Yorkers Act (PASHNY), would end that fight for good. It would create a public builder that develops and owns permanently affordable homes across our state, setting rents by what people earn, and putting tenants in control of their housing future.
The reality of unaffordable housing in many Black and Latino communities in New York is staggering. In one Central Harlem ZIP code, the median Black household earns about $53,700 a year. Meanwhile, citywide, the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey found that New York added nearly half a million households earning over $100,000 since 2021. Households earning under $25,000 saw the steepest decline, and 56 percent of renters who moved into previously vacant apartments earned $100,000 or more. Over the past two decades, New York City lost nearly 200,000 Black residents. Harlem was once 98 percent Black; by 2015 it was roughly 60 percent.
The existing “affordable” housing system hasn’t reversed this because it isn’t built for the people leaving.
Here’s why: affordability is pegged to Area Median Income (AMI), a regional figure inflated by wealthy suburbs. Black and Latino households in the city earn just 48 and 49 percent of AMI on average, and most renters earn 59 percent, according to Community Service Society (CSS) analysis. Yet 80 percent of AMI for a family of three has jumped from $76,880 in 2019 to $122,160 today, a 59 percent increase that Harlem paychecks haven’t matched. Program term sheets, the documents that set how affordable a project will be, have barely budged. Harlem has been on the front lines of the fight to end the displacement of communities of color.
The former Lincoln Correctional Facility, at 31-33 West 110th Street, shows how this plays out. In 2023 the state picked a private team to turn it into 105 homes called “Seneca,” after Seneca Village, the Black community razed to build Central Park. The homes were priced for households earning 80 to 100 percent of AMI. Senator Cleare calculated what that meant: about $3,000 a month for a two-bedroom at 80 percent, $3,700 at 100 percent. She rallied the community. A year later, the state deepened affordability: homes now start at 40 percent of AMI, with nearly a third for households up to 60 percent. That’s a real improvement, and it shouldn’t have taken a pressure campaign.
Harlem can’t rally for every building. A state development authority would have made Lincoln, and every project after it, better from day one, for four reasons:
First, deep affordability is foundational. At least a quarter of these government-built homes must go to households earning 30 percent of AMI or less. A plurality must serve households at or below 80 percent, and no more than a third can be for the highest income earners. The biggest difference is that this new authority would set rents at 25 percent of household income, with increases capped at two percent a year unless needed for operations. CSS modelling projects that half of all the social housing units would serve households at or below 50 percent of AMI. Under the last state plan, that figure was 8.5 percent.
Second, the community is in control with residents occupying seats on the authority’s governing board. And unlike today’s subsidized deals that carry regulatory agreements that eventually expire, PASNAY homes never expire.
Third, it’s cheaper. If we think of a 100-unit project costing nearly $63 million to build: a combination of a 15 percent developer fee and various fees associated with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, including syndication, could add more than $10 million in transactional costs to this project’s budget. In New York City, soft costs, including legal, financing and consulting, run about 20 percent of hard costs.
Fourth, government-built projects will scale fast and efficiently. Today, our tax dollars go out and don’t come back. State authority-built buildings stay public, and their revenue flows back into a revolving fund to build the next ones.
This idea of a state-run housing developer isn’t just theory; it is a tested practice. Montgomery County, Maryland’s Housing Opportunities Commission uses a revolving Housing Production Fund to build mixed-income buildings it owns and runs. Seattle voters created a public social housing developer in 2023 and funded it in 2025. New York did it too: the state’s Urban Development Corporation built more than 30,000 homes in the 1970s.
New York State’s last five-year housing plan in 2022 invested more than $25 billion in a system that spends all of its time incentivizing affordable housing development. Putting just a fraction of that, $1 billion a year, towards an authority as laid out in Senator Cleare and Assemblymember Gallagher’s bill means Harlem never has to fight for a say again, because the community would be doing the building itself.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society (CSS), New York’s leading advocate for low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author. The Urban Agenda is available on the CSS website at www.cssny.org
