Mayor Eric Adams has often touted the record number of subsidized housing units New York City is building for low- and middle-income renters as part of his strategy for keeping families in the five boroughs.
“We have a hemorrhaging of Black and brown families leaving New York because it’s no longer affordable,” Adams said at a June 2022 event announcing his housing plan. “We’ve decimated the middle class and we need to refocus our attention on stabilizing these families.”
But a Gothamist analysis of city data shows nearly 70% of the roughly 24,000 subsidized, affordable units built or financed citywide since Adams took office are studios and one-bedroom apartments that don’t easily accommodate families because of their size.
The concentration of these smaller units is higher in many parts of the city with greater proportions of families, such as the north Bronx and eastern Queens, according to census data. As a result, the tens of thousands of families who submit applications for affordable housing each year are left with little chance of landing a small number of apartments big enough to accommodate them.
In areas of the city such as southern Queens, studios and one-bedroom apartments account for more than 90% of the total number of units being constructed, despite the average household size in neighborhoods like Richmond Hill and Ozone Park being about four people.
Some city councilmembers are concerned the housing program isn’t fully meeting their communities’ needs as the city experiences its deepest housing crunch in over half a century. Less than 1% of apartments priced below $2,400 a month were vacant and available to rent last year, according to the city’s latest housing survey.
“It sounds really great to maximize the number of [affordable] units that you build, but oftentimes you do that at the expense of two- and three-bedroom apartments,” said Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, who represents Bedford Park, Norwood and other northwest Bronx…
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