NEW YORK—Almost one-third of the estimated 40,500 rent-regulated housing units in East Harlem will have rent protections expire by 2040, some before 2020, according to an urban research and advocacy group.
“Many of East Harlem’s residents are at risk of being priced out of their homes and neighborhoods,” stated the report, which was produced by the Regional Plan Association (RPA) for Manhattan Community Board 11 and other community stakeholders.
The report is the second in a series that aims to advance policy strategies to preserve
rent-regulated housing in the East Harlem community, where most residents live in some form of rent-regulated housing.
Using data from three different sources, the report highlights 2,600 units, which are scheduled to expire before 2020, most of them north of 120th Street. Another 9,700 units will expire by 2040.
These units expire because they are financed by programs that have expiration within their mandate of the subsidy that they provide, said L. Nicolas Ronderos, director of economic and community development at RPA and primary author of the report.
Federal programs that enable affordable housing are among those expiring, such as project-based Section 8, where subsidies pay the difference between a set rent for the building and the tenants’ rent payments. The expiration of different types of project-based Section 8s could result in the expiration of affordability for 1,246 units before 2020, according to the report.
The report highlights the need for government action to prevent affordable housing loss, an important issue, said Becky Koepnick, director of Affordable Housing Policy at New York University’s Furman Center.
Koepnick said many of the funding sources are ’renewable,' meaning even if the contract or the restriction ends, the owner, and sometimes the government, has the option to renew the funding.
Though the numbers in the report are high, and it is true some of those properties could opt against renewal, “generally what we have seen in a lot of those programs is that the owners work with the city or the federal government and continue to make those properties affordable for another 10, 15, 20 years,” Koepnick said.
According to the Furman Center’s Subsidized Housing Information Project, the percentage of unitswith expiring affordability requirements was slightly higher in East Harlem (21 percent) than in the rest of the city (17 percent) between 2002 and 2011.
Ronderos said that he expects some of the expiring programs to be renewed, and that the report was commissioned to provide information that stakeholders can act on.
“The community has started to collect information about the buildings, and is planning to address this at the community board levels,” he said.
Another opportunity is when one of the programs for a building expires, and the building may still be able to utilize another program. In this case the owners would choose between renewing the expired program and waiting for the other program to expire before increasing rent to market rates.
Ronderos said he and others with the RPA will continue to research the changing situations over the next year through another study, which will detail the various affordable housing programs in East Harlem.
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