“In a way, architects know everything about affordable housing, and very little,” said Benjamin Prosky, executive director of AIA New York, as he kicked off the half-day conference “NYC’s Housing Crisis” held last week at the city’s new Stravros Niarchos Foundation Library. “As a group we want to start where we know best, which is designing our way out of a situation.” Instead, the conference, organized by AIA New York and the Center for Architecture, constituted a pre-design call to action, bringing architects together with the policymakers, activists, and academics who have been grappling with the crisis on the front lines.
The city’s housing crisis, evidenced by record rates of homelessness and evictions and an ever-widening affordability gap, has been festeringfor years, if not decades. By the end of Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year mayoral reign in 2016, the top 1 percent wealthiest New Yorkers were estimated to be earning an average of 45 times more than the bottom 99 percent. Bill de Blasio entered office with a promise to amend this tale of two cities, and over the course of his term, more than 465,000 units of affordable housing were created across the city. But more than half of New Yorkers remain rent-burdened—spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing—and the rate of homelessness is at an all-time high. Now, at the dawn of a new mayoral administration, Eric Adams has pledged $22 billion toward affordable housing over the next ten years—a number advocates say is still not enough.
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