An Aging-friendly Community Requires Affordable Housing

We’ve talked here before about having an aging-prepared community, where the growing numbers of older adults here in New York City can feel secure and maintain their independent lifestyles with supports that are both formal and informal.

One of the big underlying requirements, though, is something that has been fast-disappearing: Affordable housing.

New York is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.

A couple of years ago, David Muchnick, a community economic development consultant and coordinator for Housing First, wrote in The New York Times that the then-housing boom was ironically worsening the crisis and that it was “putting elderly people on fixed incomes in particular difficulty.”

More recently, the Community Service Society (CSS), an antipoverty organization, released a report chronicling the demise of New York City’s supply of subsidized, privately owned rental housing.

“Closing the Door on Housing: New York’s Affordable Housing is Under Siege,” the 2007 report proclaimed, pointing out that the City has lost 27 percent of its nearly 120,000 subsidized units since 1990, with another 18 percent threatened with subsidy loss.

Particularly, the CSS said, it has been rentals in the Mitchell-Lama program that have been hardest hit. Mitchell-Lama projects date back to the 1950s and represent one of the most successful attempts New York State has made to provide affordable, subsidized housing for middle-income citizens.

Not surprisingly, people have spent their lifetimes now in Mitchell-Lama apartments, and they are aging precisely at the time when these projects are reaching the stage where they are no longer bound by the rental rules that allowed their subsidized development.

Mitchell-Lama rental losses total more than 18,000 apartments since 2001 as the property owners have begun to shift to market rates. The loss is accelerating. All told, more than 26,000 subsidized rentals have been lost.

We’re witnessing a rapidly vanishing market of housing that is affordable and available.

There are many people who are being affected by this, but none more so than older adults, especially retirees on fixed incomes, who can’t help but look around at the City’s housing market with anything but despair.

There’s really nothing here for them.

Fortunately, the housing crisis hasn’t gone unnoticed by government.

Mayor Bloomberg has started what he’s called the nation’s largest municipal housing plan that is pledged to build 165,000 units of affordable housing by 2013. Governor Spitzer in his just-released $124 billion Executive Budget proposes a $400 million Housing Opportunity Fund to expand the availability of affordable and supportive housing statewide. Seventy-five percent of those funds would be headed in the downstate direction, the governor said.

The message that both Governor Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg need to hear, however, is that a significant share of what they’re putting aside for housing needs to go to stabilizing the communities and providing affordable housing options where the fast-growing numbers of older adults live.

Housing needs to be set aside for seniors in conjunction with promoting an “aging-friendly” community – places that are stable, vibrant and supportive with program-rich housing.

What we’re quickly learning is that people really want to stay put as they age. Sadly, by our neglect, we’ve made that difficult in the face of mounting anxieties people experience as they age over health and wellness issues, neighborhood safety, transportation shortcomings, and, importantly, a lack of responsive housing options.

It’s great that both the mayor and governor have championed the cause of affordable housing. But it shouldn’t be just for young, working families caught in the housing squeeze. It needs to be for those who’ve been the backbone of this city all their lives and who helped make it the magnificent place it is today – seniors who now are confronting an affordable housing crisis.