Standing outside a shiny new red and tan brick building at 401 West 25th Street, indistinguishable from any other late-2000s new construction throughout the West Side, you can catch a glimpse of the future of housing if New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates get their way.

A young woman who works in finance and moved into this building from a “real shithole” in the West Village, a computer programmer from South Carolina, a lifelong New Yorker who moved in from the projects a few blocks south, and a gay couple—one a playwright, the other a social worker—with a son, who moved from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue.

They all found places in a 22-story middle-income affordable housing development in an increasingly unaffordable Chelsea. The Elliott-Chelsea, developed by Artimus Construction, rose on New York City Housing Authority property with the help of an alphabet soup of government agencies. Some of the 168 units in the  building are typical low-income units, reserved for families earning under $40,000 a year. But the bulk of the complex is set aside for middle-income earners, a group that this cycle’s crop of Democratic mayoral candidates is eager to court. Read More