A rendering of the Dattner Architects-designed building slated to rise at the site.

Fifty-five units of affordable housing may not do much to stem the tide of gentrification washing over Williamburg, but they will allow a not-insignificant number of low-income families to stay in the increasingly expensive neighborhood.

Today, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced that it has selected MDG Design and Construction and the North Brooklyn Development Corporation to build a mixed-use affordable housing development at 337 Berry Street, the site of a former Landmarks Preservation Commission warehouse. The development team was selected nearly a year after an RFP went out for the project, which will include 55 low-income units, ground-floor commercial space for a grocery store, community space for tenant services and an open space for use by future tenants.

The old LPC architectural salvage warehouse that currently stands at 377 Berry.

The announcement comes in the midst of rising community outrage over the dearth of affordable housing units promised by the city as part of the 2005 Williamsburg rezoning. Earlier this week, DNAinfo reported that eight years after pledging to build 1,345 affordable housing units on city-owned land in North Williamsburg, only 19 units, or two-percent of the promised tally, have been completed.

A rally is even scheduled for today to "commemorate eight years of broken promises," according to DNAinfo; Community Board 1 Chairman Chris Olechowski told the news website that "displacement is the horror of what takes place without thinking through what you're doing to your local people" and urged local residents to attend.

“What a great honor it will be to again work alongside my lifelong neighbors and friends to continue our fight to combat displacement in our community," said Richard Mazur, the executive director of North Brooklyn Development Corporation, in a release about the project. "Through our collaborative work with all the members of Mobilization Against Displacement (MAD) we have again taken another positive step toward lessening displacement in our community while fulfilling the greatest need in Community Board 1 today—the availability of quality affordable housing."

The mixed-use complex will rise on three city-owned lots between South 4th and South 5th streets, the site of an old Landmarks Preservation Commission warehouse, which was used to store old doorknobs, transoms, newel posts and any number of other architectural fixtures and ornaments salvaged from demolition sites; the items were then sold at low-cost to the public, so they could be used to restore buildings that had earlier been stripped of their own historic fixtures. (The program ended in 2000 due to budgetary constraints.)

The affordable housing units will be available to families earning between 50 and 60 percent of the area median income, which is $49,950 to $51,540 for a family of four.

The project displayed "the City's commitment to thoughtfully repurposing its resources to benefit the community,” wrote HPD Commissioner Mathew Wambua in a statement. "I look forward to seeing this once vacant warehouse transformed into safe, quality affordable housing that will expand housing opportunities for working-class families in this community.”

As for the project's other goal of enriching "the character and vibrancy of the neighborhood and act as a catalyst for future growth in both the public and private sectors"—we'd hardly say that Williamsburg is need of any development catalysts.

The courtyard at Westbeth.

The sun was setting when we arrived at Westbeth, and as soon as we entered the labyrinthine corridors of the artists’ housing complex, we found ourselves dreaming about living here, in what a friend described as “a Hotel Chelsea that never dies.”

As far as impossible dreams go, gaining residence in the rent-stabilized complex, which sprawls across an entire city block in the West Village and offers studios with rent that starts around $600 a month, is one of the most heart-wrenching. The waiting list is not only seven to 10 years long but has been closed since 2007. (As if the rent weren’t appealing enough, Richard Meier was the architect who oversaw the building’s 1970 factory conversion.)

But at least visitors got a peek on a recent Friday evening, when residents in 20 of the complex’s 383 apartments opened their doors for the PEN World Voices Festival’s “Literary Safari”—a somewhat surreal pairing of the literary and the domestic. 

Ms. Obreht reads in one of the Westbeth apartments.

In event organizer George Cominske’s spacious studio on the 11th floor, which had painfully pretty views of the Hudson, we encountered a writer who seemed just as, if not more, charmed by the cozy setup as The Observer was.

“This is a very disorienting experience, but it’s very cool,” declared novelist Téa Obreht as she turned to face a group of attendees perched on the sleeping platform overlooking the living room. The crowd’s eyes stopped roaming as Ms. Obreht, named by The New Yorker as one of the 20 best American fiction writers under 40, began to read from her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. 

(Though she published the book at the enviably young age of 26, Ms. Obreht’s literary career has not been without a few hiccups—three other books with “tiger” in the title came out the same year as hers, leading to constant confusion, particularly between her and the “tiger mom.” “People would be like, ‘Oh, you’re that cruel lady,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, I’m the other one,’” Ms. Obreht recounted.)

Czech novelist Michal Ajvaz reads from one of his books.

When she had finished, Ms. Obreht reflected on the importance of one’s setting to the creative process, explaining how her novel had grown out of a National Geographic binge brought on by feeling “terribly depressed” by the snow and the cold in Ithaca.

“It turns out my writing environment affects me tremendously. I moved to New York eight months ago and I haven’t written a word since,” Ms. Obreht said, then looked around in faux panic. “My editor’s not here, is he?”

Unnerved by the thought that her editor, or any editor, might be in the room (they seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to neglected stories and looming deadlines), The Observer retreated to the halls, where we found photographer Beowulf Sheehan. Mr. Sheehan recommended the ninth-floor apartment of collage artist Joan Hall. He didn’t remember who was reading there (it was novelist John Kenney), but he knew that it was the loveliest apartment he’d seen in the building.

And Ms. Hall’s apartment was indeed stunning, with huge, south-facing windows, comfortable-looking pillows scattered across the floor and art on every surface.

Novelist John Kenney speaks with an attendee in Joan Hall's apartment.

“I got in early—1971. It was a blessing, the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Ms. Hall said. “It’s like being on a grant forever.”

Indeed, all the residents we spoke with said that they’d never be able to live in the neighborhood without Westbeth—Superior Ink, a condo where an apartment set a downtown record when it sold for $31.5 million in 2010, is across the street. Ms. Hall referred to Westbeth as “a naturalized senior citizen community. The idea in the beginning is that you would become successful and leave, but people never moved on.”

The complex does welcome new residents on occasion. Like Ken Aptekar and Eunice Lipton, who moved in just two months ago after 14 years on the waiting list. Eager to settle into the community, the couple had readily agreed to host literature fans and Czech novelist Michal Ajvaz in their first-floor apartment, which looks out onto the river, but also, at eye level, the cars zooming by on the West Side highway.

“It feels like a very distant thing, very unobtainable, as an international student,” said one of the event volunteers, Chuck Kuan, whom we found hauling around a sketchpad and pencils. “This seems like a dream come true—to be an artist in this residence.”

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio unveiled his housing platform today in Williamsburg, where housing prices have nearly tripled since 2004.

Until now, Bill de Blasio's housing platform has mainly consisted of sniping at frontrunner Christine Quinn. But no longer: this afternoon Mr. de Blasio announced measures he would take mayor to curb what he calls the "full-blown crisis" of affordable housing. (Old habits, though, do die hard: Mr. de Blasio did take another shot at Ms. Quinn, saying, "Letting the real estate industry keep calling all the shots with our affordable housing policy isn't going to deliver what working people need"—an allusion to her tax credits-for-affordable housing plan, which seems cribbed right from REBNY and Steve Ross's proposals back in 2011.)

Mr. de Blasio started out, as all candidates do, with a promise for the number of affordable housing units he'd create: 100,000 "new affordable units," plus preservation for "nearly 90,000" others.

As a comparison, Ms. Quinn called for the construction of "40,000 new middle-income affordable apartments." In 2005 Mayor Bloomberg wanted to build 92,000 units and preserve 73,000 by 2014, but the number of new units was revised downwards to 60,000, with the balance shifted to preservation. In 1985 Ed Koch promised 250,000 new or renovated affordable units over ten years, but only delivered 150,000, the vast majority of which were renovations.

But it's once you get past Mr. de Blasio's headline number that things start to get interesting. He calls for "mandating [that] developers include affordable housing in large development" (we used to have a name for this: rent control), which he says will be responsible for half of his 100,000 new affordable units.

He also calls for investing $1 billion from the city's public pension funds in affordable housing—an interesting proposal, but one that would put city workers' retirements in jeopardy if this not-highly-remunerative investment doesn't pan out.

Beyond that, he also has some ideas for how the government can ease constraints on private builders and landlords—a sop to the real estate industry that he decried earlier if you want to be uncharitable about it, or a recognition that the market also has a role to play in creating affordable housing, to put a more generous spin on it.

His first idea piggybacks onto something that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already gotten behind: legalizing basement apartments and "granny flats" in places where they are currently illegal—namely, the outer boroughs. "Housing experts estimate there are about 100,000 illegal units throughout the city," City Limits reported back in 2010, unregulated and prone to building and fire code violations, "housing as many as 500,000 New Yorkers," with the largest concentration of illegal units in Queens.

(In his press release he mentions bringing them into the "the legal, rent-regulated system," but his press secretary clarified to The Observer that he would only seek rent controls for units developed through city programs; the rest would simply be brought into "the legal system, like we did with lofts several years ago.")

His second idea is to allow development rights to be transfered "not just to adjacent properties, but within a neighborhood, in order to encourage more affordable construction." As it is now, neighborhood-wide transferable development rights only exist within special areas, like around the High Line. Allowing easier air rights transfers across the city—with the vague "affordable construction" caveat—would certainly make it easier to build, though it would also raise the ire of NIMBYs the city over.

Mr. de Blasio also includes a number of other housing issues in his plank, from "closing the vacant land tax loophole" to "launching a national coalition of mayors and governors to secure more federal investment in affordable housing."

Though given the secular decline in federal involvement in housing over the past few decades, we wouldn't hold our breath for that last one. For better or worse, housing is New York City's problem now.

Under Bloomberg, more enter the shelters but fewer get out. (Jori Bolton)

By the time Anne Pierre and her sons arrived at 199 Amboy Street, it was after midnight. The heat of the unusually warm April day had all but drained away, but there was a mellowness to the air, a contrast to the sharp, cold spring nights that had come before. From the outside, the red-brick building looked clean and well-maintained, though the darkness made it difficult to tell for sure. In Ms. Pierre’s experience, the exteriors of homeless shelters were poor predictors of conditions inside.

Late though it was, the family’s arrival at the Brownsville shelter marked the somewhat triumphant culmination of a bureaucratic odyssey that had started two days earlier, when Ms. Pierre had reapplied for shelter at the family intake center in the Bronx. It was only somewhat triumphant in that 199 Amboy was just a 10-day placement, the latest in a string of temporary housing assignments that had become the norm since the family lost its eligibility for shelter in February. But as it turned out, 199 Amboy was the nicest place Ms. Pierre and the two boys stayed since entering the shelter system in June 2012.

As 9-year-old Jordan described their arrival, “When we saw it, we was shocked. It was nice. It was decent.”

Anne, Jordan and Tyler Pierre.

Decent is the kind of good-enough existence that has seemed to elude the family for the last 10 months. But it felt potentially within reach again when they fell asleep that night at a little after 1 a.m., relieved if still wary, with the alarm set for 6 a.m.—the preparations necessary for the school day ahead as uncompromising as the dawn.

Like many other families who have recently swelled the ranks of the city’s homeless population, routine has taken on an almost talismanic significance for Ms. Pierre and her boys. They live an approximation of a life that involved, until recently, an apartment of their own—a two-bedroom on Legion Street rented for four years with the help of a Section 8 voucher. Ms. Pierre paid $350 of the $1,100 rent until a recurrent mold problem disqualified the apartment.

Routine means showers in the morning and at night (depending on the hot water situation). It means home-style Haitian cooking for dinner, even if that involves dining out—an expensive proposition, but difficult to avoid when you don’t live in any one place long enough to lay in a supply of groceries or retrieve your pots and pans from storage. It means buying cleaning supplies and paper plates and a tablecloth for every new housing placement, no matter how temporary.

It means the boys’ hair is neatly trimmed, their Adidas sneakers unscuffed, their backpacks stiff with relative newness. Ms. Pierre, a compactly built woman who wears patterned acrylic nails and keeps her braids under a neat kerchief, is vigilant about appearances. One morning on the B35 bus to 4-year-old Tyler’s preschool, she noticed that the knees of his red school sweatsuit were slightly soiled. “He’s always on his knees,” she said apologetically. “I just washed these.” When they arrived, she asked about buying a second school sweatsuit, a purchase that would almost certainly make life harder rather than easier, given that they’d been living out of only a few bags and using a nearby laundromat’s wash-and-fold as de facto clothing storage. After 10 months, even their homelessness has taken on aspects of routine. The strange beds, the strange streets, mapping the new bus routes to the boys’ schools in the morning—it is about as familiar as an unfamiliar thing can be.

In January of this year, the city’s homeless population exceeded 50,000—the highest number since the Great Depression. But while previous homeless crises were largely defined by individuals who fell out of the social fabric long before they went homeless—unemployed, unemployable, or with serious health or substance abuse problems—the current crisis is defined by families, who make up some three-quarters of the city’s shelter population.

The number of families in shelters has nearly doubled in the last decade—as of this month, the shelter population included more than 10,000 families and nearly 21,000 children, according to city data. Homeless families have been the fastest-growing segment of the shelter population during Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, soaring from 6,921 when he took office in January 2002 to 11,984 in January 2013, according to data provided by Coalition for the Homeless.

Even as the problem has become more widespread, it has become harder to see. It’s not so much a figure sleeping in a doorway, but a mother lugging around duffel bags, a child’s grades slipping, a family rushing home to make a 10 o’clock shelter curfew.

The current situation may mirror the Great Depression in numbers, but today’s deprivation is played out not against a backdrop of 1930s austerity and thrift, but one of profligacy that revels in extravagances of all sorts, from $20 cocktails to $90 million condos. In Bloomberg’s New York, the streets may still be potholed, but every new bathroom seems to be clad in Calacatta marble.

Ever since clawing its way back from the brink of economic collapse under Koch, New York City has undergone a dramatic transformation. But to lower-income New Yorkers untouched by the city’s new prosperity, it often feels like a cruel taunt that has only made life more difficult.

Jordan and Anne on the walk home from school.

Brooklyn is now the second most expensive place to live in America (after Manhattan), with townhouses that sell for $12 million and jars of pickles that sell for $9, but nearly half of its population can’t afford to live there. According to a recent study from the Center for an Urban Future, almost 40 percent of the borough’s population works in low-wage jobs, making less than $27,000 a year. At that salary, affordable rent (affordable is defined as costing no more than 30 percent of income) tops out at $675 a month. Minimum-wage workers can’t afford to pay more than $375 a month—a virtual impossibility.

A lot of people make do, of course. They triple up with relatives, live four to a room, work two jobs, display the scrappy ingenuity and hardscrabble bravado that we like to think of as quintessentially New York, until something goes wrong.

The huge increase in families seeking shelter is proof of how precarious the lives of New York’s working poor are. Family shelters house working parents and recently working ones like Ms. Pierre, a full-time home health aide until June. They are families who have long struggled to make ends meet but for whom homelessness is a new—though increasingly intractable—predicament. Last year, families spent more than a year on average in the shelter system for the first time since 1987. Advocates attribute their inability to leave to the fact that, in contrast to the last three decades, there are no longer subsidies available to help them move out of shelters and into permanent housing.

The current reality stands in sharp contrast to the ambitious plan Mayor Bloomberg presented in 2004 to reduce the shelter population by two-thirds and end chronic homelessness within five years by addressing “homelessness at its core, rather than at the margins.” It partly focused on preventative measures like eviction protection, which were widely lauded, but more controversially, it wiped out the paths to permanent housing, replacing them with temporary housing, on the assumption that families just needed a little help getting back on their feet.

“They thought that having paths to permanent housing was drawing people into the shelter system, so their approach to ending homelessness was to eliminate the path to permanent housing,” said Councilman Brad Lander, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies.

Determining how much of the blame should be laid at Mayor Bloomberg’s feet is a complicated question. While he and his policies have certainly presided over an unprecedented rise in the homeless population, the recession, the mounting cost of living and the national rise in homelessness are significant confounding variables.

Nonetheless, in the twilight of his last term, Mr. Bloomberg seems to have retreated from the battle, leaving the next mayor to solve a problem that has grown to monstrous proportions. In March, he blamed the surge in homelessness on the loss of state funding for Advantage—a program that issued temporary rental subsidies to thousands of shelter families from 2007 to 2011—but the Department of Homeless Services has not suggested any new programs to deal with the void left in its wake.

Still, the mayor’s approach to the spiking shelter population has also struck many as less than compassionate. New York magazine quoted him as saying “you can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.”

Anne in the foyer of the shelter on Clarkson Street where the family used to live.

Anne Pierre doesn’t have a jet or a limousine. It was hard for her to rouse the boys on their first day at the new shelter, but the morning was full of promise. There was hot water, Ms. Pierre had a plan to try to get them eligible for shelter again, and she had heard about a home health aide service that might be hiring.

There were those little frustrations that can threaten to bring down a day—a late departure, unfamiliar streets, several people’s detailed though utterly unhelpful directions to the bus stop, and Tyler, impish even on a few hours of sleep, dropping Ms. Pierre’s hand and jogging backward down the sidewalk for a half block. But just as easily, the morning righted itself.

Having set off hesitantly toward the rumored bus stop, Ms. Pierre recognized a park, its pocked red running track dotted with figures in tracksuits. The park was not only familiar, it was just a few blocks from Jordan’s school—the school, she declared with amazement, was walkable. “Thank you God, his school is walkable,” she said, an exclamation she repeated in a tone of happy disbelief several times on the walk over.

For the rest of the journey, Tyler was charged with telling the family which way to turn at intersections and when it was safe to cross the streets. Though he is notorious for clowning and for a tendency to blurt out whatever he is thinking despite the social consequences, he went about the task obediently enough.

“Tyler has all of me,” Ms. Pierre says. “He’s like me when I was a kid. Don’t care if you get in trouble. Jordan is different. Jordan, Jordan watch everything. He talk around people if he like you. He plays with other kids, but he like to be by himself too. He needs time by himself and Tyler doesn’t want to give it to him, and they end up fighting.”

Anne Pierre rides the subway home. She spends much of her day in transit.

At a corner store across from Jordan’s school, P.S. 631, they stopped to buy breakfast sandwiches. Jordan fidgeted as they waited for the sandwiches. “It’s 9:05,” he said, looking at Ms. Pierre.

“I know,” she said.

School had started at 8:30, his third-grade regents exams were the following week, and he had missed school the day before because children need to be present when their parents reapply for shelter. As soon as Ms. Pierre had paid, he bolted out of the store, but not without hugging her goodbye. She watched until he disappeared behind the door.
“I have to see him go inside, in front of my eyes, or I worry,” she said. She meets him after school, too. “I’m one of those—I’m not going to say crazy mothers, I’m going to say worried mothers.”

Ms. Pierre worries a lot. She worries about where they’ll be living next, she worries about Jordan’s asthma and she worries about her 19-year-old daughter, Anna. Anna, who Ms. Pierre brought to the U.S. from Haiti as a 1-month-old infant when she herself was only 17, was living with them on Legion Street before they lost the apartment. She is now living with a girlfriend whom Ms. Pierre says is abusive and lies about whether Anna is home when the boys try to visit. Most of all, she worries on the days when she has to go to the intake center, the days when everything seems impossible and she has to plead for a new placement in a system that she doesn’t want to be in and whose rules she only half understands.

She did not, for example, understand that she could lose her Section 8 voucher for not finding a new apartment quickly enough after the last one was disqualified. Nor did she understand that, having lost it, she could not get it back (with more than 100,000 families, the waiting list is now closed). She had not understood how difficult it would be to find a new apartment by herself (the first broker she approached demanded a month up front as a deposit before showing her anything), and she had not understood that having a 4-year-old would be a problem.

Jordan and Anne studying a house in Brownsville.

But working 40 or more hours a week had meant little time to conduct an apartment hunt, which meant that she especially resented being shown decrepit one-bedrooms passed off as two-bedrooms by landlords taking advantage of the short supply of Section 8 housing. She was passed over for all the apartments she did apply for. One landlord explained that if she just had older kids, it wouldn’t be a problem, but a 4-year-old meant window grates and radiator covers and other modifications that he wasn’t willing to spend extra money on.

Other rejections were more vague, but they amounted to the same thing: by June, she didn’t have a place to live, and without a Section 8 voucher, she didn’t have the money to pay for one anyway. She was making $9 an hour—a step up from the $7.25 an hour she made when she started four years earlier, but her income was less than $20,000 a year even when she worked 48 hours a week, which she did as often as she could.

When Ms. Pierre and the boys entered the shelter system, she thought it would be temporary and even turned down an offer for public housing because it was far from Jordan’s school. But things went quickly downhill. The one-bedroom apartment she was assigned to in a dingy building on Clarkson and Nostrand was not ideal, but things would have been okay if Anna, who had just graduated from high school—one of the few in her class to graduate with a Regents diploma, Ms. Pierre noted proudly—had not moved out.

This was a problem because Anna watched Tyler when Ms. Pierre was at work. Not having anyone to watch Tyler meant that Ms. Pierre couldn’t start the next assignment her job offered her, and they gave it to someone else, which meant that she didn’t have any income for several weeks. She applied for public assistance, but before it came through her phone got cut off, which meant that she couldn’t get another work assignment because they wouldn’t give her one without a contact number.

It was simple and complicated at the same time. In a matter of months, she lost her house, her job and, it sometimes seemed, her daughter, who had dropped out of her college classes—she wanted to become a police detective someday—and moved in with the girlfriend, a woman Ms. Pierre described as a “bad influencer” who discouraged Anna from going out or talking to other people. With limited contact, Ms. Pierre and the boys have taken to walking past the girlfriend’s apartment on a regular basis, hoping to catch a glimpse of Anna.

“The last time I see her, her face has changed,” said Ms. Pierre. “Jordan is telling me we have to do something. I just keep waiting for her, but I’m afraid if she stay much longer, it will be too much damage. She’ll become someone else.”
Now everything Ms. Pierre wanted or needed seemed to rest on something else that she wasn’t able to do. When she reapplied for shelter, she was told she would not be eligible for a long-term placement without documentation of where she’d been living for the previous two weeks. She had been staying at Anna’s girlfriend’s place, but the girlfriend, whose name the apartment was under, refused to write the letter.

PS 631

Without a stable place to live, it had been hard to apply for jobs, but without a job, it seemed unlikely that they’d ever get a stable place to live. She misses her job, or at least the life it gave her.
“It’s freedom. When you work, it’s freedom,” she said. “You have money. When I worked, if I wanted something, I could buy it.”
Ms. Pierre’s plan, if she can “fix the house,” as she puts it, is to become a certified nursing aide, which she sees as more stable than being a home health aide, and ultimately to become a licensed practical nurse.

“From CNA you could go to an LPN. By the time I’m 40, I want to do it,” said Ms. Pierre, who is 37 now. “I would love to be a nurse, and I know I can do it. I know if I be a nurse, I could put my kids in a better school, a Catholic school.”
There is a class that she is planning to take as soon as they become at least eligible for long-term shelter again, because, she explained, it’s rumored to be difficult and “the head is supposed to be on the shoulders when you’re studying to be a nurse.”

She just wasn’t sure how she’d fix the housing situation beyond getting the letter and a long-term shelter placement, an improvement over their current itinerant state, but one that would still leave them homeless and at the mercy of the system, the bag searches, nightly sign-ins and strange rules (at Amboy, no blenders or TVs larger than 19 inches). But if she could get her Section 8 back, she’d move to Staten Island and start over, as much as a thing like starting over is possible.

“I’m tired of the same things over and over again,” she said. “I want to change things. I’ve been here so long, going through the same ups and downs so long. I want to go where I could work, pay my bills, take care of my kids. Maybe Staten Island—the boys and I went there and we liked it. It’s different than Brooklyn; it’s quiet, the spaces are bigger. I thought I was going to be afraid of the boat, but I just sit on the boat and I enjoy it.”

Anne Pierre on the subway.

When asked to account for the rapid rise in homeless families, Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond, echoing Mr. Bloomberg, pointed to the loss of the Advantage program, which was canceled in 2011 when its state funding was cut. Given that the Bloomberg administration had earlier stopped the long-standing practice of prioritizing homeless families for Section 8 and public housing, calling it bad public policy to let anyone entering the shelter system skip ahead in line (a claim advocates call highly specious), there was literally no way for shelter families to leave unless they could find an affordable living arrangement on their own.

“The increase is really tightly tied to the loss of Advantage. We were able to make progress and could have continued to help more households, but we will never get back the $150 million investment,” said Mr. Diamond. DHS provided statistics showing that in March of 2011, right before Advantage ended, there were 8,317 homeless families, 7 percent lower than the previous peak of 8,991 in 2009. He said that many fewer applicants are coming to the intake centers now, 8 percent less than last April, indicating that the crisis is abating and that DHS is “making good progress” even without any path to permanent housing. “The mayor has transformed the system,” he said.

Asked how families could leave the shelters without housing subsidies, Mr. Diamond said that “work works—the revolution across the board has been work.” He then went on to describe “enhanced training on the importance of work,” job-training programs and subsidies of the paychecks of homeless workers to encourage employers to take them on—none of which are new programs.

But a number of advocates claim that the Advantage program wasn’t working in the first place, primarily because the subsidy only lasted for two years; families who couldn’t make it on their own after that time just got channeled back into the shelter system. Ralph da Costa Nunez, the president of the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, who started out in the Koch administration, pointed to an increase in recidivism under the Advantage program (according to Mr. Diamond, 25 percent of families in the program returned to the shelter system).

“If you’re going to have a subsidy, you need to have a subsidy with a plan, not a subsidy with a dream,” said Mr. Nunez. “It’s a poverty problem, not a housing problem.”

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, questioned the DHS assumptions that training people to become fast-food workers and home health aides, jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour, would solve the problem. “How do you square the circle?” he asked. “These families are too poor to afford rent. Even in East New York or the South Bronx, rent is at least $1,000 a month.

“The mayor and his administration are people who craft their policies based on data, but in the area of homelessness, all their policies seem to be based on ideology,” he added.

Given that the city is mandated to provide shelter as the result of a 1980s court decision, and that Mr. Bloomberg appears to have no plan to transition residents out of shelters besides training for low-wage employment, it’s hard to imagine that anything will change.

Indeed, in the absence of any housing subsidy, shelters seem to have become New York’s answer to the lack of low-income housing. But shelters are an exceedingly expensive alternative. It costs, on average, $3,000 a month to house a family in a shelter, significantly more than the rent on a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhoods where many are located. The city also pays for homeless families’ storage lockers. And shelter life for any family is less than ideal, what with the room inspections, curfews, sign-ins, bag searches and often a ban on guests.

What’s more, said Mr. Nunez, while the costs of shelters was once higher because it included other resources to help families, many of the new shelters that have rapidly opened to meet the need are run by private operators who just provide rooms. And, seeing that they can essentially triple the rent with shelter tenants, landlords are pushing out the working-class families currently living in their buildings, perpetuating the cycle.

One of Ms. Pierre and the boys’ favorite topics is the house on Legion Street, which, while no palace (the mold was so bad that they once had to throw out a mattress that had been touching one of the walls), serves as a touchstone of what life used to be like and might be again. They talk about the food that Ms. Pierre made there—rice and beans, baked macaroni, oxtail, sweet plantains, corn on the cob. They talk about how Jordan used to ride the school bus and how much they miss Anna.

(Photo by Kim Velsey)

When they lived there, the kids would watch for Ms. Pierre from the back window, where they could see her getting off the train. “They used to fight about who would open the door for me, and I had to hug them all at the same time,” she said. “If not, it was going to be a problem.”

But when Ms. Pierre picked up Jordan from school that afternoon—she was running late, as she often is, and he chided her gently—they did not talk about Legion Street.

“When I was in school, I kept thinking of that apartment,” Jordan said. He meant 199 Amboy, and as they walked back there they discussed how clean it was and how they had been given a fresh shower curtain liner when they arrived, something you usually had to buy yourself. How they hoped they could become eligible again so they could stay, even if they hated the bag searches. They talked about how it was so close to Jordan’s school that he wouldn’t even need to take the bus, at least not until Ms. Pierre started working again.

They had reached the intersection of Blake and Amboy by then, and they stopped to lean against the fence of a little house kitty-corner from the shelter. Ms. Pierre said the shelter didn’t want people hanging around in front.
They discussed the food they would buy for school lunches when Ms. Pierre started working again and the apartments they had seen on Staten Island—how big and clean they were and how they had entire basements where you could store things.

Then Ms. Pierre started cataloging all the other things she would need to pay for: gas, light, clothes, rent. Even at $10 an hour, it was clear that the accounting didn’t quite work out.

Ms. Pierre was silent for a moment, the hopeful logic on which their conversation had cheerfully sailed broken, but then she turned to face the little house on whose fence she was leaning. She examined its hodgepodgey exterior, with its staid brick facade, red and white awning and granite porch too fancy for the house it was attached to. “This house is nice,” she said finally.

kvelsey@observer.com

It's a mansion. On an acre. In Astoria.

During the last few decades, Brooklyn has shaken off the vinyl-clad, working-class outer-borough stigma so completely that it can be hard to remember a time when New Yorkers ever dismissed the borough of Kings as a place you came from rather than went to. Indeed, it may well have eclipsed Manhattan as a exporter of culture, with traces of its handsewn jeans and vintage-style facial hair visible on vaguely artsy twenty-somethings in cities around the globe.

Queens, on the other, hand, is still struggling to shed its dreary outer-boroughness, its reputation as a place where secretaries come back to reasonably-priced studios at night. Despite all the enthusiastic references to fun beer halls and more reasonable rents and short commute times to Manhattan that new residents are likely to whip out, it still feels more like a compromise than a destination.

Definitely not a gut reno.

We never realized just how maligned Queens is until we read a recent Daily News article about how no one wants to buy a stunning, well-appointed Steinway mansion that comes with an acre of land (an acre of land!) in Astoria (the borough's crown gem for goodness sakes!) that is selling for only $2.9 million. (To be fair, a recently-organized group of preservationists and local history buffs wants to buy the mansion and turn it into a museum, but they can't swing the price.)

What's more, the 25-room mansion (a true mansion, not a townhouse calling itself a mansion–we're onto you non-free-standing structures) appears to be in really great shape. This is not one of those "bring your architect" listings. The executrix of the property is even open to selling off the surrounding land separately to make the asking price more palatable.

Maybe we've just had our head in the custom-sifted luxury sand, but $2.9 million sounds like such a steal that we spent a good five minutes convincing ourselves that we could enjoy living in Astoria and another five minutes fantasizing about how we could raise the money. (That said, the order in which we undertook those calculations is fairly revealing.)

Of course there's a library.

After endlessly hearing about how all the rich oligarchs are elbowing each other out of the way to sign contracts for $50 million floor-throughs, it's shocking to see a truly gorgeous $2.9 million property snubbed by buyers—a property that has a full English bar and pub in the basement, a sauna, and a center hall with a 30-foot skylit dome . True, the property did first try for $4.9 million when it came on the market in 2009, which was really something of a reach given that no sale in Queens had even approached that price. But considering the fact that an attached on both sides Park Slope "mansion" recently tried for $25 million, and the Pierre penthouse is asking $125 million, $4.9 million doesn't seem unreasonable at all.

And hyped up as the so-called trophy market may be, we know for a fact that in Brooklyn people are lining up millions to outbid each other on ho-hum townhouses.

Still, the sales prices in Queens are low compared to Brooklyn, even with the luxury towers that never seem to stop rising in Long Island City. In Brooklyn Heights, the townhouse where Truman Capote once lived set a borough record when it sold for $12 million last year. In Queens, it was a Long Island City penthouse that sold for $3.1 million, also last year.

In 2012, the average sales price for an Astoria one-bedroom was $387,786—an all-time high. Which sounds crazy cheap, until you realize just how warped our perspective is in New York and how it's harder and harder for anyone who's not rich, or at least very wealthy, to live here anymore. It's easy to get lost in a haze of good cheer when talking about the luxury market and the celebratory, gee-whiz atmosphere that surrounds every record-setting sale, but maybe we should be glad that for all its proximity to Manhattan, prices in Queens are lagging. After removing ourselves from the rah-rah market mindset, we realized that A.) we don't really want to live in Astoria and B.) we'll never be able to afford a $2.9 million mansion anyway C.) maybe it's not such a bad thing that there aren't enough deep-pocketed buyers to drive up real estate prices in Queens. Now that Manhattan is the most expensive place in the U.S. and Brooklyn is the second most expensive, do we really want Queens to claim third place?

Can a low-wage worker even afford this $1,100 a month one-bedroom on Pelham Parkway?

The good news is that New York City is still, in some sense, a land of opportunity. There are jobs to be had here—New York lost fewer jobs than any other city during the recession and the employment growth has been steady these last few years. The bad news is that many of those jobs are scarcely worth having—yielding less than $27,000 a year, which isn't really enough to live in on New York.

While rents have continued their relentless climb (ever skyward!) wages for low- and middle-income New Yorkers have not followed suit. Moreover, the disparity between pay and the cost of living in our metropolis is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon given that a significant proportion of job growth has been in low-paying occupations, according to a new study from the Center for an Urban Future.

In 2012, 35 percent of New Yorkers over the age of 18 worked in a low-wage job, up from 31.7 percent in 2007, according to the study. And in Brooklyn and the Bronx, that number was significantly higher, with 46.8 percent of working adults in the Bronx and 39.6 percent in Brooklyn in low-wage jobs. The study used data from the U.S. Population Reference Bureau, which defines a low-wage job in New York as one that pays less than $12.89 an hour, or $26,818 annually.

Of course, that's the most that a worker could earn to be considered low-wage; there are plenty of other New Yorkers putting in full work weeks at $7.25-an-hour jobs (which comes out to a little over $15,000 a year).

The problem is that such wages are increasingly unworkable in a city as expensive as ours, even in boroughs that New Yorkers have long turned to for more affordable options. Brooklyn, as we all know by now, is basically hopeless, with rents rising twice as fast as Manhattan and studios going for an average of $1,884 a month, according to MNS. Sure, Williamsburg—where studios rent for an average $2,731—tugs up the entire borough average, but studios in the cheapest neighborhood, Prospect/Lefferts Garden, still averaged $1,225 a month.

A quick Craigslist search for apartments in the Bronx, where nearly half the population falls into the low-wage category, turns up results that are consistently over $1,000 for studios and one-bedrooms. And the population in the Bronx is only just now beginning to stabilize after decades of flight.

Even if two low-wage workers pool their resources, they're still likely to fall below the city's median household income, which was $47,000 in 2011. That leaves few housing options. In 2011, for example, only 11 percent of the housing stock was affordable to a household earning 50 percent of AMI; households earning 80 percent of AMI had 34.2 percent, according to data from NYU's Furman Center. Affordable here being defined by costing no more than 30 percent of income. Naturally, there's some wiggle room (a lot of New Yorkers pay more than that), but the high cost of housing, which is the biggest monthly expense in many people's budgets, is becoming an increasingly impossible hurdle to overcome. Scrimping, saving and squeezing too many people into a small space only goes so far.

The only borough where the population of low-wage workers didn't increase was Queens; it held steady at 34 percent.

The growth in low-wage jobs has been mirrored by the growth of high-wage jobs, particularly in the city's burgeoning tech sector. Which is good, of course, but for the fact that New York is in an increasingly polarized city that low-income workers really can't afford to live in at all. Given that those low-income workers make the city run for high-income workers, it would appear that New York is in an increasingly untenable position.

"Related? Hahaha, get it?!"

New York City public advocate and Democratic mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio added his voice to a growing chorus of commentators (including The Observer) who have noted similarities between Council Speaker Christine Quinn's affordable housing platform, announced in her State of the City address earlier this week, and a plan proposed by the real estate industry in 2011. The proposal would cap property taxes for whole buildings if they agreed to set aside a certain percentage of their units to let at below-market rate rents.

"Chris Quinn's so-called affordable housing plan," Mr. De Blasio said at a press conference earlier today, "is obviously a giveaway, a very big giveaway, to powerful real estate interests. It's such a big giveaway that even Michael Bloomberg thought that it was unfair," he said, likely referring to a story in The New York Times today, which claimed that advisors within the Bloomberg administration were surprised at how closely Ms. Quinn's plan hewed to that of the Real Estate Board of New York's plan (a plan strongly supported by the Related Companies' Stephen Ross):

Aides to Mr. Bloomberg said they were surprised, even startled, to see the tax cap proposal prominently featured in Ms. Quinn’s speech.

When the real estate industry sought a similar set of tax incentives through a bill in the New York State Legislature in 2011, Mr. Bloomberg’s office singled out the tax cap for criticism. In a memo, a top aide said the plan was “not, fundamentally, an affordable housing program,” but “a large tax break dressed up as a housing policy.”

"I've had my ups and downs and downs with the mayor," Mr. De Blasio told reporters, "but when the mayor says it's fiscally irresponsible to give so much money to the wealthy, you know you've got a problem."

Mr. De Blasio also singled out Related's living wage exemption on the Far West Side, which was negotiated by Ms. Quinn. "And in that case we weren't even talking about affordable housing," he said (although Hudson Yards does have a below-market rate housing component). "We were talking about people trying to make at least $10 an hour so that they could feed their families."

When a reporter mentioned a "related question," Mr. De Blasio joked, "Related—get it?!"

Asked for his alternative to Ms. Quinn's plan, he said he would like to "use the city's own resources from that same tax base"—that is, the one that the speaker's tax breaks would eat into—"to create affordable housing." This bears a resemblance to Ms. Quinn's first idea in her State of the City, though he did not pinpoint a funding source (Ms. Quinn wanted to finance her 40,000 new affordable units through a combination of government efficiencies and new borrowing).

Mr. De Blasio also spoke of wanting to "hold developers' feet to the fire, bargain harder, demand more, because they're getting extraordinary value" out of the rezonings during the "Bloomberg and Quinn years," as he called them.

Below is a video of Mr. De Blasio's remarks on Ms. Quinn's housing plan.

Christine Quinn's headline plan is for the city to borrow money to build 40,000 new middle-income apartments over the next decade.

In her 2013 State of the City speech, City Council Speaker and Democratic mayoral frontrunner Christine Quinn focused on housing affordability—namely middle-class housing.

Ms. Quinn's headline proposal is to "build 40,000 new middle-income affordable apartments over ten years." It's unclear what definition of "middle-income" she would use, but the Middle Class Squeeze report that she released earlier today defines middle class as "households with incomes between 100 percent and 300 percent of area median income."

To emphasize how close to home the issue hits, Ms. Quinn brought her father to the podium to introduce her. He spoke about her grandfather leaving Ireland in 1913, and she mentioned her mother's parents snagging a rent-controlled apartment in Inwood 70 years ago (rent control in New York City began in 1943). "That apartment gave them the stability that allowed them to work their way up to the middle class," she said.

These new middle-class housing units would, according to Ms. Quinn, be paid for with "government efficiencies,"  achieved by everything from better vehicle fleet management to IT reforms. Second on her list was "using our capital budget more efficiently." She cited $50 million a year in Parks Department funds "for something called 'miscellaneous capital projects'—money that hasn't actually been used."

"The third strategy," Ms. Quinn said, "is to borrow additional money." She identified low interest and federal mortgage rates as reasons to borrow.

In her speech, Ms. Quinn name-checked the Mitchell-Lama program and the more than 100,000 middle-income rentals and co-ops created in the 1960s and 1970s, but lamented that the program has since lost more than 30,000 of those units to market-rate conversions.

Ms. Quinn said that she convinced state Sen. Martin Golden and Assemblyman Keith Wright, Chair of the Housing Committee, to introduce the Permanent Affordability Act. The program would convince landlords to "convert a number of units to affordable middle-income housing," for which they'd be rewarded with property tax caps. A "win for them, a win for middle-class renters and a win for the city," the speaker said—though capping property taxes might make her first goal, to build 40,000 new apartments, a bit tricky.

"Because it won't stop with Manhattan," Ms. Quinn said regarding the housing cost hikes that have been buffeting the city of late. "If we don't reverse that trend, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens will be next." Perhaps she lifted that line from the 2003 State of the City and forgot to edit it? Park Slope has an $18 million townhouse listing, and just after the New Year a $4 million townhouse sale set a new Carroll Gardens record.

The property tax proposal appears similar to one pushed by the Real Estate Board of New York and Related Companies chairman Stephen Ross two years ago, as the Wall Street Journal's Eliot Brown pointed out on Twitter. Related Cos. employees have also continued to support Christine Quinn's mayoral campaign by an overwhelming margin, despite Joe Lhota's entrance into the race and his business-friendly image.

The speaker also identified other housing reforms she would like to implement, including stricter enforcement of the building maintenance code.

"Contrary to what you might think," Ms. Quinn said, "this idea is supported by both tenant advocates and the real estate industry. Because it isn't about unfairly targeting landlords—it's about taking down the slumlords that give good owners a bad name."

Lofty and admirable goals—the middle-class housing crunch is a serious problem for New York—but it's unclear if Ms. Quinn's proposal, if it is ever enacted, would prove any more effective than Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $7.5 billion plan to increase affordable housing units. The plan, which has for the most part been lauded by housing advocates, has nonetheless struggled to keep to create and preserve more affordable housing units than the market subtracts.

Raul Rodriguez of Picture the Homeless. (Christopher Brennan)

The winds of Hurricane Sandy caused massive damage to the New York area when it made landfall at the end of October. But the gusts of the superstorm blew more than just debris, dislodging New Yorkers from their homes and into a constellation of already full shelters. Yet in spite of the issue of overcrowding both before or after the storm, there may actually be large amounts of space to house people in the city.

Hoping to capitalize on the renewed awareness of homelessness and the dire situation in the city's shelters, advocacy group Picture the Homelesss and a number of its allies held a rally Friday morning in Harlem to draw new attention to its regular reports on vacant properties in the city. Picture the Homeless has long argued that landlords across the city have left properties vacant while they wait for property values and rents to rise. The practice, known as warehousing, is legal, but it robs the city of precious living space at the same time.

“If you were able to pull out the money for Sandy, you were able to pull out the money before Sandy,” Raul Rodriguez, an organizer with Picture the Homeless, declared, criticizing the city's failure to capitalize on rundown properties.

Mr. Rodriguez was standing in front of one such building, a boarded-up rowhouse on 129th street between Adam Clayton Powell and Malcolm X boulevards. Supporters, bundled up against the cold morning air, stood behind him and chanted slogans such as “Vacant buildings are a crime, landlords need to do some time."

The vacant building he was standing in front of was owned by the city and was spraypainted with the large letters "H.P.D.," for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the agency responsible for creating low-income housing in the city. Picture the Homeless’s report counted 3,551 vacant buildings with the estimated ability to house 71,707 people and 2,489 vacant lots that could be developed to house 128,873 additional people. Manhattan and Brooklyn had the largest numbers of vacant buildings, with 987 and 1623 respectively.

According to Mr. Rodriguez the group picked this location because of the large number of city-owned buildings in Harlem that could be more easily converted to affordable housing than privately owned buildings or lots. The report’s findings said that 10 percent of vacant property is publicly owned.

The group also contrasted potential rent assistance and affordable housing with the tough reality of the city’s shelter system. Though the event ended up relating little to the problems of those homeless after Hurricane Sandy specifically, Kendall Jackson, a homeless shelter resident and member of Picture the Homeless, said that the $1,800 per month that the FEMA offered to give landlords to house homeless residents was a much better deal for taxpayers than the estimated $3,500 dollars per month that it costs the city to support someone with a shelter.

Mr. Rodriguez, now in his 40s, has been in and out of the shelter system since he was 14. Though currently not living in a shelter, he told The Observer, “Everybody that’s been in the shelter system goes through all the avenues to try to find housing, but all they find is nothing.”

Even before Sandy, the City’s shelter system was overcrowded, prompting Mayor  Bloomberg to open 10 new homeless shelters in recent months. Picture the Homeless says the number of those seeking shelter every night before the storm was between 46,000 and 48,000, including 20,000 children. Add to that the tens of thousands the city predicts may be homeless in the wake of Sandy, and New York is staring down a serious housing crisis.

She's digging in. (Getty)

As promised, the City Council overrode the mayor’s veto of Intro 730, a bill dubbed the HPD Transparency Act, by a unanimous vote. Speaker Christine Quinn defended the 46-0 override saying, “This piece of legislation, which is simple in many ways, it’s just transparency. It’s just the info. Why don’t we want to have the info behind our Department of Housing out there? Why don’t we want New Yorkers to have all the facts out there.”

The bill has been criticized for it’s wage reporting standards, which opponents say adds an onerous bureaucratic burden for small firms and MWBEs. Opponents of the bill argue that the supposed transparency of the bill would do little to ensure quality construction. Just knowing how much someone gets paid does not guarantee a better building, the ostensible reason for the bill. When asked about how the bill might still achieve this, the speaker stood by Intro 730.

“The truth is to some degree you get what you pay for," Speaker Quinn said. "And we’ve unfortunately heard terrible stories of people being paid off the books, under the table, corruption and things to that nature. Knowing exactly what wages are getting paid and how will give us a clear paper trail of where the money is going and we can then really do almost a comparison. What homes are standing up the best. What homes are having the biggest level of complaints. What homes are basically not standing at the end of the day. Who built them? How much? and How much did they pay their workers?”

Speaker Quinn was less forthcoming when answering the claim, in accordance with the Mayor’s own veto statement, that the wage standards were simply a way for the unions to break into public development. “What the unions do or think of this bill you’ll have to ask them," she said. "All of the reporting requirements are in one way or another, these developers are supposed to be reporting.” HPD argues the bill requires considerably more reporting and will cost the industry tens of millions of dollars, meaning less housing will get built.

But given a spate of scandals at HPD, it was easy for the bill to get broad support, whatever the motives. “Our focus on this bill is responding to horror stories from New Yorkers who scrimped and saved and bought homes through HPD programs and then found the work not at all what they bought, not at all what they paid for," Speaker Quinn said. "They're kind of a little bit of the American dream and nightmare.”

It’s a point echoed by Brooklyn Councilman Dominick Recchia, one if the cosponsors of the bill. “We want people to have home ownership, but we want it built the right way," he said. "They shouldn’t be getting something half-assed. It’s not right.”

In a statement, HPD Commissioner Matt Wambua condemned the bill yet again as "special interest politics driving bad policy."

"It places a massive burden on local, minority, and women-owned businesses that don’t have the capacity to meet the Council’s wage reporting mandate which goes far beyond current requirements," he continued. "These are the same businesses that Council Members ask HPD to include on projects to support the local economy in their districts. The real loss comes to local minority and women-owned businesses, the City’s economy, and working-class New Yorkers who badly need affordable housing."