By Stephen Jacob Smith 2/11 2:50pm

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

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

Speaker Quinn Vows to Keep Park Slope and Carroll Gardens from Becoming ‘Luxury’ In State of the City

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.” Read More

By The Editors 2/21/12 7:37pm

opinion

State of the City

There’s nothing like a mayoral campaign to inspire the political class to give long, windy speeches about the state of the city. With an open seat looming next year, there’s no shortage of pretenders to the throne, which means that there has been no shortage of speechmaking about the city’s condition. Read More

By Stephen Duffy 2/13/12 11:09am

Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof

Fixing homes from the bully pulput. (William Alatriste/City Council)

Quinn Tackles Affordable Housing and Maintenance Problems In State of the City Address

In between heavy dollops of sentiment, Christine Quinn cemented some specific plans to combat the affordable housing problem and the facilitation of upgrading the City’s landlord maintenance code in her State of the City address last week.

Ms. Quinn outlined how the Housing Preservation and Development Department is extending affordability to 60 years for some of the biggest developments. Affordability agreements currently stand at just the 30-year mark. Read More