A Tale of Two Cities: Race and Housing Equity in de Blasio’s New York

• In Event: Affordable Housing, Development, and Inclusion in Cities

Abstract

Upon entering office, Bill de Blasio vowed to take on pervasive economic and social inequality. Along with efforts towards expanding healthcare access, establishing universal pre-K, and addressing police-community relations, de Blasio pledged to solve New York City’s staggering housing crisis. To that end, the de Blasio administration launched HousingNY, committing to initially contribute 15,000 units of new, affordable housing to the City’s subsidized housing stock. New York City residents normatively commended the City’s commitment to increase its affordable housing stock. However, communities of color have argued that the majority of HousingNY units are developed in neighborhoods of color, specifically those composed predominantly of Black and Latinx New Yorkers; the mayoralty stated that development was targeted towards high poverty neighborhoods, which are often high proportion minority. Utilizing publicly available data and spatial regression, this paper explores the distribution of housing development in New York City to elucidate how policy implementation reflected the City’s stated overarching goals vis-à-vis housing inequality and the impacts of these policies on municipal racial politics, in order to grapple with both the tangible and perceptive challenges city governments face as they attempt to take on the ever increasing issue of housing access and equity.

Author

• Kanika Khanna, Cornell University