Interesting battle going on in NYC over affordable housing on site. It does look like they are getting more built there than here.
I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.
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More by Lydia Chávez
It is generally much more desirable to separate the market-rate homes from the BMR units and that would be particularly true in a luxury tower in Manhattan. Buyers are very picky about who their neighbors are – the tales about Madonna getting turned down to buy a multi-million dollar co-op in NYC has become legendary.
So it’s interesting that we often see in SF that a developer would rather pay 15% in-lieu of building the BMR units on-site rather than 10% on-site, with all the attendant marketing risks that goes with that.
Of course, NYC can afford to be more generous. Other than the Rincom Hill towers, we’ve built nothing of that scale in SF, and Rincom had a 30% set-aside, I believe.
But in general, ratcheting up the BMR percentage set-asides won’t help because that simply deters projects and leads to less new homes at all price points.