Have you heard about New York’s new “poor doors?” Seems that in return for tax and zoning breaks for giant luxury apartment complexes, the city required that developers provide some affordable housing units in the buildings. So the developers designed the building with a back door to be used by tenants of the affordable units. Here’s how London’s Daily Mail describes it:
“Extell’s proposal allows them to force affordable housing tenants to walk through an entrance located in a back alley behind the building to enter, leaving the more prominent front entrance for tenants paying for nicer apartments.”
These are not welfare apartments. People who rent the affordable units in the Extell development will have incomes from $35,280 to $50,340 a year.
Extell is not alone. In the Windermere West End, tenants in the affordable apartments can’t use services like the play area for children. According to the New York Times, the luxury building “is one of several in the city that prohibit rent-regulated tenants from using new services like gyms, playrooms and rooftop gardens.” The “rent-regulated tenant” in the NYT story pays $1250 a month for the apartment that he shares with his wife and the young child barred from the play area.
At the other end of the age spectrum, Jean Green Dorsey, who pays $1,107 a month for her apartment, is among the tenants in Stonehenge Village who are not allowed to use the gym. She was also featured in the same New York Times article
“Sitting at her dining-room table recently, a sketch of Malcolm X hanging behind her, she said, ‘Nobody makes me a second-class citizen in my own home. I had thought that by the time I got to be classified as fragile elderly that I would not have to fight this fight.’”
The New York Post says it’s all the fault of liberals who insist that poor people be allowed to live in the building. If there were no poor people, then there would be no “poor door.” And that’s about the most coherent defense I’ve seen.
Mary Turck
News Day 