The last two administrations of New York City government have done a unbelievably poor job with their contracts for affordable housing. Back in 2000, Battery Park City, then 25 years old, was to have provided, on-site or off, 60,000 units of affordable housing, but had only provided a bit more than 1500. That has not improved much! More recently, buildings like 10 Barclay St., a 58-story residential building in lower Manhattan, with 451 units, and a cost of around $185 million, which was recently renting 3-bedrooms for 9+ grand per month, was to have 15 apartments set aside as "affordable housing." In exchange for those units, in 2005, the developers received $135 million in Liberty Bonds. These crazy scams-yes, they are actual scams- are not the aberration; they are business as usual. Now, sometime today comes a report tracking the Bloomberg administration's Cornerstone program.

Says the Daily News:

The Cornerstone Program was supposed to transfer vacant city-owned land to private developers who promised to build 2,191 homes there, with 1,510 units designated for low-or middle-income New Yorkers.


Yet the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has not followed up to see whether developers complied with those terms, an audit obtained by The News found.

Now, this report is being put out by the sad man who is running against Bloomberg in the next election. But that doesn't make it any less accurate. Nearly every provision enacted under either Giuliani or Bloomberg to retain or create affordable housing in New York City-just like the financial incentives to retain corporations in Manhattan-has actually been a pro-corporation, pro-developer scam. They actually don't have to care if the program did what it set out to do. In the eyes of our last two mega-rich mayors, poor people just don't figure in their plans for the city.