Cross posted from the DMI blog.

In 1999, Boston had a housing crisis. The waiting list for public housing units had 15,000 people on it, and rent prices had gone up 47% in the past four years. More than 50,000 Bostonians were spending more than half of their income on housing, and the number of homeless people in Boston was at a record high.

But just four years later, the statistics told a different story. Almost 8,000 new housing units had been created, and 1,000 housing units were made accessible to the homeless. The new units represented about $2 billion in public and private housing investment. The number of abandoned buildings in Boston dropped by 66% -- from 1,044 in 1997 to only 350 in 2005, and by the end of 2003, 1,079 vacant public housing units had been renovated. Suddenly, housing in Boston was on its way to becoming available and affordable.

The statistics make it sound like a magic wand swept over all the old, abandoned buildings in Boston and transformed them into affordable housing. But there was no magic in Boston, just the good sense and dedication of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. Mayor Menino, who is now serving his fourth term, has worked hard to make housing affordable for all of Boston's residents. In 2000, he implemented Leading the Way, a program that surveyed abandoned commercial and residential properties and then worked with developers to rehabilitate them into housing units. The US Conference of Mayors recognized Boston's housing strategy as a "best practice."

"Affordable rent" is at the top of the list of concerns facing the middle class in New York City today. The average sale price for an apartment in Manhattan is $1.2 million and average market-rate monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment is $3,000. Rent management policies are eroding, and thousands of apartments have lost their rent-controlled status. Within the past two decades, 168,179 apartments in the five boroughs lost their rent protections.

Want to learn more about turning abandoned buildings into affordable housing? Mayor Menino will be speaking at DMI's Marketplace of Ideas event this coming Monday. The event will also feature a panel discussion, moderated by Andrea Batista Schlesinger, which will include Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Brad Lander, the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development.

Here are the details:

When: Monday, November 19, 2007, 8:00-10:00 am.
Where: The Harvard Club
35 West 44th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
New York, NY 10036
RSVP:
Admission is free. Space is limited. RSVP and registration are required.
Please RSVP by e-mail to dmi@drummajorinstitute.org or by phone to 646.274.5700.
Light breakfast will be served.

Map courtesy of onNYTurf. The colored dots represent vacant properties in Manhattan.

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