Photo: Reuters
New York is known for its multimillionaires and exorbitantly rented luxury towers, but America’s largest city has also just broken a new record of 60,000 homeless people.
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Posted on February 3, 2015 at 7:35 p.m.
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In a city with exorbitant rents, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday he wanted 240,000 new homes to be built in the next ten years, including 80,000 social housing.
“Nothing expresses inequalities in New York better (…) than the explosion in housing prices,” said the mayor in his annual speech on the state of the city.
In Manhattan, a two-bedroom apartment in a building with a caretaker costs $ 5,000 to $ 12,000 per month, according to the New York habitat specialist. The most expensive rent for hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
De Blasio pointed out that 56% of New Yorkers renting spend more than 30% of their income on housing, 10 percentage points more than ten years ago.
Hence the need, according to him, to build more social housing: he recalled on Tuesday that his administration had committed to building 80,000 housing of this type by 2024, i.e. twice the annual average than during these Last 25 years.
And he added that she had also planned to rehabilitate 120,000 social housing units.
New York City Hall, he added, also plans to build 160,000 homes during the market, taking into account that the population of America’s largest city is expected to reach 9 million by 2040.
For the first time in the history of the city, the new urban plans in the large sectors being rehabilitated will require developers to include social housing in order to diversify the habitat. “It is not an option, but a precondition,” he said.
The mayor also insisted on the need to see these new residential sectors with good access to transport, and announced a new ferry system by 2017.
Record number of homeless people in New York
New York is known for its multimillionaires and exorbitantly rented luxury towers, but America’s largest city has also just broken a new record of 60,000 homeless people.
“Tonight, 60,352 people will sleep in shelters in the city,” including more than 25,000 children, the Coalition for the Homeless said on Tuesday on its website.
This is 11% more than in January 2014, compared to the 53,615 homeless people hosted by the city in January 2014, according to the site.
Families represent four-fifths of this population.
According to Patrick Markee, deputy director of the coalition, “the historic homeless crisis” in New York has worsened further since the arrival of Mayor Bill de Blasio in January 2014.
His reasons are, according to him, the lack of low-cost housing, the policies of former mayor Michael Bloomberg on housing assistance, and the fact that housing assistance has not been reinstated for homeless families.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio briefly touched on the issue in his State of the City address on Tuesday, saying he made it his business to fix the homeless veterans issue by the end of it. of the year.
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