Affordable housing in New York City development is often discussed in terms of mandates and requirements — what the city demands, what a rezoning triggers, what a tax program requires. That framing misses something important. The most interesting affordable housing decisions aren’t the ones developers are required to make. They’re the ones developers choose to make, and why.
Across three projects — Promark Condominiums in Crown Heights, Vernon Tower in Long Island City, and the East 33rd Street tower in Kips Bay — affordable housing played a meaningful role in each deal. The mechanism was different every time. So was the motivation.
Promark Condominiums was a condominium conversion — 25 three-family buildings on Prospect Place and St Marks Avenue repositioned into 75 individual condo units in a neighborhood where that market was just beginning to emerge. As sales progressed, we were approached by Habitat for Humanity about acquiring a handful of units.
The conversation evolved. Rather than a small scattered purchase across a handful of units, we structured a transaction for 26 units — concentrating their capital in one location rather than spreading it across multiple properties at different addresses. For Habitat for Humanity, that efficiency mattered. Their capital went further. For the project, selling 26 units in a single transaction provided certainty and velocity that individual sales couldn’t match.
The units were discounted to make the economics work for both sides. That was a choice — one made easier by the fact that Habitat for Humanity believed in what we were building, and we believed in what they were doing. The financial logic and the human logic pointed in the same direction.
Vernon Tower in Long Island City was a 103-unit ground-up development on an assembled two-parcel site. The affordable housing component — 21 units integrated throughout the building — wasn’t purely a community obligation. It was the financially rational decision.
In New York City’s development framework, building affordable units can unlock two things simultaneously: additional density and tax abatement benefits. On Vernon Tower, going affordable allowed us to build more units than a fully market-rate program would have permitted, while also securing a tax structure that improved the project’s long-term economics. The alternative — a fully market-rate building at lower density without the abatement — was the less attractive option by almost every financial measure.
This is how the city’s affordable housing incentive structure is designed to work. When the programs are functioning well, they align developer economics with public benefit. The affordable units at Vernon Tower were built to the same standard as the market-rate units — not because it was required, but because it was the right way to build.
On East 33rd Street, the affordable component was tied directly to the rezoning. Under Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, rezonings that increase residential density require a permanent affordable component. The community and elected officials who needed to support the rezoning wanted more than the minimum. We negotiated, held the line at 25% — 40 of 160 units — and structured the affordability in a way that preserved the project’s financial viability while delivering a genuine and lasting public benefit.
The difference between this deal and the others is that the affordable housing here was the price of admission for the rezoning. That doesn’t make it less real. Those 40 units will be permanently affordable regardless of what happens to the market around them. The commitment made during the ULURP process is binding for the life of the building.
Three deals, three different approaches — a voluntary transaction driven by mutual belief, an economically rational decision that aligned incentives, and a negotiated commitment that made a rezoning possible.
What connects them is that in each case, the affordable component was thought through seriously — not treated as a checkbox or an afterthought. Understanding how affordability interacts with density, financing, and project economics is as important as any other element of deal structuring. The developers who treat it as a constraint to minimize will always be at a disadvantage to those who understand how to make it work.