De Blasio’s “affordable” housing has always been closer to low-grade luxury rental than it has to actual accessibility by the people who need it most.
But his alleged pursuit of affordability as a rationale for upzoning has allowed him to turn the city over to the developers, no questions asked, thus precipitating widespread displacement and destruction of historic buildings and a new generation of behemoths that wreck the scale of the city, eliminate human scale and diversity of scale. And it gave him cover as he worked systematically and successfully to sabotage landmark preservation.
As Juan Rivero at Village Preservation notes, de Blasio used his affordable housing as “sword and shield,” deflecting any criticism of the initiative by insisting it was directed against affordability–rather than against de Blasio’s fraud. Rivero writes that “it has helped city officials label those who opposed the plan as anti-affordable-housing racists.”
I say that de Blasio, Chin, Johnson, Rivera and others need to be sued for conspiracy to defraud New York City.