Affordable Housing: The Sneaky Trick That Excludes the People Who Need It Most
You've seen the headlines. A new luxury building goes up in Yonkers, and the developer or the politician cutting the ribbon proudly announces: "40 units of affordable housing included!"
It sounds great. It looks great in a press release. But there's a sneaky workaround built into how "affordable" actually gets calculated, and it's quietly excluding the exact people this housing is supposed to help.
Here's the Trick
The way affordable housing eligibility is calculated isn't based on the income of the neighborhood the building is actually in. It's calculated on a county level.
For people who aren't familiar with Westchester County, we have some extremely wealthy areas here, including Bronxville and Scarsdale. Nothing against the people who live there. But when you factor their income into the county-wide average, and then apply that average to determine "affordable" rent for a building in downtown Yonkers, the math gets distorted fast.
Who Gets Left Out
Because of this county-level calculation, what you end up with is "affordable" units priced for people making $80,000 to $120,000 a year.
Now think about who that actually excludes. A single mom working two jobs, making $55,000 a year, falls right under that threshold. She doesn't qualify. The person this program was supposedly designed to help is locked out of it, while the label "affordable housing" still gets slapped on the building.
Why This Matters
This isn't just a technical quirk. It's a system that lets developers build luxury housing, market a percentage of it as "affordable," and still fill those units with tenants who can pay rent much closer to market rate, all while checking a policy box that sounds good in a headline.
Meanwhile, the working families who actually need affordable housing in Yonkers, people making $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year, are left out of the very program built in their name.
What Needs to Change
If we're serious about affordable housing in Yonkers, "affordable" needs to be calculated based on the realistic income levels of the community the building is actually in, not blended with the wealthiest towns in the county. Otherwise, we're just giving developers a marketing win while doing very little for the people actually struggling to find housing they can afford.
Watch the full breakdown here: Affordable Housing: The Sneaky Trick That Excludes Many
Dan D'Amico is running for Westchester County Legislature, District 16, representing Yonkers.
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