Some See Little Room for Large, Poor Families in Mayor’s Housing Plan

This article is about how families in New York have been struggling to find affordable housing as lower income families.  The article spoke about how the mayor of the state has been working on a building project for affordable housing hoping that when its all done it will include building or preserving 165,000 homes for poor and moderate-income families across New York by 2014.  The only problem with this building project is that it is completely geared towards building one and two bedroom units which will not relieve any of the burden of those larger families with in the city. Groups in need of help with larger housing include, "West Africans in the South Bronx, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and Bangladeshi in Queens, who are united by their inability to afford the high prices for large market-rate rentals and their inability to find publicly subsidized alternatives even as the overall housing stock has swelled."  The city has heard these cries for help and has responded in several ways.  The mayor as well as others in charge of the project say they hear the call for bigger housing units but that this demographic only makes up a very small proportion of its residence and the average house size it 2.5.  Although the city and project managers are sympathetic for these families and say there will be some larger units built that it is not the main concern to cater just to this demographic but to do everything they can do to relieve the majority of persons housing concerns, which means more one and two bedroom units.  
I feel this is something that is a problem of a lot of families around the country as well as the world.  It is true that family size overall is smaller than it use to be with more households with only one to two children present.  The struggle for larger families is that they find little or no help in supporting and housing there "abnormal" sized household   Although cities like New York argue that family planning might be a better option and that limiting your household size to what you can afford are ways to avoid this type of struggle many cultures hold that bigger families are a way of life and still other larger families may not have had a financial problem when they first decided to have many children.  Overall as I agree it is not just the role of the city state or country to supply all the answers for larger families I don't think that in saying so insensitively "It’s not the city’s job to give open-ended subsidies and reward people for having more members in the family,” and “It is responsible behavior not to have children until you can reasonably support them.” such blanket statements are both demeaning and unprofessional on the part of city leaders.

Andrea Ward
10/20/12 12:58pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/nyregion/large-poor-families-are-left-out-of-new-yorks-housing-plans-officials-say.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0