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Kings of building: Brooklyn leads the city in affordable housing construction

city point
Brooklyn leads the city in this. Cool. Photo by David Colon

We love a good old-fashioned rent panic as much as the next web site (whether it be maps of high rents here or news of high rents leaking into neighboring areas), but that doesn’t mean we don’t like good real estate news either. For instance, guess which borough leads the city in the construction of affordable housing? Hopefully you guessed “Brooklyn,” because that’s the correct answer and also this is a Brooklyn-based website, so why would you expect us to write really nice things about other boroughs?

amNewYork made this helpful map that shows where all the affordable housing has been approved and constructed in Fiscal Year 2015 (October 1, 2014 to September 30, 2015). Turns out that Brooklyn, sweet Brooklyn, is leading the pack with preserved and constructed affordable housing units. There have been 3,069 affordable housing units given permits by the city, with 3,846 affordable housing units preserved. That’s 6,915 units of affordable housing out of 20,326 approved in the entire city over the fiscal year.

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Unsurprisingly, Greenpoint, Prospect Heights and Downtown Brooklyn have 75% of the affordable housing coming to Brooklyn, since those are the homes of Pacific Park (formerly Atlantic Yards), Greenpoint Landing and City Point projects. The last of those projects has an open affordable housing lottery right now, until September 24. Of course the odds of you getting one of these or any of the affordable projects opening up are somewhat low, so we suggest the following tips: get your credit in order, cross your t’s and dot your i’s and do some serious research into which kind of animal sacrifice is the kind that gets the most results.

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