Dedicated funding streams for affordable housing are a very good idea.

And Chicago's emphasis on the lowest income bands is right on target.

But it's not clear to me that vouchers are the right approach for New York City. With our high housing market, vouchers are much more expensive to do here than in Chicago.

And we have an enormous endangered stock of project-based affordable housing that needs to be preserved. Promoting the permanent affordability of this stock might well be a more effective use of our affordable housing dollar.

The housing picture in Chicago is indeed much different than the one in New York. For one, Chicago's vacancy rate is much higher in many neighborhoods.

One advantage of the program is that landlords receive full market rates for the units and therefore have the incentive to continue participating in the program, whereas with rent stabilization, the landlord has the incentive to displace the rent-stabilized tenant and receive market rents.

Another advantage, that was mentioned in the post, is that over half of the units under the program go to those earning below 15 percent of AMI. These are families and individuals who would otherwise be very much at risk of becoming homeless.

In a housing market as crowded as Manhattan, I don't think there's any solution except for increasing supply. For that, I'd go with any of the following ideas, roughly in increasing order of speculativeness:

1. Upzoning. Most of Upper Manhattan is capped at a floor area ratio of 3.44 (don't ask me how they got that number). This corresponds to a 4- or maybe 5-story building. Morningside Heights has a lot of perfectly successful buildings with 15 floors. Harlem is full of empty lots, scattered around the region; if developers can build high-rises there, there will be more building diversity rather than less, as well as more housing units.

2. Public construction works. If private developers are unwilling to build housing for people with five-figure incomes, the city should. This will serve a double purpose, providing housing to the poor as well as jobs in areas with high unemployment (Harlem's was 19% in 2000). This housing should look like ordinary construction, only perhaps higher, rather than like a project, and it should be built on empty lots, not blocks destroyed with eminent domain. Because new buildings are more expensive to maintain than old ones the city will initially lose money here, but as they start to depreciate, the city will eventually make a profit.

3. Adding floors to buildings. Morningside Heights is full of buildings that at least look as if they could easily have a few floors tacked onto their roofs. It's harder to do that in Harlem, with its walk-ups, but even elsewhere Uptown, it'll take pressure off Harlem and Washington Heights. With reasonable assumptions about apartment size and block coverage, we can add housing for maybe 200 more people per block.

4. Demolishing highways. The Henry Hudson Parkway serves no purpose other than to get people from Jersey into Midtown. It could be demolished from the GWB south, and turned into a rail line and high-rise developments lining it. This mostly makes sense as high-income housing, because the size of the project makes it impossible to build it just with public money, but it takes pressure off of Harlem, again, and potentially opens southern Bergen County up to lower-income housing (e.g. with a shuttle getting people from Fort Lee to the Fort Washington terminus of the rail line).

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