Supporting ZQA is a critical first step in addressing NYC’s affordable senior housing crisis. Seniors can’t wait.
- ZQA can help the 200,000 seniors currently on waitlists city‐wide Upwards of 200,000 low income seniors are waiting an average of 7 years and as long as ten years for housing as projected by LiveOn NY’s 2016 Through the Roof ‐ Waiting Lists for Senior Housing.
- ZQA will allow community‐based nonprofits to build new senior housing on untapped land LiveOn NY’s recent report Paving the Way for New Senior Housing identified 39 affordable senior housing lots that could support over 2,000 new units of affordable senior housing, as well as social and health services, gardens, and other community uses.
- ZQA provides flexibility for community nonprofits to build on lots where there is an extremely low demand for parking spaces, and assess the need on a building by building basis Car ownership at senior housing buildings is shockingly low at only 5 cars per 100 residents (5%) near transit and only slightly higher at 11 cars per 100 (11%) residents in further from transit, according to the Department of City Planning. These underutilized lots are only for senior residents, so this does not impact any public parking. At a cost of $20,000‐$50,000 per parking lot, this money could be better used to build apartments.
- ZQA can work to address the needs of the nearly one million housing insecure New Yorkers There are 942,553 “housing insecure” households, including those who are homeless, and those paying more than half of their monthly income on housing, according to the Enterprise 2015 NYC Housing Security Profile and Affordable Housing Gap Analysis.
- ZQA can provide common sense solutions to build affordable housing more efficiently and effectively to meet the needs of New Yorkers Current regulations result in years of unnecessary delays and costs to build affordable housing. In a city with hundreds of thousands of seniors on waitlists, we cannot afford to wait.
Please keep the needs of seniors in mind when considering your vote on ZQA.
LiveOn NY Affordable Senior Housing Coalition: Catholic Charities Brooklyn & Queens ▪ Association of New York Catholic Homes Catholic Charities Archdiocese ▪ Chinese American Planning Council, Inc ▪ Community Agency for Senior Citizens (CASC) ▪ Encore Community Services ▪ Goddard Riverside Senior Services ▪ HANAC, Inc. ▪ James Lenox House & Carnegie East House Association ▪ Jewish Association Serving the Aging (JASA) ▪ Jewish Home Lifecare ▪ Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty ▪ Mid‐Bronx Senior Citizens Council ▪ New York Foundation for Senior Citizens ▪ Presbyterian Senior Services ▪ Project Find ▪ Queens Community House ▪ Regional Aid for Interim Needs, Inc. (R.A.I.N.) ▪ Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council ▪ SEBCO Senior Services ▪ Selfhelp Community Services ▪ Sunnyside Community Services ▪ The Hebrew Home at Riverdale ▪ West Side Federation for Senior & Supportive Housing ▪ YM‐YWHA of Washington Heights/Inwood