More New York City residents in low-income housing owe back rent, with one in 10 residents in public housing at least a month behind in their rental payments, according to the New York Times. Roughly 12 percent of all public housing residents were behind on rent as of Aug. 31, according to the New York City Housing Authority, marking an almost 50 percent rise from the number of delinquent renters a year ago. Queens appears to be most in trouble, the data shows. The borough has seen a 70 percent climb in the number of public housing renters who are behind in their payments. [NYT]

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The city’s supply of affordable housing is shrinking. Despite Mayor Bloomberg’s success in bringing 94,000 new public housing units — 72,000 of which are designated for low-income families — to the market, his efforts have been outweighed by the 200,000 affordable apartments lost to gentrification and rent deregulation during his term, the New York Times reported. In 2008, 42 percent of the city’s households were considered low-income, that is, making less than $37,000 per year. However, the supply of apartments they could afford at that time had shrunk to 991,592, or 17 percent less than the 2002 supply. Bloomberg has said he wants to invest an additional $965 million to expand his housing plan if re-elected, in order to stabilize apartment buildings where rents aren’t covering owners’ debt, and to preserve 10,000 more Mitchell-Lama housing units. [more]

Low-income housing initiatives that Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced nearly five years ago have been less successful than the administration hoped, according to an analysis of city records by Gotham Gazette. Bloomberg’s so-called inclusionary zoning program, designed to incentivize developers to create permanent low-income housing, has come up short, creating far fewer low-income units than expected. In 2005, the Bloomberg administration reportedly said that the rezoned neighborhoods would allow for 6,000 units of affordable housing. But today, even with more than a dozen new neighborhoods rezoned since, fewer than half that number of units have been created or preserved, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.