2025 Conference: Challenges and Opportunities for Historic Affordable Housing

New York’s affordable housing is also its historic housing. The median age of New York’s residential buildings is now 90 years old; at the same time, nearly a million units of housing, almost half of New York’s rental units across all five boroughs, are rent stabilized. Hardly surprising then, that a disproportionate number of those stabilized units are within historic buildings, whether those structures are officially recognized as such or not.

Considering these facts, and taking to heart City Planning Commission Chair Dan Garodnick’s point that “ninety percent of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built,” HDC sees stewardship of New York’s historic affordable housing stock as essential to its mission, and to the city’s future. HDC’s 2025 Conference will focus on New York’s historic rent-stabilized apartment buildings, which together constitute the city’s most abundant form of affordable housing.

This vital work comes with challenges as well as opportunities. Housing violations have climbed 54% citywide since 2022, endangering tenants first and foremost, as well as the viability of their homes; at the same time, new tax incentives and public-private partnerships are being used to preserve and improve existing properties while making room for new affordable apartments. Techniques used by restoration architects are becoming faster and cheaper, making it possible to do more with less, and attempts to curb carbon emissions have given rise to a constellation of financing options for the renovation of older buildings, especially lower-income ones. In short: there is much work to do, and much work being done right now in the arena of historic affordable housing that points the way toward a more equitable, more sustainable New York City.

Popular discourse often drives a wedge between housing and preservation, but the nature of New York’s historic affordable housing belies that separation. The HDC Conference will offer a meaningful nexus for housing