Teacher housing goes up in N.Y.

NEW YORK (AP) — Elementary school teacher Ramona Roman has a master’s degree and earns $70,000 a year, but she’s barely making it in New York City.

“I think I make a good salary, but it’s so hard living here — I can’t get a decent apartment with the money I make. You also need to eat. You need to feed your kids,” said the 52-year-old teacher, who supports two children and her mother.

Over the years, teachers in Miss Roman’s predicament have left the city looking for affordable housing. They soon may have a new option — Miss Roman plans to apply to live in a 234-unit housing project being developed specifically for educators.

The project, backed by $28 million from the New York City Teachers’ Retirement System, could become a model in other cities where soaring rents are forcing out such essential workers as teachers, police and firefighters, observers say.

In New York, about 4,000 teachers moved out of the city last year, said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents more than 150,000 active and retired city public-school educators.

A New York teacher’s salary starts at about $42,000, and, at more than $2,000 a month, the average rent for even a studio apartment in the city eats up more than half of it.

In the Bronx, the borough north of Manhattan where construction on the complex is expect to start later this fall, rents between $800 to $900 are considered affordable.

The buildings will add to the supply of similarly priced apartments. Rents in the two buildings will range from $806 a month for a studio to $1,412 for a three-bedroom apartment.

The apartments will be open to teachers in public, private, parochial and charter schools, as well as administrators.

To be eligible for a lottery for an apartment, applicants cannot earn more than 110 percent of the area median income, which is $70,900 for a family of four and $49,630 for an individual.

“As a prototype of housing for people who are essential to the functioning of a city, it’s quite important,” said Richard Plunz, a Columbia University architecture professor and specialist on housing in New York City.

John Crotty, an executive of a public housing finance group at the J.P. Morgan Chase bank, said he’s looking to create other projects across the country using public pension funds for urban revitalization modeled on the Bronx experiment.

The number of working people in America who are paying 50 percent or more of their salaries for housing is growing “to unsustainable numbers,” said Mr. Crotty, who until recently was the executive vice president of the housing corporation.

The ideal ratio is to spend no more than about 30 percent of a salary on housing.

“This affordability crisis exists nationally and we figured out a solution,” Mr. Crotty said. “It’s important that people who work in cities get to live in them as well — that cities not become enclaves for the rich.”