Map the Gap is an interactive tool that highlights the inequity between what is marketed as affordable housing and what households in lower-income neighborhoods can actually afford.
Built entirely with public data, because the numbers behind “affordable housing” belong to the public.
Median household income vs. the regional 100% AMI line (dashed red).
Monthly rent at each AMI band vs. what the median local household can pay at the 30%-of-income standard.
The 2026 Area Median Income (AMI) for New York City for a family of three is $152,700. The city uses this figure to determine what qualifies as “affordable housing.” Rental units are deemed affordable at benchmarks such as 80% AMI ($122,150 per year), 100% AMI ($152,700 per year), and 130% AMI ($198,510 per year). Under the standard used nationwide, housing is considered affordable when it costs no more than 30% of a household’s income; rents for these units are set at 30% of each band’s income ceiling, regardless of what households in the surrounding neighborhood actually earn. That benchmark closely matches incomes on the Upper West Side, where the median household earns $152,246 a year. In Mott Haven, the median household earns just $27,364.
The numbers that determine what is “affordable” to New Yorkers are not derived from income data alone. The federal government uses a rule called the High Housing Cost Adjustment: if income data alone would produce a number too low for an expensive housing market like NYC, the limit is set at whatever income makes the area’s rent look affordable, regardless of what people actually earn.
HUD’s “very low income” limit for a family of four in New York is $84,800. The area’s entire median family income is $104,300. A limit nominally set at half the area median instead lands at 81% of it.
The rent-based adjustment is what moves it. Applying HUD’s ordinary income-based formula to that same $104,300 would put a family of three’s threshold at roughly $46,900; the published figure is $76,350, about 63% higher. Every other band used to determine a household’s income status (30%, 80%, 100%, 130% AMI) is built by multiplying up from that inflated base. HUD frames this as making affordable housing programs possible in expensive cities. But the mechanism runs backward: it asks what income would make the current rent look affordable, rather than what rent people can actually afford based on their income.
The result is a benchmark that rises when rent gets more expensive, whether or not wages rise to match. “Affordable” isn’t only detached from what your neighborhood earns — it’s calculated from what your landlord already charges.
Mayor Mamdani’s Block by Block housing plan commits to building 200,000 new affordable homes and preserving another 200,000 over the next decade. Within that, HPD’s own subsidized new construction grows by more than 35% in FY27 and FY28, to about 8,000 homes per year — the portion of the plan whose income targeting is specified, and the figures used below.
For whom these homes are being built matters more than the total number. Of those roughly 8,000 HPD-financed homes a year, 30% are reserved for households earning 30% of AMI or under (qualifying incomes up to $48,000 for a family of four) and an additional 20% are reserved for families earning between 31–50% of AMI. The plan also changes the rent formula for the lowest-income families: for projects that close financing after June 2026, households without vouchers earning under 30% of AMI will pay 25% of their income rather than the standard 30%.
The plan’s committed allocation of ~8,000 subsidized homes per year.
Measured against the data shown on this site, this allocation is a real shift toward the neighborhoods the map shows in dark red — those whose median household falls in HPD’s own “Extremely Low-Income” band — such as Mott Haven, Brownsville, and East Harlem.
However, the AMI benchmark used to mark affordable housing misrepresents both low-income neighborhoods and the city as a whole. NYC’s actual citywide median household income is $83,970, just 55% of the $152,700 figure used to price affordable housing. The AMI runs high because it includes Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties and is inflated further by the federal government’s calculation adjustments. As a result, at the 30%-of-income standard, the median NYC household can afford about $2,099 a month. Only units priced at roughly 50% AMI and below are genuinely affordable to the typical household in the city. Half of everything built above that line is affordable to the city on paper, but out of reach in reality.
Map the Gap was designed by Theodore Spohngellert, a public administration graduate student at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, public policy professional, and lifelong New Yorker. His work and research focuses on housing policy, harm reduction, and criminal justice reform.