“Rent regulations not only affects the lower class, but also the middle class.” “This housing crisis is not only hitting our low-income, it’s hitting our middle-income and quite frankly, not everyone is upper-income and we have a real crisis on our hand-it’s affecting multitudes,” Wright said. Klein and Assembly Housing Chair Keith Wright both stressed to City & State that housing affordability is not just an issue that impacts the poor. The state budget also included an additional $25 million to be used to finance the rehabilitation of existing Mitchell-Lama units and $100 million to NYCHA for a modernization program focused on capital repairs and improvements. For example, the AMI in New York City for 2015 is $86,300 for a family of four, which means the Mitchell-Lama 2020 units would be available to families making under roughly $112,000 a year. To incentivize development, the 2014-15 state budget included $25 million to be used primarily to finance the construction of new units for households that make up to 130 percent of the area median income. The difference between 1955 and now is that the state is short on cheap land and interest rates are already low. The original Mitchell-Lama program incentivized developers with cheap land and low interest rates. “I wanted to sort of recreate the program and we called it Mitchell-Lama 2020 because we wanted to build in the success of the original program, but realize now it’s hard to do the program as it was in the past.” and Independent Democratic Conference Leader Jeff Klein said. “The Mitchell-Lama program, I believe, was probably the greatest housing program we ever created in New York State because it was based on a very simple premise: that various income levels can live under one roof,” state Sen. Today half the rentals and 7 percent of the co-ops in New York City no longer qualify as affordable housing. However, the fatal flaw of the Mitchell-Lama program was that those units were eventually pushed to market-rate prices, and many middle-income households were priced out of the housing developments. Until 1981, when developments stopped, the program created 66,000 subsidized rental apartments and 69,000 co-op apartments in New York City and throughout the state, a report found. The state’s original Mitchell-Lama housing program, enacted in 1955, set out to tackle this problem. It’s commonly believed that middle-class households are stuck between the opportunities available to lower-income households-such as Section 8 and public housing programs-and the increasing number of housing developments that target the rich. While housing affordability for lower-income families and “fixing” the beleaguered New York City Housing Authority have dominated much of the political debate, state legislators secured key funding for new housing opportunities for the middle class in this year’s enacted budget.