Math Snafu Blamed As Stringer Backtracks On Low-Rent Crisis

NEW YORK — New York City isn't hemorrhaging cheap housing as badly as Scott Stringer thought. The city comptroller's office on Wednesday admitted its recent count of the city's low-rent apartment losses was off by nearly 600,000.

In a report issued Tuesday, Stringer's office claimed the city saw a net loss of more than a million apartments renting for $900 or less between 2005 and 2017. The report was revised Wednesday to reflect the true number: 425,492.

A human error in a formula that multiplied a number instead of dividing it caused the figure to be inflated, the comptroller's office said. The report was based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2017 Housing and Vacancy Survey.

"While it remains true that affordable housing is declining at an unsettling rate and the gap is still growing, we overstated the pace," Ilana Maier, the comptroller's press secretary, said in a statement. "We made a genuine mistake."

The blunder also caused the report to overestimate the increase in high-rent apartments, the comptroller's office said.

The number of units renting for more than $2,700 a month increased by more than 111,000 over the 12-year period, the report now says, less than half the initial figure of 237,535.

The comptroller's office stressed that the revisions did not change the report's overall assessment that shifts in the city's housing market have left low-income New Yorkers struggling to find affordable places to live.

The analysis of the shift in rent-stabilized apartments also went unchanged — some 88,518 units fell out of rent stabilization from 2005 to 2017, the report says.

(Lead image: City Comptroller Scott Stringer speaks in Washington Square Park in February 2017. Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for V-Day)