All three new construction projects, the 293-unit 20 River Terrace in Battery Park City, 264-unit Battery Park City Site 19B and 287-unit 10 Liberty St., will include 95% market rate rental apartments and 5% affordable units. The funding is to be allocated through the Liberty Bond program, which has made $1.6 billion available for New York housing projects.

"I don't think any taxpayers anticipated these resources would be used to build luxury housing," says Bettina Damiani, project director for Good Jobs New York. "This is an opportunity to make Lower Manhattan a vibrant community. There are 78,000 New Yorkers out of work since Sept. 11 and the best the state can come up with is 5%? It's unacceptable." Damiani notes that most New York City buildings utilizing affordable-housing funds are financed on an 80-20 basis, reserving 20% of their units for lower-income residents.

HFA spokeswoman Sally Crockett counters that the Liberty Bond program does not include an affordable-housing requirement and that HFA's 5% minimum on affordable units is self-imposed. "The Liberty Bond program is not an affordable-housing program, it's an economic stimulus program," she tells GlobeSt.com. "The legislation expressly states that there are no affordable-housing requirements associated with these bonds. I hear a lot of criticism connecting this to our 80-20 program, which is interesting, because this is a separate and distinct program with different functions and different goals. We continue to do 80-20s, as we always have."