“While politicians debate zoning and development, a little-discussed federal bureaucratic mechanism called the High Housing Cost Adjustment is systematically excluding working New Yorkers from programs designed to help them.”

The groundbreaking for a city-financed affordable housing project in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in 2019. (John McCarten/NYC Council)

A New York City teacher earning $70,000 applies for an affordable housing unit in Queens and is told she doesn’t qualify. Not because she makes too much money, but because she doesn’t make enough. The “affordable” one-bedroom requires a minimum income of $90,000, and even the studio required $75,000; just out of reach.

Stories like this illustrate a broader paradox in New York’s housing policy. While politicians debate zoning and development, a little-discussed federal bureaucratic mechanism called the High Housing Cost Adjustment is systematically excluding working New Yorkers from programs designed to help them.

Every housing discussion in New York centers on Area Median Income (AMI). It is the benchmark determining who qualifies for affordable housing. But the AMI used in New York isn’t what most people think it is. It’s not the actual median income of New Yorkers.

Instead, it’s been artificially inflated by the High Housing Cost Adjustment (HHCA), a federal multiplier that adjusts income requirements upward in expensive markets. For 2025, New York’s official AMI for a family of two was $129,600, and for a family of three it was $145,800. With an average household size of 2.55, you would then expect the average household income to be $137,700.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) own calculations for the same geographic area, however, this actual number is $103,000. This indicates that the HHCA is skewing AMI values up roughly 33 percent.

To give an example of this, units at up to 135 percent of AMI can be included in the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. If you apply that same 33 percent “inflation” from the HHCA mentioned earlier, that means “affordable” units are being built for those earning 180 percent of the real area median income. Is that true affordability?

The gap represents working families being systematically locked out of programs ostensibly designed to help them.

You might ask why the HHCA exists at all. HUD’s methodology explicitly allows income limits to be adjusted up in response to housing-cost-to-income disparities that deviate significantly from the national norm. In short, the HHCA was designed to prevent households in expensive areas from being disqualified from federal housing programs simply because the local cost-of-living (particularly rent) is out of step with median income figures. It reflects a federal intent to align eligibility standards with housing market realities, rather than rigid income metrics.

The geographic impact of the HHCA is evident across the city. In the Bronx, where median household income is around $46,000, “affordable” developments often require incomes that exceed what most neighborhood residents earn. This can create a perverse outcome: affordable housing resources that accelerate gentrification rather than prevent it. Low-income neighborhoods get developments that serve moderate and middle-income households from elsewhere, while local residents remain priced out.

Housing advocates typically blame wealthy suburbs in Westchester and Long Island for inflating regional income calculations. But the HHCA is what really transforms regional disparities into exclusionary policy. Yet, it receives little attention in housing debates outside of the most wonky corners. 

Mayor Eric Adams’ housing initiatives have focused on zoning reform to increase supply. Mayor Bill de Blasio largely did the same. More often than not, however, this means building “affordable” housing at the highest AMI bands. These projects count towards the total number of “affordable” units in the city (and bog down the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development and other relevant city agencies), without actually addressing the affordable housing crisis. This is why there is a constant flow of headlines about new “affordable” housing developments without the situation ever seeming to change. 

There are multiple reasons for this. One is that the HUD’s AMI values must be used for determining eligibility for projects to use federal funds. The second is that it is simply very expensive to build in New York City. And, the third is that by building “affordable housing” for higher earners, politicians can gain political wins for supporting “affordable housing,” without putting substantial money behind the effort, all while retaining residents that are more politically active and attractive as part of the city’s tax base (higher earners).

A key reason why these inflated AMI levels matter so much is that they are not optional. When projects seek to tap federal resources (from Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, HOME funds, or other HUD programs) they are required to use HUD’s published AMI figures to determine who qualifies.

In New York, that means developers and housing agencies must design affordability bands around income thresholds that are already skewed upward by the High Housing Cost Adjustment. Even if a project sponsor wanted to serve lower-income tenants, the eligibility framework itself is defined by federal formulas.

This requirement creates a disconnect between federal rules and local realities. On paper, a household earning 80 percent of AMI may qualify as “low income,” but in practice that figure can be far above what many neighborhood residents actually earn.

The result is that projects built with federal dollars often end up out of reach for the very households those funds are intended to benefit. Instead of anchoring affordability in the lived conditions of local communities, federal mandates lock projects into a standardized metric that reflects more about financing structures than about need.

The high rents embedded in today’s “affordable housing” numbers are not simply the product of developer greed or government indifference. They are, in large part, a reflection of the underlying costs of building in New York City. Land prices remain among the highest in the country, and construction costs (driven by labor, materials, insurance, and regulatory requirements) have only risen in recent years.

When the city and federal government peg “affordability” to Area Median Income levels, what is really happening is that the rents being targeted are the lowest that developers can feasibly offer while still covering the enormous costs of acquiring land and financing construction.

This tension gives validity to the claims developers often make: without additional subsidy, tax relief, or creative financing tools, they cannot simply lower rents on their own. Housing, unlike other markets, carries an upfront cost structure that is fixed long before a single tenant moves in. If land, labor, and materials command a certain price, then rents must follow that logic; unless public dollars or policy interventions absorb part of the burden. The affordability levels are calibrated to the cost of the project, not the income of the neighborhood.

The result is a distortion in what “affordability” actually means. Rather than reflecting the economic realities of households, the rent thresholds are often backfilled to make projects pencil out. In other words, AMI-driven affordability has become a financing tool more than a true measure of local need. This is not to dismiss the role developers play in shaping housing outcomes, but to recognize that the system as designed leaves them little room to maneuver without the government stepping in to close the gap.

One of the quieter dynamics at play in New York’s housing policy is that “affordable housing” has often been defined in ways that serve higher earners, not the lowest-income households most at risk of displacement. By setting affordability benchmarks at levels aligned with inflated AMIs, elected officials can claim credit for producing large numbers of “affordable units” without committing the resources required to reach those most in need. In doing so, they sidestep the political and fiscal challenges of funding deeper subsidies, while still delivering ribbon-cuttings, press releases, and campaign talking points about their dedication to solving the housing crisis.

This approach also has a built-in political logic. Higher-earning households who qualify for these so-called affordable apartments are more likely to be stable contributors to the tax base, and they are often more politically engaged. By calibrating housing policy to capture this population, the city not only bolsters revenue but also retains a constituency that is seen as more desirable to court. The cost, of course, is that the very groups most harmed by rising rents are left out of the picture. The politics of affordability, in other words, too often privilege appearances and fiscal security over true equity

New York’s housing crisis has multiple causes, but one is within local control: how the city works within federal policy frameworks that may not serve local needs effectively on their own. City and state officials should advocate for reforms to HHCA calculations at the federal level, as proposed by U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2024. They should also intentionally build at lower AMIs to counteract the HHCA. To do this, they will need to further supplement federal funds with those at the city and state levels.

But addressing this issue requires first acknowledging it exists. There is not an easy answer to this question, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the “affordable” housing we are currently building will ever create a truly equitable city. Currently, housing policy debates focus heavily on supply and zoning, but give little attention to how federal definitions and formulas determine what “affordability” really means.

The consequences are real. Working professionals consistently find themselves excluded from affordable housing programs despite earning salaries that would suggest they need assistance with housing costs. When the federal bureaucracy creates affordability requirements that don’t match local economic realities, the resulting contradictions undermine the effectiveness of affordable housing policy.

The question for New York’s leaders is whether they will examine how federal policy frameworks interact with local housing needs, and whether they’re willing to advocate for changes that could make affordable housing programs more accessible to the New Yorkers they’re intended to serve.

Once we recognize that AMI is not what it seems, the question is: would we rather the city invest funds, time, and energy into subsidizing additional housing for those earning well above the actual median income in the city, or instead turn our investments to those who most need it?

Eddie Palka is a practicing architect in New York City who has focused on affordable housing throughout his career. He is also an Associate Research Scholar at the Columbia University Housing Lab, researching the affordable housing crisis, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the NYIT Center for Offsite Construction. He is also part of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Academy for Public Scholarship on the Built Environment.

The post Opinion: The Hidden Federal Formula Making NYC’s ‘Affordable’ Housing Unaffordable appeared first on City Limits.

By BINAJ GURUBACHARYA

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Police in Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu opened fire Monday on demonstrators protesting a government attempt to regulate social media that blocked some of the world’s largest platforms, including Facebook, X and YouTube. At least 17 people were killed.

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Rallies swept the streets around the Parliament building, which was surrounded by tens of thousands of people angry at authorities who said the companies had failed to register and submit to government oversight. At least 145 people were wounded, officials said.

Protesters pushed through barbed wire and forced riot police to retreat inside the Parliament complex.

The gunfire unfolded as the government pursues a broader attempt to regulate social media with a bill aimed at ensuring the platforms are “properly managed, responsible and accountable.” The proposal has been widely criticized as a tool for censorship and for punishing government opponents who voice their protests online.

About two dozen social networks that are widely used in Nepal were repeatedly given notices to register their companies officially in the Himalayan nation, the government said. Those that failed to register have been blocked since last week.

Neither Google, which owns YouTube, nor Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, responded to requests for comment from The Associated Press. Elon Musk’s X platform did not respond either.

The video-sharing app TikTok, Viber and three other platforms have registered and operated without interruption.

The death toll was announced by police official Shekhar Khanal. He said 28 officers were among the wounded, as smaller protests continued into late Monday evening.

The situation remained tense, and the government announced a curfew around Parliament, the government secretariat, the presidential house and key parts of the city.

Seven of those killed and scores of wounded were received at the National Trauma Center, the country’s main hospital in the heart of Kathmandu.

“Many of them are in serious condition and appear to have been shot in the head and chest,” said Dr. Badri Risa. Families waited anxiously outside for news of their relatives while people lined up to donate blood.

“Stop the ban on social media. Stop corruption, not social media,” the crowds outside Parliament chanted, waving the red and blue national flags. Monday’s rally was called the protest of Gen Z, which generally refers to people born between 1995 and 2010.

The government’s proposed bill includes asking the companies to appoint a liaison office or a point of contact in the country. Rights groups have called it an attempt by the government to curb freedom of expression and fundamental rights.

Nepal in 2023 banned TikTok for disrupting “social harmony, goodwill and diffusing indecent materials.” The ban was lifted last year after TikTok’s executives pledged to comply with local laws, including a ban of pornographic sites that was passed in 2018.

By RODNEY MUHUMUZA

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — International Criminal Court prosecutors will present evidence on Tuesday to back up charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against notorious fugitive Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony at the global court’s first-ever in absentia hearing.

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Kony faces dozens of counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, sexual enslavement and rape for allegedly leading the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army that terrorized northern Uganda.

Moving forward without Kony is seen as a test case for other proceedings where the suspect is not in custody, for example Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The hearing is not a trial, but allows prosecutors to outline their case in court. Kony will be represented in his absence by a defense lawyer. After weighing the evidence, judges can rule on whether or not to confirm the charges against Kony, but he cannot be tried in his absence.

By 2005, facing pressure from Uganda’s military, Kony’s LRA had been weakened and its members forced to splinter and flee into neighboring countries, including Sudan and Congo, where they settled into wide expanses of ungoverned bush.

Proceedings against Kony will be followed by many in Uganda, where survivors welcome his trial even as they regret the failure to catch him. “He did many things bad,” said Odong Kajumba, who escaped the LRA after he was captured and forced to carry a sack of sugar to Uganda’s border with Sudan in 1996. If they can arrest Kony, he said, “I am very happy.”

Here are some things to know about Kony:

A religious boy

Raised in a Catholic family among the Acholi people of northern Uganda, Kony once served as an altar boy. His elders saw in him the occult gifts of the diviner and others began consulting him for advice on everything from curing infertility to lifting curses. “Some said he would sit in his hut with a hand placed on a Bible, or peer into a cracked shard of mirror to foretell the future,” the LRA biographer Matthew Green wrote in “The Wizard of the Nile.”

Kony seized his moment as a local leader with the rise to power in 1986 of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose guerrilla army had toppled government forces substantially drawn from Kony’s tribe. In Green’s account, Kony gathered people to tell them he had received a spirit that asked him to fight and overthrow Museveni: “Acolytes wearing bamboo rosaries gathered at his homestead, awaiting orders.” Kony left his village in April 1987 with 11 followers to begin his movement, whose stated goal was to rule the East African country according to the biblical 10 Commandments.

A feared warlord

Kony’s guerrilla campaign, with its reliance on ambushing government soldiers and others, terrorized local people even more. Attacks on villages, or fear of impending attacks, often forced many civilians to flee their remote homes in search of relative safety in nearby towns. The rebels were known to be highly mobile, hard to track. In the mid-1990s, Ugandan authorities forced hundreds of thousands of civilians into camps for the internally displaced in efforts to isolate the rebels.

That decision was criticized by local leaders, rights activists and others who said it exacerbated the people’s suffering while doing little to eradicate the LRA, whose attacks continued. The rebels abducted boys and girls in sporadic attacks, and other alleged acts of cruelty included chopping off limbs. With every successful attack Kony’s reputation as a fearsome warlord grew. Ugandan officials say Kony had his deputy, Vincent Otti, killed when Otti appeared interested in a peace deal with the government.

A fugitive hunted by the U.S.

In 2011, the U.S. sent about 100 U.S. troops to help African Union forces find Kony, a number that later grew to about 250. The effort degraded the LRA, but Kony himself remained elusive. A year later, Kony shot to international notoriety after the advocacy group Invisible Children made a popular online video highlighting his crimes, especially those against children.

The U.S. has offered up to $5 million in rewards for information leading to Kony’s capture. Ugandan officials have long said they believe Kony is alive and possibly hiding in the lawless border region between Central African Republic and Sudan’s South Darfur region. Most of the LRA’s top commanders have either been killed or captured while Kony somehow survives, adding to the myth surrounding the warlord. Many in his home area believe Kony will never be caught.

President Donald Trump has done it again.

He is attacking a genuine and serious problem recklessly, heedless of the consequences and, in this case, of human life.

On Tuesday I watched Trump proudly display grainy footage of a military strike on what he said was a boat full of narco-terrorists on their way to the United States with a load of drugs.

Typically, when the Coast Guard or another branch of the military or law enforcement spots a boat suspected of carrying drugs, we seek to stop the boat, search it, seize any drugs, and arrest and question the crew. If these drug-smuggling suspects open fire, American forces can respond, but they cannot simply execute someone on the mere suspicion of drug trafficking.

We do not kill those suspected of being criminals from the air.

‘Jus ad bellum’ and ‘jus in bello’

The thing that separates war from murder is the law, and the law of war contains two key components. They go by two Latin terms: jus ad bellum and jus in bello.

Jus ad bellum refers to the limited legal right to go to war. In other words, when is it legal to fight?

Jus in bello refers to conduct within the war. If it’s lawful to fight, then how must I fight?

For the use of military force to be lawful, it must satisfy the requirements of both doctrines. There must be a legal basis for the use of force, and the force that is used must also be lawful. Russia’s war in Ukraine would be lawless, for example, even if President Vladimir Putin confined himself to conducting airstrikes against only military targets and even if his troops behaved scrupulously in the field.

Why? Because there was no justification for the initial invasion. International law prohibits wars of aggression and territorial conquest, so Russia’s war itself is a crime, regardless of how the military behaves.

Conversely, when debating Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, jus ad bellum is satisfied: Hamas’ attacks Oct. 7, 2023, gave Israel the legal right to respond with military force, even to the point of removing Hamas from power. The controversies are, for the most part, over jus in bello, Israel’s conduct in the war. Hamas’ attack did not give Israel carte blanche to fight however it desires.

Firewalls

In the United States, we have two firewalls against unjust and unlawful wars. First, the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war. The president does have authority as commander in chief to respond to immediate military threats, like an armed attack, before a declaration of war, but he is not supposed to initiate new hostilities in the absence of congressional action.

A crime — even a crime as vicious as trafficking hard drugs into the United States — is not an act of war. It can’t be compared to Pearl Harbor, to Sept. 11 or to any other attack on American citizens or troops, or allied citizens or troops. To even mention Tren de Aragua in the same breath as al-Qaida, much less Imperial Japan, illustrates the absurdity of the administration’s argument.

Second, the international law of armed conflict still applies to U.S. forces. The broad language of Article 18 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — the criminal laws that govern the armed forces — extends the requirements of international law into U.S. military law, and that means that presidents don’t have the power to order violations of the laws of armed conflict.

So where did Trump find the legal authority to initiate deadly force against suspected members of a drug gang?

The closest thing we’ve heard to an actual legal argument is the repeated assertion that Trump could order a strike on Tren de Aragua because it’s a designated terrorist organization.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said after the attack that American forces may strike anyone “trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco terrorist.”

“We knew exactly who was in that boat,” he added, and “we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua.”

Though I question his certainty (I’ve had enough experience with airstrikes to know that our intelligence is rarely that precise), even if he’s correct, then that knowledge granted American forces probable cause to stop and search the boat for evidence of a crime, not grounds to execute the crew (or any passengers) from above.

For his part, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said that the United States will “blow up” members of criminal groups, and Thursday designated two more groups, Ecuadorian gangs Los Lobos and Los Choneros, as terror organizations.

It is true that the administration has the authority to designate foreign entities as terrorist organizations. And it’s true that the administration has used its authority to classify a host of drug gangs as terrorist organizations, but the relevant statute that allows the administration to make that designation does not include an authorization for military force.

What the statute does do is bar Americans from providing “material support or resources” to the designated group and bar members of the group from entry into the United States. It can also require financial institutions to block transactions involving terrorist property and assets.

What we are left with is a military strike conducted against suspects without due process, in the absence of any need for immediate self-defense (the boat was not firing on American forces), without any congressional authorization and without any basis in international law.

Consequences to contemplate

The consequences of Trump’s action are terrible to contemplate. If you are in a state of war with a terror organization, then military forces have the right to shoot members of that organization wherever they are found. When I served in Iraq, if we had sufficient reason to believe a person or a group of people were terrorists, we didn’t have to arrest them. We could kill them.

As an Army lawyer, I helped my commander make life-or-death decisions, including whether to use deadly force on the basis of partial information and drone footage. I know firsthand that the process is imprecise, potentially fraught with mistakes and justifiable only in extreme circumstances.

In Iraq we were engaged in a congressionally authorized counterinsurgency campaign against the deadliest terrorists on earth. Those conditions don’t apply to Trump’s campaign in the Caribbean.

Under the Trump administration’s reasoning, the president’s power to use deadly force isn’t limited to speedboats in international waters. War, after all, is war, and it can be fought wherever the enemy is present. That means members of the National Guard patrolling American streets could be granted broad authority to use deadly force, circumventing due process through a hail of gunfire.

‘Can’t you just shoot them in the legs or something?’

Trump has long fantasized about the promiscuous use of military force. His former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that Trump asked about using military force against protesters in 2020, during his first term. “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked, according to Esper.

Trump also reportedly asked about shooting migrants in the legs, and he deployed thousands of soldiers to the southern border. And it’s not just the president. Republican governors have called the flood of migrants across the southern border an “invasion” and sought to unlock their own war powers to respond to illegal immigration.

The laws of war exist because decent societies place a high value on human life and because the world has repeatedly endured the horrendous consequences of total war. Due process exists because millennia of experience with arbitrary power teach us that rulers can’t be trusted to dispense unilateral justice.

Drug trafficking, like all serious crimes, imposes tremendous costs. Drug overdoses have imposed a staggering toll on American communities and families.

But to say that drug trafficking is a serious crime with serious consequences is not the same thing as saying that it’s an act of war. Conflating crime with war obviously risks inflicting violence and injustice on the innocent and the guilty alike, but there are other risks as well.

Military strikes raise the possibility of military escalation. Venezuelan fighter jets flew over an American destroyer after the strike on the suspected drug boat, and now the United States is deploying even more military assets to the Caribbean, including F-35 fighters, our most advanced combat aircraft.

Meantime, Russia and China

Injustice and escalation aren’t the only consequences of Trump’s foolishness and lawlessness. Perhaps the most dangerous consequence is diversion. Russia and China are moving closer together, and China held a military parade last week that showcased an extraordinary range of new, advanced weapons.

Trump is diverting the military from its primary mission: deterring a war with hostile forces that are infinitely more dangerous than any South American drug gang.

No one should have any illusions that either Congress or the Supreme Court will stop the president. The Republican Congress does whatever Trump demands, and the Supreme Court has been reluctant to interfere with the president’s authority to use force abroad, especially since the Vietnam War.

It’s up to the American people to hold Trump accountable for his lawless acts. Every person who pumped his fist at Trump’s news conference should pause and think very hard about letting him — or any president — expand the definition of war until due process dies, blotted out by the flame and smoke of a missile strike.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.