A so-called “poor door” is a separate building entrance used only by residents of income-restricted units in an otherwise market-rate building. The term describes a physical door, but it usually comes with separate elevators, mailrooms, and no access to amenities like gyms, pools, or roof decks that market-rate tenants can use.
The practice grew out of New York City’s inclusionary housing program. Developers who included affordable units on site could build bigger than zoning otherwise allowed. Some developers clustered the affordable units into a separate “segment” of the building, which the zoning code allowed to have its own entrance.
The term was coined by the Upper West Side news site West Side Rag in 2013, describing a planned development at 40 Riverside Boulevard. The story spread nationally after Extell, the developer, defended a plan for market-rate condos starting near $2 million to share a building with affordable rentals starting under $900 a month, connected only by a shared address and separate doors. Mayor de Blasio’s office said it opposed the design but could not stop it because the project had cleared approvals under Mayor Bloomberg.
In 2015, New York State passed a law banning the practice going forward. Any building using an affordable housing tax incentive must give all residents access to the same entrances and common areas. The change came through the state’s rent-stabilization renewal legislation, not a City Council bill.
The ban has loopholes. It applies to entrances and common areas, not necessarily to buildings. Some developments have used separate addresses, separate floors, or legally distinct buildings on the same site to maintain a similar effect without technically violating the entrance rule. A 2022 lawsuit against 15 Hudson Yards, later disputed by the developer, made this argument about a project built after the ban.
The debate matters here because ONE LIC, the rezoning shaping LIC’s last large undeveloped swath, uses the same inclusionary housing tools that produced poor doors elsewhere in the city. The current draft splits roughly 12,000 market-rate units from 4,000 income-restricted units. No developer has proposed a segregated entrance for a ONE LIC project. But the 2015 ban covers entrances and common areas, not overall site design, so it would not stop a future building from separating affordable units into distinct segments, floors, or structures on a shared site. That gives residents and CB2 a concrete question to ask as design guidelines take shape: what “mixed income” means in practice, not just in the unit count.
