New York is in dire need of housing - particularly affordable housing for the middle class - yet the momentous nature of a development planned for Queens has slipped under the radar.

The project, called Queens West, represents City Hall's largest single foray into middle-class housing construction in decades, building a community to be mentioned one day in the same breath with Co-op City, Peter Cooper Village and Starrett City. In other words, at 5,000 apartments, it's big.

Mayor Bloomberg is pushing Queens West as part of a commitment to create and preserve 165,000 units of housing over the next decade. It would stand on 24 currently unused acres along the East River in Long Island City with fantastic views of Manhattan. And it would be open to wage earners on a scale ranging from $60,000 to $145,000 a year for a family of four.

That focus on the middle class is what sets Queens West apart. This city has a host of housing programs to create both pricey market-rate apartments and, for the poor, deeply subsidized units. In fact, 75% of the apartments under Bloomberg's overall plan are targeted for families of four with $56,000 or less in income. But cops, nurses, teachers and everyone else living check-to-check need affordable places to live, too.

The city is short about 100,000 housing units because of both population growth and the hugely expensive cost of construction. To bring Queens West in at projected rents ranging from $1,200 to $2,500 a month, the city plans to subsidize construction to the tune of $50,000 an apartment. That includes spending $146 million to buy the land from the Port Authority and abating real estate taxes.

Make no mistake, though, this would not be a housing project owned and operated by the city. Officials plan to invite developers to submit proposals for permission to build and manage the complex. The question is: Will the economics make sense? Only when the bidding begins will we learn whether subsidies at that level are sufficient to build affordable middle-class housing.

Or perhaps we'll discover that the subsidies are too rich and can be reduced. Time will tell. For now, it's enough to wish the best of luck to Queens West.

Machine politics

Tomorrow, New Yorkers will be voting once again on those old dinosaur lever machines while most of the rest of America is exercising the franchise on modern systems. We've repeatedly blamed Albany gridlock for putting the state so far behind, but maybe having the dinosaurs around a bit longer isn't such a bad thing. We shall know soon enough. Be prepared. And be afraid. Be very afraid.

From sea to shining sea, glitches with touch-screen ATM-style electronic voting have frustrated citizens and cast doubt on the machines' reliability. It's even scarier than that. Glitches are one thing; sabotage, something else entirely. A new HBO documentary, "Hacking Democracy," presents case after case of how election computer software can be tampered with and vote results skewed.

The problematic developments arose from the best of intentions.

After the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which was designed to banish punch cards and hanging chads. Every state was required to switch by this year to touch screens, or to paper ballots that could be optically scanned. However, the systems were untested, and standards were few.

New York was the sole state to blow the deadline on new equipment and was sued by the Justice Department. Under a court-approved deal, our switch is slated for next year. Albany's tardiness, however, had the unforeseen benefit of giving New York a reprieve from the difficulties hitting other states.

It now appears that the best available technology, and the one New York should choose, is the paper ballot-optical scanner combination. The paper ballot is the official record, the scanner simply the tabulator. Scanners can be tampered with, but the paper - filled out personally by the voter - can be hand-counted, if needed.

The state Board of Elections will soon certify new devices, and then the local boards will decide which to purchase. Meanwhile, sharp eyes need to be kept on how things go in the rest of America tomorrow. Or how they don't go.

(c) New York Daily News, L.P.: reproduced with permission.