The opening of the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island last week reminds us that New York can act dramatically and in a hurry. In just six years, an idea championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg went from idea to reality.
Sitting with Bloomberg at the campus’ opening was Gov. Cuomo. A few weeks earlier, he opened a new Tappan Zee Bridge ahead of schedule. Also in the first row was Mayor de Blasio, who ran and delivered on the promise of creating universal pre-K.
These swift accomplishments should light a fire under us as we confront the existential crisis of our city: a lack of affordable housing.
De Blasio made a commitment to build and preserve more units per year than his predecessors. It’s possible that he may succeed, as he is so quick to remind anyone who will listen.
But nearly every New Yorker knows that his effort is having little to no impact on skyrocketing rents and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, including many members of our congregations, schools and senior centers. It has done nothing to reduce the number of New Yorkers in homeless shelters; that number keeps increasing.
And it has not helped many of the city’s 1.6 million seniors or nearly 600,000 people in public housing.
However well intended, the mayor has spread too many city dollars and tax breaks to new developments that favor those with incomes of $52,000 or higher.
As an excellent new study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development details, those earning $52,000 to $69,000 received nearly 50% of the housing units built or preserved by the current administration. Families earning less got 32% of the units. (Even wealthier families got the balance.)
The mayor has chosen a metric — more units than his predecessors — that has undermined his impact. That has only exacerbated the Powerball-like odds that school aides, health care workers and others face of winning a coveted apartment or home.
One of our members recounted how she received two notices from the city, a few days apart. The first congratulated her on being chosen in a lottery for an affordable unit. The second alerted her to the fact that, because she made less than $100,000 a year, she could not afford the “affordable” unit.
We believe this mayor cares deeply about the future of the city and his own legacy, but it’s time for him to switch gears. That’s what we at East Brooklyn Congregations have done as we look ahead.
In the days and weeks ahead, we will propose a production, preservation and accountability strategy that can stabilize our neighborhoods, keep families in their homes, directly address the needs of seniors and New York City Housing Authority residents, and begin to solve the homeless crisis.
It consists of three elements:
One, the city’s production efforts should prioritize those making between $20,000 and $35,000 a year. This will give the single mom with two kids a chance of finding a home or apartment for her family and will begin to reduce the shelter population.
We have also proposed that the city build 15,000 units of affordable apartments on existing NYCHA sites. These apartments would enable the 30% of NYCHA tenants who are seniors, often living in larger apartments, a chance to move into a lovely new unit in their same neighborhood.
If all 15,000 units were occupied by NYCHA seniors, it could free up space for as many as 50,000 other New Yorkers to move in.
Two, the mayor should accelerate the improvements in the quality of the 180,000 units that make up NYCHA. It may cost as much as $17 billion to make NYCHA safer, more energy-efficient and freer of mold and mildew. But the cost of losing NYCHA developments to further neglect or poor maintenance is incalculable.
Three, the mayor, district attorney and police commissioner should work more aggressively against those landlords who destabilize our neighborhoods with impunity and who do not worry about accountability.
Today, a subset of landlords has a business model built on buying buildings with rent-stabilized rents and then waging a campaign of eviction, disrepair and even threats to get people out. Some will have to go to jail, and others will have to give up their property.
The resolution of the current housing crisis is much more critical to the survival of New York than a new tech campus or a bridge. Let’s act like it.
Lindsay and Brawley are leaders in the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation and East Brooklyn Congregations.
