Housing to be built (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
New York’s housing crisis is at a fever pitch – and there is new data to prove it. In a new report, the national pro-housing group Up For Growth found that New York State’s housing shortage worsened dramatically during the 2010s.
The Empire State was 161,925 units short in 2012, but 233,592 units short just seven years later. The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of several states, fared even worse, with the shortage ballooning from 245,000 to 342,000 units in the same period. With the pandemic economy and inflation rates, these figures are surely even worse in 2022.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who has sought an apartment in New York lately, but it does raise an important question: how did this happen?
Unfortunately, the answer is simple: we have not built enough housing, in large part because local governments have made it illegal to build apartment buildings throughout most of the region, including many parts of the five boroughs. Low-income households have been hurt the most by this artificial scarcity, as they are outbid by high earners for pricey single-family homes. It is time to finally reverse that trend and create the affordable and sustainable city and state that New Yorkers deserve.
The need is urgent. Consider the results of the city’s most recent Housing and Vacancy Survey –between 1991 and 2020, adjusted for inflation, the city’s overall median monthly rent went from $900 to $1,500. And that is just for occupied units – if you need an apartment, it’s much worse. The median renter household in New York City makes $50,000 a year but would need to make $110,000 a year to afford the $2,750 median asking rent for available apartments.
Half of the city’s renter households spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and a third of renters spend more than 50% of income on rent.
Add this up and you get a fair housing disaster. As the Regional Plan Association has shown, single-family zoning – the most restrictive type of zoning – is directly correlated with segregation throughout the New York City metro area. Specifically, the more single-family zoning a community has, the more likely it is to be almost exclusively white. This trend also holds in New York City.
However, Up For Growth’s research also helps us imagine a better future. It shows that if local governments reformed this exclusionary zoning to allow enough multifamily buildings, New York would see an additional $116.7 billion of gross domestic product statewide, $56.1 billion of additional personal income for New Yorkers, and 40,248 new jobs across just 20 years.
In other words, more housing is good for equity, fair housing, and the economy. It is a win-win-win.
At the same time, we shouldn’t minimize the huge efforts made by city planners and policymakers. According to a recent Furman Center report, New York City produced 185,000 units of multifamily housing between 2010 and 2020. Of those, almost 30% were affordable units for households making 80% of Area Median Income (AMI) or less.
The development of 60,000 units of affordable housing is an enormous achievement, and is the product of a highly-productive public-private partnership between the industry and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). And there are promising signs under the Adams administration’s new plan.
First, Mayor Adams and the City Council are making an unprecedented investment of $32 billion in affordable housing over the next ten years, with $22 billion in capital for development/preservation and $10 billion for the Public Housing Preservation Trust in order to renovate NYCHA units.
Second, the mayor has proposed the City of Yes, a set of zoning text amendments that would increase the allowable floor area and height of affordable buildings, while ditching expensive parking requirements that eat subsidy dollars. This effort will also help fair housing efforts by giving affordable housing an advantage when compared with market-rate buildings.
Third, HPD is looking to become more efficient and get tenants into units faster. It will no longer reverify every new tenant’s income, instead moving to an audit system that will cut a time-consuming, unnecessary step from the lease-up process. They are also moving the Section 8 briefing online, eliminating the demeaning Section 8 absent parent form, and killing the practice of requiring a person to sleep in a homeless shelter for four months before being eligible for housing.
While the city can’t do this alone – Albany too must step up – it does have the tools to take care of the area of greatest need: the intense shortage of deeply affordable housing, where there is virtually no vacancy at the lowest rent. As we have seen, building more housing is a realistic area of tremendous opportunity for New York – and it is one that we simply cannot afford to miss.
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Jolie Milstein is the President & CEO of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, a trade organization representing more than 300 affordable housing professionals statewide. On Twitter @NYSAFAH.
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Gov. Hochul visits health care professionals (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)
Preventive health and primary care are the key to a healthy population, and programs like Medicaid are essential for New York State’s most vulnerable people to access this care. Unfortunately, in New York, physician assistants (PAs) are not recognized as primary care providers (PCPs) for Medicaid managed care patients.
And while I personally provide this care daily to this very patient population, this lack of recognition prevents me from being able to provide comprehensive care and makes me invisible if a Medicaid patient tries to search for a PCP through their health plan. While Medicaid managed care does not recognize PAs as PCPs, Medicare and commercial insurances, like United and Cigna, do.
To match the current realities of primary care in New York State, lawmakers have passed legislation permitting physician assistants to serve as primary care practitioners for purposes of Medicaid managed care plans—and now it awaits Governor Hochul's signature.
At my institution, a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), PAs provide a significant amount of primary care. We work with the healthcare team, including physicians and nurses, but we often serve as the PCP. A looming shortage of primary care physicians that was prevalent before the pandemic has turned into a severe healthcare workforce shortage in the state, which is expected to worsen in coming years. In Health Provider Shortage Areas in the state, PAs are more likely than physicians to serve as primary care providers.
Like many PAs, my passion is caring for underserved populations, including LGBTQ+ and people living with HIV. These populations suffer lifelong health disparities ranging from increased mood and anxiety disorders, substance use, obesity, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and infectious diseases. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities identifies the LGBTQ+ community as a “health disparity population” largely due to their difficulty in finding accessible, unbiased care. Culturally competent providers are rare and desperately needed.
Following my PA education, I pursued certification as an HIV Specialist through the American Academy of HIV Medicine (AAHIVM). Here in New York, most people living with HIV with Medicaid are required to join a Medicaid Managed Care Plan, and through these plans, PCPs coordinate the individual’s entire care. Despite a health emergency and a worsening healthcare workforce shortage, a highly skilled, AAHIVM-certified PA cannot currently serve as a PCP for our most vulnerable people. Yet I could if the individual were insured by their employer. It’s time for that to change.
New York State is poised to sign into law legislation that will increase access to care by allowing physician assistants to serve as primary care providers to the communities who need it most. It is time for New York to support our healthcare workforce. Governor Hochul should sign this bill into law.
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Daniel Mulcahy, PA-C AAHIVS, lives in Queens.
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Public Advocate Jumaane Williams (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
Now that New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’ long-shot campaign for New York Governor is over, he presumably has more time to focus on performing the functions that the New York City Charter assigns to his elected office.
One function he has yet to perform, but something all previous Public Advocates have done, is to convene a meeting of the Commission on Public Information and Communication (COPIC). There’s never been a better time for him to do that than now.
COPIC was established in the charter revision of 1990 to “make city government more transparent to the citizens it serves and to encourage the public to become more actively involved in government.” Its purpose is, in the words of the New York Times, “to monitor policies on access to information produced or maintained by the city, including computerized information.”
While this might not sound sexy today, it was a remarkably innovative idea when it was first conceived in 1990. That was the year that the world wide web (aka Internet) was invented, and the public was awakening to the possibility that computer networks could make government significantly more efficient and transparent. In fact, the Charter Revision Commission, which was tasked by the U.S. Supreme Court to fix New York’s unconstitutional government structure, used transparency as the centerpiece of its campaign to get the charter ratified by voters.
During the campaign to ratify the new city charter in 1989, the main theme used in marketing campaigns and repeated regularly by the commission’s chair was “a Government People Can Understand.”
33 years later and New York City has elected a self described “tech guy,” Eric Adams, as mayor. Adams promised voters an upgrade to New York City's information systems that would improve city operations, eliminate waste, improve transparently and enable agencies to more effectively and efficiently deliver services to city residents. Much of his campaign rhetoric relied on the premise he could use his approach to technology to get things done.
His plans were widely discussed in local media. New York magazine proclaimed “Eric Adams wants to CompStat everything”. Gotham Gazette offered a more sober assessment: “Though it is vaguely defined and missing an estimated price tag, among other details, Adams’ plan involves revamping and redesigning how city agencies coordinate and use data and technology.”
After six months in office, the press is beginning to wonder: “Is Eric Adams All Talk?” Does he have a plan to upgrade New York City’s government bureaucracy? If so, what is it? Is his administration making progress? The public deserves to know and it’s the Public Advocate’s job to find out. COPIC offers him a powerful tool to do just that. And there is clearly interest from the media and the public about progress. Gotham Gazette’s recent report on Adams’ plan to launch a first version of “MyCity” contains some good background but very few specifics from the administration about its efforts.
The city can’t adopt the open source digital transformation approach many experts have recommended if the city doesn't work in the open. At the very least the mayor’s new Office of Technology and Innovation, under which the new administration is reorganizing various technology departments, should have a Github account, or at least put something – anything – on the Department of Information Technology and Telecom (DOITT)’s account. This is an obvious first step that COPIC could and should be pushing the administration to take.
Unlike many other city commissions composed of members appointed by the mayor, COPIC’s membership is defined in the charter and designed to bring together politicians, experts, and city officials who sit at the nexus of critical decision-making and operations of city information systems: the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Operations; the Commissioner of the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS); the Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT); the president of WNYC public radio; and additional representatives appointed by the Mayor, Public Advocate, Borough Presidents, and City Council. Its chair is the Public Advocate.
If our current Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams, put all these people in a room together, turned on the livestream cameras and had an open meeting, we’d be able to find out a lot more about the mayor’s technology strategy and progress than we know now.
Every Public Advocate has convened COPIC at least once, except for Jumaane Williams. The few times Williams has addressed the topic of COPIC has been when other people, including me, have asked if he ever plans to convene it.
In our MNN debate in last year’s Public Advocate race he was elusive, claiming at one point he can’t convene COPIC without additional funding and, at another, that he can’t because of COVID-19 but maybe he would in the future. At the NY1 Public Advocate debate in October of last year, he was repeatedly attacked by his opponent, Dr. Devi Nampiaparampil, for failing to convene COPIC.
Two days later, the COPIC website was taken down and, as of this writing, it remains down.
Fortunately, Google’s caching service had archive images of the COPIC website as of October 19, 2021. I’ve taken the liberty of republishing those images at copic.nyc with the hope that people won’t forget about a charter-mandated commission uniquely capable of making the mayor’s actions related to information technology more transparent, and holding his administration accountable for delivering genuine technology solutions that improve government operation and New Yorker’s lives. It’s also worth noting that when Williams was first running for Public Advocate in 2019, he said one reason was to more assertively hold up the city charter.
It’s Williams’ job to convene COPIC and use it as a venue to get more information from city officials about their work, including in implementing Mayor Adams’ ambitious and widely promoted plans.
Here are a few ideas for questions Williams can ask of the city administration at his first COPIC convening:
New York City government relies on technology to effectively, efficiently, and equitably serve New Yorkers, and often (and famously) falls short in doing so again and again.
Our city’s people should be able to rely on COPIC to keep us informed about how our government uses that technology.
To do that, we need to be able to rely on our Public Advocate to perform all roles assigned to their office by the city’s charter.
Public Advocate Williams: it’s time to convene COPIC. Better late than never.
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Devin Balkind is a nonprofit executive, civic technologist, and startup advisor who ran for Public Advocate as the Libertarian Party nominee. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.
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