Mayor de Blasio (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
In October, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that his ambitious affordable housing plan was two years ahead of schedule, prompting him to expand his target of creating and preserving 200,000 affordable units by 2024 to 300,000 units by 2026. At the same time, the mayor said his administration would undertake efforts to increase the involvement of non-profit developers in keeping housing affordable, likely a response to critics who said the administration was relying too heavily on the for-profit real estate industry.
As part of the enhanced and recalibrated plan, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) will take the first step on Thursday in launching its latest initiative. HPD will start seeking out developers who are interested in, and able to, purchase rent-regulated housing and maintain its affordability. The agency will then connect that list of developers -- including for-profit and non-profit entities -- with sellers.
HPD will issue a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to create that list of developers, judging applicants based on “acquisition and development experience, portfolio management history, financial capacity, and the quality of their identified property manager.”
Additionally, the non-profit developers that qualify for the list will be eligible for the administration’s “Neighborhood Pillars” program, a $275 million public-private fund intended to provide financial assistance to mission-based organizations, minority- and women-owned business enterprises and community-based organizations to buy and preserve unregulated and rent-stabilized housing for the long term. HPD estimates the program, which is expected to launch by next fiscal year, starting July 1, could help fund the purchase of 7,500 units within eight years.
“As we accelerate and expand our work through Housing New York 2.0, we are taking a more targeted, data-driven approach to preserving affordability and protecting residents from the threat of predatory investment,” said HPD Commissioner Maria Torres-Springer, in a statement. The program, she said, would “help safeguard the affordability of our city for generations to come.”
Sam Marks, executive director of Local Initiatives Support Corporation NYC, which worked with HPD on the creation of Neighborhood Pillars, said in a statement that rent-regulated multi-family homes are a “key resource” for maintaining affordability for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.
“[W]e applaud the City for creating a dedicated program to enable mission-driven developers to acquire and steward these assets,” he said. “The Neighborhood Pillars Program has the potential to protect these buildings from predatory purchasers and speculators. We are hopeful that the HPD will prioritize locally-based, mission driven developers, such as community development corporations, that would commit to long-term affordability even beyond what the public financing regulatory agreements require.”
The effort is intended, in part, as an answer to the rampant housing speculation across the city, which housing advocates say has been triggered in some cases by the administration’s proposals to comprehensively revise land use rules in low-income communities to spur affordable housing creation. The mayor pushed back against that notion when he first announced Neighborhood Pillars in October, when a reporter asked if the new program was an acknowledgement that the city may have exacerbated housing speculation.
“It’s an acknowledgement that speculation was already a problem,” he said. “I’ve said this a thousand times...the speculation problem is separate from any question [about] rezoning. We’ve seen massive speculation in Bed-Stuy, in Bushwick, in places that never had a rezoning, as well as places that had a rezoning coming. It’s unfortunately ubiquitous. So we have to approach it with new tools.”
Along those lines, the administration has taken measures, in conjunction with the New York City Council, to prevent developers from driving out rent-regulated tenants and raising rents at astronomical rates. The most recent of those is the “Predatory Equity” bill, sponsored by Council Member Ritchie Torres from the Bronx and passed by the City Council in December. The bill mandated the creation of a publicly available “Speculation Watch List” of rent-regulated buildings which have been recently sold and where the tenants could face displacement pressures. The administration will publish the list this fall.
***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
De Blasio at a rally for speed cameras (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
The Legislature’s passage of a $168.3 billion state budget over the weekend came with a few rewards for New York City, but also setbacks for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who saw several of his priorities either approved with caveats or ignored in final negotiations between legislative leaders and Governor Andrew Cuomo. Now, with three months remaining in the legislative session in Albany, de Blasio will have a number of agenda items that he is likely to pursue.
The mayor has had an extensive agenda that he was hoping to see approved by the Legislature and Cuomo, including increased funding for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the New York City Housing Authority, and schools. He was also hoping for more funds for affordable and supportive housing development, expansion of a speed camera program around city schools, repeal of a state law precluding the disclosure of police officer disciplinary records, passage of design-build authority for New York City to use in major construction projects, and a slew of voting and electoral reforms as part of his “Democracy NYC” agenda.
But de Blasio has few allies in Albany, save for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat from the Bronx. Over the years, the mayor has repeatedly clashed with Cuomo, though both are Democrats, and the two administrations exchanged open barbs in the lead up to the budget’s passage over everything from the MTA to NYCHA to education funding.
De Blasio has also been unpopular with Republicans who control the state Senate after he attempted to orchestrate a Democratic takeover of the chamber in 2014. The mayor does have somewhat cordial ties with members of the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a breakaway group of eight Senators who prop up the GOP’s hold on the chamber, but has been unable to leverage those relationships to get a number of priorities passed or funded. Recently, he has repeatedly called on the group to rejoin the mainline Democratic conference, a move that may be in the offing post-budget.
The state budget presented what the mayor called a “mixed bag” for the city, in his weekly appearance on NY1’s Inside City Hall on Monday night. An increase in school aid was approved, but with expanded oversight over how New York City schools utilizes it. Through the state budget, the city is being forced to bear more costs for subway repairs, and additional NYCHA funding is conditional upon an independent outside monitor for the ailing city agency. A relatively small stream of long-term funding for the MTA also passed, through a fee on for-hire vehicle and taxi rides in a designated quadrant of Manhattan, rather than through a tax on the highest-income New Yorkers as de Blasio had hoped. Design-build was approved for select repair work: at NYCHA, to build jail space to replace that of Rikers Island, and for a large project on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
That leaves a few key items on the table.
De Blasio’s administration has touted the success of a speed camera program in helping reduce traffic fatalities around city schools under the Vision Zero initiative. The mayor has been fighting for the program to be extended to 750 school zones, up from 140 currently, and requires the state legislature’s approval to do so. As with last year, the state Senate refused to pass the measure, leaving it unresolved when the budget passed.
On NY1, de Blasio predicted that speed cameras would be one of the more contentious issues he will put his weight behind in the remaining legislative session. “[T]here’s gonna be a fight in that session,” the mayor told host Josh Robin. “Look I would’ve loved to have seen the speed cameras in the budget. I think that would’ve been the right thing to do because it’s urgent, it’s a matter of safety. We just lost two children in the horrible tragedy in Park Slope, we lost another child before that earlier in the year. I don’t know how many kids, how many kids have to die before the legislators in Albany can say ‘Hey, OK, of course we want cameras to stop speeding around schools.’”
The mayor urged legislators, particularly the state Senate, to “put the politics aside, think about human life and protecting people. I think this should be a huge fight in the legislative session.”
The mayor also promised last year that he would pursue greater transparency for the city’s police force, in particular by calling for the repeal of Section 50-a of the state civil rights law, which currently forbids the personnel records of police officers from being made public, according to de Blasio and city officials. It was de Blasio’s administration that chose to reinterpret the law to hide disciplinary records -- claiming that successive administrations had misread and violated the statute for decades by releasing records -- the mayor nonetheless has said it is among his top priorities.
Under his democracy initiative, de Blasio pledged to pursue common-sense reforms to the state’s archaic election and voting laws. The proposals were in line with the Cuomo’s own “Democracy Agenda,” including proposals such as campaign finance reforms, early voting, no-excuse absentee ballots, electronic poll books, among other measures. But Republicans in the Senate have been averse to most, if not all, of those reforms, which advocates have long said would increase voter participation and engagement across the state. (De Blasio promised a similar push for reforms last year but did little to follow through.) With none of the reforms having passed, de Blasio promised Monday that he would take them up again.
The state budget also moved the needle on the administration’s plan to close the troubled Rikers Island jail complex by authorizing the city to use design-build, a streamlined procurement process, to build or expand borough-based jails. But de Blasio was also pushing for accompanying criminal justice reforms -- such as eliminating cash bail and implementing speedy trial reform -- which he says are essential to reducing the city’s jail population to below 5,000, which he says is a requisite for the overall effort to close Rikers. Those reforms were left out in the state budget, but not forgotten by de Blasio.
“I think there’ll be other big fights in the legislative session. Electoral reform, which I’m going to fight for very hard, 50-a reform and criminal justice reform, speedy trial, bail reform, there’s so many pieces that we wanna win in the legislative session,” de Blasio said on NY1. “I think a lot’ll be on the table but speed cameras would be I think the thing with most intense feeling because it’s about saving the lives of our children.”
***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Gov. Cuomo at the wheel (Philip Kamrass/Governor's Office)
Though Governor Andrew Cuomo has expressed support for instituting a congestion pricing program to reduce street congestion in Manhattan and create a dedicated source of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and said that he is fighting for such a scheme in state budget negotiations, the governor has recently indicated that he may only be able to win a modest first step, raising the ire of those expecting more.
“Congestion pricing doesn’t happen in one fell swoop,” Cuomo said on WNYC radio last week, acknowledging that the sole component of congestion pricing likely to make it into the budget due by April 1 is a surcharge on taxi and for-hire vehicle rides. “There are phases to the congestion pricing and I’m cautiously optimistic that we could start the process.”
On Wednesday, Cuomo told reporters in Albany that the state is “taking first steps towards congestion pricing” by including the surcharge on rides in taxis, black cars, and app-based services like Uber and Lyft. Those charges were part of the first of three phases to a congestion pricing plan proposed by the “Fix NYC” panel Cuomo had put together last year. The governor never fully embraced the recommendations publicly, but has said he’s “pushing that very hard,” in negotiations with the Democratically-controlled Assembly and Republican-controlled Senate, both home to significant skepticism.
“The congestion in Manhattan is incredible and if you want to fix the subways you need a long-term funding stream,” Cuomo said. “There is no magic.”
But many, including City Council Member Brad Lander, have voiced frustration with the likely lack of a comprehensive congestion pricing plan in the budget. “This is a classic bait-and-switch,” the Brooklyn Democrat said Tuesday during a phone interview with Gotham Gazette. “If the governor is the least bit serious about the reality that we need long-term congestion pricing, and not just the FHV [for-hire vehicle] bait-and-switch, then he’ll insist in getting that money in the budget.”
Lander, who had predicted such a possibility in January on social media, added, “Had [Cuomo] been serious about real congestion pricing, instead of appointing the Fix NYC commission and not following their report by not putting it in his budget, and made it a real top priority and put it in his budget, then it would have had a chance, I believe.”
Lander said that the insufficient effort toward including a more complete congestion pricing plan was yet another example of nearsighted political maneuvering in Albany standing in the way of implementing effective policy.
“Every year, for many years, politicians in Albany made decisions that seemed good in the short-term: to borrow more, to put a little less in the subway. Because in the next few months, those decisions were not going to harm service,” Lander explained. “What we need is a big, long-term investment, but we’re in an election year and so the politics suggest find a way to look like you’re solving the problem while just doing a little something for the short-term.”
The governor is seeking a third term this year, and the entirety of the Legislature is also up for election in the fall.
Congestion pricing, a system of strategically tolling vehicles entering a certain geographic jurisdiction, has long been regarded as the right policy for New York City, according to the lion’s share of transit experts and advocates and editorial boards, as well as some city elected officials. The policy would reduce traffic and carbon emissions, encourage commuting via public transportation, and provide a much-needed influx of funding for repairs of the MTA subway infrastructure, its proponents say.
In August 2017, as calls for officials to provide a fix to the poor-performing MTA subways reached a fever pitch, Cuomo reversed his position on the policy and said that congestion pricing “is an idea whose time has come.” In October 2017, Cuomo convened the “Fix NYC Advisory Panel,” a group comprised of elected officials, community leaders, and representatives from New York businesses, to produce a report suggesting policies.
And in January, the panel released the report. It recommended a three-year, three-phase plan including a congestion pricing proposal that would eventually mandate a surcharge of $11.52 per car to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street, and over $25 for trucks. The panel also recommended a surcharge of between $2 and $5 per ride on for-hire vehicles, such as taxis and Ubers. It also put forth a variety of congestion-reducing suggestions like better enforcement of existing traffic laws, like bans on double-parking and blocking bus lanes.
Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, who frequently labeled prior iterations of congestion pricing a “regressive tax,” changed his tune to an extent, expressing openness to the group’s recommendations, particularly noting his approval that they did not recommend tolls directly on the East River bridges.
Cuomo, however, never explicitly embraced its suggestions or promised to push for them in the budget or as stand-alone legislation. Instead, he acknowledged that the problems congestion pricing seeks to address are real, and pledged to “review it carefully” and “discuss the alternatives with the Legislature” in the ensuing months. A spokesperson for the governor, Peter Ajemian, told the New York Times that what the governor is on the verge of attaining in the state budget is in keeping with the Fix NYC plan because its congestion pricing program is also phased in.
Ahead of the April 1 budget deadline, top transit advocates questioned Cuomo’s commitment and leadership on the issue. “Where it really matters, he’s not in the game,” executive director of Transportation Alternatives, Paul Steely White, said at a rally outside the governor’s Manhattan office last week.
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for Assembly Democrats told Gotham Gazette of the for-hire vehicle surcharge, “We passed it as part of our budget proposal.”
Spokespeople for the Senate Republicans and the governor did not return requests for comment for this story. The Senate did not include even the surcharge in its one-house budget plan.
In recent days, and amid uncertainty about congestion pricing’s fate in budget negotiations, coalitions of transit, business, and technology leaders have come forward to encourage the state to enact the initiative. “Traffic congestion costs our region $20 billion every year, and the Fix NYC recommendations are the only plan on the table to address our transit crisis and get our economy moving,” said Alex Matthiessen, director of the Move NY Campaign, in a press release. Before the Fix NYC panel, Move NY had the model congestion pricing plan that was the topic of public debate and advocacy for several years. Matthiessen embraced the Fix NYC recommendations when they were released.
Julie Samuels, Executive Director of Tech:NYC, said in a press release, “New York City’s transit crisis slows down business, hinders our productivity and efficiency, and makes it harder for our companies to recruit employees. The congestion pricing plan sitting with leaders in Albany will ease congestion and, crucially, help fund our transit system.”
“We must get this done because we need a functional transit system if we want tech and business to succeed here,” Samuels continued.
While Council Member Lander acknowledged there are challenges in convincing the Assembly and Senate to agree to allow congestion pricing in the budget, he argued Cuomo did not make a genuine attempt at doing so. “When an elected leader wants to do something, they have real tools at their disposal to persuade the legislators that it’s the right thing to do,” said Lander. “And he did not do those things.”
***
by Sam Raskin
@samraskinz @GothamGazette