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Johnson Unveils ‘Holistic, Long-Term’ Plan to Tackle City Homelessness Crisis


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(photo: John McCarten/City Council)


New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson on Thursday released a plan that he said takes a “smarter, more strategic, holistic, long-term” approach to addressing the city’s homelessness crisis, seeking to end what he called the siloed policies of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and calling for more funding from the city and state to both help homeless individuals find permanent housing and prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.

“This is, without exaggeration, a humanitarian crisis in the wealthiest city in the United States of America, and the time has come for urgent action,” Johnson said at the steps of City Hall, standing with advocates from non-profit organizations that provide services to the homeless and Council Member Stephen Levin, who chairs the Council’s General Welfare Committee with oversight of homelessness.

There are roughly 80,000 individuals living in New York City homeless shelters or on the street, while tens of thousands of others are living doubled up with friends or relatives. Of that number, about 20,000 are children under the age of 18. De Blasio has released various homelessness plans and instituted many relevant programs, but the issue remains one of his main challenges. While the administration has been successful in slowing the growth of homelessness through rental subsidies, eviction protections, and new housing, over more than six years it has not been able to reduce the city’s homeless population.

“We know what we need to do. We know the policies that need to happen to make sure that we are doing the historic work to bring down our shelter census, to reduce the length of stay [in a shelter],” Levin said, noting that the average length of stay is 400 days.

He added, “Just think for a second about what it's like to be a three-year-old child, spending half of your life living in a hotel room without a refrigerator, without a kitchen, no place to do your homework, no place for recreation, limited opportunities for after school or any types of enrichment. What kind of stress that has on that child, what kind of stress that has on that family. Multiply that by 20,000. That’s what we’re facing.”

The Council’s plan released on Thursday is a 200-plus page document that has been in the works for 18 months, Johnson said, and would fundamentally rework the city’s current approach to homelessness that has shown limited results despite a massive increase in city spending.

The plan is extensive, with 90 policy recommendations under six umbrellas – preventing homelessness, increasing access to permanent affordable housing, increasing support for unsheltered homeless people, improving services for the sheltered population, consolidating housing and homelessness policy, and creating a long-term approach to the issue instead of “lurching from crisis to crisis,” Johnson said.

De Blasio has released different iterations of plans to fight homelessness. Most recently, in 2017, he announced a plan to build 90 new homeless shelters while closing down troubled cluster sites and inadequate hotels contracted by the city to temporarily house homeless people. In December 2019, he announced a new plan to end long-term street homelessness by enhancing outreach, opening more “safe haven” beds, and dedicating more city-subsidized apartments to those coming out of homelessness. 

But while he gave the mayor some credit, Johnson critiqued the de Blasio administration for effectively siloing homelessness from housing and not offering an overall plan to meet the real needs of the city’s most vulnerable. “That makes no sense,” he said, emphasizing that housing and homelessness are two sides of the same coin and proposing that the city create a new position of deputy mayor for homelessness and affordable housing (there is currently a deputy mayor for housing and economic development while the deputy mayor for health and human services oversees much of the approach to addressing homelessness).

“All of us know what ultimately solves homelessness is simple. It is housing,” said Nathylin Flowers, a homeless activist who said she will turn 74 in March and will have spent five years living in shelter. Flowers famously confronted de Blasio over his housing policies in 2018 while he was working out at the Prospect Park Y.M.C.A., to which he was dismissive. “That's all we need, housing,” she said.

Johnson noted that the city has massively increased spending on homelessness – the first budget passed under Mayor de Blasio spent $954 million on the Department of Homeless Services, while the mayor’s latest budget proposal for the 2021 fiscal year allocates more than $2.1 billion towards the agency. “Blind spending will not solve the homelessness crisis,” Johnson said.

One of the major steps Johnson said would immediately reduce the homeless population would be to increase the value of rental subsidy vouchers for those experiencing or at risk of homelessness from the current maximum of $1,580 to a fair market rate of up to $1,951. He largely placed responsibility for this measure on the state, calling on the Legislature to establish the Home Stability Support program proposed by Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi of Queens. The program would create a new statewide rental subsidy, but has so far been opposed by Governor Andrew Cuomo.

But Johnson also said the city should pitch in more funding if the state fails to act. According to estimates from the Council, increasing rental subsidies to fair market rate would cost about $236 million over five years, but simultaneously would help reduce spending on cluster sites and commercial hotels by about $400 million.

Johnson also said the city should prioritize increasing the number of safe haven beds and supportive housing for the chronically street homeless. “These are not just aspirational goals that are in this 200-plus page report,” Johnson said. “These are feasible policies that will work to help prevent homelessness, increase pathways to permanent housing, and support our neighbors who are currently experiencing homelessness.”

In response to Johnson's press conference and plan, de Blasio's office noted that the mayor still has two years left to address the homelessness crisis and that while he has admitted he should have done more earlier in his term, he has put a lot in place over the last few years. “Through unprecedented investments in legal services and housing resources, we’ve helped more than 140,000 New Yorkers secure permanent affordable homes, all while driving down evictions by over a third and overhauling our shelter system," said Avery Cohen, a de Blasio spokesperson, in a statement. "With our Journey Home Plan, we’ll be taking this progress even further—pledging to bring every last person experiencing long-term homelessness off our streets over the next five years. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Council as we do everything we can to bring more people home.”

Advocates and organizers heaped praise on the Council report at the news conference on Thursday. “It's not going to be one thing, and if it was, we would have solved it. It's many things done to scale that will help turn this crisis around,” said Catherine Trapani, executive director of Homeless Services United. “And that's what this report calls for.”

Johnson said at the press conference that the Council is also working on a housing plan, which will work in tandem with the homelessness plan to accomplish what the speaker stressed as an essential combination. It didn’t go unnoticed that Johnson’s announcement came the day after his likely 2021 Democratic mayoral primary opponent Comptroller Scott Stringer released a new affordable housing plan, which also assailed de Blasio for how he has approached that issue. Johnson stressed that, like Stringer’s, his was a government announcement, and that the Council had been working on the plan for well over a year, but also said that he expects housing and homelessness to be key pieces of the conversation in the mayoral race.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Note - this article has been updated with comment from Council Member Levin and from de Blasio's office.

What's The [DATA] Point? 6 months, with NYCHA CEO Gregory Russ


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What's The [Data] Point? Episode 88 -- 6 months, with NYCHA CEO Gregory Russ [You can download What's The [Data] Point? wherever you get your podcasts, including on iTunes]

rein russo mmSix months is the time the New York City Housing Authority has to develop a reorganization plan. New NYCHA Chair & CEO Greg Russ headlined a Citizens Budget Commission event to discuss working with the federal monitor to facilitate change, working with residents to instill confidence, and what needs to happen at NYCHA to make it a high-performing agency that can ably serve its 380,000 residents. He was in conversation with CBC President Andrew Rein, followed by audience Q-and-A.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think: Ben Max of GG (@TweetBenMax), Maria Doulis of CBC (@MariaDoulis). Listen below or download wherever you get your podcasts!

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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Commission Releases Long-Awaited Recommendations for Fairer City Property Tax System


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(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


A long-awaited report from the city’s Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform was released Thursday, outlining recommendations for potentially drastic changes to the way residential properties are taxed across the five boroughs.

The report, which contains ten recommendations to update and add equity to New York’s vast property tax system, comes after months of delay and almost a year after the commission, created by Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, completed its mandated public hearings.

Among the recommended reforms are changing the assessment methods of co-ops and condos, which include some of the city’s most expensive real estate, to reflect their true market values. Another is removing caps on tax increases for small homes, a provision experts say has over time placed a disproportionate tax burden on homeowners in less affluent pockets of the city.

“It’s clear that there are certain properties in New York, in certain neighborhoods that have had a lot of appreciation, where people have lived there for a long time, where their taxes will go up,” said Marc Shaw, the commission chair, during a conference call just after the report’s release. “But by having a fairer system there will also be people that will have their taxes go down and the end result will be a fairer system that everyone will understand.”

Together the recommendations take aim at a limited but significant slice of the property tax, intended to make the system more transparent and rational for residential properties and setting the stage for a new cohort of “winners and losers” -- the common parlance for politicos discussing the sensitive subject of reforming a system that impacts every constituent. With the preliminary report out, commissioners plan to hold a new round of public hearings in each borough with the goal of producing a final report this calendar year. Most of the proposed changes would need approval in the state capital, with few measures the city can take alone.

The report doesn’t tackle commercial and utility properties, which in fiscal year 2019 made up 28 percent of the market value of taxable properties in New York City.

“The Commission’s recommendations are the most significant reforms proposed in forty years and will bring a much needed level of fairness, transparency and simplicity to the entire system,” said Mayor de Blasio, in a statement of notable support. “I thank the Commission for its hard work tackling these issues head on and look forward to their final report.”

Despite promising action on the antiquated and unfair property tax system during his first months in office in 2014, given the significant delays in forming the commission and from the commission itself, it is now unlikely de Blasio will advance a reform agenda for state consideration before 2021, his final year in office. The timeline sets the stage for additional years of public debate at both the city- and state-levels before most changes are likely to be made, if they advance at all.

Announced in 2018 by de Blasio and Johnson, both Democrats, the commission was intended to study the entire system, which covers residential, commercial, and utility properties, and develop proposals that would bring fairness without hurting the city’s $95.3 billion in annual revenue, about a third of which comes from property taxes. The formation of the commission came amid a class action lawsuit by a group called Tax Equity Now New York alleging the tax system results in disproportionate tax burdens for residents that violate constitutional protections and the Fair Housing Act. The suit is ongoing and could impact the final set of recommendations from the commission, as well as the city’s and state’s approach to advancing them.

One of the most significant proposals is adjustments to the property tax classifications, which would change the methodology for assessing the value of co-ops and condos, which include high-value units that are often taxed on a fraction of what they would be if they were classified as small homes.

Under the current classifications, set by state law, small homes are assessed on their sales value, while co-ops and condos are categorized with large rental buildings and are assessed on the gross annual income they would receive if rented. The commission proposes bringing co-ops and condos, along with small rentals (fewer than 10 units) into the same class as small one- to three-family homes, to be assessed on sales price and taxed on 100 percent of the market value.

Another major proposal is changes to assessment caps, which limit the amount property taxes for homeowners can grow over a one- or five-year period. Because of the cap, property taxes on homes in rapidly appreciating neighborhoods can rise slower than their market values. As a result, homeowners in more economically-stagnant areas of the city end up paying a greater percentage of their property’s value in real estate taxes. A 2018 analysis by Citizens Budget Commission showed that homes in the Bronx and Staten Island had larger tax burdens than comparable properties in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.

To help low- and moderate-income homeowners, the commission has proposed a “circuit breaker,” which would reduce property tax burden with a credit calculated based on the owner’s income. It also recommends creating a homestead exemption on properties which are the primary residence of the owner when the owner meets a certain income threshold.

“Those units occupied by non-primary residents would pay a higher effective property tax rate than primary occupants,” said James Parrott, a member of the property tax commission and an economist at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, in an interview with Gotham Gazette. According to Parrott, ongoing efforts in the state Legislature to enact a pied-à-terre tax on expensive second homes, while driven by a zeitgeist for a more egalitarian city, could, if continued, hurt this broader effort to reform the tax code.

“To the extent that the property tax commission is going to change the way properties are taxed in New York, it’s likely that there will be implications for non-resident-owned properties. The ability of the reform effort to balance the changes will be limited if the Legislature approves a pied-à-terre tax separate from property tax reform,” Parrott told Gotham Gazette in December. (Meanwhile, State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, and sponsor of the pied-à-terre tax bill, plans to hold a protest Friday with activists in front of Jeff Bezos’ Fifth Avenue apartment, calling on him to pay over $2.5 million in pied-à-terre taxes.)

Many of the thresholds, ratios, and rates to pursue have not been settled upon in the advisory commission’s preliminary report, partially because more scenarios need to be run using Department of Finance data and evaluation tools, and partially because the commission is seeking more public input to determine the extent to which these recommendations should be applied in order to fulfill the commitment of being revenue-neutral.

“There is going to be winners and losers, so there is no simple answer...and as we start to hold hearings on it, people will get a better sense of how it’s going to affect them individually,” Shaw said. The winners may be those who own a small home in the northern Bronx who have seen their effective tax rate rise every year with the slow growth in market value. Big losers could be the owners of multi-million dollar co-ops in Midtown Manhattan or one- to three-family homeowners in some neighborhoods, Park Slope for example, who saw the values of their homes skyrocket above the statutory assessment cap.

“The city has to be somewhat careful about how it portrays some of this information so that it doesn’t hurt its own case,” he added, referring to the Tax Equity Now lawsuit.

The report recommends transitioning to a new tax system gradually for current owners, a position supported by many tax experts, while newly sold properties would enter the new system at the outset.

“The details of any proposal will be of great significance, and it is important to consider both the short-term and long-term implications of any set of proposals on both taxpayers and the City fiscal condition,” wrote Ana Champeny, director of city studies at Citizens Budget Commission, in an email.

"The Property Tax Commission has worked very hard to make this City's property tax system more fair and easier to comprehend for all,” Speaker Johnson said in a statement. “I look forward to reviewing the Commission's initial recommendations and I thank them for their efforts. There are outstanding issues to address like how the property tax system impacts renters in our City and how to best address luxury housing. This is a work in progress and I'm eager to hear the public's feedback on these recommendations."

With the public hearings yet to be scheduled and, ultimately, the need for a set agenda first from de Blasio and the City Council that is then approved by state legislators and the governor, it is unclear how the new reforms will shake out and who the winners and losers will be.

“I look forward to reading the commission’s report, and I hope they have recommended the kind of change that the home and business owners in the city need,” wrote State Senator Brian Benjamin, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of the Senate’s Committee on Revenue and Budget, in a text message before the preliminary report was released. Benjamin has held public forums and an expert roundtable on the subject in 2019, in preparation for possibly pursuing state level reform this year. But, like many others, he has previously expressed frustration by how long the city commission was taking to formulate its report and has questioned whether any change would be possible in the 2020 state session, which runs until June.

Shaw was able to confirm, in broad strokes, the fate of some well-known property in booming Park Slope. When asked by a reporter on the call whether de Blasio’s famously low property taxes would go up or down under the proposed reforms, he said, “Under this reform effort, the property taxes on the mayor’s house will go up significantly.”

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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