New York City (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Well before the beginning of the pandemic that has turned life upside down, New Yorkers already faced a devastating affordable housing and homelessness crisis. Even without the dramatic wave of unemployment brought about by a global pandemic, low-income tenants and homeless people across the city faced a grave lack of truly affordable housing and the absence of an effective citywide plan to fix it. Now, of course, the crisis has deepened, with tenants who have long lived paycheck to paycheck unable to scrape together even a modest living to pay their rent, and the danger of living on the street or in a congregate shelter multiplied by a deadly virus.
As we look for new leadership for New York City through this year’s elections, we must learn the lessons of why the city has fallen so short, and look forward with clarity and boldness to a new vision for meeting all New Yorkers’ housing needs and ending homelessness. That vision must begin with an Integrated Housing Plan to end homelessness and promote racial equity -- one that brings together all the agencies involved in housing, building, and planning to work in sync to meet ambitious goals based on our communities’ true needs. Such a plan can work if it addresses the shortcomings of the dominant approach from the past seven years.
Since taking the reins in 2014, the de Blasio administration has focused attention on what became the ambitious goal of creating and preserving 300,000 units of affordable housing over 12 years. And while the administration has created and preserved a substantial number of units (166,000) according to its definition of affordability, the reality is that most of that has not focused on the New Yorkers suffering the greatest housing hardship: very low-income and homeless New Yorkers.
As a recent report by the Community Service Society lays out, the administration failed to focus on the populations with the greatest housing need, paying the most attention to meeting ambitious goals for number of units instead of grappling with the true needs of communities. Moreover, the administration’s siloed approach to affordable housing -- which it largely separated from discussions and decisions about NYCHA and homelessness -- led to a failure to grapple with the full picture that breeds housing insecurity and homelessness across the city.
As we lay out in a joint report with our allies, the next Mayor must learn from these mistakes. The report, “Right to a Roof: Demands for an Integrated Housing Plan to End Homelessness and Promote Racial Equity,” offers critical recommendations for how to right the ship. First, the next administration must create the Integrated Housing Plan (IHP) to break through the siloes, and ensure that there is a Deputy Mayor of Homelessness, Housing, and Planning paying attention not just to one part of the housing context, but examining housing, building, and planning matters together.
The IHP can succeed if it prioritizes need over numbers -- in particular, by focusing on providing permanent, deeply affordable housing for those who need it most, and by preserving public housing without relinquishing public control. The plan must also improve access to affordable and supportive housing by bringing agencies together to streamline the process for finding and securing affordable and supportive housing options, as well as promoting fair housing.
Meanwhile, we cannot continue to let the real estate sector destabilize the market through speculation. The next mayor must seek to end such speculation by creating and preserving 100% permanent, affordable housing that is community built and community owned, and working to keep existing residents in their homes.
And it must preserve people’s existing housing. To ensure all New Yorkers have safe and healthy housing, the IHP must focus on stopping displacement due to poor housing conditions or harassment, secure our communities by ensuring the long-term viability of the city’s affordable housing stock, and guarantee that every New Yorker has a safe, healthy, and stable home.
Finally, planning that truly listens to community input will be crucial. The IHP must support planning that centers local knowledge within a true citywide framework. Unlike recent rezonings in communities like Bushwick, where the city has ignored community members’ deep concerns and residents’ community-based planning process, planning must meaningfully incorporate residents’ voices and create an equitable approach that centers fair housing and neighborhood priorities. It must also ensure that wealthier communities do their part to address citywide priorities, including creating housing for very low-income and homeless people.
Confronting the enormous scale of the interlocking affordable housing and homelessness crises in New York City will not be easy. But unless we set bold goals that address the full scope of the need, we won’t stand a chance.
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Jose Lopez is the Deputy Director and incoming Co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York. Barika X. Williams is the Executive Director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANDH). On Twitter @JLopez_MRNY & @barikaXw
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New Yorkers at work (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
A major new federal infrastructure investment seems increasingly likely this year. During the campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure plan to boost the economy and tackle climate change. President Biden now has signaled that he intends to move his Build Back Better plan forward later this month, and it could have bipartisan support.
New York City should start preparing to seize this opportunity.
Few other cities would benefit more from a public works-style program to get the economy going and confront the climate crisis. By the end of December, New York City still had 568,000 fewer jobs than in February. The city's unemployment rate (11%) is far higher than even the worst-off state. A federal infrastructure program would help, creating loads of jobs that would be accessible to many of the New Yorkers who have lost work during the pandemic.
At the same time, the city faces an urgent need to protect coastal communities from storms and sea level rise, modernize vulnerable infrastructure, and transition away from fossil fuels.
But to take advantage, city policymakers will need to start identifying—and planning for—sustainability and resiliency projects that can be ready to go this year.
There's no shortage of infrastructure projects that would add jobs and help the city become more resilient to climate change. For example, the infusion of federal dollars could jumpstart city initiatives to protect Lower Manhattan, the Rockaways, Soundview, the South Shore of Staten Island, and other low-lying neighborhoods that are threatened by rising sea levels and increasingly powerful storms.
As one example, the markets at Hunts Point feed millions of people across the tri-state area, yet the low-lying peninsula is in great danger of flooding. A public works project to bolster flood protections around the food distribution hub would not only protect the region's food supply, but also create thousands of good-paying jobs in the Bronx, which has the highest unemployment of any county in the state at 15%.
Across the five boroughs there is also pressing need to build out green infrastructure to capture and divert sewage and stormwater that currently flows into the city's waterways nearly every time it rains. And constructing thousands of curbside rain gardens, upgrading wastewater treatment facilities, and building new sewage capture tunnels to do so has the potential to employ thousands of out-of-work New Yorkers.
Alongside resilience measures, New York City can use federal public works investment to meet its ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. Support from Washington could help the city deploy solar panels across thousands of city-owned buildings and upgrade energy transmission lines to give the city access to wind, solar, and hydropower upstate.
It could also help ramp up much-needed energy retrofits, especially replacing thousands of aging gas boilers and moving to electrified heating systems. And all these public projects can enlist and train New Yorkers in new, sustainable careers they can take to the private sector as the economy recovers and transitions to a carbon-free future.
But these flood protection, solar panel deployment, energy retrofit, and stormwater diversion plans cannot be mere sketches. For the city to make the most of Biden's "Build Back Better" infrastructure agenda, policymakers must act now to lay out federal funding plans for projects that can break ground this year and get New Yorkers working again. With citywide unemployment still lingering above 10%, and sea levels and temperatures continuing to rise, we cannot afford to wait.
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Jonathan Bowles is executive director and Laird Gallagher is associate editor of the Center for an Urban Future, an independent think tank focused on expanding economic opportunity in New York. On Twitter @NYCFuture.
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
Construction workers at work (photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)
As our city stays focused on managing what we hope to be the final chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also need to keep thinking proactively about driving a strong and just economic recovery.
It’s no secret that in my Brooklyn district and across the five boroughs, there’s a long road ahead. Our official citywide unemployment rate is now hovering around 12%, with the highest jobless rates still in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
A recent report showed that year-to-date filings for new construction – one of our city’s most vital industries – are currently at their lowest point since the Great Recession a decade ago. Kick-starting our construction pipeline will play an important role in creating more good-paying jobs to help drive the city’s recovery. One way to start is by looking seriously at opportunities to develop on city-owned land in ways that serve long-standing neighborhood needs – particularly the increasingly urgent need for more truly affordable housing.
There are a host of ideas out there about how best to deal with our affordable housing crisis, from community land trusts and comprehensive planning to reforming the land use approval process (ULURP) and rejuvenating our public housing. All of those ideas and more should be on the table but all will take lots of time and money to get right and get going, two things that our city doesn’t have enough of right now.
So how can we get started on driving our recovery and dealing with our affordable housing crisis sooner, without waiting for Albany or Washington or revising the city charter? Part of the answer is all around us in the form of city-owned land.
I am certainly not the first politician to propose building affordable housing on city-owned land. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve had conversations with myriad stakeholders about how to activate city-owned sites. Proposals to build on city-owned land seem like a silver bullet – the land is ours, we should be able to do what we want with it! – but they haven’t been scaled up for the reason they’re appealing: public ownership raises the stakes and makes the dynamics that come with any development much more acute: “Who is this for?” “How tall will it be?” “Where will people park?” “Who is making money off this and how much?”
When it comes to developing city-owned land, we have a trust deficit as big as our budget deficit and if we don’t implement a framework based on trust and respect with impacted communities from the start, we’re doomed to repeat the development stumbles of the past.
In order to deal with that trust deficit, I suggest we create and convene, in collaboration with local community boards, Constituent Assemblies to review all the city-owned sites in each district to come up with a vision for how to best use them to jumpstart our recovery and put a dent in our housing affordability crisis. Each Constituent Assembly would be made up of stakeholders representing everyone with a stake in the area – from renters, homeowners, and business owners to immigrants, seniors, and organized labor – and will receive pro-bono technical support from affordable housing experts to make sure the Constituent Assembly’s vision is grounded in reality. Local elected officials could then work with city government entities - the housing department, Economic Development Corporation, and more - to issue requests for proposals that conform to the Community Assembly’s vision. As proposals come in, the Assembly for the area of each proposal will serve as another guiding light along with the relevant community board in helping the City Council member determine whether to lend his or her support to the proposal in the land use review process (ULURP).
You may be saying, “Justin, we already have community boards to issue advisory opinions on ULURPs, why do we need Constituent Assemblies?” And I’m glad you asked! While doing this in collaboration with community boards is crucial, community boards have a lot to do and cover a lot of ground, whereas Constituent Assemblies would be laser-focused on this one issue of what to do with city-owned sites in their assigned area in order to balance neighborhood concerns with city-wide priorities. I believe that focus is key to accomplishing anything and by focusing their time, Constituent Assembly-like bodies in Europe have tackled far thornier issues than building affordable housing.
There’s no getting around having debates about development in this city – they’re as old as the city itself. But I firmly believe that by starting these debates sooner and outside the twin pressure cookers of ULURP and social media, representative groups of constituents can grapple with the trade-offs inherent in any development in a much more just and productive manner that would ultimately lead to better results.
We should get started now by identifying sites that make the most immediate sense. There's no time to waste.
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Justin Brannan is a member of the City Council representing parts of Brooklyn. On Twitter @JustinBrannan.
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