Bills under consideration in New York City could act as pathways to social housing – by preserving public land for the public good, by offering communities the opportunity to purchase multi-family housing, by creating a public entity to hold property and facilitate social housing conversions, by strengthening tenants’ rights, and by expanding funding sources for low-income housing.
Today, a record number of people are experiencing homelessness. While CityFHEPS can be a powerful tool against homelessness, the program is plagued with issues that must be addressed.
The Fair Chance for Housing Act is a bill to both lessen homelessness and boost racial equality, but it is also a public safety bill.
The 2021 Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) showed a disturbing trend: the city’s housing stock is becoming both more expensive and more rundown. We spoke about 5 recommendations before the NYC Council Committee on Housing and Buildings.
Kingston’s rental housing emergency is particularly severe. The state defines a housing emergency as a vacancy rate below 5 percent, and Kingston’s vacancy rate as of June 2022 was a staggeringly low 1.57 percent. This vacancy rate appears to be worsening since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: in 2020, the vacancy rate was an already shockingly low 1.81 percent.
New York City’s plan to house people seeking asylum in an area that is flood-prone, lacking in basic resources, and disconnected from the rest of the city is unconscionable. While this is a crisis manufactured by a broken immigration system that the city has no control over, we do have control over local housing policy, which can help mitigate some of its externalities.
In a positive development over the summer, the city decided to extend discounted ferry tickets to Fair Fare enrollees. However, it still leaves out many people, including students. Intro 236 seeks to make it easier for students enrolled in a city high school to use the ferry system by offering them the discounted fare.
CSS conducted an analysis in 2017 and again in March 2022 to study the impact of congestion pricing on outer-borough residents. Only 4 percent of outer-borough residents (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) would regularly pay the congestion charge.
We know that well-funded rental assistance programs can act as a key mechanism for helping homeless New Yorkers leave the shelter system and find permanent homes. CityFHEPS is the city’s rental assistance program. And, while the city has made strides to improve the functionality of this program, there are a number of administrative, enforcement, and funding issues that continue to hinder it from being as effective as it could be.
The choice is simple: We can spend our public money on maintaining homelessness through thousands more street sweeps, or we can spend our public money on housing and social supports.
As New York City continues its recovery process, CSS housing analyst Oksana Mironova provides seven recommendations to the NYC Council Committee on Housing and Buildings.
Immigrants make up around 43 percent of the city’s four-million strong workforce. While they are employed in a wide range of industries, they comprise a majority of the frontline essential workers who continued to operate in-person throughout the pandemic.
Transit affordability is one of the lower hanging fruits on the path to an inclusive recovery. Fair Fares is an incredibly small fraction of the city’s budget, but will improve hundreds of thousands of lives, if not over a million lives should the program be expanded to reflect true poverty in NYC.
The pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing racial and class inequalities in our city. Today, nearly 220,000 renter households have been sued for eviction in housing court.
As New York City continues its recovery process, we provide the following recommendations to stabilize the lives of low-income New Yorkers.
Good Cause eviction protections strengthen not only individual tenants, but entire communities. They provide tenants with a baseline ability to plan their lives, have some housing stability, and live secure in the knowledge that they will not be arbitrarily driven from their homes.