Bills Targeting Housing Crisis Need Our Support
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a big victory for New York City tenants, when the justices this month refused to hear a challenge to the state’s rent-stabilization law. That move threw cold water, for the time being, on landlords’ hope of a freehand in setting apartment rents.
New York City tenants in one million rent-stabilized apartments dodged a bullet, for now. The state’s decades-old law regulating rents remains in place as two other petitions asking the Supreme Court to review the law are pending, which still may decide to hear one or more cases. Landlords argue that rent regulation is an unconstitutional taking of private property.
The pledge of property owners to continue challenging the law in court and the failure of state and city financial incentives to produce enough subsidized units at prices that working people can afford underscore the entrenched nature of the city’s housing crisis.
Something must change. Standard approaches to affordable housing have shown they will yield only standard —and inadequate —results. We need a rethinking, from soup to nuts, of how we approach housing for the poor and working poor.
A bill sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) entitled, “Public Housing for the 21st Century Act,” which is scheduled to be introduced this week, along with the Community Land Act, a package of bills pending in the New York City Council, are examples of just this type of innovative re-thinking. With rents and homelessness on the rise across the U.S., it is important that we pursue new ways to tackle the lack of affordable housing. At the same time, the federal government must once again take an active role in affordable housing production.
Both Congresswoman Tlaib’s bill and the Community Land Act deserve our support because they take a progressive approach to housing as a human right, not simply as a tool for profit, by championing permanent affordability.
The proposals support “social housing,” which is a type of apartment development common in major European, Asian, and South American cities. In the U.S., they are akin to public housing, the Mitchell-Lama program, or community land trusts. The goal is to create permanently affordable apartments, located in resident-controlled buildings. Residents usually pay an affordable share of their income towards rent or maintenance fees. In some cases, wealthier tenants’ rents cross-subsidize the rents of lower-income tenants.
At its core, social housing treats homes as a public good rather than commodities. To make this reality in New York City will take time and require radical change, everything from overhauling the property tax code and abolishing the city’s tax lien sale to cracking down on landlord violations and boosting public funding for tenant organizing, according to a study by my organization, Community Service Society of New York.
Specifically, Rep. Tlaib’s bill would require the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to research, publish and provide training and technical assistance that promotes publicly owned, mixed-income public housing. Her bill would turn HUD into a resource for nonprofit groups and tenant associations to get into social housing development.
The City Council proposals would give nonprofit community organizations a leg up in the competition for scarce city-owned land and give qualified nonprofits and community land trusts the first right to bid on certain types of buildings when their owners put them up for sale. There is also state legislation (“Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act”; S221/A3353) that would give tenants the right of first offer and right of first refusal when their building goes up for sale, creating potentially more than 20,000 social housing units across the state over the next five years.
Taken together, the aforementioned proposals represent a fundamental departure from the traditional approach to developing affordable housing: They would unlock land at the right locations (the most important lever), prevent the loss of public resources by championing permanent affordability, and increase operational and maintenance efficiency by training and promoting nonprofit developers whose goal is less than maximum profit.
That would be a great, dramatic turn of events because the for-profit real estate industry is extremely inefficient in serving low-income New Yorkers. For-profit developers built nearly 80 percent of new apartments under various city housing programs from 2014 to 2018, according to a 2021 CSS study. However, just 18 percent of those apartments were affordable to extremely low-income households. On the other hand, apartments created by nonprofit developers result in nearly double the share of affordable units for extremely low-income tenants, the CSS study found.
Here’s the bottom line: The current system for creating affordable housing in our city, despite funneling billions of dollars of public investment into the for-profit real-estate sector, has not done a particularly good job of preserving and creating such housing. At a time when 50 percent of working age New Yorkers say they cannot cover their basic needs, including housing, we cannot accept the status quo.
Helping community groups develop social housing would help curb the vicious cycle of apartments treated by New York real estate barons and commercial developers as commodities for ever-increasing profits.