Testimony: Homes Now, Homes for Generations

Thank you for the opportunity to testify at today’s hearing of the City Council Committee on Housing and Buildings and the City Council Committee on our city housing budget needs. Our names are Samuel Stein, Oksana Mironova, and Iziah Thompson, and we are housing policy analysts at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS). CSS has worked with and for New Yorkers since 1843 to promote economic opportunity and champion an equitable city and state. We center the voices and experiences of communities of color and those with low incomes, powering change through a strategic combination of research, services, and advocacy.

The city has myriad housing needs, from code enforcement to preservation to new construction. As the most recent Housing and Vacancy Survey shows, this is an extremely challenging housing market for tenants, and our homeless population continues to rise.

First and foremost, our city’s housing agency needs the human and economic resources to complete its crucial missions. As a recent report by the New York City Comptroller has demonstrated, ongoing understaffing and technological underinvestment at the agency is leading to structural problems. While a recent push to hire has improved matters to a degree, the agency needs to be fully staffed and resourced. Our public sector housing workers are doing heroic efforts with the resources they have, but it is no surprise that with staffing shortages they have not been able to hit all production goals and maintain projected timelines.

The lack of capital dollars and staffing shortage has resulted in a slight decline in new affordable construction and a complete depletion of affordable preservation during the current administration.

While we certainly commend the efforts of advocates and the administration for its focus on increasing the amount of people experiencing homelessness who are moved into a new unit, as seen in the 2023 Mayor's Management Report, we also need more investment in affordable construction to prevent homelessness and unaffordability from growing. After major wins from 2016 to 2020—​​like the 500-unit La Central development in the South Bronx, a massive addition of affordable units along the Bronx River and Grand Concourse, and the Brooklyn Development Center redevelopment of 27-acre underutilized 27-acre site that produced more than 1,300 affordable units in Spring Creek, Brooklyn—​the pipeline of large-scale projects appears to be withering. 

In his campaign, Mayor Adams called for increasing the housing capital budget to $4 billion per year. Instead, the budget is set to be reduced once again. We call on the City Council and the Mayor to fully fund HPD’s crucial work. There is no way out of our current crises without it.

Specifically, we urge the Council to press for increased funding and activity in two existing HPD programs: Neighborhood Pillars, which has been paused since 2019, and Open Doors, which is ongoing but under-resourced. If these two programs were properly funded at $2 billion over the next four years ($500 million per year), they could produce 10,000 units of permanently affordable social housing through both preservation and construction.

Neighborhood Pillars is an HPD program to help mission-driven developers like Community Development Corporations and Community Land Trusts acquire, rehabilitate and convert distressed multifamily rental buildings. It was launched in 2018, but its budget was reduced to nothing in 2020. The program, however, showed great promise after preserving roughly 400 apartments. We call on the Council and the Mayor to fund HPD to jumpstart this program and create a viable tool to convert distressed for-profit rentals into permanently affordable, community-controlled housing, as called for in the Speaker’s Fair Housing Framework.

Another opportunity to increase our city’s stock of social housing would be to expand the city’s Open Door program. Open Door finances new construction of shared-equity cooperatives. This was once a priority for the City and the State, but has since fallen in priority, despite programs like Mitchell Lama’s tremendous popularity and calls from communities for more affordable homeownership opportunities. The program is currently only funded at $100 million over four years. Also, with AMI inflation an ongoing problem, it is not currently meeting the needs of many New Yorkers who would love to be eligible for such an opportunity. We call on the Council and the Mayor to increase funding for Open Doors to $400 million over four years, and to revise the term sheet to allow for greater access – another recommendation from the Speaker’s Fair Housing Framework.

Restarting Neighborhood Pillars and expanding Opening Doors will fund these initiatives at the levels currently set for the agencies best funded programs. In other words, this funding request would put permanently affordable social housing production among the top priorities for the agency going forward.

We urge the council to make HPD funding the priority it deserves to be, and specifically to fund programs like Neighborhood Pillars and Open Door at priority levels.

If you have any questions or want to discuss further, please reach out to us at omironova@cssny.org, sstein@cssny.org, and ithompson@cssny.org.

Issues Covered