Testimony: Housing Recommendations for NYC’s Budget
Samuel SteinIziah ThompsonOksana Mironova
Thank you to the New York City Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings for holding a hearing on the Executive Budget. Our names are Oksana Mironova, Iziah Thompson, and Samuel Stein, and we are senior policy analysts at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), a leading nonprofit organization that promotes economic opportunity for New Yorkers. We use research, advocacy, and direct services to champion a more equitable city and state, including to urgently address the effects of the city’s housing affordability crisis.
CSS is over 175 years old and has been at the forefront of advocacy for better housing conditions since the beginning, from the city’s first tenement laws in the 1800s to contemporary organizing for strong tenants’ rights.
We provide the following budget recommendations:
Homes Now Homes for Generations
New York City has a rich social housing legacy, but now longer actively invests in new social housing stock. With a capital investment of $2.5 billion in Neighborhood Pillars and Open Door over the next five years, the city will be able to fund the construction and preservation of permanently affordable, community-controlled affordable homes. This investment will provide stability and equity-building opportunities for low-income and working-class New Yorkers.
Neighborhood Pillars, a program with roots in the foreclosure crisis, helps mission-driven developers buy distressed multifamily buildings. It launched in December 2018, but its budget was slashed to zero in 2020. In that brief time, the program preserved 400 apartments. Our goal is to see the program scaled to its original vision. Today, there are physically and financially distressed rent stabilized buildings on the market that were mismanaged and overleveraged by their landlords. This is an opportunity for the city to intervene and both rescue these buildings and turn them into permanently affordable housing. New York City missed the chance to do this in the wake of the 2008 crisis, and the market became even less hospitable to low-income tenants. Further, Neighborhood Pillars could compliment right of first refusal laws, including Councilmember Rivera’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (Int 0196).
Open Door finances new construction of shared-equity cooperatives. Despite the popularity and success of older shared-equity cooperatives like Mitchell-Lamas and HDFCs, Open Door is extremely underfunded, receiving $100M over four years. The city stopped focusing on shared equity homeownership over the last few decades. Our goal is to see Open Door’s budget increased to create more affordable homeownership and to revise its term sheets for broader affordability. This is especially important now, because homes sales prices in New York City are far beyond most aspiring homeowners’ budgets, even with other supports like downpayment assistance.
Overall, New York City’s investment in social housing is at a historic low point. Homes Now, Homes for Generations will bring Neighborhood Pillars and Open Doors spending in line with other affordable housing programs.
Funding for Community Land Trusts
We support the call for $3 million in City Council discretionary funding to develop CLTs and permanently affordable housing, commercial and community space. Launched in FY2020, the citywide CLT Initiative has catalyzed CLT organizing in the South and Northwest Bronx, East Harlem, Richmond Hill, Brownsville, East New York and beyond. CLTs are community-controlled nonprofits that own land and ensure that it is used to provide permanently affordable housing and other community needs. CLTs are flexible and can support permanently affordable rental housing, limited-equity cooperatives, and 1-4 family homes at risk of foreclosure, as well as commercial and cultural spaces, community gardens, community-owned solar, microgrids and other infrastructure.
Save Public Housing
CSS, New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents, and advocates from across the state pushed Albany to fund a path to address a portion of NYCHA's capital needs, which would have preserved at least 15,000 NYCHA units. We called for $710 million for NYCHA and $190 million for other public housing agencies. The state budget this year includes $140 million and $75 million, respectively.
Further, while the Mayor and the Comptroller have taken steps to allow NYCHA to spend city funds more effectively by revising Directive 10 and making other changes recommended by the New York City Capital Process Reform Task Force, inconsistent funding levels and empty budget out years make it incredibly difficult for NYCHA to begin capital work. As with all affordable housing pipelines, projects take time to design, procure, and contract; budget uncertainty keeps many of these projects on hold.
Ultimately, the city must at least compliment the state-level investment with a consistent capital plan that helps address the thousands of buildings that will not be modernized by the PACT program. Residents that do not wish to convert must have a path towards modernization and should not be punished. This year’s budget must include NYCHA capital totaling $1.5 billion, including the amount already in the executive budget, which will all go towards the PACT program.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. If you have any questions about my testimony or CSS’s research, please contact us at sstein@cssny.org, ithompson@cssny.org, or omironova@cssny.org.