The Push for Housing Justice Begins at SOMOS
David R. Jones, La Nueva Mayoria / The New Majority
Last week I attended the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico, an annual gathering of New York politicians, lobbying firms, and advocates that serve as a forum to discuss legislative and budgetary initiatives of concern to Puerto Ricans and the Hispanic community in New York. At SOMOS I had the opportunity to meet with leaders from the New York State Legislature to advocate for policy solutions that address the growing housing crisis affecting low-income New Yorkers.
Last year, the state legislature ended its session without reaching an agreement with the Governor on a housing package that would include strong tenant protections like `Good Cause’ and homeless relief and prevention initiatives like the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), among other things. Kicking the can down the road cannot be an option next year at a time when 50 percent of working age New Yorkers, including 65 percent of Latinx, say they cannot cover their basic needs, including housing.
For too long the real state industry has had a relatively free hand in creating conditions in the housing market that lead to unaffordability, displacement, discrimination, evictions, homelessness, and substandard living conditions.
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.
While bills like Good Cause, which would protect 1.6 million households from arbitrary displacement or unconscionable rent hikes, and Right to Counsel, which would offer legal representation to tenants facing eviction across the state, are essential to solve the housing crisis, they should be considered as the floor and not the ceiling of a new model that views housing as a human right. The reality is that fixing the flaws of a profit-driven market and creating permanently affordable housing will require out-of-the-box ideas like social housing that challenges the power of the real state industry and shifts the power imbalance in favor of tenants.
At its core, social housing treats homes as a public good rather than commodities. The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) is an example of this. TOPA 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.
The real estate industry lobby will undoubtedly push back on the passage of tenant protections and social housing bills without bringing back tax break programs like 421-a, which cost New York City $22.2 billion in uncollected tax revenue in the last thirty years and did little to build truly affordable housing. This is money that could have been used in closing NYCHA’s budget gap, providing enough vouchers to cover every homeless household, or subsidizing the construction of 160,000 units of deeply affordable housing.
Reviving a program like 421-a that has returned so little for most New Yorkers would be a step backwards in the fight for housing justice. But if this is the only option for the Legislature and the Governor to reach an agreement next year on a housing package, it should then be done only after lowering the program’s income targets for affordable housing, so they actually produce housing that’s truly affordable to most working people. And any such agreement on reviving 421-a should be coupled with implementing the housing policies discussed above – Good Cause, TOPA, HAVP, and Right to Counsel.
The bottom line is that any compromise to reach an agreement should not be made at the expense of policies that deliver truly transformational changes to a deeply unaffordable and unjust housing system. Otherwise, we would just be prolonging the suffering of millions of New Yorkers who today must choose between paying their rent and other essentials like food, healthcare or transportation expenses.