Comptroller Stringer Delivers Major Housing Address

(Washington Heights, NY) — New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer today delivered a major housing address, unveiling a bold vision to build the truly affordable housing New Yorkers need and tackle our affordability crisis.

Video of the Comptroller’s remarks will be available on YouTube.

The address as prepared for delivery:

Good morning, everyone!

Thank you, Cheryl, for that warm introduction and for your tireless advocacy on behalf of this community.

Thank you to the Y of Washington Heights & Inwood for hosting us. And thank you all for joining me here today.

It’s great to be back here in the Heights just a few blocks from where I grew up.

I went to elementary school right down the block at P.S. 152.

Across the street is the bodega where my mom would send me to get milk.

There used to be a dry cleaners on this block, and one of my first jobs was making deliveries
for the owner … I wasn’t very good.

I went to day camp and after school right here at this Y and played basketball upstairs.  I wasn’t very good at that, either.

My mom taught English as a Second Language to new Americans right in this very auditorium. So I am so glad to be back home.

I wanted to come here today because this is where it all began for me. Growing up here defined for me what a community and a neighborhood is all about, and who we should be fighting for.

We’re joined by housing advocates, tenant organizers, and community-based organizations from all over our city. You’re on the ground every day fighting for the dignity and rights of our neighbors.

We all stand on your shoulders.  Let’s give them a round of applause!

I’m here today to ask one question.

It’s a question that we’ve all asked ourselves as we look around our rapidly-changing neighborhoods, as we write out a rent check that’s higher than it’s ever been, as young people have to start their new families and new businesses in other cities because they can’t afford to come here, and as we watch our long-time friends and neighbors leave a city that’s grown too expensive to call home.

The question today is: Who is New York City for?

We’re told it’s for everyone – but our policies aren’t living up to our ideals.  We’re leaving people behind.

We all see it and feel it. We all live it.

In the name of development, in the name of growth, we’re leaving far, far too many of our people behind.

People of color. Artists. Families with children. Young people. Seniors. Immigrants. Entrepreneurs.

The people who forged this city and made it into the greatest city in the world can no longer afford to live in their own communities – the communities they helped build.

Young people who want to come here and contribute to our vibrant global economy are forced to put down roots elsewhere because they can’t afford the price of entry here.

We have an untenable system that’s spawning a full-blown affordability crisis. And all of us are paying the price.

The status quo is no less than taxpayer-funded gentrification.

Our affordable housing programs were meant to be an answer to New Yorkers being priced out of their homes. They were supposed to yield hundreds of thousands of affordable units. They were supposed to anchor communities against the growing costs of living in this city.

Instead, they’ve reinforced unaffordability.  Instead of solving the problem, we’ve made it worse.

And how do we know?

The median asking rent for an apartment in New York City is $2700 a month.

Here in Washington Heights – where I grew up – rents have gone up 37% since 2010.

60,000 New Yorkers are currently in homeless shelters.

181,000 people are on waiting lists for NYCHA housing as the buildings crumble in neglect and disrepair.

565,000 households pay more than half their income on rent, or they’re doubled up with friends and family trying to make ends meet.  That’s more than a million New Yorkers.

This is a broken system. But instead of fixing it, we keep doubling down – because we’re told that this is the best we can do.

I refuse to accept that.  I refuse to accept “this is how it’s always been” as a reason to keep digging ourselves deeper into an affordability crisis.

We can do better than a system that leaves more than a million New Yorkers on the brink.

We can do better than a system that provides enormous tax breaks to developers to build market-rate housing labeled as “affordable” with little oversight or accountability.

We can be smarter than that.

It’s time to break out of existing policy paradigms and think boldly and bravely outside the box if we’re going to solve our toughest challenges.

The centerpiece of Mayor de Blasio’s current plan for affordable housing – mandatory inclusionary housing, or MIH – is one of the most urgent examples of where “business as usual” is no longer enough.

Announced with great fanfare in 2014, MIH has facilitated rezonings in a few cherry-picked neighborhoods and allows developers to build buildings that are bigger and higher than the rules would normally allow in exchange for setting aside 20 to 30 percent of new units as affordable housing.

But everyone in this room knows, so much of the ‘affordable’ housing proposed for these rezonings is not affordable and completely out of reach for the people who live in these neighborhoods.

Two-thirds of the units promised by the City’s ‘Housing New York Plan’ are unaffordable to those most in need to very and extremely low-income New Yorkers living one paycheck away from homelessness.

Most of the housing built under this model is for households making up to about $77,000 a year.

I want to be clear – we do need moderate and middle-income housing. But an affordable housing strategy for our city that leaves 21,000 of our children in homeless shelters is not affordable, it’s not a strategy, and it’s definitely not for our city.

And instead of acting as a shield for working-class tenants, it’s fomenting rampant speculation, eviction and displacement.

I took a look at the East New York rezoning in Brooklyn, and what we found was especially alarming. We discovered that the City’s plan would create a maximum of 3,400 units of new ‘affordable’ housing. But that housing would be unaffordable to more than half the people who live there!

And what happened after the rezoning plan was announced? Land prices in East New York tripled, putting 50,000 tenants at risk of losing their homes.

This is not an affordable housing plan. It is a gentrification industrial complex!

And almost none of the neighborhoods the Administration identified for rezoning are white and wealthy. They said that it was already too late to try and make these neighborhoods more affordable, that it was futile to even try.

But almost every single neighborhood where the city did apply this approach – East New York, Downtown Far Rockaway, East Harlem, Jerome Avenue, and right here in Washington Heights – all are majority  communities of color,  communities where black and brown New Yorkers  live, work, and  raise their families.

Unsustainable, unthoughtful development leads to a segregated city with underserved and under-resourced communities.

We have an affordable housing shortage across the five boroughs, in neighborhoods all over our city.

We need a citywide strategy to tackle it.

But our current plan doesn’t do nearly enough to dismantle the status quo.

A status quo that is deeply embedded in our city and our nation’s discriminatory history and housing policies.

A status quo that many New Yorkers know and feel is a hard and uncomfortable truth.

That we are leaving communities of color on the frontlines alone.

The city’s plan falls far short of what we need to fix our housing crisis.

For decades, we’ve relied on piecemeal rezonings and inscrutable tax breaks to generate affordable housing – but we aren’t getting the housing we so desperately need. It’s not working.  And we cannot keep settling for more of the same.

Just because it’s always been done this way – the wrong way – doesn’t mean we can’t muster up the courage and the conviction to demand something different. To demand change.

To demand a real affordability strategy for our city – a plan that actually lifts up working people, and delivers a ticket to the middle class.

Today, I am proposing a fundamental shift in the City’s approach to our housing crisis.  A plan that refocuses our resources where the crisis is most acute.

Housing for the sales clerks and home health care aides, the taxi drivers and restaurant cooks.

Housing for the hard-working folks who take care of our parents and our children.

Housing for the people who pay more than half their income on rent.

Housing for the New Yorkers trying to own their first home.

Housing for the New Yorkers who are homeless.

Today, I am proposing a new strategy – a strategy for the housing we need.

First, New York City should institute Universal Affordable Housing – UAH.

Simply put: every new  as-of-right development  with ten or more units  – in every neighborhood, whether it’s on  the Upper East Side or  in East Tremont  should be legally required to set aside a baseline of 25% of its units for permanent low-income affordable housing.

And to make sure these units are actually affordable, they should all be set at an average of 60% of the Area Median Income, or a household income of $58,000 a year for a family of three.

We can no longer build as we have been and pretend we’ve met our responsibility to provide safe, secure, affordable housing for every family. We cannot afford to leave millions of families behind.

And with Universal Affordable Housing, we won’t.

The power in this approach lies in its simplicity.  If you’re going to build in New York City, you will provide affordability that is sustainable. You will be part of the solution.

Universal Affordable Housing isn’t just a housing plan; it’s a strategy to address the inherent inequality rooted in our current urban planning.

A framework of Universal Affordable Housing would set a new course for the much-needed integration of all our communities.  In requiring affordable housing across all new buildings in
all neighborhoods, we’re sending a strong and clear message that racial and economic diversity, in every corner of our city, across all zip codes, is paramount.

No longer would developers be able to use affordable housing as a bargaining chip with communities.

No longer would unequal rezonings perpetuate unequal resourcing.

No longer would communities of color be alone on the frontlines in our shared fight against the city’s housing crisis.

No longer should we single out neighborhoods, subjecting its residents to speculators and profiteers, in the name of a few barely affordable units.

Every community needs to have skin in the game.

Universal affordable housing would be a battering ram against disparity, helping ensure that access, opportunity, and well-resourced public amenities are universal, too.

Some people will say Universal Affordable Housing will grind new construction to a halt. But we know that’s simply not true.

Places like Portland and San Jose have implemented similar approaches to address their dire housing needs, and the sky hasn’t fallen.

Let me put it in the starkest terms. Over the last six years, the de Blasio administration has built close to 44,000 new units of affordable housing under the City’s current plan.

If Universal Affordable Housing had existed on Day One, we would have created as many as 69,000 new affordable units of low-income housing. That’s an additional 25,000 permanently affordable units – 57 percent more than what was achieved under the current system.

Universal Affordable Housing could have protected 25,000 more working families – families making minimum wage and  trying to raise a child.

Universal Affordable Housing could have drawn 25,000 more young people to our five boroughs to start new families, new businesses and new jobs.

Now, it can be a roadmap for the future. It can create the supply we need to meet the demand.

Bit by bit, building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood – every new construction will contribute to the diversity and vibrancy of our communities.

That’s fairness.  That’s justice.

We also need to make sure our most vulnerable neighbors, New Yorkers living on the brink of homelessness,  have access to deeply, permanently affordable housing.

Every day, our homeless crisis is a painful reminder of how our housing policy is failing those most in need.  Our current models leave them behind.  Tackling this crisis will require the City to leverage all its assets.

And there are concrete steps we can take right now – today – to stabilize our at-risk neighbors and build a path to reduce and ultimately eliminate homelessness.

We must direct City capital funds to build housing for those most in need.

Going forward, all of our current housing capital subsidies should be used to build housing for extremely and very low-income families – families making 30 percent and 50 percent of AMI, or $29,000 and $48,000 for a family of three.

And we can start with an asset that’s been largely overlooked: the nearly 1,000 vacant lots owned by the City that currently sit blighted, unused, and undeveloped.

That’s why I’m proposing the creation of a non-profit New York City Land Bank that could turn these vacant lots into sites that could generate tens of thousands of permanently affordable housing units for the lowest-income New Yorkers.

Instead of selling off land to developers, the land bank would enter into a long-term lease – allowing us to enforce affordability and ensure that the affordability is permanent.

Because this land belongs to you.  And when the City owns property, we get to call the shots about how land is developed and for whom.

This is the housing that helps families that are one paycheck away from losing their homes.

This is the housing that gets New Yorkers out of shelters.

This is the housing that empowers folks to climb the economic ladder to security and stability.

This is the housing we need for the New Yorkers who need it most.

Third, it’s time to end the tax giveaways.

It’s time to end 421-a.

This is our biggest tax break to build affordable housing that should be a lifeline to working families.

It costs taxpayers $1.6 billion a year, but four out of every five dollars actually supports market-rate development!

A report by Propublica found that four thousand of the affordable units were never registered and possibly never even created.

We have a skyline full of luxury high-rise condos that sit empty and unused because only a few people in the whole world can afford to live in them.

Billions of dollars are doled out with little oversight or transparency.

These “affordable” units can be rented for as much as $3,100 a month, which is more than market-rate in many parts of the city.  They aren’t even permanently affordable!

And as we’ve seen, the real scope of our housing need is far greater than this program currently addresses.

At over a $1 billion and a half a year, we deserve more. We deserve better.

At One57, a residential skyscraper on Billionaire’s Row, 421-a generated 66 units of affordable housing in the Bronx at a cost of $905,000 per apartment. If the city had provided this money as a cash grant to an affordable housing developer, we could have built 358 affordable apartments – for $185,000 per unit!

We need to fundamentally change the bargain between the city and the real estate industry.  We can’t keep spending billions and billions and getting so little affordability in return.

Instead, any subsidies should be provided to plug demonstrated financing gaps in order to meet the new mandate for affordability.

With greater flexibility to tailor benefits, including property tax abatements and capital subsidies, we can steer money to where it’s actually needed: to finance permanently affordable units. And not to spend money that we don’t have on luxury development that we don’t need.

It’s a smart, responsible solution to an ineffectual program that has plagued us for decades, with just enough tax dollars spent to guarantee results.

And unlike today, every dollar provided to a project will be fully reported and accounted for.

But we should not limit ourselves to creating just affordable rental housing.

We also have to do more to make home ownership an achievable dream in New York City,  because right now it has become the impossible dream  or too many working New Yorkers.

Our home ownership rate in the City is half what it is in the rest of the country. Only 32% of New Yorkers own their own homes, compared to 64% nationwide.

But the real disparities lie just below the surface, and point to deep, structural inequities that we as a City must reckon with.

Today, Black and Hispanic borrowers receive less than 16 percent of home loans.  This – in a City where, combined, those two groups make up more than half the population.

Call it red-lining.  Call it discrimination.   Call it the legacy of our racist past as a nation when it comes to housing and financial opportunity.

Just don’t call it fair – because it’s not.

We need to do everything we can to bend the arc of history toward justice.

And it’s not only an issue of race. It’s a generational challenge, too.

As our economy continues to create more and more lower-paying jobs, millennials and other young people are getting boxed out of homeownership.

We need to eliminate the barriers between the middle-class and the dream of owning a home.

For starters, we should be expanding the City’s programs for more aspiring homeowners – including providing more qualified homebuyers with assistance for down payments and loans for home repairs.

We should be waiving real property transfer and mortgage recording taxes. Because all these costs add up to thousands of dollars that middle and moderate-income families can ill-afford.

We should be giving tenants the “right of first refusal” to buy their building if it goes up for sale or foreclosure, and working to drive out speculators who are increasingly targeting communities of color.

And we should be leveraging Community Land Trusts to build affordable co-ops and condos on city owned land, and building more limited equity housing for middle-class families.

If New York City becomes  a place where  only the wealthy can afford to put down roots and own a home, where all we do is build glass towers in the sky that sit half empty, then we should all
be ashamed.

Homeownership has always been one of the best ways to build generational wealth. We need to be in the business of creating opportunity for the middle-class.

In the 100 years before we got to this point, New York City didn’t stay affordable on its own.

Once a generation, city leaders tackled the challenge of affordable housing – and they did it on a big scale.

Mayor LaGuardia invented the first public housing in the 1930’s when the Great Depression was ravaging the nation.

The Mitchell-Lama program in the 50’s and 60’s helped grow the middle-class and gave working families an affordable place to live.

Mayor Koch rebuilt entire neighborhoods in the 80’s – and reduced homelessness in the process.

Each generation must face these challenges head on.

I’m a lifelong New Yorker. I’ve watched my city change from a place of infinite promise and potential to a place where it’s getting harder and harder to make it.

I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with the folks in this room in our fight for the heart and soul of Washington Heights and Inwood.

The moment for piecemeal, siloed, incremental plans is long-past. In fact, I don’t believe that moment ever really existed.

It’s impossible to overstate the breadth and scope of the challenge we have before us. But this crisis wasn’t created overnight.

It is the culmination of decades of sticking our heads in the sand, of kicking the can down the road, of applying Band-Aids when we needed surgery.

It’s the expected result of a system that is based on and sustained by injustice.

No one who’s been paying attention is surprised by the five-alarm fire we’re facing. The people in this room – advocates, organizers, tenants – have been sounding the alarm for years.

So let’s act – finally. Let’s be daring – finally.

From creating universal affordability in every corner of every borough, to leveraging city-owned property to build the housing we need for the New Yorkers who need it most, to ending ineffectual
tax giveaways to the real estate industry when we aren’t getting enough real affordable housing in return, to realizing the dream of owning a home in the greatest city in the world.

Let us have the courage to break the cycle and build the New York we need – – finally.

A city for every single one of us.

The price of entry to New York City cannot be a million-dollar condo.

We must make room here for everyone.

We must align our policies with our values – and with our humanity.

We must stand up for the city we believe in.

A city that cares for its people.

A city that is diverse and vibrant.

A city that refuses to do things one way just because that’s the way it’s always been done.

A city that innovates, that drives smart solutions to our greatest challenges.

And we can finally have an answer to the worry I hear in every borough, in every neighborhood, from every kind of New Yorker – from seniors who stuck it out during the 70’s and are now feeling
priced out of neighborhoods they helped to build, from young families and immigrants who want to start a new life here, but can’t make the numbers work, from parents who wonder how their kids will ever afford to make New York City their home.

They all share the same fear, in every language – which is that New York City is swiftly becoming a place where only a privileged few can make it.

We came here today to ask one question.  Who is New York City for?

Our answer is loud and clear. This is your city, and your city cannot be bought.

This is the time for action, rooted in justice for all.

Our children, our neighbors, our city, and our future demand nothing less than the housing we need.

Thank you.

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