NYC Comptroller Lander Praises New York City Council Passage of City of Yes

New York, NY — In response to the City Council’s vote on the City of Yes housing plan, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released the following statement: 

“Props to Speaker Adrienne Adams and the 30 New York City Council Members who voted for City of Yes today for taking an important step forward to address our city’s housing affordability crisis. Housing prices are crushing New York’s families, and one big reason is because, for the past two decades, we’ve failed to build enough homes. The passage of City of Yes will start to change that, by allowing the construction of 80,000 new homes. 

“I commend New York City Planning Commission Chair Dan Garodnick, First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer, Mayor Adams, Speaker Adams, and Governor Hochul for their leadership in crafting a deal that will meaningfully increase the City’s housing supply. And I also praise those Council Members who focused their negotiations on securing funding to make sure more of the housing that gets built is actually affordable to working-class families. It’s unfortunate that some Council Members who grandstand about the middle class worked to restrict and cut back the proposal, locking middle class families out of homes in our city. 

“Let’s be clear: City of Yes alone was never going to solve our affordability crisis. We still need many more efforts like the one I was proud to lead in Gowanus, where 8,000 units of housing are rising, 3,000 of them affordable to working-class families. We need new approaches to enabling affordable homeownership, preserving distressed rental housing, expanding rental assistance and legal representation to protect tenants from eviction, and much more. 

“New Yorkers are rightly angry that the rent is too damn high – and home prices, too. Today we channeled that anger into doing more about it.” 

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