Testimony of Comptroller Brad Lander to the New York City Council Housing and Buildings Committee

Good afternoon and thank you to Housing Committee Chair Pierina Sanchez and Members of the City Council’s Housing and Buildings Committee for holding this important hearing.  

There’s broad agreement that New York City is facing a severe housing crisis, and that we need many strategies to address it. Dramatically scaling up the footprint of social housing – permanently affordable housing removed from the speculative marketplace – is one key strategy. 

You know the crisis: After a brief dip at the beginning of the pandemic, asking rents have risen above their previous peak, at $3,500 on average over the last few months. Nearly 30% of New Yorkers spend over half of their income on rent. Homelessness continues to rise, with over 70,000 of our neighbors living in shelters or on the streets, including nearly 20,000 children.  

The exodus of Black New Yorkers – nearly a 10% decline in the past ten years – is a particularly troubling trend. As a recent New York Times article made clear, it is mostly young people – born and bred New Yorkers – who are leaving their hometown to seek more affordable housing options in southern cities.  

The unaffordability of housing also represents a real threat to NYC’s economic growth. As I talk to business owners, they constantly cite the lack of affordable housing for workers, across the income spectrum, as a challenge to growing their businesses here.  

So I am encouraged by the fact that housing is one of the top issues on the legislative agenda in Albany this year. Elected officials there are largely focusing on three policies: 

Tenants rights advocates are prioritizing Good Cause Eviction protection legislation, which would require landlords to offer existing tenants a right to renew their lease and give tenants the ability to challenge unconscionable hikes. I strongly support this legislation. 

There is broad support for the establishment of a Housing Access Voucher Program, to provide rental subsidies for homeless families and those at risk of homelessness. I strongly support HAVP as well.  

Governor Hochul has made increasing housing supply her top housing priority this year.  I strongly agree that we need additional housing supply at a wide range of incomes, and that we must remove barriers to residential development through a framework for comprehensive planning.  

But let’s be clear: new market rate development, even if equitably distributed, with tenant protections and some additional vouchers in place, will not alone solve the affordability crisis. There’s an ongoing debate about whether market-rate development filters through the market – but, at best, it takes a very long time. With median asking rents in NYC near $3,500 a month and a less than 1% vacancy rate of units that rent below $1,500, new supply will do little for working families and those who need it most.  

How can we ask working-class New Yorkers people to support new market-rate development if they reasonably fear it will push them out of their own neighborhoods – and if they don’t see themselves ever having a chance to gain real housing stability, or build any equity in the homes?  

That’s where social housing comes in.  

Social housing is permanently affordable housing, removed from the speculative marketplace, with mechanisms for democratic governance. Social housing is an umbrella term, that includes shared-equity co-ops, not for profit rentals, supportive housing, public housing, and community land trusts. 

New York City has a long history with social housing, in Mitchell-Lama and other limited-equity cooperatives, from Co-op City in the Bronx to Penn South in Manhattan, developed in partnership with labor unions eager to see that their working-class members could become homeowners. And in nonprofit community-development corporations born in the 1960s and 70s to bring their neighborhoods back from abandonment, from Los Sures on the Southside in Brooklyn to Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement. 

In those cases, the private housing market, seeking the places where investors and developers could maximize profits, was failing to provide the type of affordable housing that New Yorkers needed. So social housing groups stepped up, developing and operating housing as a public good. 

In the Koch and Dinkins Administrations, the City invested strongly in social housing. In that era, about one-third of our affordable housing land and subsidies went to for-profit developers, one-third to nonprofit developers, and one-third to tenants themselves to become shared equity cooperatives. Unfortunately, in the Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio years, the pendulum swing to for-profit, private developers, who now receive about 80% of the City’s land and affordable housing subsidy dollars.  

But we need social housing today, perhaps more than ever. In a highly polarized service economy, New York City has more severe affordability challenges than ever. While supply and demand mechanisms can work well in markets where goods and services are distributed more evenly, they often fail to meet the needs of lower-income and working-class people when markets are severely stratified, and supply is inelastic. Markets like the New York City housing market of 2023.     

By establishing a robust public option for housing at a price-point affordable to poor and working-class families, a social housing program complements initiatives that increase the private market housing supply. As in higher education and healthcare, public options can complement what the market provides. This two-track approach offers the best opportunity forward. 

With an ambitious strategy, I believe we could double the footprint of social housing in New York City in the coming years, from about 10% of the housing market today, to about 20%. The legislation being heard today would help create new mechanisms to make that happen. 

Int. 714 and Int. 637, which I was proud to introduce during my time as a Council Member, would establish a New York City Land Bank and require that the City prioritize non-profit entities when disposing of public land.  

Over the past three years, the economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic has caused some commercial buildings to fall into financial trouble. While the overall economic recovery is of course a positive thing, there was also an opportunity during this period for the city to create more social housing. Land Banks are designed to take temporary control of distressed property while working with local and government stakeholders to return the buildings to a use that better serves the neighborhood, including social housing or other community uses. A New York City Land Bank, which would be created by passing Int. 714, sponsored by Council Member Gale Brewer, would allow the City to purchase properties or liens in periods of economic downturn in order to avoid the harmful effects of foreclosure, and to return the properties to the best determined community use while ensuring any jobs created meet robust labor standards.  

Public land should be used for public good. Int. 637, sponsored by Council Member Lincoln Restler, would require the City to prioritize non-for-profit developers when disposing of public land. Nonprofit development ensures permanent affordability and increases community input and control.  

Int. 196 or the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), sponsored by Council Member Carlina Rivera, gives qualified purchasers 60 days to declare their intent to purchase and 120 days to make an offer on any multifamily residential buildings that comes up for sale. Purchasing a building and rehabilitating it as affordable housing is a more intensive process than a purely profit-driven transaction. Giving affordable housing developers additional time to work with community development financial institutions and City and State housing agencies increases their competitiveness in the process and can create new pipeline of much-needed social housing.  

These three bills create opportunities for the development of new social housing on public land and greatly increase the likelihood of the conversion of existing properties to social housing. There is still more that we can do, and I am excited to support Int. 932, sponsored by Council Member Sandy Nurse, which would require the city to conduct a one-time social housing development agency feasibility study.   

In order to provide stability and affordability to a broad swath of New Yorkers we must also create a new multifamily shared equity homeownership program. In an earlier generation, Mitchell-Lama housing co-operatives were built to provide affordable homeownership to working-class residents. In total, between 1928 and 1978, 292 housing developments, with more than 149,000 units of affordable rental and limited equity co-operative housing were built in New York City. Mitchell-Lama co-ops perfectly demonstrate how social housing can cultivate solidarity in a way that becomes a genuine, tangible social asset that helps us confront the problems our city faces. Unlike many other forms of affordable housing, over 90% of these developments remain in the program today, a huge success rate that keeps many neighborhoods integrated despite intense gentrification. Yet we build almost none of this today and we must change that.  

By treating housing as a public good rather than as a vehicle for profit, we can ensure that all New Yorkers have a home they can afford.  

I look forward to working with the bill sponsors, other members of the City Council, and housing organizers and advocates to pass these important pieces of legislation and make this vision a reality. 

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