|
As anyone could tell you, New York City is in the middle of an affordable housing crisis.
Post-pandemic rents are at all-time highs, housing starts are at extremely low levels, and homeownership remains far beyond the reach of most families. Meanwhile, more tenants than ever face extremely high-rent burdens, and homelessness rates have hit historic highs.
The NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) has an urgent role to play in solving the housing crisis. Financing the production and preservation of affordable housing remains the City’s most powerful tool in combatting the city’s housing crisis – and HPD is involved in the vast majority of affordable housing projects across all five boroughs.
My latest report finds that HPD needs to dramatically increase the pace of affordable housing production in order to confront our city’s housing crisis – but we’re falling short due to high staff turnover and longstanding bottlenecks.
For example, despite the agency’s herculean effort to staff back up in core program areas, HPD lost 1/3 of staff between April 2020 and October 2022. The high staff turnover and loss of institutional memory makes it challenging to clear the agency's backlog of affordable housing projects.
And HPD needs a technological upgrade, too. HPD has digitized some of its internal processes that were done exclusively via paper forms prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, antiquated or deficient systems still exist. Updating this will surely help clear the backlog.
|
