Dear New Yorkers, 

One thing there’s broad agreement about in New York: we’re facing a severe housing crisis. One-third of New York City renters are considered “severely rent-burdened,” or spend over half their income on rent. There is an extreme vacancy shortage – less than 1 percent – of the City’s most affordable units, while over 60,000 of our neighbors are homeless, including nearly 20,000 children. And as of writing this there are over 260,000 active eviction cases in New York City.  
 
There’s less agreement, however, on what is causing it, and what to do about it.  

In one corner are supply-side advocates, rightly angry about exclusionary zoning and concerned about the lack of housing production. In another corner are tenants’ rights advocates, often skeptical of developers, landlords, and private equity firms increasingly buying up homes and driving up costs. But it’s going to take an all-hands-on-deck approach, including New Yorkers of all backgrounds, to face this crisis.  

One obvious, yet often overlooked, approach that New Yorkers employ every day when facing crisis, is to turn to our faith leaders for help. 

Faith-based organizations and houses of worship have been, and continue to be, advocates for a more humane approach to housing. Which is why we’ve teamed up with the Interfaith Center of New York to co-host Housing Now: Faith Communities’ Call to Action – a virtual conference aimed at bringing New Yorkers of faith and their communities into the movement for safe, affordable housing – next Thursday, December 15th starting at 9am.
 

With panels and workshops on: building housing for the public good, protecting tenants’ rights, confronting homelessness, protecting vulnerable populations, and improving public housing, Housing Now will highlight concrete steps faith communities can take to address the affordable housing crisis in their local communities and beyond. The workshops will be followed by an affordable housing tour and community conversation at Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement (HCCI). 

Alongside our faith-based communities, we know an all-hands-on-deck approach must also include our neighbors at NYCHA.  

After a summer of roundtable meetings and visits to New York Housing Authority developments in each borough, our office convened a first-of-its-kind NYCHA Audit Resident Committee earlier this week. Comprised of 21 residents, the committee will help inform our NYCHA audit process in the new year.

The resident committee kicked-off the inaugural meeting with a review of the NYCHA residents survey our office conducted over the summer and discussed ways to follow up on the results with future audit and oversight ideas. Sanitation, safety, and repair tickets being closed before repairs were completed were top of mind for most of the nearly 800 respondents from across 132 developments and received in five different languages.

The challenges NYCHA faces are large, and both the costs of repair and the need for management reform can seem overwhelming. But by making sure we include residents in the conversation, we can bring transparency to the process and take meaningful, achievable steps to restoring basic services, safety, and trust.  

As we head into 2023, my office is hard at work on advancing policies to protect tenants like good cause protections, researching proposals to build new 21st century Mitchell-Lama cooperative housing, analyzing needed investments in our supportive housing infrastructure to help people experiencing mental health crises get stable housing, and more. 

The housing crisis facing New Yorkers won’t be solved overnight – it’s going to take united efforts by city and state leaders, public and private stakeholders, and everyday New Yorkers to win policy changes and make needed investments for our neighborhoods. I hope some of you will join us to talk about that work at the Housing Now conference next week (RSVP here) and in the months to come. 
 

Brad