The New York City Council recently passed a bill to bring greater transparency to the city’s affordable-housing programs. The mayor vetoed it — and today the council will override that veto.
This legislation is important and necessary. Here’s why.
Building affordable housing enhances our city by providing homes for people and by creating jobs. Since 2004, the city’s spent more than $8.5 billion on affordable housing (over $1 billion in the last year), building more than 125,000 units during that period.
At least, we’re told it’s over 125,000 units — but there’s far too little public information about these public investments. Right now, it’s almost impossible to find out where all these units were built, just how affordable they really were, who was responsible for building them or whether they were soundly constructed.
The public has a right to know where taxpayer dollars went, who they went to and whether we got what we paid for.
Generally, the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development offers a loan or subsidy to the developer it selects to build a given project. Afterward, the developer sells units to the winners of an affordable-housing lottery.
If the new homeowner finds defects in the property, he or she can call HPD — which then tries, often unsuccessfully, to mediate with the developer.
Sadly, many New Yorkers who invested their savings in these homes have found themselves trapped in defective properties, unable to sell or even to get access to information about who did the work.
At a City Council hearing on this bill back in January, a number of homeowners came to testify about the construction of their city-funded housing. We heard about sinking foundations, sewage backups, water leaks, combustible pallets being used to hold up hot boilers, buckling facades and crumbling staircases.
Again, these homeowners are having an impossible time finding out who’s responsible for building — and fixing — their broken houses. They’ve got nowhere to turn.
The HPD Transparency Bill helps these people. It requires HPD to post information about affordable-housing projects on its Web site — including where the project was built, who built it, how HPD chose the builders, how affordable the project is supposed to be and what was done about any construction problems linked to the project. It also requires that certain developers and contractors file wage reports.
The bill’s opponents raise two arguments. First, they say gathering and posting the project information online is too onerous. Second, they say the wage reporting is too expensive and that it will harm small or minority-owned businesses.
Wrong on both counts. HPD already has the information it needs to post. So costs to implement this bill should be minimal at best, amounting to less than one quarter of one percent of what the city invested in affordable housing last year.
The wage reports, meanwhile, contain the same information that every employer has to have under federal and state law, information that must be given to each worker with every paycheck. Anyway, the bill excludes small businesses with less than $2.5 million in annual gross revenues. That exempts over 80 percent of minority- and women-owned enterprises and locally-based enterprises certified by the City’s Department of Small Business Services.
The HPD Transparency Bill will shine a light on how affordable housing is built in this city and how it’s paid for. The legislation is a win for our city and for every builder that follows the law and builds quality housing.
Christine C. Quinn is the City Council speaker. Domenic M. Recchia Jr. chairs the council’s Finance Committee.