The city must produce or preserve six housing units an hour, 11 hours a day, six days a week to make good on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise to create 200,000 homes for low- and middle-income New Yorkers over the next 10 years, according to the city’s new housing commissioner.
“I’m behind,” Vicki Been told building owners Wednesday in her first speech since she was tapped to lead the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in February.
Speaking at the BuildingsNY event at the Javits Center, Been said that the Five Borough Housing Plan, which is being formulated for a May 1 release by de Blasio, will be “the product of many minds.”
At a historical high of 3.35 million city units, she called the real-estate industry a “powerful economic engine” and a “force for change” that makes and stabilizes neighborhoods.
While the administration “understands” that building owners “need to earn a reasonable return,” she noted rents have gone up 10 percent while wages have remained stagnant. She said many people need to choose between rent and health care.
Along with affordable housing, the city wants to focus efforts on the maintenance of current housing stock and, to satisfy the demand, increase the development of market-rate housing.
Housing officials are looking at minimal up-zoning that would preserve the character of neighborhoods while increasing density, such as allowing six-story buildings in current four-story areas and 10 stories where there are now eight — but not 20-story buildings.
“I am not talking about density that overburdens the neighborhood’s services, but building that is coordinated with concomitant investments in parks, and schools, infrastructure and transit,” she said.
To boost the unit count, the administration is also exploring inclusionary zoning, air rights transfers and leveraging land and development rights now underused by the city, state and nonprofits.
Higher taxes may be used to nudge the development of vacant land. To reduce development costs, the city is looking to smooth and remove bottlenecks in the approval processes while taking a “hard” look at construction costs.
Financing programs will be reviewed, along with subsidies that may be limited and not layered so that developers are not “double dipping.” But to get more bang from their buck, the city may require longer periods of affordability.
The administration may also turn to, and tweak, past programs such as Mitchell-Lama housing.
But Dan Margulies of the Association of Builders & Owners observed that nothing was developed until that law was changed to allow projects to withdraw from the program.
The upkeep of current housing and code enforcement will also be a focus so that tenants receive basic services and are not subject to harassment.
“When you cut some slack to a tenant who has lost a job or suffered a health crisis, you help promote the stability of our neighborhoods and our families,” Been said.
She also praised the real-estate industry for creating neighborhoods and asked for their help and ideas to craft the upcoming programs, but warned, “I won’t always agree with them, or weigh the pros and cons in the same way that you do, or necessarily be able to make them happen.”