How to Address New York’s Housing Crisis

Ralph R. Ortega goes On the Record with New York State Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal (D/WF-Manhattan), Chair of the Assembly Committee on Housing, on how to address New York’s housing crisis.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

We’re here to talk about housing. I’d like to give you a chance to summarize what we’re hoping to say today.

We need to build more housing. We need more affordable housing, we need more supportive housing, and we need every other type of housing. But at the same time, we must preserve the housing that we have right now, because many properties — not-for-profit housing, Mitchell-Lama housing, public authority housing, NYCHA and housing outside the city — are falling apart. They’re older, they have not been able to be maintained properly, and we can’t lose these units. You cannot build fast enough to replace what we have now.

So there are two problems. And there are many different models, but not one answers every call, every need. In central New York, for example, there’s been a big push for factory-made housing, especially around Rochester. But if you go down to the city, in Harlem, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is building affordable housing, and it’s for everyone. It’s not a health intervention; they saw it as part of their mission. So you have organizations contributing to filling the need for housing. And lenders are quite instrumental as well, because they are funding different developments — there’s some exciting work that M&T is doing in Buffalo, for example. How do you sift through all these options to answer the call?

It is overwhelming at times, because New York’s a big state, a diverse state, and there are different needs in different areas of the state. There are people who can afford a lot and can buy, and then there are people who can’t really afford much, and it’s for them that we need the Housing Access Voucher Program, which is modeled on Section 8. It just began in New York State. We allocated $50 million two years ago. We really need $250 million.

It’s a voucher program for people who are on the brink of homelessness, and this will keep them housed. If you’re only talking about the monetary problem, it’s cheaper to keep someone in their home. If you’re talking about it from a humanity point of view, we want to get people stable so that they can go lead successful lives, but you really can’t do that from the street or from a shelter.

I’m glad you’re mentioning affordability. First-time homebuyers are pretty much priced out of traditional housing in many cases. Factory-made housing, for example, is pitched as costing as little as one-third of traditional housing. Do you see this as a viable option not just for suburban and rural areas, but for other parts of the state? Could it actually serve a need in New York City?

I’m not sure about New York City. I’d have to think some more about it. But certainly other parts of the state have manufactured home parks, and people already live there, and they have issues as well. But it is a good resource for some. It’s like the tiny home movement — you have them all over the place, and this is similar. You don’t need 10 bathrooms. Sometimes I see all these wealthy celebrities with 10 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms. We’re talking normal scale, and a manufactured home is great for people who are interested in that.

How does the state fit in to supporting these different programs? The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, for example, is hoping to get some state money to help subsidize its construction costs. They’re buying old hotels and refurbishing them. They don’t like calling it an SRO — it’s just affordable housing for anyone who can qualify.

Some years ago we passed something called HONDA [the Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act], and that was a fund for those converting hotels into housing. So there’s some money in that fund. There are a lot of loans, a lot of grants, a lot of programs. We spend millions upon millions in the budget every year that go toward different programs around the state, whether it’s $100 million for the construction of modular and starter homes or $20 million in funding so that people can obtain or rehab single-family housing. We have many of those programs around the state. So there is help.

We heard the Syracuse mayor say we need to build — that we need to help developers who are dedicated to affordable housing actually accomplish the mission of the day. What are the hurdles that you see?

I think right now some of the hurdles are the enormous tariffs that Trump has put on building materials. His whim one day is lumber, and it comes from Canada — forget about it. All of that is creating instability in the market, so it’s extra hard. It’s always hard to get the financing.

We have a program called 485-x: If a developer will build X number of units, and maybe 25% of the units are affordable, they will get a tax break. That’s how we’ve traditionally obtained a lot of affordable housing. It can’t be the answer to everything, but in New York City we have a lot of 421-a, and this is the successor program. So that’s one way, but there are so many ways.

You mentioned Mitchell-Lama. One time I was interviewing a real estate developer and I asked him, “Why haven’t we seen any new Mitchell-Lama programs?” And he said, “Because there’s no political will.” Is that true? You were talking about maintaining and revitalizing what’s still there, right?

Yes. We actually came up with a program called Foundations for the Future. It might have a different name now. And we’ve been putting hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few budget cycles into housing like that. So we have to accumulate more money. But I think that model is wonderful. It’s just that everything’s going to cost a lot more these days than it did back then, when you could buy an apartment for $2,000.

One thing I’m concerned about is continued attempts to privatize those units, and it’s not fair. When that generation needed an affordable place to live, they got one.

Mitchell-Lama has a shelf life.

There was, yes. And many of the developers bought out of it. They said, “We’re done. We gave it to you for 20 years, 30 years — enough.” But there are rentals, there are co-ops. We need to keep them in the system, but we also need to give them funding and a promise for the future. We give a lot of money to help maintain Mitchell-Lamas right now, but that’s not sustainable. It’s, “Here’s emergency [money].” We need something more predictable.

What are your legislative priorities on housing going into the next session?

I think we’re going to have a big fight ahead. I see that various landlords and others are trying to make the case that they need to roll back some of the protections that we passed in 2019 in the HSTPA [Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act]. For example, there had been a 20% vacancy bonus, so anytime someone moved out, the landlord would get to raise the rent by 20%. At the time, that actually was an incentive to harass tenants out. Now rent-stabilized apartments will be rent-stabilized forever, so there’s less incentive to get someone out, and they don’t do it that much now. However, if you have a 20% vacancy bonus, there’s the incentive again. We’re not going to roll back something that tenants fought long and hard for.

The reason that we did so many protections in 2019 is because landlords used to run the show when it came to rent. When the Senate was Republican-run, they were at the beck and call of landlords. Now it’s both [houses] Democratic, and they don’t have an in the way they used to. So we evened the playing field. Now they’re crying poverty — not all, but some — so we’ll see.

The argument’s always that the landlords who are hurting are the small mom-and-pop landlords — people who are maybe renting out a part of their house. How do you make it fair enough for them to stay in business?

It hasn’t been broken down for me how many are small and how many are large. The ones doing the big talking are the large ones. There are some small homeowners who speak up. But when they say there are 50-something thousand vacant ones, that is not a number that has any detail to it.

How many is it because someone just moved out and someone’s going to move in next month? How many is it because the landlords are purposefully keeping them off the market, anticipating that they would change the law? And not all of them need a huge increase in capital. So it’s a big push without details, and if you want to play that game, you’re not going to get anywhere.

We can have a serious discussion about this and what we do with the small landlords, but not when there’s all this bluster and bullying out there. It’s not helpful.

Before we wrap up, was there a question that you wanted me to ask, or something you wanted to add before we finish our conversation?

I think we had a good talk. I’m excited for our upcoming session, where we will hopefully come up with more ways to help build more housing, but also to help those struggling not-for-profits who run and manage affordable properties — help them stay in business, help them pay their mortgage, help them maintain their buildings, because they’re a precious resource.