Two weeks after governor’s statewide housing plan passed unceremoniously stopthe City Council Speaker announced a similar proposal for the five administrative districts.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams on Thursday announced a “fair housing framework” that shares Gov. Kathy Hochul’s goal of increasing housing, but adds a component that’s critical to city politics: affordability.
Like Hochul’s housing compact, the speaker’s plan will set targets for each of the city’s 59 community areas. But the targeting will be more granular — tailored to each region, not just for total units, but for low-income and supportive housing as well.
Its citywide goals include two other indicators: new units for older New Yorkers and reserved homes for families earning less than 60 percent of the area’s median income.
This framework is much weaker than Hochul’s proposal because it neither sets goals nor requires their achievement. Instead, it’s asking the city’s housing agency to create them every five years starting in January 2025 after numerous hearings. The city then had to pass laws to achieve the goal.
Another difference from the Hochul plan is that it has an underlying principle of fairness, which means different things to different people. Speaker Adams seems likely to interpret it, as most of the council’s 51 members do, that wealthier parts of the city must be allowed to provide far more affordable housing than in the past, while poorer areas should be protected from Affected by sharp rises in market interest rates.
Later in the de Blasio administration, the framework allowed for massive upgrades in Soho, Noho, and Gowanus, but stopped them in the South Bronx and Bushwick.
However, the Council is not monolithic. Opinions vary across the city about what kind of housing is appropriate in any given neighborhood. The Speaker has power over her members, but her leadership also depends on them and cannot rule by command. Individual city council members have long enjoyed the unwritten power to halt redistricting in their districts.
Adams did manage to weaken the authority to authorize housing developments at Throggs Neck and Astoria last year. Whether she can replicate the feat in the city’s many other low-scale, mostly white but not affluent enclaves is an open question.
This year, a developer’s proposal to build a modest mixed-income apartment building in Homecrest, Brooklyn, faced strong opposition from the local community board and city council representatives. They want it to be reduced from eight floors to five.
The developers withdrew their zoning application, saying the expiration of the 421a tax break made the project unfeasible, but it seemed destined to fail politically anyway.
The speaker’s blueprint aims for such an outcome.
“Not only have we failed to build enough housing overall, but we have also failed to distribute housing equitably across the city,” Adams’ plan states. “Many communities have an abundance of infrastructure and amenities such as open space, thriving schools and public transport, yet have had too few housing units in recent decades.”
At the same time, production of affordable units has been concentrated in the poorest areas. That’s partly because affordable housing developers can’t compete with market-rate or mixed-income projects for development land in affluent neighborhoods. It’s unclear how Adams intends to change that dynamic.
Another key is how much market-rate housing Adams will demand in communities of color, which is generally opposed as an engine of gentrification, although research suggests it neither accelerates displacement nor drives up rents on existing homes.
The speaker saluted opponents of gentrification, saying housing would be allocated in part based on “displacement risk/vulnerability indicators.” Another premise of her plan is to increase the use of rental vouchers in “high opportunity” areas where market rents are too high for voucher holders to afford. And, checking all the boxes, it takes into account climate change and infrastructure capacity.
Adams Council has the power to require new market-rate housing to cross-subsidize affordable housing, but it cannot simply allocate billions for low-rent apartments. The mayor largely controls the purse strings, which in turn are constrained by economic output.
Previous speakers and mayors have developed housing plans, including one that the de Blasio administration created in 2021 very similar to this plan. The “Where We Live” fair housing plan calls for a citywide framework to “increase housing opportunity, especially for low-income New Yorkers in amenity-rich neighborhoods.”
The speaker’s plan would make such a framework a legal requirement, but would not in itself incentivize, let alone require, any housing.
