Mayor Eric Adams.
Credit score: Ed Reed/Mayoral Images Workplace.
If there may be one subject that unites New Yorkers from each stroll of life, it’s housing.
Our metropolis’s rental emptiness charge is at a historic low of 1.4 %, which reveals how few houses in our metropolis can be found for hire; and half of all New Yorkers pay greater than 30 % of their earnings on hire. The numbers don’t lie: our metropolis is dealing with a housing scarcity disaster that results the price of residing and that should be addressed as swiftly and aggressively as potential.
The answer to that is easy: to construct extra new, reasonably priced houses and get extra individuals into the housing we have already got. I’m proud to say, now we have carried out simply that and extra AGAIN this previous fiscal yr. To satisfy this second head on, our administration has achieved back-to-back record-breaking years of each creating and connecting New Yorkers to reasonably priced housing.
For the second yr in a row, the town has produced probably the most supportive housing and housing for previously homeless New Yorkers. And, this yr, our administration has additionally financed probably the most new reasonably priced houses in historical past.
Following many years of disinvestment, now we have transformed 3,678 New York Metropolis Housing Authority (NYCHA) flats into newly renovated residences. We’ve delivered on transferring a file variety of homeless New Yorkers into completely reasonably priced housing by means of the very best utilization of Metropolis Preventing Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Complement (CityFHEPS) housing vouchers. And, in whole, our metropolis businesses financed a mixed 28,944 reasonably priced and public housing items in Fiscal Yr 2024 by means of new building and preservation initiatives.
This can be a sport changer for working individuals, households, immigrants, younger individuals, and others in want.
Whereas right now we have fun our progress, tomorrow we have to get again to work and goal even increased. Our ‘Metropolis of Sure for Housing Alternative’ initiative is one other instrument now we have to provide over 108,000 new houses that our metropolis wants and deserves within the subsequent 15 years. Moreover, now we have superior a number of strong planning efforts to ship greater than 50,000 items over the following 15 years within the Metro North station area within the Bronx, Central Brooklyn, Midtown South in Manhattan, and Long Island City and Jamaica in Queens. As we work to advance every of those daring proposals, we’re calling on our companions on the Metropolis Council to assist us clear up this housing disaster by saying “sure” to extra reasonably priced housing.
Simply final month, along with Speaker Adams and the Metropolis Council, we invested a historic $2 billion in capital funds to the Division of Housing Preservation and Growth and to public housing at NYCHA. This brings our funding in reasonably priced housing over the present 10-year plan to greater than 26-billion-dollars — a brand new file degree. I do know the Metropolis Council understands the significance of taking motion and look ahead to our work collectively.
However whereas the numbers are spectacular, extra importantly, behind every of those record-breaking numbers is a human affect and story. I do know what it’s wish to dwell with out the safety of housing. Rising up on the sting of homelessness, my siblings and I needed to take trash baggage full of garments to high school as a result of there have been days the place we couldn’t ensure the place we’d sleep that night time. That’s the reason, from day one, our administration has been dedicated to creating this metropolis extra reasonably priced and livable.
On daily basis, we’re preventing to verify New Yorkers don’t must undergo what I went by means of, by constructing extra houses and connecting extra New Yorkers to houses we have already got. Collectively, we are able to and can construct a metropolis that’s extra reasonably priced and extra accessible for all.
