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The New York Senate and Assembly are calling for a housing deal that offers incentives for developers while also providing tenant protections. It’s part of a push ahead of the due date for the state budget. However, the proposals don’t fully line up with Governor Kathy Hochul’s plans.
Jacob Anbinder
Klarman postdoctoral fellow
Jacob Anbinder, a Klarman postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, researches how America’s most progressive cities become unaffordable for a significant portion of the population and the housing politics of prosperous metro areas. He says New York has a fundamental housing need: new homes now.
Anbinder says:
“New York is the epicenter of a national housing shortage afflicting families from the Northeast to the West Coast. Soaring rents and home prices have created a city of haves and have-nots. While a landed gentry of New Yorkers who bought before the recent boom years reaps the benefits of rising property values, millions more have been priced out of the city, forced to relocate to far-flung exurbs or to leave for other parts of the country altogether.
“Legislative action to address this crisis is long overdue, and Albany’s new ‘grand bargain’ is a step in the right direction. How far it will go toward alleviating the region’s housing problem, however, will depend on the details.
“Though much attention has focused on the ‘Mitchell-Lama 2.0’ initiative, it is far from clear whether this new public benefit corporation would produce housing at anywhere near the scale of the original Mitchell-Lama program. By the same token, new inclusionary requirements might mean that a handful of working families get to live in glassy Manhattan high-rises but could just as easily make it impractical to build middle-class housing in outer-borough neighborhoods. And while ‘good cause’ eviction rules offer crucial protection for renters, tenants will always have the most leverage over unscrupulous landlords when they have the power to move somewhere better.
“Ultimately, that’s why New York’s most fundamental housing need is for hundreds of thousands of new homes of every shape, size, and price. I’m hopeful that lawmakers can come together to write a bill that achieves this goal by eliminating the legal, political, and financial roadblocks that stand in the way of building housing on a massive scale.”
