Ask the Mayor: Looking at Affordable Housing

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Well, we're down to three more weekly asked the mayor segments with Mayor Bill de Blasio, and we'll do three more big-picture [inaudible 00:00:21] on some of the biggest issues facing New York City that he's had to deal with over the last eight years. Last week, it was education, today we'll talk about affordable housing, including creation and preservation of affordable apartments, fighting homelessness, the steady creep of gentrification and displacement, and more.

Like last time on education, our focus will mostly be pre-pandemic to measure most of the eight-year change before this big and hopefully, still temporary shock to the system. Listeners, we can take some calls for the Mayor, but no longer on the news of the week. We're talking today about the major solutions to the city's chronic affordable housing shortage. If you have a question for the mayor about that, or maybe a story of how his housing policies have helped you personally, or hurt you personally, or affected you personally, I'll ask the Mayor, lines are open at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Your personal stories of how de Blasio housing policies have helped you or hurt you or affected you in any way, or a big picture policy questions on creating enough affordable housing, which I don't think we've had in anybody's lifetime. Who's alive today in New York City. Well, maybe if they were alive in the '40s. 212-433-9692. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, but I just want to jump in with one thing on COVID just to say, obviously we now have evidence of the Omicron variant here in New York City, five cases so far. Related to that, but also related to the intense challenge of Delta variant, we announced late yesterday, our second major vaccine mandate of the week. First, it was childcare employees, a hundred and two thousand employees. Now 56,000 employees for non-public schools, private and religious schools, they'll have to be vaccinated.

That mandate goes into effect on December 20, so we are, as I like to say, climbing the ladder, going to use more and more aggressive tools to handle, what's happening now with COVID, the colder weather, the holidays, the dangers posed by Omicron. We're going to be very aggressive in addressing these with new approaches.

Brian Lehrer: I'll ask you one follow-up policy question on that, that came up earlier in the show when we were talking about the case of the person who got diagnosed in Minnesota, but who had been at the Javits Center with tens of thousands of people for an anime convention and only had one of the two vaccination, a series of doses.

The question came up, is the policy for getting into restaurants, concerts, and other venues strict enough? It's currently one shot and you can go in right away. You don't have to wait. if you get your second shot, I know that was to encourage people onto the vaccination track, but the question came up, is that enough now? Do you have any thoughts on toughening that requirement?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: That's a good question. I think you're exactly right. It was created the way it was created to maximize vaccination because we know, overwhelmingly, people get the first shot go on to get that second shot. It did serve that purpose very, very well and in some ways, I think it continues to. I think it's a fair question that we are going to analyze now.

With all of our approaches to COVID, we're going to update them because we're dealing with some new challenges at this moment. That will be looked out along with a series of other actions, because it's really dynamic right now. Not just because of Omicron. You look what's happening in much of Europe, a very troubling reality, and that's not Omicron, that's Delta. We're going to keep updating policies regularly to meet this challenge.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Housing, I've been looking at some stats getting ready for this and quoting to one side, I assume these are relatively consistent and reliable, but when you took office in January of 2014, the average rent in Manhattan that you inherited was $3,900 a month. Now, according to the real estate site Zumper, it's $4,072. Up about a hundred seventy dollars.

That's just a Manhattan measure, but multiple signs seem to indicate the outer boroughs rose at faster rates over the last decade, so rents are up from when you took over. It was New York, any affordable today, any more affordable than it was when you took office?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I think it is by some measures. If you just take the composite rent level, that obviously includes luxury housing and affordable housing and everything in between. I think if you talk about housing for working-class people, middle-class people, low-income people, I think we're in much stronger shape than we were.

Look, there was a great study by the Independent Budget Office, which is truly independent, and Gothamist did some good reporting on this about the fact that we really have taken a bite out of income inequality, and have really increased incomes for low-income and working-class people over the last eight years. With everything from $15 minimum wage to pre-K for all and paid sick leave, a variety of tools that really had an impact.

The affordable housing programs are a big part of it because, as of the end of this year, we will have 200,000 apartments that have either been created or preserved or about to be built for everyday New Yorkers,

and that's a constant increase in the supply of affordable housing. When you look at that, when you look at the fact that with Rent Guidelines Board, we've created a lot more fairness, including when it was necessary, rent freezes, which was unprecedented in the last 50 years.

When you look at the efforts to protect the 400,000 people live in public housing, I think in composite we're in a much stronger position on affordability in this city than we were certainly during the Bloomberg years. Certainly, let's take the opposite example, the painful opposite of San Francisco, the place that has gentrified beyond the point of recognition, they don't have tools to protect everyday working people. We have huge, massive tools reaching millions of people, and they're actually growing in the impact.

Brian Lehrer: On gentrification, can you name three neighborhoods in the city that have become more affordable rather than less on your watch?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Brian, that's a fine way of asking a question, but I think it's a misleading way of asking the question. It's not about, does a neighborhood become more affordable? It's about the families. When I say to you that we now are going to have 200,000 families, we had a plan originally to reach 200,000 families. That plan will be completed by the end of this year in terms of all of those homes, either being built or preserved in place, subsidized and preserved in place, or in the pipeline.

We're going to get to 300,000 before this is over with the plan that plays out over the next few years. That means to individual families, and I've met families in the day they walked into their new apartment, their long-term affordability problem is solved for them for decades ahead, but that's in a whole range of neighborhoods. It hasn't changed the fundamental reality of a neighborhood. It has profoundly changed the lives of families.

Just one other point, when we announced 200,000 apartments, I remember this vividly, The New York Times Editorial Board called it, "Moonshot", and basically said, this was highly unlikely to happen, it is now happened, and we're going to be able to do a lot more. We've proven this city has the capacity to build and preserve really on a vast scale, and that is going to change the lives of just an untold number of New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: Before we take some calls. That combined metric of created or preserve 200,000 affordable units created or preserve that you, and frankly, previous mayors, have used so much of it is preserved. Maybe you can give us the actual ratio, but it means you just stopped a stabilized ran from being flipped to market rates, which is a necessary defensive measure, unfortunately, but it means so much less new affordable construction when the city's population, the demand is growing faster than the new supply. How do we ever become a more affordable city, if that's all we can do, is lump in new with preserved?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It's a great question. I actually think there's underlying fact that's important. In the Bloomberg years, a vast amount of existing affordable housing was lost, because the laws were too lax, and I honestly believe that administration was not particularly focused on preserving housing for working people that was being lost to the market.

I went and fought in Albany with a lot of the good people. We got much stronger rent laws, that was crucial. We used the process of Rent Guidelines Board to make it more fair and objective, which meant it was more fair to tenants and there were not as high rent increases. In fact, the preservation effort, it is a big chunk of what we do, you're right, but it means that you're not losing what you had, and a lot of them are getting rehabbed at the same time and improved. It's incredibly valuable and it's the fastest way to get people long-term stability.

What we've also proven, Brian, is you can do tens of thousands of new apartments constantly. I think what's exciting, and we saw it in the recent rezonings with Gowanus and with SoHo/NoHo, that you can now, with the tools we put together, including Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, which is another really powerful tool we didn't have. We fought for it. We got it done. We can create affordable housing in any part of the city where we have land to build on. This is going to open up a lot of possibilities for the future, for new, but you cannot forget the preservation because if you keep losing all the time, it just doesn't net out for the people who need it.

Brian Lehrer: Abby in Greenpoint, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Abby.

Abby: Hi. Hi, Mayor. I'm calling to ask about what you said that there were 200,000 new apartments, but in my neighborhood all of the high-rises, they only allow applying if you earn 130% of the median income, which to me means that you can only get an affordable unit if you make more than the average. Correct me if I'm wrong.

For sure, I'm not eligible to any of those new apartments. In the beginning, some had maybe you could make 80% or 70%, and I could apply to those, but right now, none of the apartments are actually available for lower-income people.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Abby, here's the reality, there are apartments available across neighborhoods, across the city for different income levels, depending on how the building is put together. Any New Yorker can apply for the apartments that fit their income level, anywhere in the city. This process has now been made a lot simpler, you can do it once and put your name in for a variety of places.

You're right to say there are some places where there may be a building that has a certain income level that you may not personally fit, but the fact is, there are more and more options available, including for the lowest-income levels. I want to emphasize, and Brian, this is an important point, we consciously built housing that also included working-class people, middle-class people.

Giving you the obvious example, if a nurse and a firefighter are trying to live in New York City, they make okay money for sure, they make good money, but it's still hard to find a place to live. We want to make sure that working people across the spectrum, can stay here. There are four different income levels, and Abby, you can go, and anyone, all your listeners, Brian, can go to Housing Connect, one word, housingconnect.nyc.gov, and put in one application to start the process that can match you to the kind of housing available for your income level.

Brian Lehrer: There is the question of broadly whether the income levels match the housing that's being built as affordable. I actually was looking into this issue to prepare for this conversation, and the real estate site Curbed in 2019 said you were on track to meet your 200,000, 300,000 goal, but quote, "The Mayor's housing plan has taken heat for building or preserving apartments that are mostly affordable to households with incomes at or above the average for a given neighborhood".

"One Bushwick building, for instance," it says, "Last year offered, 'affordable', apartments for those making between $60,000 and a hundred forty-six thousand dollars annually, but the median household income for the neighborhood was 51,000, below the whole range, according to the NYU Furman Center." That's when Curbed just before the pandemic. How did you set the ratios for what incomes you were targeting? And for that matter, what would you advise Eric Adams on that front?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: That's a great question, Brian. We actually changed the approach at the halfway mark after my first term. When our now Deputy Mayor Vicki Been came in, we reset the scale to move to more lower-income apartments, and also more apartments for seniors because that has been a crucial need. We have some preferences for seniors, we have some preferences for people with disabilities, and those are two communities that there's particular need.

We did move more and more of the activity to lower-income, but I want to emphasize, the new affordable housing, the preserved affordable housing subsidized in place, plus the 400,000 people who live in public housing, plus the over 2 million people who are rent-stabilized and have seen very modest rent increases over the eight years because we recalibrated the approach to be fair.

When you add that all up, you're talking over 3 million people who are reached by one or another of these approaches. All of them, much more powerful approaches to affordable housing than almost anywhere in the country. Well over a third of the population of this city is reached by one or another. Remember, if you're in public housing, it's a very modest percentage of your income. if you're in rent-stabilized housing and the increases are very small, it means you're able to keep going and staying in that apartment, and the apartment is preserved and protected.

You got to take it all in context, but the big answer to your question is, we have pushed the income scale down lower, but I want this to be clear, there's more than one mission. I really believe we have to also protect housing for everyday working New Yorkers. If folks who work and contribute deeply to the city, folks who work with their hands, folks who are public servants, if they can't afford to live here too, that's not fair and it doesn't make sense. We have tried to strike that balance.

Brian Lehrer: Janet in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Janet.

Janet: Hi. My question has to do with those of us who are lucky enough to be in rent-stabilized apartments. I'm a senior citizen, and during COVID I took shelter outside the city. I'm assuming that the residency requirement would be waived for them, but I wonder if it will be going forward.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I want to make sure, and Brian, you can help me or we can ask Janet, when you say the residency requirement being waived, I'm not sure what that means in this case.

Janet: I don't actually know that it is, I'm hoping that it is. My understanding is that in order to keep your rent-stabilized apartment, you have to be in the city more than six months a year.

Brian Lehrer: It has to be your primary residence. I know that landlords will sometimes challenge that to get people out of rent-stabilized apartments if they have a secondary home somewhere. I think he get it, Mr. Mayor, Janet's saying, in the case of COVID, where people went out for a number of months, are they at risk of losing their rent-stabilized departments?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Janet, I take your question very seriously and I appreciate the question, but you're literally the first person in the last two years to ask that question, which is a hopeful sign to me that landlords are treating this respectfully. Obviously, if a senior citizen chose to leave the city for a period of time at the height of COVID, everyone understands that. I have not heard of anyone trying to negatively use that fact against the tenant, but if anybody out there is experiencing that, please call 311. We have an office of Tenant Protection that can work on this immediately.

Obviously, we would provide free legal help. This is something we've done with our right to counsel law, making sure, especially for low-income New Yorkers, they can have free legal help if they're ever faced with illegal eviction. I think that would be fully illegal to say that if someone left temporarily because of COVID they were going to be evicted. I think we would be able to protect that tenant with the city's resources and with the legal help we can provide.

Brian Lehrer: In your first term, I used to interview your Deputy Mayor in charge of housing, Alicia Glen. I think it's fair to say she believed in flooding the city with a lot more housing of all kinds, affordable to the extent that policy could leverage it or the city could afford to subsidize it, but also lots of market-rate just to help supply meet demand. Advocates didn't like that approach and have called for limits on any development that isn't affordable below-market rates. Not just more affordable construction, but less new market-rate construction. How do you see what's right or what's possible there as you leave office?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: That's a great question. Brian, again, thank you for raising the big questions that we really need to think about as a city. We are a growing city, let's start with that. Even in the height of COVID, the census came out with a figure that really should in some ways move and impress all New Yorkers, 8.8 million New Yorkers are now highest population in our history. That comes with a lot of challenges too, but- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: That's up from 8.2 million in the 2010 census. Even if you accomplish your 300,000 new or preserved, the population grew by twice that.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, careful. 300,000 apartments mean 700,000 people on average, but I think it begs the point, what is the vision? This is also a great conversation about, does the city keep growing? Is there some limit that we should think about? I would argue this, realistically. Given the laws of this country and this state and the society we live in, I think it is objectively right to say, first, maximize affordability. Use our tools of government very aggressively, put real restrictions in place.

For example, when we changed some of the tax incentives, like for 421a, we said, "You have to produce affordable housing or you can't get the incentive." We got to do more of that, in fact. When we create mandatory inclusionary housing, we said, "If you want to build higher, you must include affordable or you cannot build higher." I think more muscular laws like that are really helpful, and also just continuing to poor resources into the creation of building and preserving affordable housing.

There's a lot more we can do to meet demand but I do think there's a place for the market as well because in truth if you keep building housing, it's not all going to be luxury housing. A lot of it will be for middle class and working-class people too and you think about the locations all over the city where a new housing is being built including by the market. It is true if you keep building you will have some ability to reduce price or at least keep prices stable.

I don't think there has to be a dichotomy, but I do think it begins with the first point. In the Bloomberg years, it was very laissez-faire. It was a very market-friendly, developer-friendly approach. We tried to reign that in aggressively. I think there's more that can be done on top of it. I wouldn't negate the market, I would continue to put real measures in place to make sure the market is producing what we need.

Brian Lehrer: Ben in Brooklyn as we take a landlord call talking about housing during 8 years of Mayor de Blasio's terms Ben, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Ben: Yes. Hello. I'm in the affordable housing business as a matter of fact. I did want to comment on some of what's been said.

Brian Lehrer: When you say you're in the affordable housing business, is that mean you're a landlord who has went stabilized apartments? What do you mean?

Ben: That's correct. My biggest operating expense is taxes and we've lived with very low rent increases while taxes have risen rather high. Now, the fed has announced a policy of a target inflation rate of 2%. Now, if you apply that to my business, the tenants who have had increases of zero or 1% over the last several years at the end of 10 years, their rent will have gone up 10%, let's say if the inflation is used as a measure. But my expenses will go up at 2%. At the end of 10 years, my expenses are going to be 20% higher than they are now. This is all as I see it a formula for the destruction of affordable housing in the nonsubsidized area. That's pretty much my comment that I see current housing regulations as a disaster for housing in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Look I take to heart the underlying point that Ben is making and I've had this conversation with a lot of building owners who have rent-stabilized units. There is a balance that has to be struck. I think it was absolutely right to rework the approach of the rent guidelines board, which I think for too many years very much lean to higher rent increases. It looked at the landlord's costs without taking in my view all of the facts into consideration.

I think that was the right thing to do to rebalance the equation but we got to constantly rebalance the equation and there is a problem for landlords have a legitimate problem expenses have gone up and he's making a good point about inflation dynamics and how you balance all of these pieces. I'd say a couple of things. One, you cannot have a situation where landlords cannot invest in their own buildings and keep up their buildings. We all want affordability, but we don't want to see buildings fail and we don't want to see tenants not get services and proper building maintenance.

I'd say one is to look at the laws in Albany and look at anything that can be done to address that because there was reform and there can continue to be tweaks and improvements. Then think about what are the right levels of increases going forward that matched the reality. I'm very glad we rebalanced the equation but it's not static. We have to keep working with it and this is a legitimate concern. We have to have buildings kept up well for the good of everyone.

Brian Lehrer: How would you describe the politics of housing as mayor over the last year eight years? On the one hand, you have the real estate developers and landlord groups like the Rent Stabilization Association, which exists to abolish rent stabilization and they always make the argument that Ben made that if you stabilize rents, it's going to lead to destabilize rents. On the other hand, you have the affordable housing advocates who don't like a lot of what you've done with zoning when it lets a lot more market-rate units be built along with a percentage of affordable. Of course, all sides are exerting whatever pressure they can. How would you describe the politics of affordable housing and managing different groups trying to have power?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It's a fantastic question, I'd say this. One, we got to be clear in a city of 8.8 million people with extraordinarily complex realities and competing interest. Balance really is the thing a leader has to strike. It's not take the policy of the Rent Stabilization Association or take the policy of any advocacy group and accepted wholesale. It's, "Look at what's going to keep things moving forward." I believe all the affordable housing policies we talked about a few minutes back, including the approach to the rent guidelines board, has rebalanced the equation.

The equation used to be very much over-weighted to developers and landlords, and the Rent Stabilization Association used to have massive power at City Hall. Now we've got a situation where the politics of the city is much more based in communities. It is much more based in working-class communities in the outer boroughs. That's who elected me, that's who elected Eric Adams. I think once upon a time I heard this from leaders of the previous generation, their assumption was developers and landlords control the city government.

We have fundamentally broken that, and that's very very healthy. That said we can also acknowledge that sometimes there are folks in the private sector who has really good points that have to be addressed because we need rent-stabilized housing to work for people. It's not just a Black and white thing. If landlords legitimately are struggling to keep up their buildings we've got to figure out what to do. You look at the tax issues, look at the regulation issues and figure out what strikes that balance, but always while protecting affordability.

Affordability used to be thrown out the window. Remember, there was vacancy decontrol. There was all sorts of things that happened in the last few decades that were wildly pro-developer, pro-landlord. Those have now been reigned in and rebalanced. I think that gives the next administration a much better starting point to figure out how to keep housing affordable in this city.

Brian Lehrer: I saw your social services commissioner, Steven Banks on New York 1 last night, looking pretty good with the numbers he was giving and which the host, Lewis Dodley, seemed to largely accept that before the pandemic you had gotten the homeless population down roughly from 53,000 when you started to 46,000 through a combination of housing for homeless people and prevention of new homelessness. The perception of so many New Yorkers is that street homelessness and subway homelessness were rising steadily during your administration. How do you square that perception with any reality that you might say is better than people think?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I understand the perception, I really do. The perception is part we are all pained and rightfully when we see anyone homeless. Sometimes it's someone panhandling who has a home, honestly, but a lot of times it really is someone who's homeless, and that hurts, it's wrong. It doesn't sit anything we all believe. Also, as the city and sometimes the last two years felt more deserted and the subways felt more deserted but there were still homeless individuals that it loomed very large for people, they felt it even more.

But the facts do matter. The number of people in shelter has gone down markedly, it's well below the number when I came into office. You're right, that is because we did anti-eviction legal services. We did write to council, we created a whole lot more affordable housing. We got about 170,000 folks who were in shelter to affordable housing, out of shelter to affordable housing. Street homelessness is down according to the Federal Government's annual count, but we have more to do.

The one silver lining, and I've been self-critical on this issue, Brian, I think there were things I missed in the beginning and things I should have done better but when we finally got the formula right in the last three-four years, we now see the ability to get homeless people off the streets through very intensive outreach. Very humane, decent outreach getting them to smaller homier facilities called not the big shelters, but the safe-havens. That is getting a lot more people off the street and we're also finding that once they're off the street, they're staying off the street.

They're accepting if they need substance abuse treatment, if they need mental health support, whatever it is, and now we're getting people to supportive housing where they can stay long-term with services. We're far from out of the woods, but I think we have the formula more than we've ever had in the history of the city of what works and what can change. The numbers are actually going down.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. Looking forward, and we're going to give this question to a tweet that just came in from the Legal Aid Society. It says, "Tish James, Jumaane Williams, and others, have recently reaffirmed the need for Albany to enact good cause, which is legislation to afford New Yorkers and unregulated units basic tenant protections." I think it's a rent stabilization for people who aren't in stabilized units, if that's a fair interpretation of it. Legal Aid asked, "Does Mayor de Blasio support this critical bill?" Obviously, the context here is you might join Jumaane Williams and Tish James as a candidate for governor.

Mayor de Blasio: Yes. If I make that decision, I'm going to be speaking to the details of a wide range of policies. The underlying concepts, as I understand legislation, I cannot tell you I've read every word of it, but as I understand it, the underlying concepts I have a lot of sympathy for, I'm not sure I agree with all the mechanics of it. That's one where I'm going to reserve the right if I take on a new identity, if you will, to speak to the specifics then.

I will say that anyone who is being evicted inappropriately anywhere in the city, that's a problem still, and I want to figure out what are the tools that stop inappropriate evictions. The most powerful one I know is what we did with right to counsel, it's been emulated all over the country. Gives people a lawyer, if they can't afford it, give it to them for free. That has had a massive impact on keeping people who rightfully deserve to be in their home, right where they belong, and they get to stay. That's my focus, but I will definitely say more on this law in the weeks ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to say anything specific about your reservations about good cause as it's written?

Mayor de Blasio: I think it's the balance point again. We got to be clear, and I think it's really important to recognize there's bigger landlords, there's smaller landlords, there's a lot of community-based landlords who have only a few buildings, or one building, small building, who are in many cases working-class people themselves. We got to be careful about understanding the different types of realities, and we've got to make sure that the standards are legitimate. Meaning, if someone really does deserve to stay in their apartment, they should, but we got to also be clear that sometimes there are tenants who don't do the right thing, and what is that balance. That's what I'm looking for as I evaluate the law.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Two more Ask The Mayor's to go. Next Friday and the Friday after that we'll continue to do big picture conversations now that we've done education on a previous show and housing today. I think we're going to do public safety next Friday, Mr. Mayor, so thanks for these and I'll talk to you then.

Mayor de Blasio: Thanks so much, Brian.

 

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