Mayor Eric Adams: Good to see you. Thank you so much. And I am really proud to stand side by side with Speaker Adams to begin to right some of the wrongs in the history of our city. For decades, outdated regulations have contributed to housing discrimination and inequality. We've often ignored it and wondered why we could not really integrate our city is because our housing stock was not integrated in the right way.
And for far too long we have let restrictive laws and zoning rules keep us from building the housing we need. And just think about the 1961 zoning resolution which set the stage for decades of dysfunction and discrimination. We can no longer lose sight of the fact that many of those who pushed for that resolution aimed to promote racial segregation.
We have to be honest about it, and we need to move towards the future with a different mindset. And that is what we're doing. They have succeeded in the past and we're going to succeed now.
In addition to enabling discrimination, these outdated zoning laws have ultimately limited growth. Former councilman and now in charge of Planning for us, Dan Garodnick, he talks about it all the time how it just limited our ability to grow throughout the city. And we need to grow. We have an inventory problem that must resolve the issues around those who cannot find housing.
Restricted new housing is just a few areas of our city with the mindset of the past and contributing to the housing crisis we're still facing now. I'm sure the speaker would tell you, everywhere we go throughout the city people are talking about housing, housing, housing. And when you have such a large homeless population, we have to build more to house more.
So, today we have two leaders of this city of color — both the speaker and myself as the mayor — we have a Working People's Agenda and we are helping to end the era of injustice. And this bill, Intro. 1031‑A, requires city agencies to create and submit a fair housing assessment and plan every five years so we won't remain stagnant, we will continue to move forward.
The bill also recognizes that we must change the way we build housing, making it more abundant and affordable, ensure that New Yorkers have access to the housing they need and take us one step closer to a fairer, more just New York City. And our administration is doing all we can to address this housing crisis and build more affordable housing.
Just last year alone, in partnership with the City Council, we built more supportive housing, homes for formerly homeless and homes for extremely low‑income New Yorkers than ever before in our city's history. We eliminated the 90‑day shelter rule and connected more New Yorkers to permanent homes with CityFHEPS vouchers than any year since the program's creation.
And when you look towards Willets Point with 2,500 new homes, all affordable, New York City's largest 100 percent affordable housing project in 40 years, it shows how with our partners in government and our partners in our various unions, how we could get it done.
And I'm really excited to see my friend Manny that's here, president of the 32BJ, Mike from Local 79 the Laborers, and all of our partners that are here in government: Deputy Mayor Maria Torres‑Springer, Adolfo Carrión, commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development and our City Planning commissioner, who really has a vision towards building towards the future, Dan Garodnick.
So, this is an important time to sign an important bill, and I know that together with the council we continue to expand our housing inventory and ensure that we build more, build better and build affordable. And so I cannot say how much we appreciate the support from the speaker as well as making sure the council passed the City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality as well.
So, I'm looking forward to continuing our work, continuing to build for our city, and I'm going to now turn it over to the Speaker Adrienne Adams. Speaker. Thank you.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams: Thank you very much, Mayor Adams. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. I am so glad to be here with Mayor Adams today for this important bill signing; and I, too, want to thank the advocates and labor unions here who worked with us along the way to develop this bill and build support for it.
Manny Pasterick and Candis Tall of 32BJ SEIU, Mike McGuire of the Mason Tenders District Council Laborers Local 79 and everyone here from the union. Rachel Fee of The New York Housing Conference, ANHD, Churches United for Fair Housing, Make the Road New York, Community Service Society, Pratt Center for Community Development, Regional Plan Association, Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association and dozens of other organizations. We're also joined by the New York State Association of Affordable Housing and Open New York. Thank you for being here.
I am so thrilled. Our representation comes with the responsibility to prioritize the needs of New Yorkers and communities that have been overlooked for too long. I want to give a special thanks to our council's leaders on housing for their leadership and collaboration on this bill, including Housing and Buildings Chair Pierina Sanchez, Land Use Chair Rafael Salamanca and Zoning and Franchises Chair Kevin Reily.
And I want to thank again Mayor Adams for signing this bill today, and his administration's partnership in confronting the city's housing crisis. I'm so proud that this legislation passed unanimously with support from every corner of our diverse city. The breadth of support demonstrates the scale of the crisis we're facing and that the council understands the importance of addressing it together.
So, whether the ongoing housing crisis, our city's top priority must be to develop more affordable housing. While these changes won't happen overnight, I'm proud to say that we are actively building towards a future where New Yorkers can afford to raise their families in our city, long‑time residents can afford to remain in their neighborhoods, and our constituents can afford to put a little more of their money away rather than spending excessive amounts of their paychecks on housing.
We know that housing is a key determinant of health and safety and one of the best ways we can help secure stability of New Yorkers. It is our responsibility as a government to provide these opportunities for residents to thrive.
There are many solutions we can pursue to address the housing crisis, among them is ensuring that we boost housing production in an equitable way so that every community does their part to produce and preserve affordable housing. That is what the Fair Housing Framework helps promote. This legislation sets local housing targets based on equity and our city's needs with real affordability as a priority.
It also addresses the disparities in housing production and investments across neighborhoods. We know that every community is different and housing needs vary across income, age and other demographics, but some neighborhoods with abundant access to infrastructure and amenities like open space, thriving schools and public transit have not produced enough housing units.
As a result, too many neighborhoods have been able to opt out of building affordable housing while others have shouldered more of the responsibility and deserve greater investments. This leaves too many New Yorkers out of a real chance at stable housing, and by establishing housing production targets, we're setting the expectation that every district must equitably contribute to addressing the housing crisis.
The Fair Housing Framework is the centerpiece of my housing agenda, which is focused on shifting our cultural norms and expectations on housing. A crisis like ours requires that we all contribute to a greater housing production. We started to shift how the council approaches equitable housing development by making clear that we are most successful when all stakeholders work together and all of us contribute to solving the housing crisis. This has led the council to approve many projects that the mayor mentioned that will produce thousands of units of which 67 percent are affordable.
This includes projects that no one believed we could bring to the finish line, like Innovation QNS, the largest… And we chuckle, the largest private affordable housing project in the history of Queens. Many of these projects go beyond affordable housing development to create opportunities for community investments through open public space, community facilities like senior and youth centers and commercial spaces for nonprofits and small businesses.
By treating housing as a part of an ecosystem that can help generate new growth, we are better able to utilize housing as a tool to invest holistically in the strength of our neighborhoods. Yet, we of course know that so much more is needed to truly confront this housing crisis. We have to produce more housing, and that requires leadership, effective and honest communication and our coming together collectively to recognize that the challenges our city faces are ones for all of us to solve.
Homeownership is also critical to providing housing opportunity. It's what allowed my family to stay rooted in southeast Queens. We were able to build equity and security for ourselves and our future generations who are still thriving in southeast Queens. Yet, what was possible for my parents then is often out of reach today for others' parents.
Over the years, it's become increasingly difficult for people to access homeownership in our city, leading many working and middle class families to leave for more affordable options. This is why we advocate to protect and expand homeownership opportunities for New Yorkers.
Over the past two years, the council passed several bills and secured budget investments to assist homeowners. I was proud to stand with Mayor Adams in my own district last year to announce the creation of 16 new and rehabilitated homes for affordable homeownership through a partnership with HPD, NYCHA and Habitat. It was a cold morning and it was snowing outside, too.
It was one of the first new construction of affordable homes where land was transferred to the Interboro Community Land Trust to ensure long‑term affordability. There's more work to do to ensure homeownership is attainable to New Yorkers, and the council will continue to uplift this as a priority as we seek to confront our city's housing crisis.
Permanent affordable housing is how we can achieve safety in our communities. It's also how we can break cycles of homelessness, poverty and recidivism experienced by too many communities. By investing in equitable housing production, we can ease the stressors that worsen some of our city's other challenges.
At the end of the day, the Fair Housing Framework is about building more housing in a fair way and uplifting New Yorkers working families across the five boroughs have a real chance at building their legacy in the city. This is the reality that New Yorkers deserve and one that the council is determined to realize through our Fair Housing Framework and other efforts.
This legislation has been a long time coming, and I thank all of those who are here: the council staff who work to bring it to life, my colleagues in the council for passing it, and, the mayor for signing it today. Thank you very much.
Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.
Mayor Adams: How are you?
Question: I want to ask about housing at the state level. If I'm not mistaken you didn't exactly come out last [inaudible] this past year in support of the governor's mandates that she was proposing. Are you concerned at all that she is apparently not really proposing her own housing plan this year and do you have any expectations or hopes for what the legislature will come up with?
Mayor Adams: It's not that I didn't get what I wanted, the people of the city didn't get what they've been calling for. As I stated, I'm pretty sure the speaker would tell you, when you move around the city, that is one of the top agenda, housing.
And I had a very fruitful conversation this morning with the governor who clearly understands how imperative it is for us to get a real housing agenda moved forward, and she's excited about doing so as well. And we're going to make sure we speak with our colleagues in Albany to get it done.
Question: I want to ask a question about housing overall, and I guess mainly for, it's directed towards the deputy mayor. I know, and you might not think it's on topic, but it is. One of the casino proposals under Mets owner Steve Cohen, it's to redevelop 50 acres of city‑owned land to build this casino. It's right across from the Willets Point project. But this doesn't include any housing.
So, I wanted to know, you know, given the scarcity of available developable land in New York City and the need for housing in a district like Corona and Flushing, do you think it's a wasted opportunity for the city to even kind of go down a road of potentially building a casino on city‑owned land when there's no housing attached to it? Would that be a conversation you have?
And I know Mr. Cohen's a large donor for the mayor and there have been some conversations about that. I just don't know, I know your office is kind of the lead on this when it was proposed. I don't know if there's any communication about adding housing to a project like that or just figuring out a way to make it more community-minded?
Deputy Mayor Maria Torres‑Springer, Housing, Economic Development and Workforce: Thank you for your question, Katie. Here's what I'll say, that the commitment of this mayor and our speaker to building housing everywhere in the city is really strong.
I'm glad you mentioned Willets Point. As the mayor mentioned, that is 2,500 units, fully affordable, building a whole new neighborhood. And you see us doing that by reforming all of the ways that zoning, for example, through the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity prevents us from building housing, you see that in the five neighborhood plans that we have launched together with the City Council, you see that in record affordable housing production from Department of Housing, Preservation and Development. And we want to see that everywhere.
The various casino proposals, as you might know, that process is a state‑run process. We want to make sure that we're setting a level playing field here in the city so that the applications that come from the city are not disadvantaged together with all other downstate applications because in a time when we want to make sure that we continue to recover and grow jobs in the city various casino projects are a source of good union jobs.
And so we're working with all of the applicants, but at the end of the day that is a state‑run process and to the extent that there are any developers for profit or not for profit that want to talk to us about building more housing, we are all ears. Because the crisis the city faces in terms of housing has gone on for too long, and it'll take really coordinated action like what you're seeing here today to make a dent.
Question: I just wanted to follow up. Mr. Mayor, you said you talked to the governor earlier today. I want to know, did you talk to her about possibly pursuing something similar to 421-a, is that something that's at the top of the priority list for both of you? Did she seem open to that, something she can successfully get through the legislature this time [inaudible].
Mayor Adams: I don't want to go into the details of a private conversation that we had, but I will tell you this. We both know that we have to build our way out of the crisis. And we are willing to sit down with the lawmakers, our unions, developers. We want to get everyone in the room, because everyone agrees that we have to build more.
The most important issue and conversation we must have is the inventory conversation, that is something that has been left out. And we want to make sure everyone knows we have to build more and find ways to do it. And she's excited about doing that, and I left the room with her optimistic that we can get it done if we have our partners together.
Question: Mr. Mayor or Madam Speaker, there are swaths in the city that basically exempted themselves from any new housing construction under a series of provisions in Landmark Preservation and a whole host of others. What does this legislation or what does the City of Yes package do to change that? Why does my neighborhood get to say no more housing and it's legally allowed to, why does, you know, the West Village get to say no more housing and it's legally allowed to.
Speaker Adams: I'll take my piece and then you can take your piece. Thank you, Nolan.
The Fair Housing Framework deals with equitability across the board. So, what this legislation aims to do is kind of like the anti situation that you just laid out. This is to make sure that there's equity across the board. So, the legislation and the council is going to be looking at who has been bearing the brunt pretty much for the city when it comes to building housing and who has pretty much opted out of building.
So, we are going to take a hard look. We're going to continue to consult with our members. We're going to continue to partner with our communities even on a more stronger level than we have before. Communities have been complaining for years that they have not been able to sit at the table where decisions have been brought to them and placed to them because they feel that others know better for them in their communities, and that's just not the case.
So, we hope that by bringing all of these things together collectively that we can get out of that pattern that you just described in your question and that we can move forward with equitability that everybody understands.
Question: The city's housing deficit is like you'd have to build 350,000 units a year for the city's housing market to function. Even with the City of Yes package, you can get that number but it's not… Sorry, by decade, not by year. The City of Yes package gets it from about 200,000 per decade up to 250,000 per decade. There's a 100,000 unit gap that's still there. How do you close it?
Mayor Adams: Well, I think that… And Dan, I want you to come and talk about what our plan is on really looking at, as the Speaker said, some of the historical inequities and what our plan is in doing that. And deputy mayor, you could talk about some of the things we're going to do as well.
Deputy Mayor Torres‑Springer: I'll turn it over to Dan in a second, because I think it's important, your question, Nolan, about the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity because the dynamic that you mentioned where neighborhoods are frozen in place; and in many ways, the 1961 zoning resolution, it's frozen in place. And that's just untenable given this housing crisis. So, the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity both for high‑density and low‑density districts really seeks to change that, and Dan will talk about it.
But when we released the moonshot about a year ago — 500,000 new units over the course of the next decade — that's what we believe is needed to keep up with population growth, to keep up with job growth. And what we said at the time, and it continues to be the plan today, is that we need to build faster, we need to build everywhere and we need to build together.
So, the faster part is part of the Get Stuff Built Report, the 111 reforms to accelerate the production, because the process, environmental review, land use and permitting, way too slow. We've implemented more than 20 of the 111.
The build everywhere is what Dan is going to talk about, The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, it also includes the five neighborhood plans, tens of thousands of new units of housing made possible because of those rezonings.
And then the bill together, to the mayor's point about working with colleagues in Albany, we're doing everything that we can locally and that we need to, but we need the help of our colleagues and partners in Albany. They must be partners in this mission.
And we've been clear about what those tools look like to boost rental production, like the replacement tax incentive lifting of an artificial cap that allows us to have more density in parts of the city and also the ability to convert offices into residential but in ways that allow those conversions to happen and where we get affordability.
But Dan, why don't you talk about City of Yes for Housing Opportunity?
Dan Garodnick, Director, Department of City Planning: Thank you very much. And before I do, let me just note that I think that this is a really important marriage of proposals between what we're seeing today, what the speaker introduced and the council passed and what the mayor's just signed, and the proposal for City of Yes for Housing Opportunity. Because the speaker and the council have said now very clearly that we cannot abide by the status quo and that we need to see more housing throughout the city.
And that is precisely what the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposals is designed to do, a little bit more housing everywhere. Today and last year we saw, we have 59 community boards, nine of them created as much housing as the other 50 combined. And when we see challenges of housing scarcity like we do, there are real human costs. And the costs are obvious, they relate to the price of rent, gentrification, displacement, homelessness, the imbalance of power between landlords and tenants in New York City.
And people are making that connection now in a way that they have not before. The governor's making it, the mayor is making it, the speaker is making it, the City Council is making it. So, our proposal is one that allows for growth throughout the entire city. A modest amount of growth throughout an entire wide geography will, in the aggregate, result in a significant amount of housing together.
We have proposals for low‑density districts which include town center zoning, modest missing middle apartment buildings above commercial strips. We have transit oriented development, opportunities on qualified sites to build more housing, again, three to five story apartment buildings on qualified sites near transit.
We want to enable accessory dwelling units. We want to give homeowners more flexibility to be able to make good decisions for their families that are growing. And of course, in medium and high density districts we have an opportunity for a bonus for all affordable housing much like we have for senior affordable housing today. Office conversions, smaller units, campus size, campus opportunities for churches, other stakeholders that have development rights but can't use them today.
This is a significant package that we believe will be important for the next 10 years but also the next 80 years. And we know that some of the changes that the state questions about tax incentives, et cetera, they will come, they will go. Zoning is for an extended period of time. So, real credit to the mayor for being very, very clear about the need to do this; and of course, to the speaker for introducing this bill, which really sets the stage for the proposal.