Transcript: Mayor Adams Most Pro-Housing Administration in City History: Mayor Adams’ Administration Shatters Affordable Housing Records (Again)

August 1, 2025

James Giovan: Hi, everyone. Good morning. My name is James. And I am so excited to be here today to celebrate affordable housing. Can we get a round of applause for affordable housing? Thank you. I was born and raised here in New York City. And I have always dreamt of being able to make it here on my own. That meant getting my own place, setting up my own apartment, embarking on my own life. 

I wasn't sure if it would happen. Frankly, I wasn't sure if it could happen anymore. But then, last year, I got that email I had been waiting for. I'd been chosen for an affordable home. Yay. I could not have asked for a better location. Being so close to Yankee Stadium is very convenient. The irony, though, is that I'm not a Yankees fan. No shade to Yankees fans, though. I am just not a sports guy, to be honest. Y'all were expecting me to say I was a Mets fan. But no shade. 

What I am a huge fan of, though, is living very close to my family. In my new building, the gym is helping me to hit my fitness goals. The shorter commute to work is helping me create more time for myself and the opportunity to decorate my own place is helping me to express my personality in ways big and small. From the Subway-inspired antique gumball machine, to vintage board games, from the wall art to my house plants, it really is a home. 

It's a place to spend time, relax, and be myself. It's a reminder that you can still make it here in New York City. I understand we have some tenants moving in today. Congratulations. Give a round of applause to our incoming tenants in this beautiful building. 

So after a year of living in affordable housing myself, I wanted to offer them some advice. First, make the place your own. Find the art, posters, and pieces that remind you it isn't just a place to sleep. It is a place to live. Secondly, enjoy everything your neighborhood has to offer. Find the bar where you'll grab a drink with friends, the store where you'll shop for your groceries, and the park where you'll go for a walk. Whether you've lived there in that neighborhood your entire life or just moved to the block, take advantage of everything you can here. 

And finally, pay it forward. Tell others about your success and encourage people to apply for Housing Connect lotteries, too, because after all, you have to be in it to win it. Apply for those Housing Connects. There are stories like mine all across New York City in buildings like this one and across the five boroughs. They're a reminder that our city can still do big things and can still make a difference in people's lives. 

Thank you to all of the housing agencies who helped get me here, and on that note, I am very excited to welcome up the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. Thank you.

Mayor Eric Adams: You should be the poster person for our announcement. Very well said, and I still believe it's true. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, and we see that every day. Job well done, deputy mayor and your entire team over at HPD as we roll out Housing Week, and just really excited about what we have done year after year after year. 

When he was the commissioner of HPD, he had an awesome task. The mission was clear that we need to put New Yorkers into housing, and we came into office three years ago with an affordable housing crisis that we were facing, and so we knew we had to put the best team together, and that best team is not the Yankees or the Mets, it's HPD. 

And we did not need studies. We did not need blue-ribbon commissions. We did not need polls. We didn't need any of that stuff. We heard it every day from working-class New Yorkers, housing, housing, housing. Those were the two top issues that we heard in 2022 when we came into office, public safety and housing, public safety and housing, and we knew we had to meet it head-on and actually go together, because whenever someone comes to New York, they ask the question, how safe is the area, and how affordable are the homes that they're moving into? 

New Yorkers were sharing this with us, and we heard it in barbershops and supermarkets, on the trains, no matter where we would travel to or walk to, in our town halls, the conversation was the same, and we knew that we can do better in the city, and I knew it firsthand as a young man growing up on the edge of homelessness. I know how important housing was. 

I remember the fear every time I would turn the corner, thinking that that van was going to be there to move our family out, and we would not have a place to stay, and so this was not just professional. It was personal. It was personal for me and so many others. Deputy Mayor Carrión would share his story all the time of their housing journey with his family, making it here in this great city.

And so we put an ambitious plan in place of 500,000 new homes over a decade. Three years later, three years later, we are now doing exactly what we committed to do. We are ahead of schedule, but we are delivering real hope to New Yorkers, and so today, I'm proud to announce that thanks to our administration, tireless efforts so far to increase the city housing supply, we have already created, preserved, or planned for approximately 426,800 homes for New Yorkers. 

The goal was 500,000, and you see how far we have come. We are really pleased with this number. That's 426,800 homes for now, or we'll soon have a roof over their heads for New Yorkers that would have it now, or soon would have a roof over their heads and a place to sleep at night. 

This wasn't done by ticking around the edges. We had a laser focus on the city's housing supply and the city's housing supply, we had a laser focus, aggressive plan, and people told us it was not possible, but we knew we had to succeed because residents were dependent on it, and we have been shattering affordable housing records year after year after year. 

Now, we're adding another year to that list, Fiscal Year 2025. Over the last fiscal year, our agency produced nearly 34,000 homes for New Yorkers, including the most affordable rental units in city history, the most affordable rental units in city history. For the third year in a row, we produced the most affordable homes for formerly homeless New Yorkers. We had Shams DaBaron on our back. Sham was a constant presence at city hall. You know, I thought he was the deputy mayor, Shams DaBaron, I used to see him so much. 

We placed the most homeless New Yorkers into affordable housing and connected the most New Yorkers to housing through the city housing lottery. We are now clear on our mission, and we will continue that mission forward. We have just shattered records after records after records, and we're shattering them again and again and again. 

We're beating our own records over and over again as we move forward, and this is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of our administration's work. We invested a record $26 billion into affordable housing through HPD, and what we didn't do that previous administrations did, we didn't leave out NYCHA, where it was. That's right. 

We made sure NYCHA was included in this. We cut red tape and made it easier to build housing and infrastructure, appointed incredible leaders like the one standing with me today, the team over at HPD just had a laser focus. Even with dealing with staffing, a lot of folks did not want to come back to work after COVID-19, but they did not say, what was me? They said, why not me? And they got it done. I cannot thank this team enough over at HPD. 

We took on decades of dysfunctions, got rid of outdated zoning and opened the door to tens of thousands of new homes with the City of Yes. When everyone was saying no, we were saying yes, and we got it done. Most comprehensive housing reform in the history of the city. 60 years in the making. We did it in three and a half years, and that is really an amazing accomplishment. 

We put forward five neighborhood plans to create even more homes. 50,000 units, I believe, are coming out of those neighborhood plans. What do I do to get a HPD hat? It's all about the cap. It's all about the cap. You know? And there's a way to wear it. You got to, you know.

We created ways to turn city-owned land into much-needed housing. Huge, huge effort on our part. So much of our city land was sitting dormant, and we turned it into housing. Flushing Airport, major accomplishment, city owned land, sat there back from 1984. My first— I was a rookie cop and that land was sitting there empty and now we're turning it into housing and an open space. 

Won a historic housing deal in Albany thanks to the governor. So if any governor states they don't have an input in housing, they're wrong because Governor Hochul partnered with us and we got it done. And then a landmark project over at Willets Point. What we accomplished there at the start of the administration, the buildings are going up, people will be moving in soon and we're just getting started. 

This week alone, as part of Housing Week, we unveiled a historic plan to turn an abandoned airfield, as I stated, into 3,000 new homes. That's Flushing Airport. We implemented new policies to build more family size units and senior housing and improve the lives of seniors. We broke housing records for the third fiscal year and we're not even done. We have more to announce later today on affordable housing. 

I don't know how many times we have to say it, this is the most pro-housing administration in the history of the city and we're building affordable housing in the process. So the numbers don't lie. 426,800 families will have or will soon be connected to housing and we know that home is more than just a roof. It's a place where the American dream comes alive and too many people were living in a nightmarish reality that they did not have a home. We are stopping that. 

Job well done, the entire team. Thank you all for coming out. I want to turn it over to the Aaron Judge of the team, Adolfo Carrión.

Deputy Mayor Adolfo Carrión, Housing, Economic Development, and Workforce: Thank you, mayor. What a way to top off housing week in New York City. We started the week with the announcements that the mayor shared and today we talk about the incredible performance of this team behind us. All of the dedicated public servants that lean in every day to make sure that we continue to make New York City the best city in the world to raise a family. That's what it's all about. 

So I have a lot of thank yous and a lot of reasons to celebrate, but I want to first thank our hosts here at Shepherd Glenmore Building and developers. I want to thank HousingPlus Solutions and their chief operating officer, Rebecca Chatterham. I want to thank Spatial Equity Company and their executive director, Teg Sethi. You can give them a round of applause. All right, Teddy. He's back there hiding. 

So I will share some words of gratitude about certain individuals and the organizations they represent, but I want to start by saying that obviously this is not our first rodeo. We've been down this road before, but today I really want to take a moment to go deeper into the numbers, not just because 426,800 homes is larger than anything you've ever heard before, and not just because we're being more transparent about our city's housing production than ever before, but because we've never shared this number publicly until now. 

I want to dig in because every single one of these units translates into a home, a family that will sleep easier knowing they have a stable roof over their head and good prospects for the future. So let's dive in for a second. Here's the reality. Our vacancy rate is the lowest it's been in over 50 years at 1.4 percent, and the demand for housing continues to grow. 

You know, people really like New York City. You've heard the mayor say there's two kinds of people, right? You can fill in the rest. So that demand continues to grow. People continue to arrive. Our population continues to grow, but over the last three and a half years, through our investments, our programs, and our plans, the Adams administration has laid the groundwork for nearly 426,800 homes across the entire city, and it's important that you get this. At a minimum, at the very least, 250,000 of those homes will be affordable housing, a quarter of a million homes affordable housing. 

So how did we get there? First, we created more than 95,000 new homes, and that includes affordable units financed directly by HPD, NHDC, and created by tax exemption programs like 421-A, which we've heard a lot about, the new 421-A, now 485-X, or 467-M. These numbers get really boring. Which is really the office to residential conversion authority and legislation that we fought for, that the mayor fought for, and our team fought for.

And for the first time it includes market rate units that were created because of those same tax exemption programs, as well as units under construction that used the city's office accelerator program. You could read about that, as the mayor likes to say, Google it. 

Second, we preserved nearly 134,700 homes. That includes traditional preservation programs, as well as the New York City Housing Authority's PACT and comprehensive modernization deals, but it also includes programs like another number that everybody's heard, J-51, which assists privately owned apartment buildings to improve the conditions without passing the cost on to the tenants and keeping housing affordable. 

And Unlocking Doors, which is a home ownership program, these programs haven't historically been counted in HPD's work because they don't come with the capital A, affordable housing distinction. But, they're just as critical to ensuring New York is more affordable and reflects real investments and efforts by our team to stabilize existing housing largely affordable. 

Number three, and maybe my personal favorite, as a city planner, we planned for almost 200,000 homes, 197,000 homes. This includes, as the mayor said, City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, our neighborhood rezonings, housing requests for proposals where we invite the private sector, non-profit organizations to come with their ideas, their energy, and their creativity to partner with us. 

The New York City Housing Authority trusts voting sites where tenants have selected to enter the program, understanding that there is no hope of federal funding coming any time soon or in the foreseeable future. And so many more. Unlocking opportunities in a city where space is scarce takes incredible effort, and I'm so proud of the intentional work our teams have done to make this possible. 

More detail will be shared in the press release that should already be in the inboxes of all the reporters and the technical briefing that's coming later this afternoon where you're going to be able to do your rapid fire questions about what the heck does all this mean for real. 

In all my years in public service at every level of government, I have never seen, mayor, momentum like this in any administration, and I've been around the block a little bit. You know, I go back to working for the city in the early 1980s, so it's been a little bit of a journey. 

The data proves it. In just three years under Mayor Adams' leadership, we hold each of the top three years for nearly every category of housing production, including affordable rental units, units for formerly homeless households, new construction units, and supportive housing units. And we're not just financing future housing, we're getting people into homes today, holding the top three years for connecting more New Yorkers to affordable homes and placing homeless individuals into permanent affordable housing. 

If there were gold, silver, and bronze medals for new construction of affordable housing, this administration would sweep the podium. We have done it. Give yourselves a big round of applause. Thank you.

I know I'm taking a little longer than normal. I usually speak briefly, but it's our day. It's like the Housing Academy Awards, you know? So I want to especially point out, you know, the mayor talked about NYCHA being included for the first time in the housing reports and the housing efforts and the housing announcements and the housing package and measuring the success. 

Well, NYCHA preserved 5,434 homes through the PACT program. And the Department of Social Services, which is with us here today, supported 16,200 households in moving out of shelter and into permanent housing. 

Again, this work is intentional. There is focus. There is intentionality in this. By investing billions of dollars, of capital dollars, cutting bureaucratic red tape, advocating for state legislation, securing zoning changes, using city-owned land, and advancing neighborhood plans across the city, we are leaving no stone unturned. 

And I want to say thank you to the many teams who have made this possible, spearheaded by this amazing group of leaders. First and foremost, a huge thank you to the executive director of Housing at City Hall, the person who makes it all happen, Leila Bozorg. As they say in the Bronx, you go, girl. She's terrific. She keeps me pretty steady. 

I want to thank the guy who picked up the torch. He's not only a great public servant, a terrific leader, and my friend, Ahmed Tigani, acting commissioner at the Department of Housing [Preservation and Development]. My brother. The irrepressible, inimitable, Kim Darga, deputy commissioner for Development. We give her a lot of headaches, a lot of headaches. And her team is like, what? Wait, what? Again? It's like, yeah, the mayor said keep pushing forward, and I'm the messenger. You're going to have to shoot at me. 

But they perform. They come back every time and hit it out of the park, to keep the analogy going, that the mayor started. And the entire HPD team, it's truly a whole of agency response in order to do the work of this magnitude. There are people who are not seen. They're housed at 120 Broadway. They do the oxygen for these. They provide the oxygen for these deals, and it's the folks at the Housing Development Corporation. They are our bankers. Thank you, Ruth Moreira. Where are you, Ruth? You go, girl. 

Ruth Moreira and Eric Enderlin. My dear friend, fellow golfer, she keeps getting it on in regulation and two-putting every time. Lisa Bova-Hiatt, the chief executive officer of the New York City Housing Authority. My friend Dan Garodnik, the mayor always refers to Dan because Dan has done something. He shepherded an incredible amount of work. City of Yes for Environmental Responsibility and Sustainability, City of Yes for Economic Opportunity, City of Yes for Housing, and City of Yes for Families. The Department of City Planning folks keep hitting it out of the park as well. 

Dan Garodnick at the Department of Social Services. My dear friend, wonderful, wonderful public servant, Molly Park, the commissioner at the Economic– yeah. I'll let her know that you stopped me so that you could applaud. She's that popular. 

The president of the Economic Development Corporation, the mayor knows this. A lot of people don't see this, but we do a lot of partnering with the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Housing is economic development. Housing creates opportunity. And the mayor often refers to a place where you can lay your head and sleep safely at night so you can pursue your dreams and aspirations. That's what happens with housing. It happens in partnership with the Economic Development Corporation. 

I do want to point out another quiet one that is a very effective and an exceptional public servant, the executive director of Get Stuff Built, Rob Holbrook. Where's Rob? There he is. There he is. And finally, our partners at the Office of Management and Budget. Tara. Where's Tara? Tara Boirard. She's here, right? There she is. 

Now, Tara is like the pillar. Jacques is out there. He's fighting with us. But then when we finish our conversation with Jacques, we're like, Tara, okay, how do we do this? And she walks us through it patiently and with great, great grace. Thank you, Tara, and the entire team at the Office of Management and Budget. 

Thank you all for your tireless work. Under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams, we're proving what's possible. We need visionary leadership in a city like New York. The mayor has established himself as the most pro-housing mayor in New York City history. Because under his leadership, we're not just naming the problem. We're not just pointing at it and saying, woe is me. Oh, my. How terrible this is. What we're saying is, how do we solve it? Let's get it done with every possible tool in the toolbox. 

So to all of the people that make this happen every day, what a great year you've had. What a great three and a half years. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And it gives me great pleasure to introduce the next speaker, who is, let me get this right, Marc, the executive director of the Interfaith Affordable Housing Collaborative, Marc Greenberg.

Marc L. Greenberg, Executive Director, Interfaith Affordable Housing Collaborative: Thank you. As the deputy mayor said, I'm the executive director of the Interfaith Affordable Housing Collaborative. We have one of our board members here. I'm also the Executive Director of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing. I've been working on behalf of homeless and housing issues for over 40 years. 

Last night, as I and our team of volunteers have done for nearly three years, I was on the street on West 32nd Street serving hot chocolate and cups of coffee to our street homeless sisters and brothers in partnership with the Department of Homeless Services, offering them access to one of the over 5,000 low-barrier beds that this city has helped to establish as a first step from homelessness into their own home. 

Since we started the project at over seven sites around the city, we've helped close to 800 people move from the streets into low-barrier shelters. And it's largely for these people that I'm proud to stand here today and applaud the efforts and accomplishments and the leadership of this mayor and this extraordinarily dedicated team. 

Coming out of COVID and in the midst of the migrant crisis, this mayor and his team have established a can build, will build spirit in the area of housing and that will have an impact on our city for generations. With the historic City of Yes, gaining the collaboration of City Council, borough presidents, the governor, and now with the housing, affordable housing provisions, the pros changes to the New York City Charter, this mayor and his team have set the tone and challenged New York City to live up to our promise as written on Lady Liberty to lift our lamp beside the golden door. 

A city cannot be great if so many people are struggling to find affordable housing. And this affordability crisis has been decades in the making and cannot be resolved in a few short years. But with this administration's trailblazing leadership on affordable housing, particularly for those most in need, and your can build, will build spirit, you continue to inspire and challenge New York leaders and New York's people to live up to the promise of the greatest city in the world. 

From the Hebrew Bible, let me quote Nehemiah 4, who spoke about the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, the city of peace. So we built the wall for the people had a mind to work. Mr. Mayor, your efforts have helped unleash the people's mind to work. And for this, New York City is very grateful. Thank you.

Mayor Adams: Great partners.

Question: Mayor, there are some in town who will view rent control as sort of a silver bullet when it comes to housing, not just freezing the rent, but everything the city helps build, they argue, should be rent controlled. You've opted to go a number of different paths that the deputy mayor outlined in great detail. 

Why not rent control as a bigger part of your efforts? And also, if you don't mind just updating New Yorkers on the state of flooding and rescues and how the city's doing this morning.

Mayor Adams: I'm going to turn it over to my guys and ladies that plan out our housing strategy, and they can touch on that question. But, you know, New York is a resilient city. And, you know, we're seeing many of these major storms hit our city over and over again. And because of the coordinated effort, immediately, we notified New Yorkers ahead of the storm and New Yorkers prepared themselves. 

And when you saw when we called the state of emergency, it allowed us to have all of our agencies kicking gear, how our FDNY team were out there doing rescues where they were needed. Not many, because people listened and stayed off the road as we asked. People did not go in subway stations where they saw flooding. 

And so, part of the success of moving through the storm was the role that the city had to play, but also New Yorkers. New Yorkers realized that this has become a normality, that we're being hit with these storms, not only along our coastal areas, but inland. And so, because of that, I think that the city and New Yorkers responded appropriately. And we will dry out. This is the new weather patterns that we have to face and we're going to have to address. 

So why don't we talk about the question?

Deputy Mayor Carrión: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that question. And I'm going to hand it over to the commissioner of Housing, but I just wanted to share with you that there's approximately 3 million rental apartments. We're largely a renter's city. A million of those are controlled. 

But you also should know, and everybody should understand, that every time HPD enters into a deal with a private owner, most of the affordable housing that we create is a public-private partnership. Most of the applications that come in, come in by invitation. And we have different tools that you heard me speak about. 

All of them enter into agreements, into a social contract with the City of New York that say, we will dedicate X number of units, whether it's a tax incentive, or we will dedicate the entirety of our development to affordable housing. But these are agreements that last the life of mortgages. So they're 30, 35, 40 years. They extend at the end of those mortgage sunsets. So, you know, that is principally the work that we do. But the commissioner, you can–

Acting Commissioner Ahmed Tigani, Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development: Henry, I think the deputy mayor really hit it on the head. So for our resources, especially when we're using subsidies, we are actually expanding the number of units that are income-restricted and registered with the State of New York as rent-regulated apartments. And then when you think about some of our as-of-right programs like J-51, you'll see in the policy that we're really targeting existing buildings that are at least half rent-stabilized buildings. 

So we're focused on not even in our new construction, thinking about how we are growing the number of rent-regulated units, but also in our as-of-right programs, we're either increasing the affordable units going from a regulatory period to permanency, like we did with 485-X, or driving down the AMI like we did in 485-X, or in our as-of-right tax abatement programs, you now see that we're focusing and targeting on preserving those units. 

And in addition, we talked about the really impressive and exciting work that we're doing on preservation, and you see that those are units, many of which are income-restricted or part of programs that are keeping people who are working families in New York, and we're preserving to extend that affordability. We're working to extend those units in the long term to make sure that we have that for future working-class New Yorkers.

Question: So it sounds like, just to put a button on it, it is baked into a lot of this work. It's just less obvious as you kick through the various tools.

Acting Commissioner Tigani: I think there's two parts to it, and you hit it right. One, when we're using subsidies, we're definitely focused on trying to increase the type of protected housing that we're doing. But you’ll see from the way that we've laid out the numbers that this is a crisis, that we have to use every resource we can. 

We have the most aggressive capital program that the city has ever seen in housing, but in addition, we need to leverage the private sector, we need to leverage all our partners. So those market rate units on some of those projects help offset the cost of creating the affordability in the long term or permanent. And so that's important too, since we have New Yorkers across the board at different income bands, all of which are asking us to create more options, mobility, and fair housing throughout the city.

Question: You know, you mentioned the 426,000 units. Some of those are units that are planned that still haven't gotten the other nominal evaluation process. This is the airport. Are you considering that the number might be inflated, or that there might be some significant holdups by the time we actually see [inaudible]?

Mayor Adams: No. It's going to move forward. Everyone knows, on every level of government, knows that housing is a crisis level. And as the deputy mayor stated, it has been clear our message is not to define the problem, but to correct the problem. And we're going to do that. 

You know, there are a great deal of folks who thought City of Yes couldn't happen. They thought we couldn't break the records that we did. They thought we couldn't do the five-neighborhood rezoning. They thought Willets Point– how many mayors tried Willets Point? If there's one skill we have, we know how to land the plane. And we landed the plane in Flushing Airport, and that's going to turn into housing. We'll be fine. We're going to get it done. Okay? Alright. Thank you.

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