December 2, 2025 — December 2, 2025 | Shared Housing Hearing

Testimony of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development

to the New York City Council Committee on Housing and Buildings

Good morning, Chair Sanchez and members of the New York City Council Committee on Housing and Buildings. My name is Michael Sandler, the Associate Commissioner for Neighborhood Strategies at HPD, and I am joined by my colleague, Lucy Joffe, Deputy Commissioner of Policy and Strategy. We are also joined by Elizabeth Suarez, Director of Architecture at DOB, for questions. Thank you for the opportunity to testify here today.

In 2020, and again this year, HPD affirmed its commitment to fair housing through Where We Live NYC, a plan to expand housing opportunity and choice for all New Yorkers. In order to advance this commitment, we are looking both to innovative ideas and to draw on lessons from the past. Shared housing represents an opportunity to reimagine a historic housing model for the 21^st century.

Shared housing – two or more privately leased bedrooms with shared kitchens, bathrooms, and living spaces – has a long history in New York City. By the first half of the 20^th century, shared models, such as boarding houses and single room occupancy hotels, constituted a substantial and affordable part of New York City’s housing stock. They served a wide range of households from immigrants newly arrived on the city’s shores and young people flocking to the city for factory jobs to New Yorkers looking for a short-term place to stay as they navigated life changes. However, policies implemented in the mid-20^th century – intended to improve housing quality – led to a prohibition on the construction of new shared housing and a sharp reduction in the existing stock. The loss of this stock coincided with the rise of street homelessness. In the 1980s, realizing the role the model played in housing New Yorkers, the City tried to reverse course and stop the wholesale conversion of shared housing, but the damage was already done, and the SRO stock was significantly diminished.

The impacts of these policies reverberate across the city today. Per the American Community Survey, between 2013 and 2023, the number of small households increased 11.1%, while the growth in the city’s small unit-sized stock failed to keep pace, growing only 7.5% during the same period. While it is clear that New York City needs housing across all types and household sizes, a growing number of single adults are taking on roommates to mitigate high housing costs and the lack of affordable housing for single persons. This trend puts additional pressure on the city’s existing stock of larger homes, as single persons pooling multiple incomes outcompete one- or two-income families. Increasingly, roommate shares have been commercialized, and landlords are renting individual rooms in illegally converted apartments, compromising tenant safety by violating fire safety and egress rules and blocking access to light and air. A burgeoning unregulated market of co-living shows that there is demand for this type of housing in New York City at a variety of price points.

Reintroducing purpose-built shared housing models provides a new set of tools to expand housing opportunity and choice to the growing population of single New Yorkers. Intro 1475 will establish clear design, occupancy, and safety standards to promote harmonious living, with more kitchens and bathrooms than historically required for SROs to mitigate conflict and increase privacy and fire safety standards that meet or exceed those of traditional apartment buildings. New shared housing will be built based on new regulations which ensure effective tenant protections and high quality and safety standards.

On November 25^th, HPD released New York City’s Shared Housing Roadmap, which lays out a path for reintroducing shared housing. The Roadmap builds on lessons learned from past shared housing models and recent efforts to expand housing options and opportunities for New Yorkers. In 2018, HPD launched the ShareNYC pilot program to explore potential shared housing models on three sites across the city. In the course of developing these projects, we encountered myriad zoning, code and policy challenges that slowed development and raised costs without improving quality of life. Where We Live NYC’s commitment to facilitate equitable housing development bolstered HPD’s efforts to overcome barriers to shared housing. The passage of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity in December 2024 removed zoning barriers identified in the Roadmap. Today, Intro 1475, sponsored by Councilmember Erik Bottcher, advances the Roadmap’s legislative strategies, to allow as-of-right construction of new shared housing and introduces code changes governing its design, occupancy, and safety.

The Shared Housing Roadmap and the strategies it lays out are the result of careful research, analysis, and testing over nearly a decade. Research into the legislative history of shared housing provided a strong foundation for understanding the strengths of historic models and the operational pitfalls to avoid. Conversations with shared housing tenants, nonprofit and for-profit co-living operators, policy experts, and other municipalities implementing shared housing models provided context on modern-day operations and best practices. Collaboration with other agencies, including the Department of Buildings, the Department of City Planning, and the Fire Department, as well as partners like the Administration for Children’s Services and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice ensured a comprehensive, multi-sectoral approach that examined the model from a variety of perspectives. Lessons learned from the implementation of other new housing typologies, like Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), informed our legislative approach. Taken together, these efforts chart a path to enable shared housing that ensures robust design, management, and tenant protections.

As New York City continues to grapple with growing housing demand, rising rents, and high construction costs, shared housing opens up new opportunities. In central areas where office-to-residential conversion opportunities are abundant, shared housing offers the potential to not only create more units within a large office floorplate, but to also develop less costly conversions by clustering bathrooms and kitchens around pre-existing, centrally located plumbing networks. Shared housing can also increase tenant protections for thousands of renters by providing them a housing option with separate and independent relationship with their landlords through individual leases and Good Cause Eviction protections. Shared models can also create opportunities for communal caregiving, shared responsibilities, and light-touch services for households who may be isolated or vulnerable in traditional housing, but who do not need the depth of care provided by supportive housing.

Existing shared housing programs in New York City demonstrate that the model can serve New Yorkers who are seeking a communal lifestyle or who are navigating a transitory phase of life as well. The Ascendant/Ali Forney Center Share NYC project, which was approved by the City Council in 2023, provides an opportunity for formerly homeless young adults to learn life skills for independent living, while sharing costs and responsibilities with fellow residents and maintaining a support system through communal living arrangements. The Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter’s Scholars Program provides unhoused CUNY students with stable, year-round housing and educational supports to see them through to graduation. The New York Foundling’s Mother and Child Program supports caregiving by providing shared housing for new mothers, who are themselves young adults in foster care, where they can finish school, find employment, and learn how to care for their children. The International House in Harlem provides a first home for students and young professionals from abroad who do not have credit scores or other resources necessary to access housing on the private market and offers opportunities for new arrivals to settle into a purpose-built community.

While these models demonstrate the possibilities that shared housing can offer, we want to be clear that this model is not the right fit for everyone. Heeding the expertise from the supportive housing community, HPD has determined that shared housing is not the right fit for most supportive housing residents, and, as with all our programs, no one will be forced to live in shared housing that does not meet their needs. Additionally, shared housing is not transitional or short-term housing; it is class A, permanent housing that is not a substitute or supplement to the shelter system and it will not be permitted to host short-term rentals.

Intro 1475, a collaboration between the City Council, HPD, the Department of Buildings, and the Fire Department, brings the vision for shared housing articulated in the Shared Housing Roadmap into reality by proposing amendments to the Housing Maintenance Code, Building Code, and Fire Code.

At a time when vacancy rates are at an all-time low, especially among New York City’s lowest-cost apartments, we need to take a multi-pronged approach to the housing crisis. Shared housing is one of many tools HPD is deploying to tackle the crisis. While not the appropriate model for all New Yorkers, shared housing offers a new option for single New Yorkers seeking communal living at an affordable price.

We are grateful for our continued partnership with the Council and our collective efforts to address the shortage of low-cost housing and meet the needs of our diverse residents. We welcome the opportunity to work with the Council to advance this historic legislation and look forward to your questions.