New York mayor pledges to boost city's housing by 500,000 units (updated)

Adams Resources & Energy

08/12/2022 22:59

(Adds background, quote from housing group)
    By Tyler Clifford
       NEW YORK, Dec 8 (Reuters) - New York City Mayor Eric
Adams on Thursday unveiled a plan to boost its housing supply by
500,000 dwellings over the next decade by easing regulations for
home builders and cutting construction time in half.
    The goal is to combat declining affordability of housing in
the city, the nation's largest with nearly 8.5 million residents
and ranking among its costliest rental and real estate markets. 
    With the plan, Adams pledged to more than double the number
of homes developed in the city in the past 10 years. New York's
housing stock grew by 200,000 in those years, while the city's
residential population increased by 800,000, he said in
announcing the plan.
    "We have more people than homes. This shortage gives
landlords the power to charge any price they want and leaves too
many New Yorkers with no place to go," said Adams, a former New
York City police captain who took office last January. "That
needs to change."
        Median residential rental prices in New York's Manhattan
borough topped $4,000 a month in November, a nearly 20% increase
from a year earlier, according to a monthly report by Douglas
Elliman and Miller Samuel. They were above $3,000 a month in
Brooklyn and Queens.
  
    Adams, who has focused much of his first year in office on
the issues of rising crime and homelessness, called for more
than 100 changes to government policies that he blamed for
slowing down house construction. The changes include reforms to
the environmental quality review, zoning approval and building
permit processes.
    Housing Rights Initiative, a tenants rights advocacy group,
applauded the mayor's plan, saying that the city builds less
housing per capita than most large U.S. cities.
        The mayor also proposed legalizing existing basement
apartment units, converting unused office buildings into housing
and exempting small housing projects from often lengthy
environmental reviews.
    The plan also seeks to authorize the city to finance and
preserve more affordable housing units.
    "If we do not deal with this housing crisis, New York will
no longer be a city for working people, for families, for
immigrants or for elders," Adams said.
    In November, Adams unveiled a plan to address the city's
worsening homeless crisis. It opened the door to forcing more
mentally ill New Yorkers living the streets into hospitals.
        More than 60,000 people slept in city shelters in
September, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, which
said that plan was misguided. The group instead encouraged the
Adams administration to expand access to voluntary psychiatric
care, hotel rooms to unsheltered people and supportive housing
units.
  
    Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Adams' predecessor, made
housing a signature policy goal when he took office in 2014. New
York built or preserved 200,000 affordable units before his
second term ended at the end of 2021, according to a statement
from the former mayor when he was leaving office a year ago.
 (Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York; Editing by John
Stonestreet and Diane Craft)
 ((tyler.clifford@thomsonreuters.com;))