Albany legislators and Gov. Hochul are calling victory on the housing provisions painstakingly negotiated in the budget, which include much of what the governor sought. Kudos, though the battle is far from done.
If you’ve walked a mile in the wrong direction and then turn around and start jogging back, it might seem like you’re making heady progress, but you’re not only far from where you need to be, you’re much further than when you started.
We’ve let our housing stock stagnant for decades, with the emergency becoming just a little bit more acute with every passing administration since the city’s population started growing again, sharply in the early 2000s. A more recent population dip might have bought a bit more time, but certainly hasn’t reversed any market trends for housing.
Allowing 421a to expire two years ago was a monumental mistake that a replacement will only begin to fix now. That exact replacement is an untested modification of 421a, which might work better or might work worse. Getting rid of the bad floor area ratio cap and other concrete regulatory victories will move us further along, while additional eviction protections under the good cause umbrella are a bit of a wild card, watered down as they are from initial demands. What we need now is for lawmakers to keep going, to make housing a year-round priority, not the subject of one huge push per budget season.
There are plenty of public policies that require some caution and equivocation, but housing construction, especially in transit-rich areas, is not one of them. We need housing, we need it in all income bands, we need it to be economically feasible to both build and maintain and actually live in, we need it in perpetuity and we need a lot of it.
The bursting of the commercial real estate bubble was out of left field, a slow-moving trend that was made suddenly into a lightning-speed one overnight by the pandemic, but one fact of life is that human beings will always need somewhere to live. In fact, the budget recognizes that the decline of the former can benefit the latter via office conversions, one plank in an overarching strategy.
Even if proximity to jobs becomes less and less of a factor, they’ll want this place to be near entertainment, commercial opportunity and the ability to get around. There is no real debate about this, which means that the only conceivable path forward is to keep pushing for this demand to be satisfied.
A moonshot plan like the governor’s efforts last year, which would have much more explicitly forced the issue via the exercise of state power, is ideal. We don’t put much blame on her for its collapse, which was driven by the legislative leaders beholden to handfuls of protesting suburban legislators who won’t personally face the consequences of ever-climbing rents. Now, lawmakers have delivered something that checks many of the right boxes, but they shouldn’t forget they’re starting from behind.
The New York middle class has been heading for the exits and a surprisingly resilient economy is battling against escalating costs driven by child care and, yes, rent. At least the message has set in that we cannot keep moving in the wrong direction, but lawmakers have a long road ahead.