People poor, rich and in-between should be able to afford to live in New York, a metropolis that depends on the contributions of all types to thrive. But there’s no switch to flip to make that happen — only steady and aggressive work to build more and more homes, responsible management of public housing, potentially modest curbs on landlords’ ability to raise rents, and sufficiently robust support for low-income families in the form of housing vouchers.
A voucher called CityFHEPS is a crucial rental assistance supplement, one we strongly support. It is both fundamentally decent and economically sensible to help families stay in their apartments rather than getting the boot and winding up in homeless shelters, where conditions are worse and they cost the public far more.
But just because a government program is good doesn’t mean more and more of it is good policy or fiscally doable. When the City Council approved a major expansion of CityFHEPS — raising household income cutoffs from around $27,000 to around $60,000 for a family of four, and loosening the definition of being at risk for eviction — they, true to form, gave hardly a moment’s thought to what it would all cost.
Nor did councilmembers consider a harmful side effect, whereby more financially stable New Yorkers would increasingly compete against families currently in shelters for limited apartments.
Atop those deep policy flaws was another serious problem: The Council went for legislative overreach, usurping the authority to engineer the expansion in the first place. So ruled Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank in a lawsuit brought by the Council and the Legal Aid Society. The suit claimed that Mayor Adams was breaking the law by refusing to comply.
But Frank, agreeing with the mayor, said the administration’s reasoning was exactly right: State social service law preempts, meaning effectively overrides, the city’s statute.
Frank is no rubber stamper for the mayor. He’s the very same judge who dealt a huge defeat to the administration and a huge victory to city retirees challenging the move to Medicare Advantage. In both cases, Frank read the law carefully and ruled accordingly.
Pending a change of decision on appeal, the Council can now try to get more allies in the state Legislature to take up their cause. While it’s waiting for that, and for the slim possibility of a major expansion of federal Section 8 at a time when 630,000 New Yorkers are seeking that assistance, there are concrete ways they can attack the problems they decry.
The best way to bring down the high cost of living and the record number of people in shelter is to build more housing. Apartment production is still far slower than it should be in most of New York and far below the per-capita rates in other major cities.
Mayor Adams’ City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the most serious attempt in generations to rezone the city to allow a bit more housing in neighborhoods all across the five boroughs, comes before the Council in the fall. It will be shocking and irresponsible indeed if any of the councilmembers who want to open the taxpayer spigot to help countless more New Yorkers afford rising rents refuse to do the one proven thing that brings the too-damn-high monthly payments down.