Facing Homeless Crisis, New York Vows 1,000 New Apartments a Year

The requirement will be the centerpiece of a bill that the City Council is expected to pass next week and represents one of the city’s most ambitious efforts in a decade to address the dearth of housing for homeless people.

The legislation, which applies to rental buildings with more than 40 units, could add roughly 1,000 new apartments for the homeless a year, almost doubling the 1,300 apartments that are under development.

Many other cities require these so-called set-asides for the lowest-income households. Boston, for instance, requires that city-funded developments with at least 10 rental units reserve 10% for homeless families. But there does not appear to be another mandate on the scale proposed under the legislation in New York.

The measure pending before the City Council is the culmination of a long effort to push de Blasio to redraw his housing plan to address a homeless crisis that has shown no signs of abating. About 79,000 people now live in New York’s shelters or streets, up from about 64,000 people the year before de Blasio took office.

The mayor’s plan, which seeks to create or preserve 300,000 apartments, includes a goal of designating at least 15,000 units for homeless people.

Because de Blasio’s plan applies to the overall total, and not specific developments, homeless set-asides have tended to be clustered in poorer neighborhoods, particularly in the Bronx.

The council’s plan would impose a hard mandate on individual developers on a project-by-project basis, potentially spreading such housing into neighborhoods that have had the political muscle to resist it.

The legislation, which has the support of 34 council members as well as the mayor and the public advocate, Jumaane Williams, would take effect in July 2020.

“We have a homelessness crisis in New York City, and we have to start getting aggressive or we are never going to fix it,” said Corey Johnson, the Democratic speaker of the City Council and a likely mayoral candidate in 2021, when de Blasio concludes his final term as mayor.

Nonetheless, New York’s effort still falls short of the original bill’s language, which sought to apply the 15% set aside to a wider range of residential buildings.

The bill’s sponsor, Rafael Salamanca Jr., a councilman from the Bronx, said his goal was to increase set-asides for homeless people, yet make sure such reserved housing was integrated into all neighborhoods across the city.

“This is hope. We are giving homeless families hope,” Salamanca said. “This is about fair share. Some districts are looking down on families who have had bad luck.”

De Blasio’s administration argues that it has recently begun requiring more set-asides. About 9% of the units the city has financed are reserved for homeless people, higher than the original 5% goal.

“This agreement will ensure it’s written into law that future administrations continue the progress we’ve made,” said Jane Meyer, a spokeswoman for de Blasio. “Homeless New Yorkers can rest assured we’re doing all we can to put a safe and stable roof over their heads.”

Still more than half of the projects included in the mayor’s plan for low-income people have no homeless set-asides, according to an analysis by the Coalition for the Homeless.

The largest share of newly opened units where homeless people have been placed has been in the Bronx, about 37%, according to data requested by The New York Times. About 55% of the construction projects financed for extremely low-income people are in the Bronx.

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Salamanca’s involvement in the bill can be traced to a confrontation last year between a homeless woman, Nathylin Flowers Adesegun, and de Blasio. Adesegun, who lives in a shelter in Queens and was active in homeless issues, asked the mayor at the Brooklyn gym that he attends why his housing plan did not include more units for homeless people. In a moment caught on video, the mayor smirked, declined to talk and walked away.

Adesegun and advocates for the homeless continued to protest de Blasio and urged council members to take legislative action, eventually working with Salamanca.

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In interviews, developers of affordable housing in New York City acknowledged that they held a crucial role in helping reduce the city’s homeless population.

But the developers, who agreed to discuss the legislation only on the condition of anonymity, suggested that it made more sense to place housing for the homeless close to other city social services. They favored a framework that gave the city the right to tweak the percentages in each residential project.

“The flexibility is very important,” one developer said. “There is no question that the city should be doing as much as possible for the formerly homeless, but it is difficult to legislate that every single building have a 15% set-aside when there are not services to go along with that 15%.”

The Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s main lobbying arm, echoed the developers’ concerns about social services.

“A robust set of services is essential once housing is provided,” said Basha Gerhards, the group’s vice president of policy and planning. “We join with advocates across the city to ask that the mayor and the council put forward a plan that truly provides for this.”

De Blasio has repeatedly said that he favored a measure of flexibility in his housing plan, consistently urging that it should help those with a range of incomes.

“Affordable housing initiatives cannot just be for the lowest income folks,” the mayor said in a radio interview in September. “There has to be a place for work force housing and middle-class housing as well.”

In 2017, de Blasio announced a homeless strategy that called for the opening of 90 shelters and improved social services. But the administration has opened only 30 new shelters, and the efforts have not driven down the number of people who seek refuge in them.

Other strategies have been more successful.

The city has provided free legal assistance to tenants facing eviction, resulting in evictions dropping by a third between 2013 and 2018. With new rental assistance voucher programs, the city has moved about 111,000 people out of shelters and has prevented about 22,000 people from entering them in the first place.

But the rental assistance vouchers are not a panacea; recipients have complained about poor housing stock and the length of time it takes to find landlords that accept the vouchers.

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The new apartments at Villa Gardens in the Bronx are a vivid example of the mayor’s vision. Tenants who move in next year will have plenty of light from their floor-to-ceiling windows, a rooftop recreation area and easy access to the elevated train that rumbles past the building.

All 52 apartments will go to low- and middle-income renters; none are set aside for the homeless.

Javon Ford, a 28-year-old restaurant porter who lives in a shelter nearby, said he has a housing voucher worth $1,303 a month and has been looking for an apartment. He said he had entered lotteries for city-financed units like the ones in Villa Gardens but was turned down twice.

“The system, it’s just made for you to fail,” he said.

Ivy Faison and her husband, Kevin, had been living in a shelter for about four years when they won a lottery last year for a unit in a building that had been set aside for the homeless in East New York, Brooklyn.

Ivy Faison, 60, cried as she remembered that her husband, who had trouble walking and illnesses that caused seizures, finally had comfortable surroundings. Kevin Faison died of heart disease in August.

She remembered the day they first saw the apartment in the building, which received $6.5 million in city financing. “I just kissed my floors, and I said, ‘Thank you, heavenly Father, so much,’” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Facing Homeless Crisis, New York Vows 1,000 New Apartments a Year

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