Cuomo Unveils Key Planks of Housing Agenda During Address to the Building Congress Board
“If people can’t afford to live in New York City, there simply won’t be a New York City - period. We need to build more housing and build more housing now to increase supplies and drive down costs. To accomplish that, we need a city government that will partner with builders, not strangle them with bureaucratic red tape and endless delays. This will be one of our administration’s top priorities as the very future of New York will be depending on it.” - Andrew M. Cuomo
New York, N.Y. – Andrew M. Cuomo, candidate for mayor of New York City, today detailed key parts of his housing agenda during an address before the Building Congress Board.
The heart of his plan is to build or preserve 500,000 units of housing, two thirds of which will be affordable to low or moderate income New Yorkers over the next decade to address New York City’s crushing housing shortage that is driving up costs and is perpetuating the cost-of-living crisis in this city.
“If people can’t afford to live in New York City, there simply won’t be a New York City - period,” Cuomo said. “We need to build more housing and build more housing now to increase supplies and drive down costs. To accomplish that we need a city government that will partner with builders, not strangle them with bureaucratic red tape and endless delays. This will be one of our administration’s top priorities as the very future of New York will be depending on it.”
Key Components of Governor Cuomo’s Housing Plan Include:
– Targeted rezoning of industrial business zones to allow residential housing.
Cuomo proposes pragmatic select rezoning on the edges of the roughly 10,000 acres of land within city limits that is currently deemed as Industrial Business Zones. The goal is to keep intact the core of these industrial areas that facilitate industry such as trucking, heavy manufacturing, or critical food distribution, but allow mixed use residential development on these edges of these zones that are within walking distance of subway stations, commercial corridors, or waterfront redevelopment sites. Under this plan, if just 100 acres of this land (less than 1 percent of IBZ land is rezoned) it could yield 8,000 to 15,000 new housing units.
– Streamlining the Permitting Process
Currently, it takes years to obtain the necessary permits for housing construction, causing many of them to stall or die on the vine. During his first 100 days, Cuomo will issue an executive order setting clear timelines and accountability standards for DOB and HPD reviews. He will also manage permit approvals from the mayor’s office as a mayoralty priority, so that builders and communities aren’t stuck in endless back-and-forth.
– Partnering with Faith-Based Institutions
There is also a significant opportunity to partner with faith-based institutions in the development of affordable housing on surplus land that they own, which will bypass bureaucratic barriers to develop affordable housing consistent with the character of their neighborhoods, and it would identify underused assets that can be repurposed for housing. Safeguards on maximum density can be negotiated, but meeting the combined needs of faith-based institutions and the many thousands of New Yorkers in need of housing is too good an opportunity to pass up.
– Get Vacant Rent Stabilized Apartments Back Online
Even amid New York City' s severe housing shortage, as many as 25,000 rent-stabilized apartments in New York sit vacant because many landlords cannot afford the cost of repairs to meet basic habitability standards. Along with increased oversight to ensure that owners are not engaging in bad-faith vacancy practices, the City must also develop a policy to make it financially possible for landlords to bring these units back online. The cost of such a program would still be substantially less than the cost of construction of a new housing unit.
More Details of Cuomo’s Housing Plan Available Here
A transcript of Cuomo’s remarks is below:
Thank you. Lemme make a couple of points and then whatever questions you have, Greg is right when, and you should appreciate it when you look back and when they write the history books, we did more infrastructure development than any administration in modern political history. You have to go back to Rockefeller to come up with an administration that did more, and that's if you include the World Trade Centers and you include the SUNY projects.
On public infrastructure, we did more than had been done in a hundred years and these were hard projects to do and we did them. And I think one of the lessons is there is no perfect answer and that's why government is so suited to do it, because the politicians don't want any opposition except you're never going to find a situation where there is no opposition.
There's never a perfect answer. And if you are waiting for the perfect answer, then you're going to wind up doing nothing. And when you do nothing for sure, that's when you fail and that's what happens to government all too often. We're seeing it in New York City today.
Brooklyn Marine Terminal: how long can it take? You're dying for affordable housing? You're dying for development. They put together a process that by definition is never going to conclude.
You put the local politicians to make the decision, they're never going to make a decision because there's always going to be some opposition. You're never going to find perfect. BQE Cantilever. Same thing for how long? Not until it collapses and then we're going to have a real problem. But it's the same pattern over and over and over. And what Greg is saying is, yeah, I made the decisions. By the way, everyone there was always opposition. Somebody always complained about everything.
LaGuardia Airport, there are complaints that the old LaGuardia was historic and should be preserved under historic preservation. I mean, it's always going to happen, but you have to get through that and you have to do it and you have to make it happen. I used to be HUD secretary and HUD does housing and urban development, and I would fly into a city and I would count the number of cranes and use that as a litmus test for that city because you are either building or you are dying.
It's one or the other. Either the city is growing and new businesses are coming in or they're going somewhere else. It's binary.
New York City, now we have a great opportunity. We need affordable housing. We do. We need it desperately and we are going to need hundreds of projects to begin immediately. City of Yes is a good start, but it's only a start. Now you have to get it actually done and there's a lot of other rezonings that have to be done.
Look at how well Midtown South turned out. You can do that in Jamaica. You can do it all over the city, but you're going to have to do it if we're going to get the number of affordable housing units that we actually need and there's going to be the same NIMBY and not in my backyard and politically, we're going to have to be prepared to take that on. The NYCHA projects are a phenomenal opportunity for more affordable housing. I did this as HUD secretary all across the country. They probably have more green space on NYCHA projects than any other place in the city, and you can make those deals all day long. There's an opportunity.
The MTA has $5 billion in capital projects for New York City Transit.I have intimate knowledge of dealing with the MTA on capital projects, right? None of it good. I was just talking to someone who brought up the L train tunnel. MTA has a project, a sidebar by the way, to redo the L train tunnel, which goes from tip of Manhattan to Brooklyn and it goes to Williamsburg, which is now a hot area. They say we have to close the tunnel for two years to fix the tunnel. All of Williamsburg goes crazy. The whole part of Brooklyn goes crazy. I call them in and ask ‘why do we have to close the tunnel?’ They say ‘Oh there's only one way to do it. We have to rebuild the bench walls because that's where the cables are.’ He says, no other way. No, it's the only other way. Make a long story short, I get the dean of Cornell Engineering School, two other engineering professionals.
I go Google myself how they string cables in tunnels when they build a new tunnel and I see on Google image, the cables are strung off the sides of the tunnel and they're hangers that come off the sides of the tunnel and they run the cable, the L train. They have the cables buried in the bench wall. Why? Because when they built it in 1905, that was the only way you could insulate the cables was by putting them in cement. Okay, but that was 1905. We're here today. I take the Google picture, I go to the dean, we take a walk through, the tunnel. See, maybe you can look at this picture over here. You see your hang them over here. Make a long story short, they hang the cables on the side. Tunnel never closes. So the MTA has a lot going on. That $5 billion is not going to be spent in my lifetime or your children's lifetime. Maybe New York City should take over the capital project management or just New York City Transit, because like Second Avenue subway, like Moynihan, like the L train, I can actually get them done -- by hook, or by crook, one way or another, I can actually get them done.
So there are major opportunities for major development and affordable housing is so desperate for New York City that the only thing that could actually hurt our growth is the lack of housing.
One last anecdote. Amazon is going to do a second headquarters and there's a competition, national competition for the headquarters because it's 15,000 new jobs, average pay $150,000. Every governor, every mayor wants it. I go, I present, work on the presentation. We win. Amazon's going to come and it's going to be in Long Island City. I say to Bezos, the presentation was pretty good, right? He said, not really. I had be pretty good. We want. He said, yeah, it had nothing to do with your presentation. He said, I have to be in New York because the young people are going to New York and I need the young talent. That's why I have to go to New York. That's what is driving this engine. People want to be here, young talent wants to be here. And then the businesses, especially in the tech sector, they follow the talent and then it's a virtuous cycle. The businesses come because of the young people and the young people come because the businesses are here. But we need the affordable housing end of the Amazon story. It's never built because the socialists organized and they kill it.
Why? Because it was corporate welfare. Because we gave them a tax reduction over 25 years. We are the highest tax city and state in the country. We give them a tax reduction and that's corporate welfare. And the socialists organize and they stop the project. And that, my friends, is the metaphor for where we are today. This is not an election between two people. This is not who's better, John or Joe. This is an election between two fundamentally different philosophies. I am a Democrat, I am a capitalist. We are all capitalists. We are in the finance capital of the country. That's what made New York, New York. The opposing philosophy is socialism. I mean, real socialism. Government should control the means of production -- that's in their charter. People should not own real estate privately. No private ownership of real estate. So there'd be no home ownership, no American Dream. This is literally written into their charter. Anti-police because the police are used by the whites to oppress the minorities. Abolish jails – They started to defund the police movement and everything, free, everything free, free food, free transportation, free education, free everything. How do you pay? You raise the taxes on the corporations. The amount of tax increase that you would need to do anything like what he's talking about is $20- $30 billion. Income taxes would have to go up, not a quarter of point. They'd have to go up 6- 7%.
There would be nobody left in this city. There would be no corporation that could afford to stay in this city. The shareholders would have a revolt. It would be so dysfunctional economically. That's the choice that we face. And this is not something that the city would recover from. Well, it is like de Blasio, who is not my favorite mayor. No, this is worse than de Blasio. You can deal with incompetence. You can't deal with a philosophy change to socialism. You do not undo that. That's why the selection is important and that's why I'm running because it is that important. I also believe the inverse is true. I believe we have a moment to make this city better than ever.
That's where we are today. Look at our competition, Chicago, L.A., London. We could be the preeminent urban center and everything we're talking about. We just have to clean up our house. That's all this is. Get the homeless off the streets, hire 5,000 additional police. Get us back to where Rudy Giuliani was, David Dinkins, that was full force.
Build affordable housing. It's bricks and mortar, the simplest type of construction, and clean up the trash and do something about the damn e-bikes,so somebody can cross the street!
It's simple. Just do the simple operational, basic competent management tasks. But the dynamic is there. The young people are coming, the businesses are coming for the young people. Just clean up the house and this city will take care of itself and will grow and continue to grow and be once again the greatest city on the globe. I believe that in my heart and my soul, and that's what every person in this room wants, and that's what I want. Thank you for taking the time.
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