CSS Report: Assessing Mayor de Blasio’s Housing Legacy

New report examines mayor’s achievements and shortcomings, and asks: why hasn’t the “most ambitious affordable housing program” produced a more affordable city?

Bill de Blasio came to office promising to confront housing inequalities head on, but despite some important achievements, housing unaffordability remains one of the greatest challenges facing New Yorkers in general, and low-income people in particular. Over the last seven years, homelessness has risen precipitously, conditions in public housing have declined, much “affordable housing” remains unaffordable to those who need it most, and rent burdens remain punishingly high for low-income New Yorkers.

As the de Blasio administration enters its final year and the race for the next mayor heats up, New Yorkers are looking for a clear analysis of why inequities persist and what the city can do to reverse course.

A new Community Service Society (CSS) report, Assessing de Blasio’s Housing Legacy, analyzes the data on the administration’s impact on housing across various issues and sectors, including affordable and market-rate development dynamics, overall affordability, land use, homelessness, and public housing preservation. The report argues that the administration’s approach overemphasized top-line numbers – i.e., the overall number of units produced and dollars committed – rather than producing the kinds of housing that would have been needed to stabilize the city. Equally important, the administration continued the established pattern of planning in siloes, with private affordable housing treated separately from and prioritized over ending homelessness or upgrading public housing. As a result, public housing and housing for the homelessness had to compete for resources and were under-funded relative to private housing construction and preservation.

“We must take the lessons of the de Blasio era into consideration as we look toward a new city government and plot a just recovery out of the pandemic and recession,” said David R. Jones, CSS President and CEO. “The next mayor must plan comprehensively and prioritize those least served by the current housing system.”

What is De Blasio’s Housing Legacy?

Building on housing and demographic data culled and analyzed in coordination with several leading housing and community-based organizations, including Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development, Center for New York City Neighborhoods, Make the Road New York, Mutual Housing Association of New York, and VOCAL-NY, CSS Housing Analyst Samuel Stein shows why the plan our mayor frequently calls “the most ambitious affordable housing plan” in the country’s history was not enough to halt the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Under this administration, and at the urging of community-based organizations and advocates, several crucial pieces of policy and legislation were enacted to protect tenants, including Right to Counsel, three rent freezes for rent stabilized tenants, and an early surge of money into the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). As a result of these and other measures, formal evictions declined from 26,900 in 2014 to 16,200 in 2019.

This, however, was not enough to reverse the growing unaffordability of housing in New York. One of the mayor’s primary sources of prestige—that his plan seeks to create and preserve 300,000 units of affordable housing, and that his housing department is well on its way to fulfilling that aim—also points to one of the problems with this approach: the administration has prioritized achieving its chosen metrics without ensuring that those metrics correspond to the city’s existing affordability crisis. In fact, the act of chasing large quantities of the wrong metrics incentivized the administration to prioritize plans and programs that were most expedient—those that produced the greatest number of units with a given amount of investment, or those most favored by the private developers and investors upon which their plans relied—rather than those which would have met the greatest need, or which would have done the least harm. In so doing, the de Blasio administration limited their program’s efficacy and foreclosed on opportunities to target housing toward those least served by preexisting programs, markets, and models.

At the same time, the administration’s decision to exclude public housing from its goal of developing or preserving 300,000 units of affordable housing led to significant funding disparities between public and private housing preservation funds and reduced the administration’s interest in focusing on NYCHA. NYCHA and public housing advocates thus had to compete with private projects and private developers for access to public dollars. Similarly, the Housing New York plan initially treated homelessness as a separate issue from affordable housing, despite the fact the de Blasio administration inherited a homelessness crisis of historic proportions. As a result, spending on shelters more than doubled between 2014 and 2018, while new construction for homeless New Yorkers and placements in permanent housing lagged behind the pace of the growth of homelessness.

The report identifies the following key facets and outcomes of de Blasio’s housing plans and policies:

• The administration pitched the plurality of its Housing New York programs toward 50–80 percent of AMI earners, the highest income levels permitted by the federal programs on which the city relies. The plan thus meets less than 15 percent of the need for those most vulnerable to becoming homeless—severely rent-burdened extremely low- and very low-income New Yorkers—while overproducing for moderate- and middle-income New Yorkers.
• The stock of higher-priced apartments proliferated while lower-priced apartments dwindled. While the number of units renting for more than $1,500 grew by 17 percent, the number of units renting for less than $1,500 declined by 14 percent, even as the proportion of New Yorkers who need such housing grew by 5 percent.
• While rent burdens for New Yorkers overall declined slightly during de Blasio’s term, the percent of low-income New Yorkers paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent remained at a staggering 72 percent over the course of the de Blasio administration, and the percentage of low-income New Yorkers paying more than half their income in rent rose by one percent.
• The rezonings initiated by the city through the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program have widely been criticized for their siting choices, which, until recently, have been in largely working-class, majority people of color neighborhoods. This report finds that privately initiated MIH rezonings have followed a similar pattern. Eighty-nine (89) percent of apartments approved through project specific MIH rezonings would be unaffordable to the average neighborhood resident without additional subsidies. Even among those projects’ “affordable” units, 75 percent were targeted toward people making more than the neighborhood average.
• Over de Blasio’s terms in office, despite several proposals to raise funds for public housing, NYCHA’s capital backlog rose an alarming 471 percent, from $7 billion to $40 billion, due to both accelerating deterioration and inflating project costs.
• Between 2014 and 2019, the number of people living in Department of Homeless Services shelters rose from 53,173 to 63,839. Thousands more lived in other city-run shelters, in three-quarter houses, on the streets, or doubled- and tripled-up in apartments, leading to an estimated total homeless population as high as 79,000 in 2019.

CSS Housing Analyst Samuel Stein: “As the city reels from both pandemic and recession, and as the public looks to elect a next mayor, we must look back squarely on this mayor’s housing legacy and speak honestly about its shortcomings in order to chart a better way forward. Simply put, while the de Blasio administration corrected some of the most regressive aspects of the Bloomberg administration, they failed to produce a city that is livable and affordable for low-income New Yorkers.”

"For far too long, New York City's housing policies have failed to center and address the needs of those most in need of safe, secure affordable housing, including homeless New Yorkers, NYCHA residents, and our BIPOC communities. It's time for a new approach, with bold commitments focused on meeting those needs and ending racial disparities," said Barika Williams, Executive Director of ANHD.

“Even before COVID, our communities faced rampant displacement, enormous rent burdens, and a dire lack of affordable housing. Now the crisis has deepened,” said Jose Lopez, Deputy Director of Make the Road New York. “As we look forward to the next chapter in this city’s housing policy, we need an approach that starts with the needs of low-income residents and listens to their voices.”

"It was never the Mayor's goal to end homelessness or even reduce it in any meaningful way. Despite years of organizing and advocacy by homeless New Yorkers and devastating stories of people living in shelters or on the streets, he simply ignored them and refused to make a plan," said Paulette Soltani, Political Director of VOCAL-NY. "We've seen all that we need to see from this Administration. It's time for a new path forward - and new leaders - who will make it their priority to end homelessness and coordinate our City's agencies to do it."

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