New York City is facing its greatest housing shortage since the Second World War. There are more homeless families, more homeless children now, than at any time since the Great Depression. Over 35,000 people live in the streets or in homeless shelters, and the number continues to rise.
The latest Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) relying on 1999 data, shows that the vacancy rate is the lowest it’s been for the 1990s -- at 3.19%. More ominous is the fact that 825,000 households pay over 30% of their incomes for rent, with almost 450,000 of that total paying more than 50%. Before the Reagan/Cuomo/Koch years, it was a rule-of-thumb that you never paid more than one week’s salary for a month’s rent. For many years now, neither major party has demonstrated any capacity for providing affordable housing.
215,000 renter households are overcrowded, at more than one person per room. It it the highest number of overcrowded households since 1970. More than 75,000 are severely overcrowded (more than 1.5 person per room). That is the highest number since the HVS began the count in 1960. Almost 170,000 households are living doubled-up with a non-relative.
Median incomes rose only 1.7% from 1997 through 1999, despite the alleged prosperity of the Clinton presidency, but median rents went up 3.1%. At the same time the number of renters earning less than $20,000 a year went up from 36% of all renters to almost 40%.
Over 270,000 households have more than three serious violations in the units they occupy, while 19,000 live in households that the Census Bureau labels “dilapidated”.
What is needed is about 20,000 more units just to bring the vacancy rate up to 5%. Right now, the only rent level where there is an adequate vacancy rate (over 5%) is for units renting over $1,750 a month. It takes a minimum income of $70,000 to afford that kind of rent.
The Columbia University Urban Planning Department put together a plan to solve the housing crisis. We in the Green Party wholeheartedly embrace their proposals. They involve, first, putting dollar figures on pieces of this most important social problem.
1. To get an adequate number of vacancies: 38,700 units, $4.56 billion
2. To eliminate severe overcrowding: 81,120 units, $9.57 billion
3. To house the homeless permanently: 26,000 units, $3 billion
4. To gut rehab dilapidated units: 28,800 units, $2.016 billion
5. To do moderate rehab on deteriorated units: 169,000 units, $2.535 billion
6. To eliminate excessive maintenance deficiciencies: 100,700 units, $845 million
7. To make rent:income ratios affordable for those under poverty: 348,000 households, $1.072 billion a year
These seven pieces come to a grand total of $22.5 billion in construction costs. If that is amortized at 7% interest over 30 years (the city should be able to do better), it comes to $1.806 billion a year for new construction and rehab.
All together, it would take less than $3 billion a year over 30 years to successfully address the current NYC housing crisis that is a product of benign neglect and illegal acts. Witness the recent scandal involving the city tax collectors underassessing commercial real estate that resulted in hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in losses to city tax coffers.
In addition we have these other ideas:
1. Restore public housing to its original role of publicly building and managing housing for people, not for profit. Both the city and the State built excellent housing with their own money after World War II, and the most recent, and some of the oldest, public housing is very good housing indeed.
2. Invest in rehabilitation, with tenants playing a major role in managing the process.
3. Strengthen rent regulation and enforce good maintenance so the private sector can make a real contribution.
4. Bring the housing allowance in welfare programs up to where it meets real housing costs, and expand, not contract, eligibility to those who need it.
5. Plan the location of housing and community facilities so they promote integration and choice, rather than reinforce ghettoization.
6. Provide enough building inspectors so that existing codes are really enforced. Under Giuliani the number of inspectors was severely cut back.
7. Support non-profit and community-based organizations on a sustained and substantial basis to do the work they can best do, in building, rehabbing, managing housing.
8. Mount a coordinated attack on homelessness, centered around permanent housing (and supportive services where needed), and a decent way to handle individual energencies.
AND
9. Let communities and tenants in, with other supplier interests, to work with the City in both planning and executing a coordinated, goal-oriented plan to do these things efficiently and quickly.
We in the Green Party pledge to work togther with such groups as the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Supportive Housing Network, the Community Service Society, the Parodneck Foundation, Citizens Housing and Planning Council, the Metropolitan Council on Housing, and the New York State Tenants and Neighbors.
