NYC needs housing, not lawsuits
As the City Council mulls a lawsuit to force the Adams administration into compliance with its CityFHEPS housing voucher expansion, the Legal Aid Society beat them to the punch last week. City Hall has made no bones about the fact that it otherwise has no intention of complying with the misguided law, which among other things makes New Yorkers eligible if they’ve received a demand letter from a landlord and aren’t even in eviction proceedings while also significantly raising income thresholds.
We of course should not set the precedent that a mayoral administration is empowered to simply ignore laws as passed by the City Council, a circumstance that would lead to chaos and rule by arbitrary edict. While this particular law may have been shortsighted and premature, coming into effect as NYC hit a historically low vacancy rate for affordable apartments, it is still a law duly passed by the public’s elected representatives over the mayor’s veto. If a court has to order the administration to start issuing the vouchers, so be it.
What the court can’t do is change the availability of housing. While it is incumbent on City Hall to ensure it has the administrative and bureaucratic resources to comply with its legal obligations, the mayor can’t snap his fingers and create this capacity, especially as the city has already been struggling to timely issue benefits for existing applicants.
Piling on thousands of additional beneficiaries will, obviously and unavoidably, set back efforts to get the benefit to the people who more desperately need it. You can think this is a shame or a dereliction, but none of that changes the calculus as it currently exists.
More to the point, a judge certainly can’t produce more housing or increase the vacancy rate (or print the extra billions needed for the extra vouchers.) There are several efforts underway at the city and state levels to shift things around, to streamline zoning requirements and incentivize transit-oriented development and restore tax incentives for new construction. These initiatives are crucial, even existential, and they must be pursued with expediency and resolve by lawmakers and advocates.
Prior to the fruits of these efforts, though, we’re at an emergency level of housing shortage, and it is wrong to pit currently homeless voucher holders against a large pool of new beneficiaries for a minuscule stock of current affordable apartments. As per City Hall, there are already some 10,000 voucher holders who have yet to find housing to actually use their vouchers on. Adding another 10,000 seems like the opposite of a solution.
The Council knew all this before it passed the bill and overrode Mayor Adams’ veto, and now what’s done is done.
New vouchers are mandated and will be going out, but the Council’s supposed pro-housing members shouldn’t be surprised now when this fails to fix the city’s affordable housing crisis, and they certainly shouldn’t take it as a job well done without working in a concerted way to address this crisis.
They began with a potential last step and are working their way backwards, and if they don’t reach the first steps soon then they will find that this push is cosmetic at best and counterproductive at worst. Get to it, clock’s ticking.