Newsman: New York City Mayor Eric Adams pledged to boost city housing by 500,000 residences. Mayor Adams’ plan focuses on building housing faster, everywhere, and together in partnership with New York State, the New York City Council, and New Yorkers in all five boroughs.
Mayor Eric Adams pledge is more than double the number of homes that developed in the city in the past 10 years. The goal is to combat declining affordability of housing in the city, the nation’s largest with nearly 8.5 million residents and ranking among its costliest rental and real estate markets. New York’s housing stock grew by 200,000 in those years, while the city’s residential population increased by 800,000, he said in announcing the plan.
Mayor unveiled “Get Stuff Built,” a comprehensive, three-pronged effort on Thursday to address New York City’s affordable housing crisis and underlying housing shortage by rapidly accelerating the pace of housing production. the housing boost plan to provide 500,000 units over the next decade by easing regulations for home builders and cutting construction time in half. With the plan, Adams pledged to more than double the number of homes developed in the city in the past 10 years.
“We have more people than homes. This shortage gives landlords the power to charge any price they want and leaves too many New Yorkers with no place to go,” said Adams, a former New York City police captain who took office last January. “That needs to change.”
Housing Rights Initiative, a tenant’s rights advocacy group, applauded the mayor’s plan, saying that the city builds less housing per capita than most large U.S. cities.
The mayor also proposed legalizing existing basement apartment units, converting unused office buildings into housing and exempting small housing projects from often lengthy environmental reviews.
The plan also seeks to authorize the city to finance and preserve more affordable housing units.
“If we do not deal with this housing crisis, New York will no longer be a city for working people, for families, for immigrants or for elders,” Adams said.
New York “If New York is to remain the city we love, we must have places for the people we love. We need more housing, and we need it as fast as we can build it,” said Mayor Adams. “The system has been broken for so long that we have come to view it as our reality. Our city declared a housing emergency five decades ago, yet, we have failed to address it with the same urgency we would any other crisis. That ends now. We can, and we must, do better. We need to add hundreds of thousands of units to address the problem, and that is exactly what we are going to do. Today we are saying yes to more housing and yes to getting stuff built. We are going to build faster, we are going to build everywhere, and we are going to build together” Mayor Eric Adams said.
Median residential rental prices in New York’s Manhattan borough topped $4,000 a month in November, a nearly 20% increase from a year earlier, according to a monthly report by Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel. They were above $3,000 a month in Brooklyn and Queens.
Additionally, Mayor Adams formally kicked off the environmental review process to rezone the areas around two of the four new Metro-North train stations coming to the Bronx, with proposals to create thousands of new homes and family-sustaining jobs. Finally, Mayor Adams announced a series of policy priorities focused on stimulating housing creation, which his administration will pursue alongside partners in New York City, Albany, and Washington, D.C.
The eric Adams administration said, All of these initiatives fulfill commitments made in “Housing Our Neighbors,” the Adams administration’s blueprint for housing and homelessness; “Rebuild, Renew, Reinvent: A Blueprint for New York City’s Economic Recovery,” the administration’s blueprint for a strong, equitable comeback; and the mayor’s “City of Yes” plan, which includes proposed zoning changes that would allow for the creation of a significant amount of additional housing.
Mayor Adams focused much of his first year in office on the issues of rising crime and homelessness, called for more than 100 changes to government policies that he blamed for slowing down house construction. The changes include reforms to the environmental quality review, zoning approval and building permit processes.
In November, Adams unveiled a plan to address the city’s worsening homeless crisis. It opened the door to forcing more mentally ill New Yorkers living the streets into hospitals.
More than 60,000 people slept in city shelters in September, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, which said that plan was misguided. The group instead encouraged the Adams administration to expand access to voluntary psychiatric care, hotel rooms to unsheltered people and supportive housing units.
Adams’ predecessor former Mayor Bill de Blasio made housing a signature policy goal when he took office in 2014. New York built or preserved 200,000 affordable units before his second term ended at the end of 2021, according to a statement from the former mayor when he was leaving office a year ago.
