East New York: Fighting for our homes and community

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing plan passed in the City Council two weeks ago after a bruising citywide battle. Though many tenants’ rights, workers’ rights, and other community groups opposed the plan for its failure to reach the poorest third of New Yorkers, the mayor has assured critics that Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is just one tool in the city’s toolbox, not the whole housing plan. The city will reach the people with the greatest housing needs through other tools, officials have repeatedly said.

But here in East New York, the tools the city is planning to use to secure affordable housing are inadequate, uncertain or simply nonexistent. Our coalition has spent the last 18 months pressuring the city to add new resources, pilot new policies we’ve proposed, and be more responsive to the community’s needs.

As the Council readies to vote on the East New York plan, we feel that the city is no closer to a plan that will create the bright future that our neighborhood needs. We urge the Council to vote no on the plan, so that we have time to craft a strategy that will live up to the mayor’s promises of a more equitable city for all. There is no reason to rush to approve a plan that does not meet the needs of the community, and the stakes are too high to get it wrong.

The city has promised to use subsidies to get the deeply affordable housing East New York needs, and we agree that such subsidies will play an important role in the years immediately following the rezoning. But as our coalition has written elsewhere, there are several issues with that plan – chief among them that the subsidies still do not reach the deepest affordability levels the community needs, and the city is upzoning to allow significantly more building than it can reasonably expect to subsidize soon.

Though some developers may accept subsidies to build more deeply affordable housing, others will buy land and warehouse it until the local housing market heats up – constructing subsidy-free buildings that will be far beyond community members’ reach and will fuel gentrification and displacement from the neighborhood’s existing low-cost housing, most of which is unregulated. Though the city has set a goal of making at least half of the 6,500 new apartments in East New York “affordable,” the truth is that based on current commitments, as little as 10 percent of what’s built could be affordable to the average neighborhood resident.

This is not the only way forward. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development could create a new housing financing tool/term sheet that reaches deeper affordability levels, securing more housing at the local neighborhood need. It could cut sites out of the rezoning plan, which would allow the city to invest its funds in fewer, more deeply affordable sites, reduce the risk of displacement resulting from a flood of market-rate apartments and preserve manufacturing sites in the area, which are vital homes for high-quality jobs. The city could also do a better job of leveraging its public land, and make more effective use of tax lien sales to preserve affordability and help keep low-income people in their homes.

Critically, the city can and must do more to curb displacement of existing residents and address the needs of the community’s unregulated small homes, which represent a majority of the housing stock in East New York. We believe that the city has significantly underestimated the risk of displacement from the rezoning (as we explained at length in our response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement). And at present, the city’s toolbox for small homes is essentially empty – even though there are many strategies the city could employ to protect low-income owners and tenants. These include legalization of basement apartments in exchange for affordability, the creation of a $15 millionSmall Homes Preservation Fund to support basement dwelling upgrades, energy efficiency improvements and systems repairs, and on-the-ground outreach and counseling to prevent scams and fraud.

Will these investments cost the city money? Of course. But the city has under-invested in East New York and its people for decades. And after generations of neglect, we are willing to wait a little longer for a rezoning plan that gets it right. If the rezoning moves forward without meaningful strategies to prevent the displacement of low-income residents and secure housing that is affordable to the current community, it will not advance de Blasio’s affordable housing plan – it will instead result in an overall loss of low-income housing in the community.

In Williamsburg, a spokesperson for the mayor recently said, “The administration would never accept a rezoning here that did not have the support of the Councilman and community.” We hope that the community of East New York is accorded the same level of respect and that the administration hears our call to shelve the current rezoning plan so we can do it right, together.

The authors write on behalf of the Coalition for Community Advancement: Progress for East New York / Cypress Hills, a coalition of residents, faith-based institutions, affordable housing developers, small business owners, and other community-based organizations that collectively represent roughly 20,000 East New Yorkers.