With the housing crisis rightly a top concern of New Yorkers, some hard-won improvements are yielding their promised advancements. Over in the Nostrand Houses in Sheepshead Bay, City Hall and NYCHA have announced a cash injection of $607 million for repairs and improvements, courtesy of the Housing Preservation Trust. We hope residents elsewhere take heed.
Getting here has taken a while. First, four years ago, the Legislature in Albany and Gov. Hochul had to pass a law allowing for a trust structure to unlock new federal funding streams. Then individual NYCHA developments had to vote on the option of remaining in the current system or choosing the trust or selecting a third way, known as the PACT (Permanent Affordability Commitment Together), using private and nonprofit developers to finance major repairs and upgrades.
Nostrand went first and the residents favored the trust in December 2023. Now is the time to deliver. All eyes will fall on Nostrand now, not only of their own residents but other developments that either already have or are considering throwing their lot in with the new system. Much hinges on what they see.
The $607 million sum both sounds like a lot of money and not much at all when you consider that $60 billion-plus estimated capital funding need estimated to get the entire NYCHA system to basic habitability.
Yet this is for just this one development, to rehabilitate 1,148 units and their surrounding systems serving some 2,000 residents. That’s a sizable investment for this population, and it puts in sight something that has in recent years seemed almost unimaginable: that the public housing authority could not just keep a development limping along indefinitely, but actually revitalize it to the point that what it needs is only routine maintenance, away from managing perennial collapse.
All without the city or state having to allocate additional funds, as the structure of the trust is engineered to take maximum advantage of federal funding.
The millions of New Yorkers not in NYCHA housing may also get a boost soon, as the Department of City Planning has announced the 12 community districts whose lethargic pace of affordable housing development have triggered an expedited approval process lasting only 90 days, a measure voters approved last year along with other housing-related ballot measures.
The neighborhoods include both wealthy, dense areas like the Upper West Side and Upper East Side and semi-suburban neighborhoods like Eastern Queens and Staten Island. What they have in common are abysmal rates of affordable housing construction, which creates problems that are not confined to these neighborhoods themselves. The whole city ends up bearing the brunt of astronomical housing prices that, whatever their other causes, are principally downstream from a housing market that quite simply cannot keep up with demand.
There is already predictable grumbling from some residents and elected officials in these neighborhoods, but if they want someone to blame, they can look around at each other and in the mirror for being laggards. Now, that’s been shown to be behind other communities on new development, then the city must step in. Plus, these neighborhoods should ultimately understand the bigger picture, which is that lots more housing is needed, everywhere.
The city’s population is growing and the only real way to preserve any semblance of affordability and keep residents — both longstanding and newcomers — is to have enough housing for everyone.