City Renews Fair Housing Commitments, Focusing on Climate and Affordability

New York City announced new fair housing goals to increase access in every neighborhood. “Everyone should be able to choose a home in the neighborhood that is best for them,” said Lucy Joffe, deputy commissioner for policy and strategy at the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development.

On Monday, the city released 16 new fair housing commitments as part of its “Where We Live 2025” plan, a City Council–mandated effort to make New York City’s housing market more fair.

The draft plan, shared with City Limits, includes a program to encourage New Yorkers living in areas prone to severe flooding to voluntarily move, and another to legalize more housing with shared kitchens or other common facilities.

In 2023, the City Council passed its Fair Housing Framework that mandated the city develop a fair housing plan every five years and set development targets for all 59 community districts. That first plan refresh is due in October. Next year, the Council will set housing production targets for each district.

The “Where We Live” plan builds on the original fair housing plan from 2020, which defined 81 commitments across six major goals.

“The City has completed 50% of those commitments, with more than 90% currently underway or complete—progress driven by cross-agency coordination and sustained engagement with New Yorkers,” a spokesperson for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) told City Limits in a statement.

Officials pointed to the City of Yes for Housing, which aims to create more affordable opportunities in neighborhoods across the city, and to the nearly 100,000 new units of housing HPD produced during the last four years.

HPD is constantly juggling new projects, construction, and repairs. But officials want each of those efforts to help march the city towards greater equity, said Lucy Joffe, deputy commissioner for policy and strategy at HPD. “This is the long work.”

What is Fair Housing?

The city’s first fair housing plan in 2020 set six goals: fight housing discrimination, build more housing, protect affordable housing and prevent displacement, ensure access for voucher holders, increase housing options for people with disabilities, and improve conditions in divested neighborhoods.

New York City, the report notes, has pockets of deep inequality where rent burdens, poverty, and hazardous environments disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. “We’re talking about centuries of discrimination and segregation and decades of discriminatory policies and the ways in which undoing some of this is not quick,” said Joffe.

New Yorkers are protected from discrimination in the housing market based on race, religion, sex, disability, family status, and national origin, according to the federal Fair Housing Act. New York State’s own fair housing protections also protect people based on their source of income, criminal record, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

But housing discrimination can be insidious and hard to identify, especially in a housing market with many potential tenants and few available apartments. New York City’s vacancy rate was the lowest since 1968, at 1.41 percent, in 2023. Disparities in the cost and availability of housing across the city mean some high opportunity areas are inaccessible for many New Yorkers.

Fair housing can feel abstract, Joffe said, but at its core is something that everyone can relate to: “Everyone should be able to choose a home in the neighborhood that is best for them, right? And that might mean staying in your current home.”

Climate and affordability

The draft commitments keep the same overarching goals as 2020’s plan, but changing times have called for tweaks. One of those is aimed at property owners contending with the rising threat of climate change. 

That means “for folks that are living in flood prone areas, giving them an option for the city to buy their home and for them to move to a new neighborhood,” said Joffe.

Sylvia Morse, director of research and policy at the Pratt Center, pointed out that much of the city’s low income and public housing is at risk of flooding. 

“Identifying displacement risk as a fair housing problem—and planning for it—is absolutely right,” Morse said “The challenge is ensuring that we can actually carry out fair housing solutions. Are we investing in new low-income housing? Are relocation programs equitable? Is the land people are displaced from used for social good?” 

The report will consider further changes to zoning and new housing construction in low-density areas with strong transit access. January’s passage of the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity included policies to increase density around transit, but ended with several carve outs for single family neighborhoods and outerborough transit stops.

The draft plan calls for going further than City of Yes did on shared housing—homes with communal kitchens like single room occupancy or co-living spaces. A spokesperson for HPD said that could include changes to the housing maintenance and building code.

Slower progress on NYCHA

While half of goals from the 2020 Where We Live plan are marked as completed, some of the goals for public housing are more long term. None of the actions where NYCHA was tagged as the lead agency have been completed so far—though many of them involve construction and rehabilitation projects that take time.

In the new plan, policymakers pledged to focus on the areas around large clusters of affordable housing, like NYCHA campuses.

“Because our investments are concentrated…in the case of NYCHA, we really want to focus on these places and think about what we can do to improve safety and quality of life, to improve outcomes in these areas,” said Michael Sandler, associate commissioner at HPD.

Six new commitments include a strategy to maintain and develop vacant lots, invest in public space near affordable housing developments, coordinate public and private actors to clean up streets, and design housing to mitigate the urban heat island effect.

New data tool highlights housing disparities

A new data tool, released alongside the 2025 plan, lays some of those disparities bare.

For example, 1.7 million New York renters, or 21 percent, were “rent-burdened” in 2023, meaning they paid more than 30 percent of their income on rent. 37 percent of rent-burdened households were severely rent burdened in 2023, when they make up just 31 percent of renter households.

The tool visualizes data from New York City’s Housing and Vacancy Survey, which is published once every three years and examines New York City’s housing stock and population. 

Policymakers use key indicators from the report, like the vacancy rate—the percentage of unoccupied units—that can indicate how tight the housing market is.

Make your voice heard

The city is inviting the public to weigh in on the plan through an online form that will be on the “Where We Live” website later this month. Interested participants can sign up for email updates.

In September and the beginning of October, the city will put together a full draft plan and host public meetings to collect feedback.

The Fair Housing Framework and the “Where We Live” goals have no enforcement mechanism attached. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed housing compact, which would have mandated production targets, flamed out in the legislature in 2023.

“The Council’s Fair Housing framework is, as it stands, just a reporting mechanism,” Alec Schierenbeck, executive director of the Charter Revision Commission told City Limits last month. 

Scheierenbeck told City Limits he agreed with the Fair Housing Framework. The Charter Commission introduced measures for November’s ballot that it says will strengthen the framework, like fast tracking housing in specific neighborhoods that have underproduced.

Policymakers are hopeful the plan will build on 2020’s, and help hold the agency and the city accountable for progress on housing.

“Having this policy document with the type of research and community engagement that goes into it then helps us later to achieve the things that require legislative changes, or state law, state law changes, zoning changes,” said Sandler. “You can use this for ourselves as a tool for accountability for those external bodies and vice versa.”

If you feel as though you’ve been a victim of a fair housing violation you can file a complaint with the NYC Commission on Human Rights or find more resources on the Where We Live website.

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