As the state’s budget deadline approaches, Queens democratic lawmakers are at odds over whether it should include a path for legalizing the city’s basement and cellar apartments.
While Gov. Kathy Hochul included a pathway to basement legalization in her February budget proposal, the word ‘cellar’ is absent from her plan. The two terms may be indistinguishable to most property owners, but they’re different under zoning and dwelling laws, and excluding cellars from the state’s plan would omit a significant swath of below-grade housing stock from potential conversion, advocates say.
The governor’s proposed budget did not include funding for the state-run Homeowner Protection Program, or HOPP, a network of legal service providers and counselors aimed at preventing foreclosures. Program supporters say the omission ‘makes no sense’ as New York grapples with a housing crisis, which Hochul’s administration has centered as a policy focus this year.
“It’s pretty dreadful,” one housing advocate said. “The governor decided to-go drinks and a stadium in Buffalo were more important than housing the homeless and marginalized New Yorkers.”
The State Senate and Assembly included a quarter-billion dollars to fund the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), which would create a new rent voucher for New Yorkers experiencing or at-risk of homelessness—including immigrants without legal status—with values pegged to fair market rent levels.
A proposal for the new rent subsidy, dubbed the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), may emerge as a bargaining chip amid high-profile legislative battles in Albany. “There is no substitute for the rapid change we could realize by dramatically expanding rental assistance,” said the bill’s sponsor, State Sen. Brian Kavanagh.
The New York Legislature passed a bill in June to increase the value of the state’s FHEPS rental subsidy program to fair market rent—$2,026 for a two-bedroom in New York City. But the governor has yet to sign the legislation, which will get automatically vetoed by the end of the year if she doesn’t act on it.
With seven weeks to go before state eviction protections expire, New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) has yet to cut a single check, and the organizations tasked with helping tenants say they’re hamstrung by inefficiencies.
State lawmakers are taking a third pass at amending the rent relief program to reach more people, but some housing advocates – who are calling for the cancellation of rent– have slammed the legislation as putting the burden to getting assistance on tenants’ shoulders.
Worth about $572 million in fiscal 2019, it’s the fourth largest tax break affecting city revenues.
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