The Senate and Assembly on Tuesday released their annual budget resolutions, responding to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $227 billion spending proposal unveiled last month. They rejected the bulk of Hochul’s strategy to increase housing production statewide, while entertaining eviction protections the governor has ducked.
The city’s landmark Right to Counsel law was the country’s first to guarantee legal representation in housing court to low-income tenants most at risk for eviction. But advocates and providers say it’s been undermined in recent months as the courts schedule eviction cases faster than there are available housing attorneys to take them. “When the law was first passed, it worked,” Ruth Riddick, a Flatbush tenant, testified Friday at a city hearing on the initiative.
“The city and state must stop relying on failed capitalist strategies when developing more housing, which is why I introduced a bill Thursday that would require the city to study the feasibility of creating a municipal social housing development agency.”
“As Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to deliver the speech that could define her first full term, she has an opportunity to set a path of real progress on housing. But she will have to break the patterns of past leadership—and her own first year in office.”
The city’s trailblazing program guaranteeing legal representation to the city’s poorest tenants facing eviction has been falling short since the state eviction moratorium was lifted last year; many still face housing court alone. State officials told City Limits the program has declined more than 10,000 cases since March 2022.
Among immigrant-headed households with children, 52 percent experienced rent burden in 2021, a new study describes, compared to 48 percent of households with kids headed by native-born New Yorkers. Non-citizen immigrants specifically saw the highest rates of rent burdened households: 55 percent for those without children and 59 percent of those with children.
“In 1890, Jacob Riis photographed and documented the inhumane conditions of tenements in New York City: the lack of light, air, space, and basic sanitation. Today, 132 years later, much of New York City’s housing stock is still bad: unsafe water, broken elevators, mold, lack of heat, roaches, and rats.”
The legislation directs the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-based Violence and the Department of Social Services to establish a new fund and dispense modest grants to survivors of domestic violence.
Jimmy McMillan’s performance in a gubernatorial debate in October 2010 sealed his status in New York political lore and cemented a six-word slogan into our vernacular. Today, he is fighting to hold on to his apartment from a nursing home in Queens.
The dearth of affordable housing across the city—and the nation—should prompt Congress to increase rental assistance programs and supercharge the National Housing Trust Fund, Sarah Saadian of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) told WBAI’s City Watch. The fund sends money to states to develop homes for extremely low-income Americans.
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