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Each Friday, City Limits rounds up the latest news on housing, land use and homelessness. Catch up on what you might have missed here.
Welcome to “What Happened This Week in NYC Housing?” where we compile the latest local news about housing, land use and homelessness. Know of a story we should include in next Friday’s roundup? Email us.
Mayor Eric Adams declared this week “housing week,” kicking it off with a brief video tour of Gracie Mansion.
On Monday, he announced a plan to create 3,000 units of workforce housing at the former Flushing Airport site in College Point, Queens.
On Wednesday, he announced an initiative to reform the city’s Senior Affordable Rental Apartments (SARA) program to include more family-sized apartments. In neighborhoods with few deeply affordable homes, new SARA projects must include 20 percent two-bedrooms units, the new rules said, for the purposes of accommodating multigenerational households.
Housing week concluded Friday with a press conference where the mayor and the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) announced that the city built or preserved 28,281 units of housing in the past 12 months. It was an 11 percent increase over the previous year, and included 13,361 new affordable units.
Officials said that brought the total number of units created under the Adams administration to 95,100. Since taking office, officials said they preserved another 134,700 units of housing, including more than 16,000 rehabbed NYCHA apartments. They planned an additional 197,000 units by unlocking new development through zoning actions like City of Yes and neighborhood plans, which made up around two-thirds of the total.
Mayor Adams’ office, claiming to be the “most pro-housing administration in city history,” said they would outpace both the de Blasio and Bloomberg administrations when it comes to building new housing through zoning actions. The total built, preserved, and planned, the administration says, is 426,800—near the mayor’s moonshot goal of 500,000 by 2032.
But not all the units planned may break ground, and some still have to go through the city’s land use review process, which could cut the number.
Separately, Adams promised to double the number of homes in the city’s affordable housing lotteries that are set aside for city workers, from 5 percent to 10 percent, and make veterans eligible for those units.
More housing news ICYMI, from City Limits:
- The first hotel-to-housing project using a state incentive to boost such conversions will open soon in Queens, with 318 affordable apartments at the former Hilton Hotel near JFK apartment.
- New York State is advancing its plan to phase in all-electric buildings in new construction and get rid of fossil fuel-based gas stoves and other equipment.
- Fewer migrants are being subjected to 30- and 60-day homeless shelter deadlines, as the number of new arrivals to the city declines.
ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:
- The MTA is evicting people from their East Harlem apartments to make way for construction of the next Second Avenue subway expansion, Gothamist reports.
- Mayor Adams vetoed the City Council’s rejection of Bally’s bid to open a casino at Ferry Point in the Bronx, according to The City.
- A closer look at the thousands of New Yorkers living in overcrowded apartments, via the New York Times.
- “I wasn’t in charge of building affordable housing in New York,” former Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of the decade he spent as New York State governor, via WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show.
