Op-Ed | Back-to-back years of building more housing and making our city more affordable

If there is one issue that unites New Yorkers from every walk of life, it’s housing.

Our city’s rental vacancy rate is at a historic low of 1.4 percent, which shows how few homes in our city are available for rent; and half of all New Yorkers pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent. The numbers do not lie: our city is facing a housing shortage crisis that effects the cost of living and that must be addressed as swiftly and aggressively as possible. 

The solution to this is simple: to build more new, affordable homes and get more people into the housing we already have. I’m proud to say, we have done just that and more AGAIN this past fiscal year. To meet this moment head on, our administration has achieved back-to-back record-breaking years of both creating and connecting New Yorkers to affordable housing. 

For the second year in a row, the city has produced the most supportive housing and housing for formerly homeless New Yorkers. And, this year, our administration has also financed the most new affordable homes in history.

Following decades of disinvestment, we have converted 3,678 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartments into newly renovated residences. We have delivered on moving a record number of homeless New Yorkers into permanently affordable housing through the highest usage of City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) housing vouchers. And, in total, our city agencies financed a combined 28,944 affordable and public housing units in Fiscal Year 2024 through new construction and preservation initiatives.

This is a game changer for working people, families, immigrants, young people, and others in need. 

While today we celebrate our progress, tomorrow we need to get back to work and aim even higher. Our ‘City of Yes for Housing Opportunity’ initiative is another tool we have to produce over 108,000 new homes that our city needs and deserves in the next 15 years. Additionally, we have advanced several robust planning efforts to deliver more than 50,000 units over the next 15 years in the Metro North station area in the Bronx, Central Brooklyn, Midtown South in Manhattan, and Long Island City and Jamaica in Queens. As we work to advance each of these bold proposals, we are calling on our partners at the City Council to help us solve this housing crisis by saying “yes” to more affordable housing.

Just last month, together with Speaker Adams and the City Council, we invested a historic $2 billion in capital funds to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and to public housing at NYCHA. This brings our investment in affordable housing over the current 10-year plan to more than 26-billion-dollars — a new record level. I know the City Council understands the importance of taking action and look forward to our work together.

But while the numbers are impressive, more importantly, behind each of these record-breaking numbers is a human impact and story.  I know what it is like to live without the security of housing. Growing up on the edge of homelessness, my siblings and I had to take trash bags full of clothes to school because there were days where we couldn’t be sure where we would sleep that night. That is why, from day one, our administration has been committed to making this city more affordable and livable.

Every day, we are fighting to make sure New Yorkers don’t have to go through what I went through, by building more homes and connecting more New Yorkers to homes we already have. Together, we can and will build a city that is more affordable and more accessible for all.