By Howard Husock
Editor’s Note: This excerpt is Howard Husock’s chapter found in Empire Center’s new edited volume, The Next New York: Renewing and Reforming the Empire State.
To a far greater extent than any other state, New York has made substantial public investments in its housing sector—both through direct financial support and indirect tax subsidies. The state’s subsidies aim to create what is often referred to as “low-income” or “affordable” housing, but might better be described as income-7restricted housing. Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul doubled down on this approach, launching a new multibillion-dollar wave of government-backed affordable housing construction and preservation, financed by a combination of federal grants and billions of dollars in new state borrowing administered by agencies answerable solely to the governor’s office.
State-authorized regulation of local rental markets has also been significantly extended in recent years. In 2019, then-Governor Cuomo signed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, making permanent New York City’s long-standing “emergency” rent control system, in the process rolling back a modest “decontrol” reform enacted in the late 1990s. The law also extended rent regulations and a local rent-control option to upstate communities that already have ample affordable housing. Some state lawmakers have continued to push for more widespread rental regulations, including laws capping rent increases on all private market-rate properties and requiring landlords to show “good cause” for failing to offer automatic lease extensions to their tenants.
In a bid to boost housing supply in suburbs, Governor Hochul’s fiscal 2023 budget bills included a provision that would have effectively overridden local zoning laws by requiring towns and cities to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in neighborhoods now limited to single-family homes. That proposal ultimately was dropped but seems likely to emerge in new forms.
For all the political focus on housing issues, however, New York’s policies have produced meager or counterproductive results—when they haven’t arguably undermined supply and affordability.
On Long Island and in the lower Hudson Valley, little new housing has been built, and the existing supply is both scarce and expensive.
New York City added a rising annual total of housing before the 2020 pandemic lockdown disruption, but not enough to compete with demand. The city’s housing market remains hobbled by counterproductive regulations, inequitable taxes, high prices, and a massive but dysfunctional public housing complex.
Upstate urban areas, by contrast, have higher vacancy rates and more affordable housing stock—reflecting generally stagnant economic conditions. They, too, nonetheless have been targeted for expensive state-subsidized development—and, under the 2019 state law, upstate rental markets may now also be subject to disruption by local adoption of state-authorized rent regulation.
Eligibility for affordable and low-income housing units in New York is limited to tenants whose income falls within a set percentage—typically 50 or 60 percent— of “area median income” based on family size.
Continue reading the full chapter
Howard Husock
Senior Fellow, Domestic Policy Studies
www.fotavgeia.blogspot.com
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