Council Leader Highlights Housing Crunch

While City Council Speaker Christine Quinn may have been speaking in jest when she said during her State of the City address that “if we don’t do something soon, public toilets ... may well be the only new housing available to the average working family,” the implication was quite clear—the state of city housing has reached a critical point.

Quinn devoted much of her Feb. 12 address to the issue of affordable housing—a theme on which she also spoke extensively in her address last year. Her speech included proposals for several new initiatives aimed at easing what is now a citywide affordable housing crunch, one of which would lower the cost of housing for middle- and lower-income renters.

“The single biggest complaint I hear from New Yorkers is the skyrocketing cost of housing and the devastating impact it’s having on our middle class,” Quinn said. She applauded “several historic pieces of legislation to preserve and upgrade the limited supply of affordable housing” that have been passed this year, as well as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s continued support of his New Housing Marketplace Plan, which has already financed 40 percent of the 165,000 rent-controlled units to be built and preserved by 2013.

But much of the address centered on the changes still to be made, and Quinn highlighted the housing struggles of the middle class in addition to the lower class.

“We can’t expect to keep a strong middle class here in New York or provide opportunities to immigrant families if we make the city literally uninhabitable for them,” she said.

Toward this end, Quinn pushed for legislation that would create the Renters Tax Credit, an initiative proposed in her 2007 address that the Assembly did not approve. The plan would provide New York renters, who make up about two-thirds of all city residents, with a $300 tax break that could benefit as many as 1.1 million tenants who have suffered from rising property taxes.

Quinn, who has been working to implement affordable housing initiatives since her time years ago as a tenant organizer, cautioned, “If we are going to hold on to our middle class and those striving to join it for the long term, we have to expand our focus and even the definition of affordable housing.”

Perhaps the most important proposal is Quinn’s citywide Mitchell-Lama plan, which would increase the number of Mitchell-Lama buildings, which provide affordable rental and cooperative housing to moderate- and middle-income families. According to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development Web site, there are currently 107 such developments, containing approximately 47,000 units.

Quinn has selected Maxine Griffith—Columbia’s executive vice president for government and community affairs and former Department of Housing and Urban Development assistant deputy secretary—to lead a “high-level task force” to develop a blueprint “with detailed and doable recommendations on how best to deal with this complex challenge.”

The task force and plan are both in very early stages, and Quinn’s office could not comment on when either would be revealed. Quinn did say her goal was “to unveil our next generation Mitchell-Lama plan this fall and to have the commitment and resources next year to begin implementing it.”

“This is one of the most critical issues facing our city, and I’m honored to represent the University in an effort to build on the work of the Bloomberg administration and to bring creative solutions to the table,” Griffith said. “Preliminary planning discussions have been fruitful—as those continue and as the task force becomes fully constituted over the coming weeks, we hope to engage the broader campus community in this critical effort.”

lydia.wileden@columbiaspectator.com