Thank you Speaker Adrienne Adams, Chair Pierina Sanchez, Chair Rafael Salamanca Jr., and all the co-sponsors of Intro No. 1031-2023 for holding this hearing to discuss the importance of creating a comprehensive framework for addressing our City’s housing crisis. We are grateful for the opportunity to submit this testimony in support of Intro No. 1031-2023 to establish a Fair Housing Plan for the City.

My name is Maulin Mehta, and I am New York Director at Regional Plan Association (RPA), a role with big shoes to fill as Council Member Sanchez was my predecessor! RPA is a non-profit research, planning and advocacy organization that has been serving the NYC metropolitan region for over a century. We are driven by our values of health, equity, sustainability and prosperity to ensure the region works for everyone who calls it home. While we are known for our generational long-term plans, we work everyday to deliver insights and promote new projects and policies that will improve quality of life.

In our Fourth Regional Plan, released in 2017, we provided a framework and set of recommendations to help make the region more affordable for everyone. The various recommendations center around the need to build more housing to keep up with demand, prevent displacement, and address our region’s history of segregation by furthering fair housing. As we noted in our 2017 report, Pushed Out: Housing Displacement in an Unaffordable Region, displacement had become more and more a risk for low and moderate-income residents in amenity rich neighborhoods.

And the affordability crisis has only gotten worse post-pandemic, forcing more households to grapple with housing insecurity as the true cost of living continues to go up. Within our region, New York City has the highest proportion of households who are cost burdened - 48% - of which more than half are severely burdened (See Figure 1). Moreover, while segregation has declined in our region over the last decade - mirroring trends we see nationally - the New York region still has the highest level of Black-White and Asian-White segregation, and second highest level of Latino-White segregation of the twelve largest metro areas. (See Figure 2)

Fair share systems – which require localities to calculate and meet affordable housing obligations – already exist in other parts of the tri-state region. While not perfect, New Jersey is considered to have the most robust, specifically since its enforcement was turned back to the judicial system in 2015. New Jersey’s fair share housing framework, known as the Mount Laurel doctrine, helped facilitate the state’s greater housing production, and affordable housing in particular. A recent analysis revealed that the last round of Mount Laurel is associated with adding 69,000 multifamily units between 2015-2022 across 349 municipalities (i.e., 12.4 units per 1,000 residents). Unfortunately, New York does not have a similar framework in place, and so we have been unable to meet our housing needs to protect vulnerable New Yorkers from displacement.

In the most recent State budget session, Governor Hochul proposed a statewide framework to address our housing crisis through growth targets and mechanisms to ensure all communities were doing their part to solve the problem. RPA, along with a number of partners through our New York Neighbors coalition, were actively engaged in trying to get that proposal approved. Unfortunately, that effort did not succeed in part due to entrenched ideas that communities can avoid their fair share of housing to support low and moderate income households who want access to better opportunities.

It turns to localities to continue to drive programs and policies to help create equitable housing policies that build more types of housing across more communities, especially those with good infrastructure and access to opportunities and amenities that have otherwise avoided adequate housing development. The Fair Housing Plan would create metrics and a framework for equitable housing growth, helping ensure that all entities approach housing development with an emphasis on sustainability and support for disadvantaged communities. The citywide assessment around displacement risk, climate vulnerability, infrastructure capacity and others in formulating community district level needs is critical to identifying implementation steps.

We are especially grateful for the inclusion of assessments that would identify the needs of specific vulnerable groups. For example, we know that 60% of older residents in the region experience a much higher rate of housing cost burden, and that it is difficult in many places to build the type of modern, accessible and affordable housing needed to accommodate their goal to age in place. Having a plan to help tackle housing disparities with a more granular understanding of various groups will be critical for advocates to help support development projects meeting the plan’s goals across the City.

One of the biggest challenges we face is the ad hoc approach with which we approach planning. We have a fragmented system, with many processes and reporting requirements that do not necessarily speak to each other. Centering planning on addressing some of our most pressing equity issues would begin to address this coordination issue. We would like to see this effort go further in the following ways:

• Ensure community engagement and planning is properly funded and staffed to educate or train community boards and residents to engage more fully in the Plan’s development.

• Link the citywide needs assessment with other challenges the city, state and region is grappling with including transportation, climate change, economic development, etc. - so that efforts we are undertaking can be more equitably addressed with collaboration outside the City’s borders. (See Figure 3)

• Similarly to what other advocates have expressed - incorporate additional indicators beyond what is analyzed through the EDDE so that we can more comprehensively assess the factors and investments needed to improve quality of life and access to opportunity.

• Identify efforts - through Charter Reform or otherwise - that would help commit funding and streamline development and foster interagency coordination that aligns with the Fair Housing Plan. This is especially critical since, as noted in the committee report, the City has lost over half a million low-rent apartments from 2008 - 2021 and we are far from meeting the pace and scale needed to address our housing crisis.

Thank you for your time and consideration of this testimony. As always, RPA stands ready to serve as a resource to help implement ideas like this that will help create a more equitable City and region.