Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony. My name is Melissa Kaplan-Macey, and I am the Vice President for State Programs at Regional Plan Association, and a resident and local volunteer with the Town of Mamaroneck in Westchester County. RPA is a non-profit civic organization that conducts research, planning and advocacy to improve economic opportunity, mobility, environmental sustainability and quality of life for everyone who works and lives in the New York metropolitan region.
Prior to the pandemic, in New York State more than 1 million owner-occupied households (28% of all owners) were paying more than a third of their monthly income towards mortgages and/or maintenance costs. New York State renters were in worse condition. Approximately 1.6 million renter households (52% of all renters) were housing cost-burdened. Here in Westchester County 61% of owners and 39% of renters were cost-burdened. The pandemic has only exacerbated these trends.
While no one strategy is the silver bullet that will address the housing needs in our County and our State, one thing is very clear- in order to meet our housing challenge we need more homes. And it is equally clear that we have not made the updates to our local laws that we need to allow more homes to be built. We have to get to work to solve our housing supply problem - just saying “no” is not an option.
The Governor’s NY Housing Compact proposal is an opportunity to invest in our state’s future by providing towns with the technical assistance and infrastructure funding they need to plan for and create the homes our state’s economy needs. When every community does its part, it’s not such a heavy lift for any one community and all communities benefit. We all agree there is a housing crisis - that is no longer a topic for debate. The thing we’re still debating is where we’re going to create the homes we need. Progress towards addressing this crisis is only possible if we actually plan for and zone for the places where we are going to create homes.
We believe that the approach of providing municipalities with a menu of policy options and incentives to help them meet their goals and giving them a 3-year window of time to take meaningful actions towards achieving those goals, is a sensible way to strike the necessary balance between local control of land use and zoning decisions with an incentive to act. Towns can decide to allow lot splits, to zone for Transit Oriented Development, to allow Accessory Dwelling Units, or to remove exclusionary zoning measures long embedded in local codes, among other tools. It is up to local governments to decide what tools will work best for their own communities.
Without a framework like this, which encourages forward momentum, the status quo will continue and we will miss our window of opportunity to invest in our own future. We can be a County and a state that attracts jobs and workers, where our children can live in the communities where they grew up, where we can see our grandkids without having to fly across the country, where older adults can stay in their communities as they age, and where workers can live near their jobs. We just need to plan for it at the local level and act on it at the local level in a reasonable timeframe, with support from the state. That is the framework the Governor has put before us- now is the time to act.
