Public Housing in Perpetuity: How Will New York City’s Next Mayor Solve its Age-old Housing Crisis
Throughout the singular year that was 2020, The Coalition for the Homeless captured data indicating that an average of 60,000 people, of which 18, 000 were children were reporting to city shelters in need of a bed. This of course did not include more arcane evidence of ephemeral refuges such as temporary stays with friends or relatives, sheltering in cars, hotels, or as a last resolve, the streets themselves. School-aged children facing homelessness also had the added stress of attending school remotely-making it crystal clear that the most underserved and vulnerable New Yorkers spent the lockdown vacillating from one quarantined existence into another, without the most necessary of all protections-a home.
The next mayor of New York City has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to architect foundational partnerships with the Biden Administration, to the likes of those FDR’s New Deal bestowed Fiorello LaGuardia, to expand housing provisions and meet this era’s post-disaster, post-segregation citizenry. Seize the lauding of fairness and equality and offer a commitment to regain the city’s economy, vibrancy, and sanguinity. Remove the stigma and the labyrinthian chore of being poor by easing access to the inhumane system Citizens Housing Planning Council of New York City (CHPCNY) Executive Director Jessica Katz describes as the “brutal bureaucracy” in this Daily News piece:
New York City has a patchwork of social safety net programs cobbled together from federal, state, and city funding sources, creating a complicated mix of procedural and eligibility requirements that rely on an array of case managers and navigators, who are also tasked with navigating the systems’ inefficiencies.
Our bureaucratic systems aren’t designed for efficiency. Often, they are not even designed for results.
CHPCNY recently invited a Viennese panel of housing experts to provide insights on the highly touted Vienna’s Social Housing program, a unique and affordable housing model very counterpart to the one that we have here in the States; save for the program’s caveats that are revealed during the session’s Q& A segment, showcasing New York’s endemic albeit enigmatic quest for egalitarianism.
Scott Springer’s 27-point plan of progressive solutions to the housing crisis, Housing is a Right, Not a Privilege, also explores the Social Housing model as a component among them. New York cynics such as myself however refute any comparison or possibility of converting our urban setting to that of Vienna’s, the Huffington Post refers to as a “Paradise”. Alas, a pattern did appear, when Stringer interviewed on WBAI’s Max & Murphey revealed he’d been examining a new age in policing coming out of Eugene, Oregon. Perhaps this Vienna idea could gain some traction especially since it also introduces an environmental component to it which aligns with the city’s urgent search for more environmental leverage to contrive into its construction capacity. New York City is after all at its proverbial crossroads to address the homelessness issue and the bureaucracy behind it that is choking both, the dispossessed facing unimaginable dangers discreetly out of public view, and those who interact with peripheral dangers by way of daily cataclysmic interactions and impasses in public spaces.
For all the elegance, egalitarianism, and envy Vienna’s housing expounds, it also eschews a large parcel of its population, that by contrast its American counterparts constitutionally aim to protect: immigrants, low-income earners, and the homeless. This is, mostly, because the social housing program in Vienna is not designed to address any of these societal woes, and requires that each tenant come up with a down payment between $5,000-$30,000 to snag a $400 a month unit for those whose salaries cap at about $58,000 sending applicants to take out loans. Yes, we are still talking about social housing, but not one even the most verbally dexterous could spin back here, in good ol’ New York, USA.
Fret not, however, as there is plenty a social model left to save the day; but it just may need to be the one built by and for Americans, and urbane Americans at that. In his op-ed piece, Ross Barkin lays out the fight that is being waged by Progressives such as Sanders, AOC, and Omar, to repeal the Faircloth Act and its Clinton-era caps which further stagnated the stymying provision put on low-income housing constructions. Mayoral candidates must communicate how they will address the perpetuity of New York’s housing crisis, which in essence is the city’s existential black and brown crisis.
In his, You Decide podcast series, NY1’s uber gifted Political Anchor Errol Louis asks author, economist, and former head of Demos, Heather McGhee, about the “zero-sum hierarchy” which she dissects illustrating the pernicious and perpetual racist practices “we all” paid for, in the end. She argues in the book, The Sum of Us: The Cost of Racism, however that therein exists the “social dividend” to turn things around before it does get too late. Vienna’s positing of a utopian housing model could never properly serve our five boroughs, it is not built to address the city’s troubling history of discrimination and segregation. But New York City also cannot afford to ignore its affordable housing crisis. It is costing unimaginable millions in collateral damage when we do: lost talent pools: public safety and health casualties: environmental measures, and most of all, in what robs the children of New York City, children face, who come at this with the underdeveloped intellectual and emotional wiring to fight back, and a lack of resources to help them cope and navigate their futures in this city. New Yorkers may not need Vienna, but we do need each other because, in New York, we all would stand to benefit from actual affordable housing.
