Today, CBC will testify before the City Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings on Mayor Eric Adams’ new housing plan.

CBC very much supports the plan’s focus on improving the quality and efficiency of housing-related service delivery, the need to increase housing production to help address the city’s affordability crisis, and that it prominently prioritizes NYCHA.  However, for the plan to succeed, the City should specify the operational and policy actions needed to achieve these goals, and implement a performance management and accountability system to ensure that they are executed well. Without strong management and accountability, the plan will not succeed.

We recommend:

• Identifying the specific actions needed to improve housing-related operations, the responsible parties, implementation milestones, and publicly available performance metrics;

• Planning for growth: setting goals for total net housing production citywide and by community district (inclusive of both income-restricted and market-rate units);

• Zoning for growth: proposing broad-based rezonings to increase as-of-right development capacity in every neighborhood to meet the immense need for all types of housing;

• Tracking and publishing the net increase in housing units citywide and by neighborhood and outcome metrics such as the share of rent burdened households or homeownership rates; and

• Pursuing other City and State actions needed to make housing less expensive to build and operate, such as speeding up development approvals; better balancing citywide needs and local concerns; and reforming the property tax system, building and construction codes, insurance laws, and the Multiple Dwelling Law.