By Forum Staff
Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday announced the issuance of executive order 43 requiring City agencies to review their City owned and controlled land for potential housing development sites.
As the Big Apple faces a generational affordable housing crisis with just a 1.4 percent rental vacancy rate, Adams said he is proposing to use every possible tool available to deliver affordable housing.
Without significant public investments in new construction and housing preservation, the City’s wealth gap and racial disparities will grow while middle- and low- income New Yorkers will increasingly struggle financially,” City Department of Housing Preservation and Development officials wrote in February.
Wednesday’s executive order will help support the Adams administration’s “moonshot” goal of building 500,000 new homes by 2032, Hizzoner noted.
“If there’s any land within the City’s control that has even the remotest potential to develop affordable housing, our administration will take action,” Adams said. “To solve a generational affordable housing crisis, we must bring new innovative ideas to the table and activate all city agencies, whether they are directly involved in creating housing or not, to help deliver for New Yorkers. Today’s executive order is one of the many ways we will continue to exhaust every option to meet this crisis head on and fulfill our pledge of building 500,000 new housing units by 2032.”
Effective immediately, the executive order establishes the City Housing Activation Task Force, with representatives from mayoral agencies and other public entities. The task force will review land under the ownership and control of the city to identify potential sites for housing development, and develop guidelines to ensure agency policies promote housing production. All locations that can be used to further housing production or on adjacent or nearby sites without disruption to critical municipal operations will be considered.
This year, Mayor Adams and members of the administration successfully advocated for new tools in the 2024 New York state budget that will spur the creation of urgently needed housing. These include a new tax incentive for multifamily rental construction, a tax incentive program to encourage office conversions to create more affordable units, lifting the arbitrary “floor-to-area ratio” cap that held back affordable housing production in certain high-demand areas of the city, and the ability to create a pilot program to legalize and make safe basement apartments.
“Mayor Adams’ executive order is a bold, transformative decision that will streamline our ongoing efforts to build more affordable housing in every neighborhood,” HPD Commissioner Adolfo Carrion, Jr. said. “HPD stands ready to work collaboratively with all government agencies to unlock the housing opportunities and leverage the valuable resources of city-owned land as we work to solve the housing crisis.”
“’City of Yes for Housing Opportunity’ is all about ensuring that every neighborhood helps solve our housing crisis, and we are ready to roll up our sleeves and work with our sister agencies to build new income-restricted, affordable housing on city-owned land,” added City Planning Director Dan Garodnick. “Initiatives like this demonstrate our commitment to turning the tide on our housing shortage and building the homes that New Yorkers need.”
