NYC Dragging Its Feet To Develop Vacant Lots, Report Finds

NEW YORK, NY — New York City officials are dragging their feet to develop empty lots that could hold the key to fixing the city's affordable housing crisis, according to a report published Monday. The Office of Housing Preservation and Development has only made plans to use 118 of 1,125 vacant city-owned lots from September 2015 to September 2017, City Comptroller Scott Stringer's report says.

The agency has transferred 64 lots to developers and signed over 54 others to different city agencies for their use, Stringer found. But it's pushed back plans to develop hundreds more after missing its own deadlines to transfer ownership by last June, Stringer found.

It would take the city 17 years to get plans for the remaining 1,007 lots in motion at the current pace, Stringer says.

The report comes about two years after Stringer, a Democrat, released an audit of the city's vacant land and found hundreds of properties that he says could hold up to 57,000 permanently affordable homes. Stringer wants the city to get nonprofit developers to build them to prevent rising rents from forcing more people out of the city.

"Now, we’ve come back two years later, and we’ve uncovered that the agency’s promises were as empty as these vacant lots," Stringer said in a statement. "At a time when we face an affordability crisis, HPD is sitting on precious resources. And to make matters worse, we know that it has been willfully avoiding the truth for years."

Stringer's vacant land proposals have been a point of contention between him and Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration. The Democratic mayor has his own suite of initiatives that he says will build or preserve 300,000 affordable homes by 2026. Some of de Blasio's critics, including Stringer, say the proposal lacks bold solutions to an urgent crisis.

De Blasio's revised affordable housing plan, released last fall, looks to build senior housing on some "underutilized" vacant lots, build apartments on parking lots in affordable housing complexes and put small homes on oddly shaped lots.

Stringer said Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, officials should set realistic deadlines for developing lots and track its own plans more closely.

But housing officials say Stringer is misrepresenting the pace of the agency's efforts. HPD has actually transferred 190 lots to developers or other agencies since the start of 2015, officials said; Stringer's report doesn't include 75 transactions that happened in the first eight months of that year.

HPD has picked a developer or solicited proposals for another 450 lots, even if they haven't been officially transferred, officials said. And nearly 500 properties face "significant development challenges," such as the threat of flooding or lawsuits that stall projects, the agency says. One development near Seward Park on the Lower East Side was mired in disputes for 50 years before finally opening last month, The New York Times reported.

"HPD is aggressively developing its 1,000 remaining public sites for affordable housing, almost all of them small and hard to develop lots," HPD Commissioner Maria Torres-Springer said in a statement. "The comptroller’s report misrepresents the facts and denies the very real progress made by HPD over the last four years from Seward Park, which now has housing after decades of neglect, to the hundreds of small sites where affordable homes and apartments are in the works."

HPD is also working with other city agencies, such as the New York City Housing Authority and the Department of City Administrative Services, to develop more than 10,000 affordable homes on properties they own, housing officials said.

(Lead image: City Comptroller Scott Stringer speaks at a news conference on Monday. Photo from Comptroller Scott Stringer via Twitter)