NYC Needs A 'Bigger And Bolder' Housing Plan, Stringer Says

WINDSOR TERRACE, BROOKLYN — Continuing his criticsm of Mayor Bill de Blasio's affordable housing initiatives, Comptroller Scott Stringer on Wednesday said the city needs a "bigger and bolder" plan to keep New Yorkers in their homes and stem the tide of homelessness.

Addressing Brooklyn Community Board 7 at PS 154 in Windsor Terrace, Stringer said "there is a lot of good work" de Blasio is doing to build and preserve affordable apartments. But it lacks ambition and relies too heavily on wealthy developers, he said.

"What is the program that we’re looking towards? It doesn’t exist," Stringer said. "Our housing program is, how can we squeeze multi-billionaire developers, give us some affordable housing that’s not affordable? That’s not good news, in my opinion."

Stringer, a Democrat just re-elected to a second term, repeated his call for a city land bank, which he says could be used to build thousands of affordable apartments on empty city-owned lots.

An audit Stringer's office released last year said the city could build more than 56,000 affordable apartments on more than 14,000 city-owned lots.

While Stringer has similarly criticized de Blasio before, these remarks came the same day that de Blasio's administration rolled out specifics of his expanded plan to build or preserve 300,000 affordable homes by 2026.

That plan, dubbed "Housing New York 2.0," looks to make use of vacant lots. The city wants to build senior housing on some "underutilized" city lots, build apartments on parking lots in affordable housing complexes and put small homes on oddly shaped lots.

The city has plans to develop more than half of the roughly 1,000 vacant lots the Office of Housing Preservation and Development controls, according to de Blasio's plan. The rest are targeted for non-residential uses or are difficult to develop at all, the plan says.

"Building on the incredible affordable housing accomplishments of our first term, Housing New York 2.0 commits us to creating 25,000 affordable homes a year and 300,000 homes by 2026," de Blasio said in a statement Wednesday. "Making New York a fairer city for today and for future generations depends on it."

De Blasio also plans to bolster subsidies to keep rents down in existing affordable apartments, such as the city's Mitchell-Lama Housing Development buildings.

But Stringer said the city should build homes like the first Mitchell-Lama and New York City Housing Authority complexes, which were conceived as a path to the middle class. Such new complexes could give homeless people a path out of shelter, he said.

"If we were to build housing on city owned land, where we didn’t have to pay back the lease, we didn’t have to pay back the big investors, we could create the kind of housing we need, housing that could help people move from shelter to permanent housing, and housing that could keep long term residents in place so that they wouldn’t get pushed out," Stringer said.

De Blasio also has a plan to curb the city's homelessness crisis. He wants to build 90 new homeless shelters and stop housing homeless people in commmercial hotels and so-called cluster sites, which have proven dangerous and controversial.

Melissa Grace, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said the Housing New York 2.0 plan is "a massive mission built on partnerships with non-profits, clergy, communities and home-grown builders — working together to build exactly the kind of housing and for the very families the Comptroller is calling for."

(Lead image: City Comptroller Scott Stringer is pictured in 2015. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)