Staking New York City’s Future on Social Housing
To fend off an affordability crisis, NYC council member and comptroller candidate Brad Lander has proposed a plan to dramatically ramp up the city’s public housing stock.
Public housing buildings stand in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. The city’s housing affordability is likely to be a key issue in coming elections.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
In the recovery period after the 2008 recession, opportunistic investors scavenged cities and towns across the U.S. for parts, scooping up foreclosed homes. By 2016, U.S. homeownership rates had fallen to 62.9 percent, the lowest rate since 1965. The coronavirus pandemic could leave similar scars — and new ones — housing advocates have warned, as job loss and expiring eviction moratoriums reshape local markets.
“If we want things to go differently this time, we need to move quickly,” Brad Lander, a New York city council member, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times in September.