(photo: Andrew Russeth via Flickr)
If you’ve lived in New York City anytime in the last half-century, one thing is as certain as the sun will rise: the rent is just too damn high.
Now, in recent weeks, defenders of the hotel industry would have you believe that this is some new phenomena to be entirely blamed on hardworking home-sharers. How dare they!
I don’t buy it, and neither should you. This is all just part of the hotel industry lobby’s smear campaign, funded by big corporate hotels, like Trump Hotels in New York City. Let’s walk through their mudslinging playbook one step at a time and then talk about the truth.
Step one: Cite a “report” authored by a Canadian researcher and based on unreliable data and offensive racial profiling of hosts -- and most importantly, paid for by the hotel industry lobby -- and pass it off as serious academic research. Falsely claim that New Yorkers sharing their homes are responsible for gentrification.
Step two: Demonize New Yorkers sharing their home so that they can afford to start a business, pay their bills -- and even combat those rising rent prices and stay in their home. Accuse these law-abiding people of gaming the system and operating in secret, and falsely claim that they are the single reason rents are increasing. And go for the shock and awe effect: compare them to President Trump (who, by the way, is a famous hotelier, for anyone looking to make accurate connections).
Step three: Erroneously claim that Airbnb doesn’t share data about listings, hosts, and impact on the local economy. Paint Airbnb and home-sharers as a faceless, opaque, corporate special interest.
Check, check, and check for the hotel lobby.
Over the years, I’ve become skeptical of any front group that will stop at no end to deliberately demonize people and cast blame. It’s a page right out of the Trump playbook - under the chapter titled, “Fake News.”
Because in the case of home-sharing, the truth - the real truth - tells a different story.
The truth is that increasing costs of rent, property taxes, and utilities are resulting in some New Yorkers, particularly in communities of color whose families have lived in their neighborhoods for generations, being pushed out of their homes.
The truth is that, for these New Yorkers under increasing pressure to make ends meet, home-sharing platforms like Airbnb have been a tool of economic empowerment, especially in communities of color. It helps New Yorkers pay for that unexpected doctor’s bill, afford their taxes, fund a new business - and in the case of Airbnb, it’s even helped 79 percent of hosts to stay in their homes. The cost of living is not going down, but in the case of these New Yorkers, home-sharing has ensured that it doesn’t overtake them and their families.
The truth is that home-sharing has helped New Yorkers take control of their economic future. With tourism booming, these new tools have helped expand economic opportunity to New Yorkers, not just hotel owners and others who have traditionally held the wealth and the power in our city.
But here’s the most important truth: if any one party is to shoulder the blame for the declining affordability of our city, it’s the hotel industry that has that dubious honor.
A recent report by the Internet Association found that hotel development (not home sharing) cost the city affordable housing. This report looked at public data, showing that between 2010 and 2016 hotel development “resulted in the loss of more than 750,000 square feet of pre existing residential space and 773 pre existing residential units.”
The hotel industry is all too willing to cast home sharing New Yorkers as the culprits of the affordable housing crisis. But it’s clear that is just a diversion - because when it comes to their big, brand-spanking-new hotel developments, they aren’t putting their money where their mouth is. Consider this truth bomb dropped in that same report:
“If just half of the total new hotel space had been used for residential purposes and 20% of that space was dedicated to affordable housing, more than 2.9 million square feet of market-rate housing and over 727,000 square feet of affordable housing could have been created. That is the equivalent of 3,878 market-rate and 969 affordable one-bedroom units, assuming an average unit size of 750 square feet.”
Next time the hotel industry blames New Yorkers for the affordable housing crisis, ask its representatives how many residential buildings will be converted into housing for visitors. Ask them what new hotel developments will include affordable housing. Ask them why they aren’t partnering with advocacy groups or the city to build new affordable housing. And most importantly, ask why the hotel industry is prosecuting ordinary New Yorkers just trying to make ends meet.
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Rev. Dr. Johnnie M. Green Jr. ios Senior Pastor, Mount Neboh Baptist Church and President of MPAC.
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(photo: Sofie Hecht/Gotham Gazette)
Last month, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) announced that it selected developers to build affordable housing on 87 city-owned vacant lots, which could produce almost 500 affordable homes. This came the day after Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report criticizing the city for moving slowly on developing such lots.
As New York City staggers through the unrelenting affordable housing, homelessness, and displacement crises this plan is a missed opportunity that we can not tolerate. The city has repeatedly squandered the most value asset - land - it has in fighting these crises. Instead of giving away these vacant lots, the city should keep them and create a public land trust.
New York City owns 1,125 vacant lots. For decades it has relied on an insider-favoring process that turns over vacant properties to private developers and some non-profit developers. That number doesn't include city-owned distressed properties, which is bound to spike as foreclosures are nearing great recession levels. In either case, the transfer comes with laughable requirements for (and definitions of) affordable housing.
This process is the result of a long retreat from the public ambition that defined New York City during its period of great growth in the first half of the 20th century. An activist city government - albeit one tainted by machine politics and systemic racism - built institutions that expanded the very idea of what public life could be and made modern New York City possible. That all ended in the 1970s and left subsequent leaders wary of ambitious public growth and reliant on powerfully connected private actors.
This must change. Our over-reliance on the private market has demonstrably failed the public interest and carries much of the blame for the mess we are in.
Using the community land trust model, the city should retain ownership of the land - removing it from the speculative market that drives up prices - and contract out development based on a fixed equity model that incentivizes construction while limiting costs. It would then directly own and manage this housing stock, guaranteeing that 100% of it is permanently affordable for low- and middle-income households.
Make no mistake, what I am suggesting is public housing. A new, 21st century form that avoids the previous century’s mistakes of massive public housing developments while retaining its public virtues.
Public housing, for all of its problems (thanks to a loss of $1 billion in federal funding since 2000, with more reductions on the way), is still the best vehicle for providing New Yorkers with sustainable affordable housing.
Despite its operational failures, NYCHA currently offers an average monthly rent of $509 to over 400,000 New Yorkers in 176,000 homes and has a waiting list of 257,000 families. Public housing works and we need more of it.
A public land trust that takes advantage of small-site development on vacant lots would work even better as a public housing model in today's economic, political, and social landscape. Instead of the discredited 'shotgun' approach of megablock development that destroyed existing communities while isolating its newly created ones, this approach would be a syringe-sized injection of affordability into existing communities and landscapes.
Neighbors would barely notice the physical changes while enjoying the practical protections of permanent affordability taking root across individual sites. Most of these lots are in distressed neighborhoods that are at high risk of displacement as speculative developers (many of them private equity firms) swoop in. The best, fastest way to address displacement in these neighborhoods is through public-owned land anchoring their development.
The community land trust model works, too. It has successfully provided permanent affordability across the United States for decades, notably in Burlington, Vermont (initially supported by then-mayor Bernie Sanders) and in Dudley Square in Boston (created by local residents who were granted eminent domain). Even here in New York City, the city's first trust, Cooper Square, has quietly managed hundreds of homes in the Lower East Side as a community land trust since 1994.
Speaking of Cooper Square, through its efforts along with the New Economy Project and NYCCLI, the community land trust model has finally started to get the attention it deserves in New York. Last year HPD and Community Enterprises announced $1.65 million in initial funding for the creation of new CLTs and training programs. Many elected officials like then-Borough President Scott Stringer, Council Members Donovan Richards and Margaret Chin, and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have all worked to expand CLTs in the city.
These developments represent the chance for a fundamental shift in how to create permanent affordable housing in New York City. The land trust model does not rely on excessive tax-subsidies to private developers, flimsy definitions of affordability, or unenforceable protections for maintaining affordability over time. It is simple and sustainable. We should all be excited that the city finally sees this as a viable policy tool.
However, if Mayor de Blasio wants to deliver on his promise to build or protect 300,000 affordable housing units while also recommitting to public housing and NYCHA, he should take the next step by transferring the city’s many vacant lots into a public land trust.
We know the model works. The city knows the model works. Usually the hardest part is acquiring the land, but the city already has it. There is nothing to stop a public land trust from getting into the fight.
New York City was once capable of envisioning and delivering bold progress for the public good. We need this again, updated for the 21st century. The mayor has at the very least claimed this rhetoric and along the way tapped into a respondent audience in many corners of the city. Now it is time to act.
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Peter Harrison is CEO/Co-founder of homeBody, a public benefit startup. On Twitter @PeteHarrisonNYC.
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Mayor de Blasio voting (photo: Samar Khurshid/Gotham Gazette)
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced a DemocracyNYC plan. One big goal: “to register 1.5 million New Yorkers to vote over the next four years.”
To make this work the mayor will create a new city leadership post: Chief Democracy Officer. How hard will it be for this new chief to meet the mayor’s goal?
Let’s do some rough math, based upon recent enrollment, census, and vital statistics data:
According to estimates in the most recent American Community Survey, there were 5,402,352 citizens of voting age in New York City in 2016 (plus or minus 22,325).
According to the state Board of Elections, in November of 2017 there were 5,053,842 registered voters in the city. That’s 93.5% of the eligible citizens.
Let’s make two initial assumptions to maximize the number of potential additional registrants among those of voting age now to make the CDO’s job more possible. First we’ll put aside reasons for disqualification other than age that would further reduce the number of those eligible but not registered (in prison or on parole for a felony, judged mentally incompetent by a court, voting elsewhere). Second, we’ll add that 22,325 to the estimate – that is, make the high side assumption of the number of age- eligible citizens while remaining within the statistical range of error.
That results in 370,835 citizens who are of voting age now and not registered.
Additionally, there are about 372,000 teenagers in New York City who will reach the age of 18 in the next four years. Of all people in the city over the age of 18, about four in five (80.5%) are citizens. The percentage of citizens among younger people, many born here of immigrant parents, is likely higher. They are not all citizens, but again let’s count more rather than fewer as likely to be eligible to register to vote: 9 in 10 of them. That would be 334,800.
That brings the available target total of potential new registrants to 705,635.
People from elsewhere in the country or living abroad (but not new immigrants) will move into and out of the city during the mayor’s second term. For now let’s just consider those moving in. Some will be children. Some won’t be citizens. A high side assumption from past experience of the number who can be registered: 200,000.
That brings us to 905,635 potential registrants.
Uh oh. We are 594,365 short.
Of course there are all those people who move within the city. They change their addresses. They need to re-register. Maybe the mayor meant to include them; he did not say the Chief Democracy Officer would have to find “new” registrants. So let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Again we have to watch out for kids, non-citizens, and those already included in our count as not registered. Estimating from federal statistics on people moving annually within and between counties for 2011-2015, it looks like 483,000 is a reasonable number.
Still not there: 1,388,022 (OK, though, we’re getting within shouting distance). To meet the mayor’s goal the Chief Democracy Officer must find about 112,000 more people eligible to register in the next four years, and register them all. Where?
But wait a minute, that’s just the additions. How about the subtractions?
The Empire Center and others have noted that New York City’s population continues to grow every year because immigrants from abroad outnumber the many already living here who are leaving. Less noticed, most of those leaving are voters or vote-eligible, while those who are arriving are non-citizens. A conservative estimate is that 189,000 actual or potential registrants will move out of the city over the next four years.
Finally, there’s mortality. About 212,000 New Yorkers will die during Mayor de Blasio’s second term, more than 95% of whom are voting age. Of course, some - probably a smaller portion than for the city population as a whole - will be non-citizens. A reasonable, conservative estimate is that death will reduce New York City’s potential electorate by 171,000.
One-hundred-eighty-nine thousand plus 171,000 equals 360,000. Departure and mortality will reduce the city’s potential electorate in the next four years by about 6.5%.
Implications:
-Registering 1.5 million people to vote in New York City over the next four years is an impossible dream.
-Registering all of the age-eligible citizens now in the city won’t significantly expand the current electorate; it will keep it about the same size.
-The largest pool of potential registrants during Mayor de Blasio’s second term is comprised of people living in the city who are already registered, but changed their addresses.
-It would be truly extraordinary if the city’s voting roles grew by half-a-million registrants in the next four years.
The bottom line: If I were asked to be the new Chief Democracy Officer, the first thing I’d do is some serious counting. Then I’d call the mayor, to renegotiate the voter registration goal.
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Gerald Benjamin is Director of The Benjamin Center at SUNY New Paltz.
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