With a new legislative session underway today in Albany, Gov. Hochul has launched the season with commitments to consumer protection and affordability, highlighting plans to, among other things, combat price gouging and lower the price of insulin. The affordability on everyone’s mind, though, is of another kind: housing.
To her significant credit, the governor last year laid out an incredibly ambitious plan that would set aside pleading and force the construction of the housing the state so desperately needs. To their eternal shame, lawmakers of both parties suffocated it and delivered nothing of substance, even after Hochul approved a huge pay raise for them.
It’s ironic that lawmakers feel that voting for an expansive housing agenda is politically perilous territory, brave votes that they have to expend political capital on, to the point that they can imperil reelection. It should really be the opposite; policymakers should pay a heavy price for having torpedoed one of the most forward-thinking agendas in decades.
Every session without significant, aggressive housing policy designed to bring New York — NYC especially, but not exclusively — back from the brink of a shortage that has long been at crisis levels should well be a black mark. Actively opposing these solutions should be grounds for landslide losses. We’ll only really get the reforms we need when this is true, which starts at the voter level. Voters should understand that the housing situation isn’t an issue that will dissipate if ignored for long enough, and that nowhere can immunize itself from the results.
People priced out of NYC will decamp to other parts of the state, which will find their own housing stocks squeezed, and so on. Rent burdens discourage the economic activity that could help the state as a whole, they counteract the impact of increasing wages, prevent savings, quite literally cost us congressional representation as people leave the state. If you think because you’ve got yours — in the form of ownership or rent stabilization or some other mitigating circumstance — that you don’t need to worry about this, you’re sorely mistaken.
Unless legislators’ fix here is to make the state far less appealing to live in — and we’re guessing that none would at least openly cop to that approach, for good reasons — then we aren’t going to solve things from the demand side. It can only be solved on the supply side, and there is really only one way to address supply shortages. Housing can’t be grown, it can’t be imported or regenerated. It can only be built, and for that to happen, there must be both capacity and incentive.
That means that nobody gets everything they want. Housing advocates may not love the 421-a tax program or some equivalent, and it may be a somewhat roundabout fix to an overall broken tax policy, but that doesn’t mean that you can argue with its results in generating affordable housing. If there’s a version of stronger tenant protections that comes attached, so be it, though the Legislature should really eschew its troublingly common “pass it and iron out the kinks later” strategy and be very careful about language here.
Will a compromise here be perfect? No, but lawmakers should either deliver one or voters should choose policymakers who will.
from New York Daily News https://ift.tt/6ObQvat