It's official: New York City's housing market is the tightest it's been in 50 years, and the affordability crisis facing middle-class New Yorkers has reached historic proportions. A quarter of the city's tenants spend more than half of their income on rent. And with interest rates and home prices rising significantly, families need to earn more than $250,000 a year to afford a typical home.
The reality is that it will take years and enormous political will to build the amount of housing our cities need. But this oppression has very real and very direct consequences. The main ones among them are; Employment crisis in the public sector. The city government job offer rate is more than double what it was before the coronavirus.
As New York becomes increasingly unaffordable for the middle class, current and future New York City teachers, social workers, police officers, and other public servants will find it increasingly difficult to find or live outdoors. It's no surprise that it can be difficult to find someone to choose from. City boundaries.
It's a double whammy: the erosion of middle-class neighborhoods. and Public sector workforce. It threatens our future as a socio-economically diverse city and one that provides excellent public services to its residents. This in turn only makes it harder to maintain the core of the middle class.
We propose an innovative way to tackle both problems simultaneously.
New York City should create a new program, Housing for City Employees, to help city employees purchase housing in the five boroughs.rent a Approaches used by some academic institutions To help faculty and staff live closer to campus, city pensions will now pay half of the purchase price of homes purchased by city employees.
Meanwhile, the city's pension fund will own 50% of the property and will receive half of the sale price when the home is sold. (The program covers the purchase of an apartment below the maximum price and requires homebuyers to have spent a certain number of years in city service).
For urban workers, the effect would be dramatic, cutting housing costs in half and doubling their purchasing power. For a home in the city with a median sales price of $785,000, monthly mortgage payments would drop from approximately $4,400 to $2,200. It would be a powerful incentive for people to join the local government workforce and for those public servants to live and raise their families in New York City neighborhoods.
At the same time, the city's pension funds will partner with well-employed homeowners with aligned financial incentives to make good long-term investments in New York City real estate. These investments would be consistent with the pension fund's long and well-established history of investing in housing for low-, middle-, and moderate-income New Yorkers.
Since the City's Economic Targeted Investment Program began in the 1980s, $4.5 billion has been invested in housing, generating risk-adjusted market rate returns for New York City retirees. Housing for city employees will build on this success.
This will be a win-win-win-win. Without impacting the city's budget, housing for city workers would provide affordable homeownership opportunities to thousands of working and middle-class New Yorkers across the five boroughs. . It will help maintain the socio-economic diversity of our neighborhoods, and the cultural and economic vibrancy that comes with it.
It would help attract and retain talented people to the city's workforce and allow those workers to live closer to their jobs. And it will generate a healthy return on investment for city pensioners.
New York has a long history of innovation when it comes to housing finance. A coalition of labor unions formed the United Housing Foundation, and housing for union members like Co-op City and Penn South were created. The Mitchell-Rama Plan, enacted in 1955, created more than 100,000 homes for the middle class.
When the abandonment crisis hit, New York City pioneered a new model for investing in communities to renovate vacant and aging buildings. But now, public servants can often live and work in New York City in homes built three or four generations before him.
Housing for city employees will be a lifeline for a new generation of New Yorkers and for the public sector itself.
Lander is New York City's comptroller. Lasher serves as Governor Hochul's policy director and is also a candidate for the state legislature.
