Transcript: Mayor Mamdani Launches Lift Tracker To Build Affordable Housing On City-Owned Land
Zohran Mamdani on NYC Mayor's Office transcripts.
Passages
Good morning, my friends, and welcome to the LIFT bus here in the beautiful Bronx. My name is Zohran, and I'll be your mayor today. First things first, let's go over a few housekeeping items. I want to acknowledge leaders both within our city government and outside of it. We have our Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg here with us; our HPD Commissioner Dina Levy, who is here with us; our City Planning Chair Sadeya Sherman and Executive Director Edith Hsu-Chen, as well as our EDC Interim President Jeanny Pak, who is here with us; representatives from NYCHA and the New York Public Library President Tony Marx, who is here with us as well. And we've also just been joined here, to get us to start our tour, by Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson. We appreciate that. Now let us go over some of the basics. Contrary to what you may have drawn from context clues, today we are not announcing a new fleet of double-decker buses here in the Bronx. Today, however, is all about housing and how City Hall is building a historic number of affordable homes at the scale and the urgency that our housing crisis requires. So, why are we here on a very tall bus? I'm glad that you asked. On day one of our administration, I signed an executive order alongside our deputy mayor for housing and planning, Deputy Mayor Bozorg, that created the LIFT Task Force, our team that has now scoured the city to identify sites where we can build the affordable housing that New Yorkers so desperately need. As of today, they have identified more than 100 city-owned properties where we will build upwards of 50,000 high-quality affordable homes, and they will continue to identify more sites in the months to come. Today, I am proud to announce the release of the LIFT Tracker, a comprehensive and interactive database of those sites across the five boroughs. This tracker is available at nyc.gov/lift for any New Yorker to study and to scroll. And today, our lifted double-decker bus will bring us to three of the most exciting sites here in the Bronx. At Sol on Park, you will see how we are delivering on a promise of our housing plan, Block by Block, and rebooting NYCHA as a public developer. At Claremont House, you will see how we're bringing affordable home ownership opportunities to working families here in the Bronx with 40 new homes that will not only be affordable enough to rent, but affordable enough to buy. And at the Grand Concourse Library, you will see what happens when city agencies, public developers, and our friends at the New York Public Library work together to build 113 affordable homes on top of a brand new 17,500 square foot library. It is a fantastic example of one of the co-located housing and library projects currently in the works across our city. I understand that some of you may feel compelled to stand in joy and awe as we approach each site. For your safety, however, I would ask that everyone remain seated while the vehicle is in motion. And if you choose to stand once we have come to a complete stop, please use the handrail for support. And if you do disembark, I urge you to stay with the group and do not wander off. Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce our guide for the day, Deputy Mayor of Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg. Leila Bozorg, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning: Thank you, mayor. As the mayor mentioned, my name is Leila Bozorg. I'm the deputy mayor for housing and planning, and I'm happy to be your tour guide today. We've got a busy morning of sites to visit, so we'll get into it quickly. As the mayor shared, though, on his first day in office, he signed three executive orders taking on the biggest expense that New York families face: housing. Those three executive orders show exactly the range of work that we are undertaking in the city. We've revitalized the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants. We launched the SPEED Task Force, which is committed to procedural changes to help get affordable housing built more quickly and move New Yorkers into that housing more quickly. And today, we're sharing the work of that third executive order, LIFT, finding opportunities to build housing on city-owned land all across the city. We know we need to build much more housing, especially affordable housing, if we're going to build a more affordable city. And while a lot of the land that the city owns has already been developed, there are still plenty of opportunities on our own land to create housing opportunities. This work is not as simple as it might seem. Much of the City's land is already in use for important services or is already being used for housing. Still, we know there is land we can use for affordable housing. The LIFT team surveyed the city, spoke with a wide range of agency partners, and pulled together — for the first time in one place accessible to the public — our affordable housing pipeline on City land. More than 100 projects that will create over 50,000 homes. We've also taken steps forward on projects all across the city already. Just yesterday, we announced the designation of a long-vacant plot of land in Hunters Point, Queens, to become nearly a thousand homes. A couple of weeks ago, we announced the designation of an NYPD parking lot in the East Village to a development team that's going to include a community land trust. We released the RFP for the development of a library in Bensonhurst that the mayor visited just Tuesday night, which will become affordable housing with a new library facility below it. And that's just this month. So, we're also working, of course, to speed up these projects. As I mentioned, one of the mayor's first executive orders was to establish the SPEED Task Force, and those actions will cut as much as two years off the development and lease-up time for new housing. Specifically for City land, we also announced the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, a new HPD program, and have been making use of the new ELURP review process, which was approved by voters last year. Together, these programs will cut another two years off the pre-development timeline for affordable housing, specifically on City land. We know there's much more work to do, but we are treating the high cost of living in New York with the urgency that New Yorkers deserve, and we are investing with the scale to match, $22 billion just in the next five years. The projects that we will see on today's tour show the breadth of what that investment can do, benefiting NYCHA residents and seniors, creating new home ownership opportunities, and pairing housing with new services like libraries. So, with that, let's get going. Please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times as we get to our first destination. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at our first stop. We are at Morris Houses — named after Gouverneur Morris, founding father, penman of the Constitution — but much more importantly, the future site of Sol on Park. Sol on Park is a great example of how we'll be doing additional infill on NYCHA campuses, and it's going to be the largest use of a tool we call “Transfer of Assistance,” the largest used of this tool to date. It shows how our agencies will be working together across NYCHA, HPD and HDC to use innovative financing tools to build more affordable housing that not only produces housing for New Yorkers, but specifically for NYCHA residents as well. It's going to include 80 apartments that will be reserved specifically for NYCHA residents; 69 homes for formerly homeless individuals; and 79 homes that will be available through the Housing Connect lottery for low- and middle-income New Yorkers. The Transfer of Assistance, again, is one tool that we're going to be using more of in this administration as we look to reboot NYCHA's role as a public developer. In doing so, we'll also be using other tools that allow us to convert Section 9 to Section 8 to build more housing. We also have Policy Director Justin Lamorella with us today to talk a little bit about how NYCHA residents are engaged in projects like this. Justin Lamorella, Policy Director, NYCHA's Real Estate Development Department: Hi everyone, I'm Justin Lamorella. I'm the policy director for NYCHA's Real Estate Development Department. This is a really great example of the way that we've worked together with our sister agencies of HPD and HTC. We engaged with residents over many years about the development of this building; we learned a lot from them. We heard that they really wanted to be a part of this building, so we're really excited that we'll be able to use this Transfer of Assistance tool to open up opportunities for Morris Houses’ seniors to be able to move into this brand-new building with lots of amenities and social services and outdoor space. We're going to continue to engage residents. It will still be many years, as you can see, before the building is built; but closer to the construction completion, we'll make sure residents are ready to actually apply and make sure they're ready to move. Happy to answer questions at the end of the tour. Deputy Mayor Bozorg: We'll be moving on to our second site right here. Yep, Sol on Park. This is going to be the site of the project. Question: Can you talk a bit more about how Transfer of Assistance works? Deputy Mayor Bozorg: Sure. So, Transfer of Assistance is a tool through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, federal government, that allows NYCHA to apply. It's a tool, through the Rental Assistance Demonstration, to convert Section 9 assistance to Section 8. Those Section 8 units are converted into a project-based voucher contract that helps with the financing and underwriting of the new affordable housing project. But because those units are coming specifically from NYCHA residents, they will voluntarily apply to be part of the project. Those units specifically are for those NYCHA residents. That also allows NYCHA, for the units that convert over, to use their Faircloth Limit to then backfill the homes that folks are coming out of, with additional Section 9 assistance. So, we both enable a new Section 8 unit and a resident to live in a brand-new home, and we enable NYCHA to bring a brand-new public housing unit online. Yes, the NYCHA team is looking to use this tool, and this is part of our goal in supporting NYCHA to reboot its role as a public developer. We'll be using it both on NYCHA land but in partnership with owners of other land as well.
Zohran MamdaniCheck at the source
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