The New School's Alex Schwartz is a widely recognized expert on national and local housing policy. 

Urban Matters: Alex, as you know, every three years, New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) publishes the Housing Vacancy Survey, which is considered a pretty authoritative picture of housing availability. The most recent one came out earlier this month – and the picture wasn’t very pretty. What stands out to you in these latest figures?

Alex Schwartz: The new Housing Vacancy Survey is a shocker.  Previous iterations of the survey had shown the overall vacancy rate inching up towards the five percent level that, under current law, would allow for the lifting of rent regulation – although vacancies for units renting under $1500 remained very low. The latest HVS pegged the overall vacancy rate at just 1.41 percent, a sharp drop from 4.54 percent in 2021. 

Vacancies for units renting for less than $1650 (less than $1500 in 2021) remained under one percent. However, the survey shows big decreases in vacancy rates for more expensive units. Those renting for $1,650 to $2,399 ($1,500 to $2299 in 2021) had a vacancy rate of just 0.78 percent, down from four percent. The vacancy rate for the most expensive apartments ($2400+ in 2023; $2300+ in 2021) fell from 12.6 percent to just 3.4 percent. 

Perhaps the only positive spin you can take from these numbers is that they show that the city’s population has bounced back from the loss it experienced during Covid.

UM: In December, the Fiscal Policy Institute put out a report suggesting   that, at the statewide level, New York’s high cost of living is driving out low- and middle-income residents. Income polarization is an old story in New York – but to what extent might it be fed by a tightening housing squeeze?

Schwartz: I’m no expert on migration trends. I will say that housing affordability problems are worsening across the country, making it more difficult for people of limited means to find affordable housing almost anywhere – which is not to say that housing costs don’t vary.  I don’t know the degree to which out-migration from New York State stems from worsening housing affordability.  Out-migration from upstate New York is probably driven mostly by people seeking more economic opportunity. 

UM: Mayor Eric Adams has his “moonshot” program to build half a million new homes in the city over the next decade. But haven’t we seen this movie before? Both his immediate predecessors as mayor also had big affordable housing agendas – yet we’re still losing ground. How come? 

Schwartz: Mayor Adams’s moonshot differs from the housing goals of his predecessors, in that it pertains to all housing, not just City-funded affordable housing.  In fact, the previous two mayors – Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg – met their housing production goals. 

Mayor Adams, unlike previous mayors, has not set numeric goals for the City’s housing program. That’s partly because quantitative targets for the closing of affordable housing deals had become the primary metric for gauging success, and could occlude other key performance indicators, such as how long it took to complete construction or reach full occupancy. 

So, the moonshot concerns production of housing in general, market-rate and subsidized, rental, condo, single-family. To reach this goal the mayor is also pushing for the loosening of various land use restrictions that impede housing development. It’s possible that these and other moves will lead to more housing production, perhaps even enough to reach the half-million moonshot target. 

However, more production by itself will not solve the city’s acute housing affordability problems. It would ease prices for home buyers and for market-rate rentals, which in turn may reduce some of the competition that low-income renters face. But new supply will not reduce rents to levels that are affordable to very low-income New Yorkers, who struggle the most with housing costs.

UM: City Comptroller Brad Lander also recently weighed in on HPD’s continuing difficulties in getting affordable housing projects moving. He thinks that’s at least in part because of an overhang from a big loss of expert staff during the pandemic. What would it take to get things into higher gear?

Schwartz: The report shows that HPD saw serious losses in staff, senior staff included, in the aftermath of Covid, and that these losses contributed to delays in bringing projects to a close, and in covering the costs incurred by its nonprofit partners.  The report shows recent progress in staff hiring, and makes sensible suggestions for addressing the remaining bottlenecks and other challenges, some of which HPD says it is already implementing. Things look like they’re moving in the right direction

Next week: We talk about the housing vouchers blow-up between Mayor Adams and the City Council, what’s on the housing agenda in Albany, and more.

Alex Schwartz is a professor at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment at The New School, and chairs the Milano School’s Master’s Program in Public and Urban Policy. He is the author of Housing Policy in the United States, now in its fourth edition.

Photo by: Steven Pisano