CHPC Executive Director Jerilyn Perine joined Mayor Bill de Blasio and other government officials in Downtown Brooklyn this morning for the release of the mayor’s Housing New York plan. We were so pleased to be invited to share our thoughts and congratulations at the announcement of the plan (which are copied below).
CHPC is excited to work with the mayoral administration and City agencies to advance practical policies to improve neighborhoods in all five boroughs. We applaud the inclusion of several of the plan’s proposals that CHPC has spent the past few years working on and compiled in our recent report, Steering the New Course.
The Housing New York plan offers a broad vision for improving New York City’s neighborhoods. Its thoughtful approach to government intervention in housing policy is welcome. We look forward to working with the City to make its vision a reality.
Jerilyn Perine’s public comments at the Housing New York announcement:
This is New York, and here we know that housing and our neighborhoods determine our prosperity and whether they support our aspirations that we all have for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for those who woke up this morning in another place completely—but who have the same dream—of a future that will be better here in New York.
Mayor de Blasio and the amazing team he has put together understand that it is the private sector that builds our housing but it is the city’s public policies that will ensure there will be room for everyone.
It’s a hard thing to drive a housing policy through a large bureaucracy and across 5 boroughs, but this plan strives to tackle the difficult issues, not just by relying on new construction and ribbon cuttings, but also by undertaking the hard work of reshaping our building code and zoning regulations, working with residents and landlords in new ways and figuring out how to put the resources of government to use in the most effective ways. It’s not easy to create a strategy that recognizes that our population is changing – and that people are shaping their lives in ways that don’t easily fit within a housing stock that has largely been built before World War II.
By recognizing the challenges of high costs—affected not just by the shortage of supply but also by the entanglement of regulation that drives up the cost of housing—and recognizing that demand for housing is not just numbers but has become more complex and will continue to grow, this plan seeks not just to recreate more housing and preserve what we have, but transform it for a 21st century New York that will be bigger, better, and have a housing market that will make room for everyone.
Congratulations to all of you who worked so hard to put this together.
