In 2014, shortly after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, the city released a housing planthat set a goal of building and preserving at least 200,000 units of housing over the next ten years. At the time, Jessica Katz was working as an assistant commissioner in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), which is in charge of making and implementing New Yorks housing plans. The department had a kind of clarity of purpose and ability to execute that government is not often known for, Katz says. The numerical goals had a way of focusing peoples attention. So when she left city government, right around the time the city released Housing New York 2.0, increasing the preservation and development goal to 300,000 units, she had a strong sense of what that energy could accomplish.
I just want to figure out, Katz says, how to bottle that towards other things than just counting units.
Today, Katz is the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council(CHPC), an 80-year-old nonprofit that focuses on housing and planning policy in New York. Last fall, CHPC launched a research initiative calledA New Lens for NYCs Housing Plan, and this month, the group has started issuing a series of policy briefs, exploring how the citys housing plans might change if they were pointed at achieving different social goals. What if the goal of the next housing plan was to improve the health of New Yorkers?one asks. How would we measure our success if the next housing plan was feminist?says another. Two additional briefs are focused onadvancing racial equity, andmeeting the needs of the citys immigrants.
Read more in the Next City.
