Graduate students in Hunter College’s Urban Policy Program have added important elements to a bill in Albany that would establish a vehicle for financing affordable housing.
The students in Professor Laura Wolf-Powers’s class worked with the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York to create a model for a “Social Housing Development Authority,” which would finance the building and preservation of affordable units. The proposal was introduced in the Legislature by State Sen. Cordell Cleare (D-Manhattan) and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher (D-Brooklyn).
The students mapped out the authority’s rationale, organization, and relations with other agencies. They also provided detailed case studies on how it could expand housing production and opportunities for renters and first-time homeowners.
“Knowing that state laws raise the cost of producing below-market housing, our students worked out the details of an ingenious public-benefit corporation that could bypass such pitfalls,” Wolf-Powers said of the plan, which drew the notice of The New York Times and the Commercial Observer. “I’m proud of the substantive work they put into the model, which will get developers, communities, and nonprofits thinking about new housing strategies.”
The financing scheme is a way of solving New York’s long-standing, acute housing shortage. As Hunter Urban Policy alumni Avi Garelick and Andrew Schustek wrote in a City and State oped supporting the plan, housing costs have jumped by 68% during the last decade, driving working families out of the state, spurring evictions, and ballooning the costs of housing the homeless. The bill has gained the support of housing activists and several labor unions, including the influential Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.
