City budget deal adds $2B in housing funding

Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council reached a budget agreement that adds $2 billion in housing funding over two years to the mayor’s initial proposal.

The mayor and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announced the handshake agreement for the $112.4 billion spending plan on Friday, just two days ahead of the deadline.

The agreement includes $1.3 billion in additional funding for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development for fiscal years 2025 and 2026. The remaining funds will go toward the New York City Housing Authority.

“An additional $2 billion isn’t an abstract number, it is a decisive and deliberate investment in confronting the housing crisis HPD works to tackle every day,” HPD Commissioner Adolfo Carrión Jr. said in a statement.

The Council, arguing that the mayor was being too conservative in projecting future revenue, had initially sought a housing bump exceeding $3 billion.

Of the added funds, the New York Daily News reported, $272 million will go toward constructing homes for low- and extremely low-income New Yorkers, and $479 million for affordable multifamily housing. A spokesperson for HPD indicated that the agency is still working out what programs will receive the money.

The investment includes $140 million for Neighborhood Pillars and Open Door, HPD programs that respectively finance housing rehabs and new shared-equity co-ops. Of that, $15 million per year will go to Neighborhood Pillars, which will be relaunched, and $55 million for Open Door over the next two fiscal years.

Those infusions still fall well short of a push by the City Council’s Progressive Caucus to dedicate $2.5 billion over five years to these programs. In a statement, Council member Sandy Nurse, who co-chairs the caucus, said she was disappointed, but that the group was “proud of major new investments in low-income housing.”

“But the mayor’s budget is a fraction of what our communities need,” Nurse said.

Leading up to the budget deal, the New York Housing Conference had urged the administration to add at least $1 billion to HPD’s capital budget in 2025. The group estimated that the mayor’s executive budget would lead to a 52 percent decrease in the number of new affordable housing units subsidized by the city.

On average, the group said, HPD subsidizes about 6,500 new units per year. The mayor has set a “moonshot” goal of building 500,000 apartments over the next decade. That figure includes all developments, publicly or privately funded.

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