Jumaane Williams’ Housing Not Warehousing Bill Has Flopped

A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, a radical advocacy group called Picture the Homeless set out to require the city to count vacant units.

Its goal was to make “warehousing” illegal, according to the group, using a term that landlords consider propaganda. The year was 2008.

Picture the Homeless was hopelessly naive about how to pass a bill, but not so clueless as to think the City Council — let alone the mayor, Mike Bloomberg — was ready to prosecute owners of empty apartments.

So rather than immediately seek to “criminalize” keeping units unrented, the activists started with a bill to force the city to count vacant buildings and lots.

“Once we could shine a spotlight on the role that warehousing played in the housing crisis, we felt confident that we could galvanize public support for more aggressive solutions,” the group wrote on the website Shelterforce.org.

“Easy, we thought. Who could be opposed to simply counting property?” Picture the Homeless recalled. “As it turns out, lots of people.”

Bloomberg was one of them, but even after Bill de Blasio succeeded him as mayor, the bill was pushed back year after year. Among the many reasons was that the city already did a Housing and Vacancy Survey every three years. Why require yet another count?

But Picture the Homeless did not give up. It got then-City Council member Jumaane Williams to reintroduce the bill in 2014, and in 2018, after a decade of setbacks and strategy shifts, two hearings, two committee reports, and a fiscal impact statement — the bill passed.

Shelterforce’s colorful account tells a tale of perseverance overcoming cynical politics and culminating in triumph.

But in The Real World, Hollywood endings are rare, and the Housing, Not Warehousing Act is no exception.

To get it through the Council and the de Blasio administration, Williams’ bill was whittled down to essentially one sentence compelling the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to annually evaluate city-owned property for its potential as affordable housing — something the agency does anyway.

The Council also passed a bill sponsored by Ydanis Rodriguez to create a registry and make owners pay a registration fee for each vacant property, according to Shelterforce. Reports required by such bills are supposed to be on this city website, but the “warehousing” reports are not there.

The bill has been so inconsequential that I forgot all about it until Williams, who is now the public advocate, mentioned it in his statement about the City of Yes’ passage last month.

“When I was in the City Council, I passed a ‘Housing, Not Warehousing’ bill to require a canvassing of the city for vacant properties which could be utilized for housing production,” he boasted. “But private owners are taking advantage of a lack of oversight and enforcement, and we need both an accurate count and actionable steps to bring these units back online.”

It is unclear what “enforcement” private landlords are evading. Each year rent-stabilized owners report their units to the state, but attempts to identify the exact number of vacancies have produced wildly divergent results, from 13,000 to 80,000.

Apartments are vacant for a variety of reasons. Some have rents so low that it doesn’t make financial sense to bring them up to code. Some might be slogging through the rental voucher process, which can take months. Some might just be in between tenants.

An untold number of housing units are kept off the market by owners who don’t want to be landlords because they hear horror stories about nightmare tenants who fend off eviction for years without paying rent.

Even big landlords like LeFrak are stymied by housing court dysfunction, so it’s not hard to see why potential mom-and-pop landlords won’t risk it.

Make it feasible to return dilapidated, rent-stabilized apartments to the market and landlords will do it. Give small owners confidence that they can evict a problem tenant and they will rent out more units. Speed up the voucher process and units won’t sit vacant waiting for paperwork.

It’s said that you can’t fix what you can’t measure. But passing bills to conduct yet another count of vacant units — which the Housing Not Warehousing Act has failed to do, despite 10 years of lobbying, protests and Council hearings — won’t solve anything.

This article has been updated to include information about a bill to create a registry of vacant units.