Cuomo Touts $1B Affordable Housing Plan

ALBANY-Although his call for tougher gun laws made the headlines, Gov. Andrew Cuomo had plenty of real estate-related agenda items in his annual State of the State address Wednesday. Along with calling for more casinos upstate but not in New York City, the governor proposed a $1-billion plan to produce or preserve more than 14,000 units of affordable housing statewide over the next five years.

Cuomo said the plan, dubbed House NY, would be paid for “by reallocating and making better use of existing funds.” Elsewhere in his address, the governor said there would be no new taxes this year.

According to NY Rising, a 326-page plan released in conjunction with his annual address, Cuomo envisions Housing NY creating or preserving estimated 5,600 housing units “by investing in the most successful affordable housing programs and creating new programs to meet unfilled needs.” Additionally, control of the Mitchell-Lama asset portfolio of 10,400 middle-income housing units will be transferred from Empire State Development Corp. to the state's Division of Homes and Community Renewal.

“As a result of this shift, HCR will be able to refinance these housing projects and leverage additional private and public funding to rehabilitate and update 8,700 housing units that are suffering from deferred maintenance and other physical deficiencies,” according to NY Rising.

In downstate regions of New York, according to NY Rising, “low vacancy rates are accompanied by high demand and high costs, such as in New York City, where one in three residents spend over half of their income on rent. Across areas of Long Island and New York City, Superstorm Sandy has only made this challenge tougher. At the same time, some areas upstate have the opposite problem, as communities with vacant and abandoned homes pose significant and very different policy and development challenges.”

New York Housing Conference's CEO, Judy Calogero, says in a statement that “the new funding couldn't come soon enough, with federal disaster aid stalled in Washington and some 305,000 homes and apartments destroyed or damaged by Sandy's fury.” Calogero's counterpart at the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, president Donald Capoccia, says in a separate statement, “Not only will New Yorkers benefit from homes they can afford, but this historic public investment in housing will leverage private resources, and drive job creation to catalyze community development in underserved neighborhoods.”