Gov. Hochul moved unilaterally to address New York’s housing crisis on Tuesday, issuing executive orders to spur housing development after failing to reach a home creation deal with state lawmakers last month.
One of the orders would clear the way for housing development in Gowanus, Brooklyn, by effectively reviving a tax benefit specifically for developers in the area, Hochul said. The program could be replicated in other parts of the city and state in a piecemeal effort to prompt housing creation.
A second order outlined Tuesday would give communities that hit certain housing goals a leg up in applications for a range of state grants.
Under the Gowanus order, the state would buy privately owned properties for a nominal fee and lease them back to developers for the duration of developments. The program would reduce costs for developers, who would pay the state fees — equal to reduced taxes under the prior regime — during the leases.
“Where some see a hellhole, I see homes,” Hochul told a crowd on the top floor of a warehouse in Gowanus.
The executive action could invite legal challenges. In a statement, the Legal Aid Society described the order as “legally dubious at best.”
Hochul told reporters shortly after her announcement that the “state has the ability to do this,” citing powers held by Empire State Development.
A number of housing developments are underway in Gowanus, an industrial area of Brooklyn that was rezoned under a massive plan passed by the City Council in 2021.
It was not immediately clear if the orders would generate significant pushback in Albany. The new Gowanus program has the support of the local state senator, Andrew Gounardes, who attended the news conference.
And the action affecting state grants seemed to satisfy calls from some lawmakers to use carrots rather than sticks to create housing.
Still, the orders marked modest steps compared to the aggressive program Hochul had pushed earlier in the year. She acknowledged Tuesday that the state still needs a “comprehensive” program to build housing.
Her so-called Housing Compact set a goal of building 800,000 homes within a decade across New York, in part by forcing municipalities to build housing stock.
The governor struggled to sell the suburbs and state leaders on the plan, and ultimately dropped it from the spring budget negotiations, a humbling concession. Any immediate hopes of a broad Legislature-authorized housing effort vanished entirely last month, when Albany lawmakers closed the legislative session without taking action on housing.
Legislative leaders insisted they had put together their own housing plan, but said Hochul was not behind it. The governor’s office emphatically rejected the lawmakers’ account, saying in a statement that legislators were blaming Hochul “for their own failure to act.”
The testy back-and-forth between the Democratic governor and the Democratic-led Legislature highlighted internal divisions in Democratic-ruled Albany.
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the state Senate majority leader, and Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said their plan included so-called good-cause eviction legislation, which is popular among progressives but not supported by Hochul, and a statewide extension of the 421a tax exemption, the expired provision central to the Gowanus development.
Hochul said the expiration of the program would “effectively kill” housing development in Gowanus without Tuesday’s order.
Earlier in the year, Stewart-Cousins, a Westchester Democrat, balked at Hochul’s ambitious compact, asserting that the state should use incentives to produce new homes.
The governor declined to bend, apparently judging that she would rather wait than endorse a watered-down version of the plan.
On Tuesday, Hochul said legislators should get behind her approach. “I’m not sure why anybody’s averse to building housing,” she said. “But if they listen to their constituents, they’ll understand that their constituents want them to do this.”
State Sen. Jessica Ramos, a progressive Queens Democrat, described Hochul’s approach as “lazy,” and said the governor has declined to meet her colleagues “where we are.”
“At this rate, we’re never going to be able to build the supply of housing that we need,” Ramos said by phone. “I would recommend a much more collaborative approach.”
New York is facing a severe housing shortage, especially in the city, where the housing stock has grown by a sluggish 4% since 2010, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit. The crisis has been inflamed by a surge of migrants over the last year that has pushed the count of people living in the city shelter system past 103,000, according to City Hall.
Open New York, an advocacy group focused on housing, expressed support for Hochul’s orders but urged her to reach a deal with lawmakers.
“These actions are necessary, important, and yet insufficient,” Annemarie Gray, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “New York will only see changes that match the magnitude of the crisis when the governor and the state Legislature come together to pass major legislation.”
