Speaker Adams Outlines Vision to Prioritize ‘People Over Everything’ with Focus on Workers and New Yorkers’ Access to Economic Mobility, Fair Housing, and Healthier, Safer Neighborhoods in State of the City Address

 

Council Speaker unveils agenda to expand workforce development and entrepreneurship, increase affordable housing, and improve health and safety with a focus on underserved communities

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne E. Adams delivered her State of the City address today at Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Community Center in the Bronx, outlining her vision to invest in the City’s workers, expand opportunities for entrepreneurship, prioritize affordable housing, and improve the health and safety of neighborhoods.

The full text of the speech can be accessed here.

An accompanying report on the Speaker’s proposals can be found here.

Speaker Adams announced several new proposals, including those to increase industrial development, increase and preserve affordable housing, advance guaranteed income programs to move New Yorkers out of poverty, expand Fair Fares, and fix the City’s 3-K system.

Economic Mobility

Support for our city’s workforce, entrepreneurs and small business owners is essential to expanding economic mobility for more New Yorkers through many diverse pathways. The City must fill understaffed public service roles that provide critical services to New Yorkers, leveraging the job opportunities to employ New Yorkers in need of employment. By removing barriers and providing targeted support to foster economic mobility, the City can unlock new opportunities that help more New Yorkers reach their full potential, strengthening our workforce, I made this exact change in the report too my economy and communities.

The Speaker outlined the following priorities and proposals:

•   Advocating for budget investments in key city agency front-line positions that serve New Yorkers and urging the city to expedite agencies’ abilities to effectively hire.
•   Collaborating with municipal labor unions and the mayoral administration to identify jobs that no longer require college degrees and other unnecessary qualifications, passing legislation that opens more civil service jobs to New Yorkers.
•   Supporting additional resources and pipeline programs for public service occupations with staffing shortages, such as mental health workers, nurses, public defenders, and housing attorneys.
•   Increase city and state resources for public defenders and civil legal services attorneys to hire, provide salary increases to implement discovery laws, address court delays, and ensure legal representation in housing, immigration and other civil proceedings.
•   Establish “Social Worker Fellows” program to cover tuition for those pursuing social work degrees who provide mental health services in public institutions, such as schools.
•   Expanding CUNY Reconnect and Investments in CUNY
  •   Proposing deeper investments to expand CUNY Reconnect to more eligible New Yorkers and broadly increase support for CUNY.
•   Expanding Workforce Development for Disconnected Youth
  •   Expanding the Renaissance Technical Institute’s program that provides free vocational training to young people, particularly disconnected youth, at-risk students, or justice-involved young people.
    •   Expanding to NYCHA’s Sedgwick Houses in the Bronx, Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, and South Jamaica Houses in Queens.
•   Prioritizing Industrial Development for Jobs, Manufacturing, and Green Energy
  •   Leading on comprehensive reform of the city’s outdated 1961 manufacturing zoning in the upcoming “Zoning for Economic Opportunity” text amendment to foster industrial economic development, protecting industrial areas from commercial intrusions that undermine the sector’s ability to meet the city’s economic, employment, and environmental needs.
  •   Identifying industrial sites in outer-borough neighborhoods that can provide space to cultivate industrial business growth and entrepreneurship opportunities. For example, in Southeast Queens, the 15-acre industrial site that was once home to the Elmhurst Dairy has been vacant and unused for several years. Located in the Jamaica Industrial Business Zone (IBZ), the site’s proximity to Downtown Jamaica and CUNY’s York College presents a major opportunity for industrial job growth and workforce development. Working together with the State and the private property owner, the City can reactivate sites like this with a job-intensive industrial use that also helps fulfill citywide manufacturing or green energy needs.
•   Expanding NYCHA Resident-Owned Businesses 
  •   Advancing legislation requiring the creation of a business directory of NYCHA tenant-owned businesses and a marketing campaign to highlight them. 
  •   Advancing legislation requiring SBS to expand its Business Pathways programs beyond catering and childcare to include creative fields, retail, cosmetology, and others periodically identified as of interest to NYCHA residents.
  •   Advocating for NYCHA and EDC to identify vacant spaces appropriate for commercial pop-ups and business incubators and develop a program to make these available to NYCHA entrepreneurs. 
  •   Collaborating with private partners to launch a NYCHA business competition that provides business development support, networking opportunities, and awards to support entrepreneurs.
  •   Investing in worker cooperatives at NYCHA.
  •   Providing funding to worker training programs at NYCHA to include entrepreneurship programming.

Fair Housing

New York City faces a dire housing crisis that disproportionately burdens low-income and working families and exacerbates homelessness. While the city is growing in population and jobs, available homes and housing production have fallen behind dramatically, resulting in a housing shortage. As a result, competition for affordable housing is fierce and rents continue to reach record highs. The New York Times recently reported that over the last two decades, the city’s Black population has decreased by almost 10 percent, driven out by skyrocketing rent prices and the increasingly elusive dream of owning a home. This exodus is deeply concerning and illustrates the need to confront our housing and opportunity crisis that is costing the city its diversity.

In December 2022, Speaker Adams released “A Housing Agenda to Confront the City’s Crisis,” which details actionable steps to increase housing production with a focus on equity, deepening affordability, preservation, and restoring capacity for housing agencies and staff. As part of affordable housing preservation, the City must also address the poor conditions within NYCHA developments.

In her State of the City, Speaker Adams proposed the following housing proposals:

•  Contribute to safeguarding public housing by combining all of our existing city, state and federal financing tools within a single newly developed NYCHA building to provide new Section 9 units for existing public housing residents living within a development.
  •  The same new building would continue to be owned by NYCHA but would include additional city and state-funded mixed income units developed in partnership with another housing entity. Ground floor usage could include community spaces, healthcare centers, supermarkets, childcare centers, or other commercial uses.  
•   Advance a Fair Housing Framework Law
  •   Introducing legislation establishing a citywide Fair Housing Framework that creates community district-level targets for housing production, preservation, voucher use, and neighborhood investment.
    •   This will help increase housing production and ensure every community equitably contributes to affordable housing production. will be introduced in the coming days.
    •   The criteria for calculating neighborhood goals will be based on several factors, including access to opportunity (jobs, economic development, etc.), services, infrastructure capacity, and displacement risk.
    •  This legislation will help ensure that all neighborhoods throughout New York City address the city’s housing crisis, while delivering investments for local residents. 
•   Increasing Affordable Housing Production through Zoning Changes  
  •   Advocating the State to eliminate the 12 FAR cap to increase density in parts of the City, and pursuing a new city-level framework that utilizes Mandatory Inclusionary Housing to direct more affordable housing in these areas where restrictions currently exist. 
  •   Proposing to allow for reasonable increased density in development beyond what certain types of current zoning permits if it provides housing at deep affordability levels for people with annual incomes of $56,000 and below.
  •   Update Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) to deepen affordability, reflecting the rapid inflation of Area Median Incomes (AMI) during the last decade that has outpaced actual income inflation. It would require the deeply affordable option of MIH (Option 3) and increase the proportion of units dedicated to the lowest-income households – earning incomes of $48,000 on average and below – from 20 percent to 25 percent. This would be contingent on the state providing the necessary affordable housing credits to facilitate its development in New York City.  
•   Strengthening Housing Preservation 
  •   Advocating to expand funding and improve the effectiveness of existing programs within the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), including the “Neighborhood Pillars” and “Landlord Ambassador” programs for renters and the “HomeFix” and Homeowner Help Desk programs for small homeowners. 
  •   Pursuing budget, legislative and policy solutions at the city-level and working with our state government partners to address the issue of vacant public housing and rent-stabilized units. 
  •   Increasing community-based ownership and participation by exploring expanded use of community land trusts and other social housing tools.
    •   HDFCs and land trusts can increasingly be used to expand affordable homeownership, similar to a project Speaker Adams helped finance to construct affordable homes through a transfer of distressed property in HPD’s Open Door program. It was the first construction of affordable homes through land transferred to the Interboro Community Land Trust, providing lasting affordable homeownership opportunities to sixteen low-to-middle income households, and can be replicated. 

Healthier, Safer Neighborhoods

Health, safety, and opportunity have been the hallmarks of our city’s first women-majority City Council, and improving the health and safety of our neighborhoods is critical to increasing opportunity for all New Yorkers. Too many communities currently lack access to the basic support services they need to thrive. The City must begin to address long-standing inequities that undermine the health and safety of our neighborhoods through the improvement of current programs and systems, and the implementation of new ideas.

•   Creating year-round public pool access and expanding free swimming programs.
•   Expanding half-price rides on buses, subways, and Access-A-Ride to more low-income New Yorkers by expanding eligibility of the Fair Fares program to New Yorkers with incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty level.
•   Committing $5 million towards guaranteed income programs that provide direct anti-poverty assistance payments to low-income mothers with infants and to vulnerable youth – those at risk of poverty due to engagement with the foster or justice systems.
•   Fixing the City’s 3-K and early childhood education program with reforms and solutions. This includes expanding 3-K programing with new contracts, adequate staffing and capacity to immediately reimburse providers to address the late contract payments that have undermined programs.
•   Elevating proven community safety investments to stop cycles of violence including building on a new Speaker’s initiative for Community Safety and Victim Services providing $100,000 to each Council district.
•   Renewing the City’s Commitment to Close Rikers with Action.

The speech was simultaneously broadcast in Spanish, Mandarin, Bangla, and American Sign Language (ASL).