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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're going to talk about housing again with rents going crazy in New York City, and elsewhere in our area. We're going to get our first interview with New York City's Chief Housing Officer under Mayor Eric Adams, and we'll bring her on in just a second. First, let's hear a clip of Mayor Adams from July, describing the housing crisis as he sees it, as he prepared to announce what he calls the Housing Our Neighbors Plan.

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Mayor Eric Adams: My first month in office as mayor, I went and sat in encampments and tents, and talked to people on the ground. No cameras following me, just talking to everyday people, and saying, why are you here? What are your needs, and really getting a real feel as I went back to the administration and say, "This is the urgency of the moment, and I'm not succumbing to the theory that people are living in a dignified way, in a tent on our street with no restroom, no food, no place to take care of themselves. I'm not accepting it. I'm not."

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Brian Lehrer: Now, that was before he decided to set up a temporary tent city on Orchard Beach, and then Randalls Island for all the asylum seekers coming. He was talking about people living in tents more permanently, who are homeless on the street. We'll talk about homelessness as one of the issues with Jessica Katz in a minute. Rent prices, of course, are soaring. You've heard the stats, maybe the average apartment in Manhattan is now asking over $5,200 a month, that's up from about 4000 a little more than a year ago.

Additionally, in order to have the growing population of New York City, which is continuing to grow all the time, an additional 560,000 apartments and other half million plus apartments must be built by 2030, the experts say. The lack of housing is clearly reflected in the ballooning rates of homelessness. The Coalition for the Homeless, the advocacy group, share that "Homelessness has reached its highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s as over 107,000 different people slept in the shelter system during fiscal year 2021.

Again, that was even before the currently homeless population shelter population exploded with all the asylum seekers coming in from south of the border. Here to talk about the city's housing situation, and her agency's plans is Jessica Katz, New York City's Chief Housing Officer. Let's see, so what's the proper title? Is it Commissioner? Is it Officer Katz? How should I address you?

Jessica Katz: Some people call me that city's housing czar, but you can call me Jessica.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, so Czar Katz, you heard the clip in which the mayor rejects the idea that people can live in dignity in tents. Again, asylum seekers aside, how do you address that with the homeless people in New York City, on the streets, and very little room in the shelter system?

Jessica Katz: I think one of the things I'm most proud of when we released our housing blueprint back over the summer, is that we really listen to the voices of people who had been homeless in New York City and are currently homeless as we put together the plan. Getting the mayor personally, together with the impacted advocates that know exactly how this feels on the ground.

At the city agencies, we know how these programs, our housing, and social safety net programs are supposed to work. We know how we wish they would work, but we really want it to hear with people who've been through it themselves, and who are still going through the experience of homelessness, to hear from them about what kind of problems they face in terms of navigating the programs that we've designed to try to help them. Making sure that that was a core part of how we designed the housing our neighbors' blueprint is something that I'm really proud of.

Brian Lehrer: What did you hear, and what did you design as a result?

Jessica Katz: We've heard over and over again, is that despite the fact that we're somewhat lucky in New York City, that we have a pretty wide range of housing subsidy programs, those are sometimes pretty difficult to use. They sometimes shut out the very folks that we are expecting to help, so making sure that we take a look at the red tape and the administrative burdens of these programs and make them easier to use was really, really top priority for the impacted advocates and something that we've been taking head-on.

Brian Lehrer: How much of homelessness do you think is a result of rent prices, as opposed to other problems that the individuals have such as mental health?

Jessica Katz: I'm so glad you asked that question. Homelessness is a housing problem, full stop. There's certainly plenty of people who have various other issues to deal with and we see that every day in New York City, but those issues be very, very difficult if not impossible to address without a roof over your head. There's plenty of individuals with mental health problems or substance abuse issues across the city. The reason why we see that turn into a homelessness crisis here in New York is because it's a housing problem.

Brian Lehrer: We talked on last week's show about the 60-year history of deinstitutionalization of people from psychiatric institutions, but the lack of supportive housing that was supposed to come from the city, the state, the federal government, to help those people get and maintain housing, to the extent that mental health is an issue in homelessness. How many more units of supportive housing is the Adams administration proposing to create, or for that matter, the Hochul administration in conjunction with the Adams administration, and how much of homelessness is about supportive housing, which does apply or does imply mental health issues?

Jessica Katz: This is a bit of an oversimplification. Typically, what we see is that many of the single adults in the shelter system are there because they need a certain amount of support, and many of the families are there primarily for economic reasons. Again, there's many exceptions to that. That's an oversimplification, but that is the conventional wisdom of what we need.

We are very blessed in this moment to have a mayor and a governor who want to work together, and Supportive Housing has always relied on a partnership between the city and the state. It's very important that we can work together on as much building as much supportive housing as possible. Although I will say one of the things that we saw when we came into office in January with the Adams administration is that, despite a very robust effort toward development of more supportive housing over the past couple of decades, what we did see was, again, these administrative burdens of what it takes to get in.

We also saw a very high vacancy rate in our supportive housing portfolio despite the fact that thousands of people desperately need it, we have this mountain of bureaucracy that you have to get through in order to get placed. Our focus, in addition to building as much new supportive housing as we can, is also to ensure that we're making the absolute best use of the supportive housing units that we have and try to move people in as quickly as possible with a minimum of paperwork.

Brian Lehrer: I see that some people are calling in already, let me make sure that everybody has the number if you want to ask a question of the Adams administration's chief housing officer, Jessica Katz, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Is there an irony by the way of the mayor saying in the clip we played in July, that there's no dignity and living in a tent, as he's trying to clear 10 cities from the streets of unhoused people who were already here, but now he himself taking steps to house people in tents, who are coming from the southern border.

Jessica Katz: I think, it's important to understand here is that as of this week, more than 20,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, and more than 15,000 of them are living in our shelter system project program. We've opened 55 emergency shelter sites to meet this need, and our system truly is at a breaking point. We really need the assistance of the state and federal partners in order to make sure that we can meet the moment and make sure that we can welcome these asylum seekers in the tradition of who New York City wants to be as a city.

Brian Lehrer: The first time I've heard the 20,000 number, so maybe you're making news here and saying that number has now passed 20,000 recently arrived asylum seekers.

Jessica Katz: The number has passed 20,000. There's buses arriving every single day, we get a report every morning on who's coming in, and as of this week, we are past 20,000. It's a crisis that we want to absolutely be as welcoming, and make sure that we're welcoming the asylum seekers who come here and make sure they have the right services to support but what we're facing here is a humanitarian crisis. We're looking at every solution that we can to house everyone. We've been working closely with our state and federal partners, but we continue to need their support to meet the scale of this crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Tom in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tom.

Tom: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I saw a man on a train yesterday, was mostly naked and everybody else left the train. What are we supposed to do? That's all.

Jessica Katz: Tom, thanks so much for your question.

Brian Lehrer: All right, and his implication is the man was homeless.

Jessica Katz: Tom, thanks so much for your question. I think making sure that we have a system that can be as compassionate as possible towards the New Yorkers who clearly desperately need our city's help and making sure that we address those issues is something that we've been working on since day one. It's very tempting to look the other way and as an administration, we don't have that luxury. We want to make sure that we're really addressing the need directly and helping somebody who's in that situation get the support that they need and find a roof over their head.

Brian Lehrer: Izzy in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC with the city's Chief Housing Officer, Jessica Katz. Hi, Izzy.

Izzy: Hi, Jessica. Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I have been trying to get ahold of the city actually since COVID. We, my family, have a pretty large property in Southern Staten Island. There's 5 acres and a Victorian home that's been vacant for quite a while and we've been trying to reach the city to see if there's any way the city could initially use it for COVID housing and now for shelter housing. Can you help us do that?

Jessica Katz: Sure, Brian, let's get Izzy's contact information and we'll talk to her and see what can be done.

Brian Lehrer: All right, Izzy. Producer's going to pick up, if you want to leave your contact information, do so. It sounds like Jessica Katz's office will be in touch. How much is solving the spike in rent problem in the chronic shortage of affordable housing problem in New York a matter of building more and more and more, and how much is it not? Mayor de Blasio and before him, Mayor Bloomberg had these poofy-sounding numerical goals in the hundreds of thousands of units that they described as new or preserved.

A lot of them just meant preventing units from falling out of the rent stabilization system, that's the preservation part, but some of it was building new housing. We had a guest last week who said, "We have to just build more and more and more. We have to build so much more housing." One of the big problems is NIMBY, not in my back yard. People don't want density in their areas but we need more density. Mayor Adams, as I followed him so far, has said numbers is not the point. Sheer quantity is not the point, quality is the point. Help us understand this, how is your position in Mayor Adams's position on how much housing we have to build different from the Mayors before?

Jessica Katz: Sure. This is the third Mayoral administration that I've worked in government and the third housing plan that I've had the honor of helping to implement. As you said, several administrations in a row have focused on one top-line production number as being the headline of what the housing plan is. When we came in in January, we felt that in order to meet the moment given COVID, given our homelessness crisis, given our crisis in our public housing authority here in New York City, we really needed to pivot a little bit and it wanted to make sure that we were focusing on measuring the right metrics that would help get us past this crisis.

The first thing we did is made sure that chapter one of our housing plan was NYCHA, the New York City Public Housing Authority. NYCHA units house about 500,000 New Yorkers. It is, by far, the largest and most important piece of affordable housing infrastructure that we have and it's been excluded from prior housing plans. We really wanted to make sure that NYCHA was front and center in this housing plan.

We're proud to say that speaking of numbers, we preserved almost 6,000 units this year through the city's packed program which is more than we've ever done through that program. That's going to be 6,000 families who are going to have a much, much better quality of life and their apartments are going to be preserved in a way that allows them to live in dignity on into the future.

We also have had some successes recently. Obviously, the NIMBY headwinds can be strong, but we feel pretty confident that we're on a role with a couple of big successes with some projects recently and that we're moving ever more forward towards being a city of, "Yes," and making sure that we turn the tide on this basic understanding that supply and demand is really, really important and that the constraint in the housing supply is what fuels gentrification and displacement as opposed to the reverse.

I think that there's been a sea change in the language that you're hearing from across the political spectrum recently, and we're really looking forward to riding that wave and building more housing and making sure again, that we're focusing on the housing where we need it the most, preserving the public housing authority making sure that we're helping provide supportive housing for homeless households and also achieving some of our fair housing goals by focusing on building housing in places that have very good access to jobs and to transit.

Brian Lehrer: But you don't have an overall goal, numerical goal X new units of housing to bring supply and demand more into balance by the end of four years of the Adams administration.

Jessica Katz: We're going to continue to have an annual production goal so that we can make sure that our city's housing agencies stay on track, but we want to make sure that instead of burying all of our other housing policies under that headline of one banner number that we want to remind people that preserving NYCHA is a top priority, that listening to homeless people about what programs are working and are not working, and making sure that the administrative burdens to get people into the housing that we've built already are top priorities and that that doesn't get squashed under one big headline number but of course, we'll continue to track housing production because that's the number one way that we're going to build ourselves out of the housing crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Peter in Astoria, you're on WNYC with Jessica Katz, the city's Chief Housing Officer. Hi, Peter.

Peter: Hey, thank you. I think you answered my question. I was just wondering what's your position on things like innovation queens that are very contentious rezonings. Tiffany Caban interestingly came out approving a rezoning in Northern Astoria and the innovation queen's rezoning is very contentious. I think that it's important that we pass it. Bushwick should have been rezoned when it had the chance. We need to really control NIMBY because they may not be the majority. I think that they have the loudest microphones but they're probably not the majority. Most of us want NYCHA--

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned Tiffany Caban's support for that. She, of course, is a progressive member of city council who would be concerned about gentrification. Peter, do you want to go one line further and say why you think zoning is one of the answers to the housing shortage?

Peter: You have to build more housing if you don't have enough housing. It's really just math. It's as common sense as that. For some reason is against rezoning and it boggles my mind.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Do you agree with him about the math rezoning means more density could come, more units per block in some areas that are zoned for less density right now? Do you have aggressive rezoning plans in the Adams administration?

Jessica Katz: Stepping back a minute, if we're trying to solve the city's housing supply crisis, there are a couple of different tools that we can use. One is in the city's capital budget, we've added more money to the city's capital budget to build affordable housing using government financing than ever before. The other is with our zoning rules. Our zoning rules govern what can be built in any particular location. By changing those zoning rules, it's a way that we can increase the capacity for new housing supply out of thin air through our regulations rather than paying for it directly and sometimes we use a combination of those tools.

We're definitely going to need every possible approach to bring to bear and zoning tools are definitely an important piece of that. Right now, we again are on a role with a couple of different particular housing projects that are really Marquee projects and we really appreciate the partnership that we have with the largely new city council and really have been enjoying the discussions with them on making sure that they focus not just on the loudest voices in any particular community hearing but also focus on and who's not being heard from in community board meetings, who their constituents might be 10 years from now and what their districts are going to need and what the city overall needs in terms of housing crisis.

We are working together with the council members on that and we also are looking at some citywide approaches with our city of Yes zoning changes where it'll just make some tweaks to the zoning rules that govern housing programs that would make it easier to build housing citywide.

Brian Lehrer: On more density and more development, I feel like NIMBY comes from two different camps. It comes from people who might have higher incomes who don't want a lot of "affordable housing" built in the areas because they don't want the influx of lower-income people. Then we hear from lower-income people who don't want a lot of new development in some of their neighborhoods because they see gentrification happening where a lot of new housing gets built.

Williamsburg is the classic example, but there are many others where most of that housing is market rate, these 80%, 20% formulas. It sounds good at first to say, "Oh, 20% of the units are going to have to be below market rates subsidized housing," but what really happens is the 80% prevails, the average rents in the area go up and people get displaced. How do you solve that problem? That comes up on the show so often. Concern about gentrification, which leads to resistance to more development in areas. How do you solve that problem?

Jessica Katz: It stands to reason that in a city like New York where everyone's wanting to carve out their own little space, that we would hear people who are worried about change or nervous about their neighborhoods changing and gentrification clearly has changed the landscape in a lot of New York City neighborhoods. In order to try to stem the tide on gentrification, the answer, however, is to build more housing and not less to behave as a sponge to soak up all that demand of people wanting to move into certain neighborhoods.

Because what happens is that if you don't build enough housing, people go looking to that two suburb stops out one borough over to see whether there might be a better deal someplace else. We really want to focus on some of those zoning and tax tools that will allow us to create the new housing supply that prevents gentrification from spilling out across the city.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's a long-term goal, it sounds like. What are you doing to prevent the displacement of people from neighborhoods in the short term?

Jessica Katz: We have again, a very robust supply of housing vouchers that, unfortunately, can be extremely difficult to use. We want to make sure that everyone who has access to a housing voucher can get access to one quickly and that we also spend a lot of energy trying to combat what we talk about as source of income discrimination, where landlords don't want to take a housing voucher.

We want to make sure that we prevent that from happening wherever possible and that we put these landlords on notice to make sure that if someone comes to you with a housing voucher, you are required to accept that voucher and the source of income discrimination that makes it harder for the lowest income to Yorkers to remain housed in our city.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a follow-up on this thread of our conversation from a listener on Twitter. Person tweets, "How will the city ensure that future housing development and rezoning doesn't mimic the story of Long Island City where the average rent for a studio apartment is now $3,300 after a decade of intense development?" Is Long Island City a negative example for you?

Jessica Katz: I'm not sure. I think Long Island City is a great neighborhood and I think the fact that we were able to build a neighborhood like that out of whole cloth, it's a very vibrant place to live. We did manage to build quite a lot of integrated housing where we built low-income housing alongside some of the new market-rate developments that were being created. We want to make sure that we preserve the existing neighbors in Long Island City, which would be much, much harder to do if we are not building new.

Brian Lehrer: Lynn in Westchester. You're on WNYC with Jessica Katz, New York City's Chief Housing Officer. Hi, Lynn.

Lynn: Hi. I'm the owner-manager of Rent Stabilized Buildings and I think the 2019 laws have done great harm. It has prevented me from upgrading apartments so people can rent them so they're vacant and I know over 22,000 apartments in New York City are vacant for the same reason. I think this is a crucial issue and they should go back to the 1974 laws.

Brian Lehrer: Ms. Katz?

Jessica Katz: The rent stabilization laws changed in 2019 and something that we have heard is that it makes it more difficult for owners to upgrade their properties. We have to come to a place where we're protecting tenants as well as making sure that housing quality doesn't get compromised. One way that we can do that and I'm going to get real wonky here, is through something that's called the J51 program, which is a tax abatement program that helps fund repairs and upgrades building so that we can protect tenants and also protect housing quality at the same time, which ultimately will benefit tenants.

Brian Lehrer: What would you do for landlords, especially small landlords? I know when Mayor Adams was running when he was candidate Adams and he was challenged by reporters on why he's taking donations from the real estate industry. He said he identifies with some parts of the real estate industry because he's a small landlord in his own right. The tax returns that he released last week did include income from rental housing for him as a landlord. Is there anything else you'll say to the people like our last caller in New York City who feel like more and more is becoming anti-landlord in the law or ways that you feel they need some relief?

Jessica Katz: Well, last year when we had our first go-round with the rank guidelines board, we made sure to try to strike what is a very, very difficult balance between protecting tenants and letting them stay in their homes and making sure that property owners have the resources that they need to make those homes high quality. We did that at that time and we also want to make sure that we get a tax program next year that helps property owners to maintain the quality of life in their homes.

I think this is one of the places where while we tend to talk about housing policy as pitting landlords and tenants against each other, it actually doesn't do a lot of good for New York City's tenants to have low-quality housing that they feel like they can't move out of. We want to make sure that we provide the resources that are necessary and the programs that are necessary so that property owners can maintain their housing so that tenants can have a nice place to live.

Brian Lehrer: We're just about at a time, do you want to say a last word? Either something generally or something specific from this housing or neighbor's plan that has now been released by you and the Mayor as to what will come next very specifically.

Jessica Katz: Sure. I think, again, making sure that NYCHA is absolutely chapter one in our plan and we did that by design, was really important and something that we're really proud of. We did a record number of renovations in NYCHA housing this year, we're listening to people who've experienced homelessness themselves and taking our cues from them. I think if I can look our impacted advocates' group in the face and tell them that I'm proud of this housing plan, that's my north star for this project and also just making sure we have every possible tools, zoning tools, tax tools, financial tools that we could possibly have to attack our housing supply crisis.

Brian Lehrer: New York City's Chief Housing Officer, Jessica Katz, we really appreciate your openness and coming on the show today, answering my questions, and answering listeners' questions on the phones and on Twitter. This is obviously such a central issue in New York. We didn't even get to how people in a survey recently called housing one of the number one underlying causes of crime in the city, which is, of course, another big issue that the Adams administration has to deal with. We look forward to having you on multiple times as the term of office goes on for Mayor Adams and for you and we can continue to get into detail on some of these things as we did today. Thank you so much for coming on.

Jessica Katz: Brian, thanks so much for having me. I'll come back anytime.

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