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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As you just heard, one of the items in the COVID relief bill is rental assistance. An article in The Times over the weekend gave some stats on how bad the problem is. It says even before the pandemic, about a quarter of renters in the US were spending more than half their pre-tax income on rent. Now, nearly a year into the pandemic, Moody's Analytics says US renters owe a total of $53 billion in back rent, utilities, and late fees. The eviction moratoriums in place in New York and elsewhere only delay payment of back rent, not cancel it. When it's over, there will be a debt crisis that could yet become an eviction and homelessness crisis.

Here in New York, how should we evaluate the mayoral candidates who are now in the running and their approaches to affordable housing? Well, the Community Service Society of New York just issued a new report called Assessing de Blasio's Housing Legacy. Its subtitle gives away its conclusion, Why Hasn't the "Most Ambitious Affordable Housing Program", de Blasio's slogan, Produced a More Affordable City?

The most ambitious part as I say is in quotes, and so to talk about what they found in looking at this mayor's performance on housing the city with an eye to the next mayor's platform, and also talk about the context of the potential eviction crisis post-pandemic, we are joined by the author of the report, Samuel Stein, housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society, and by David Jones, the organization's President and CEO. The Community Service Society is a think tank and advocacy group that focuses on the needs of low-income New Yorkers. Welcome, Samuel Stein, and welcome back, David Jones.

Samuel Stein: Thank you very much. It's an honor to be on the show.

Brian Lehrer: David, can I get you first to react to the federal piece, to the COVID relief bill and what you see in it and what's needed and the potential eviction crisis facing the city after it's over?

David Jones: We already have commented upon it that unless this comes through, it could be devastating, not only to poor renters in a sudden increase in homelessness, as people who haven't been able to pay their rental costs that amount to $1000 a month, 5 or 6 months, you're talking about unbelievable amounts of money, but also to the landlords and our concern that suddenly landlords are going to be defaulting on mortgages and losing their property. This hits almost every part of New York and we have to have some real relief soon both obviously, for renters so they don't become homeless, and for landlords who are likely to lose their property.

Brian Lehrer: I don't want to leave the landlords out of this. Going up the chain from the renters, what about small landlords? The news organization, The City, maybe you saw it, ran a story on Sunday about New York City's small landlords of color among those battlings for survival amid the rent moratorium. It tells the story, for example, of a man named Clarence Haimer who rents out a two-family home in Brownsville. One of the tenants stopped paying rent in 2019 before COVID but with the eviction moratorium, Mr. Haimer cannot evict him and says he expects to be foreclosed upon because he can't pay his mortgage.

Do you have any thoughts about how to balance the needs of tenants and small landlords of color in any other?

David Jones: Obviously, I come from a family where the mortgage was supported by having tenants upstairs. This is a very real problem. You can't just ignore this issue as solely one of renters. You have to figure out what's going to happen. In some ways, small landlords are the backbone of poor communities. Certainly, growing up in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, that was true, but I think if you could go all around the city in all sorts of neighborhoods, these individuals are really critical parts of the infrastructure and support for a viable city, so I don't think they can be forgotten. I think it would be a major mistake.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Samuel Stein, to your report on the de Blasio legacy on housing. He certainly wanted to do better than his predecessor, Mayor Bloomberg, at providing affordable housing. Take us through some of the numbers. How many units of affordable housing does the de Blasio administration get credit for here in their final year? Is that the best way to measure success?

Samuel Stein: As you said, the de Blasio administration came in promising a real change in housing policy. What we saw was a focus on housing and a focus on affordable housing, some continuities despite the change in style and ideology, and many problems persisting at the end of the administration. Their goal overall is to produce 300,000 units of affordable housing. A lot of that is preserving affordable housing into the future, and some of it is creating and that's a long-term goal, but they're basically on pace to hit that big number. That means that they have a faster and higher pace of affordable housing production than any other mayor in a very long time.

The issue, however, is that homelessness has persisted and in many ways gotten worse. The condition of public housing has worsened in many cases, low-income renters are paying just as high if not higher, a percentage of their income in rent. Many people we're seeing their rents going through the roof and the pandemic has scrambled that a little bit but hasn't really changed the fundamentals. The administration was successful in producing large amounts of income targeted housing, was not necessarily successful in arresting the patterns of gentrification, segregation, and unaffordability in the city.

Brian Lehrer: You also argue in the report that the numbers aren't the only thing. You take issue with how they got to those numbers of affordable units and the implications of this for the future. The de Blasio administration partnered in many cases with for-profit developers. Is there really an alternative to that going forward? I know we're already hearing from some of the mayoral candidates, "Oh, I'm going to use the nonprofit sector, much more," things like that, but how much can the nonprofit sector develop the vast number of new affordable units that the city needs?

Samuel Stein: That's a great question and the problem wasn't that they set an ambitious goal, we want the next mayor to be ambitious about affordable housing. The problem was that they seem to be more interested in hitting that overall number than in matching the number of units they were producing to the need. They skewed it toward a higher income than has the most desperate need in terms of rent burdens, how much of your income is going to rent, homelessness and susceptibility to homelessness, and overcrowding.

You correctly point out that a large percentage of the so-called affordable housing was produced under the de Blasio administration, in fact, the majority of it, was granted to for-profit developers, and they are there to make a profit. That is directly in contrast with the mission of providing affordable housing at the lowest possible rates. We have in the report a case study provided by the Mutual Housing Association of New York, of how nonprofit developers differ from for-profit developers in seeking to reach the lowest-income New Yorkers.

We've got ourselves in a self-perpetuating cycle where for-profit developers get the biggest projects and nonprofits get the scraps. If that's the case, the nonprofit sector never has a chance to build up the capacity to do the scale of development and preservation that the city needs. We are almost in a self-fulfilling prophecy that only for-profits can do this when the truth is nonprofits have the capacity and in fact did it in New York City for decades. It's only in the last couple of decades that we've shifted affordable housing production to for-profit companies.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, let's talk housing with Samuel Stein, housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society, who just wrote this new report on de Blasio's affordable housing record, and David Jones, President and CEO of the Community Service Society. You can call and talk about your relationship to the possible coming eviction crisis. Are you in your apartment now only because there's an eviction moratorium? If you're a landlord, you can talk about the foreclosure side of that.

If you're somebody who is okay for now in any of these senses, but you're very interested in what the next mayoral candidates are proposing for affordable housing, how would you like to see the de Blasio administration's emphasis change next year under whoever becomes mayor, or anything related? 646-435-7280. Tell us a story about your own situation as a renter or a landlord or ask a question of our guests. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet @BrianLehrer.

Samuel Stein, before we pivot to some other things, another detail from the report, you take issue with the fact that homelessness is seen as a separate issue from affordable housing. Elaborate on that.

Samuel Stein: Right. In our view, homelessness is the ultimate housing issue. First of all, the way to end homelessness is to get people into permanent housing, to build housing specifically for people who are in the shelter system or on the streets right now, and to make that a priority of housing policy. Due to the organizing of homeless people themselves and their own advocacy, there has been a commitment to setting aside I believe it's 5% of new city-subsidized affordable housing for the homeless. That was done about halfway into the de Blasio administration, it should have been done immediately and it probably should be an even larger number.

We saw the number of homeless people in New York City rise over the course of this administration, even as affordable housing was a political priority. We can't think of homelessness as just a social service problem, we certainly can't think of it as a police problem. It is a housing problem and it needs to be thought about holistically in line with public housing and in line with private affordable housing.

Brian Lehrer: David Jones, rezonings were a big part of the mayor's plans for boosting housing. They've gotten push back. The idea is developers bring new businesses and apartments to specific neighborhoods that are rezoned to allow larger buildings in exchange for a certain percentage of the units being priced "affordably", which on paper seems like it might work, there'll be more units overall, there'll be more affordable units overall, where did it break down for you?

David Jones: Well, for us, we were concerned almost from the beginning that parachuting these new developments into low-income neighborhoods would obviously, you have to not only look at the number of, "affordable" units that are coming in but what it does to the price structure of the surrounding neighborhoods. Every indication is that when this rezoning takes place, it often makes unaffordable the surrounding rental properties.

You can't look at this in isolation. I think the problem of this administration, looking at things in silos, homelessness, public housing, new units, and not recognizing the overall impact on low-end communities and making potentially having a devastating effect by driving individuals who could afford it before these rezoning took place and now suddenly can't because of the impacts that come about because of these new developments.

Brian Lehrer: How would it work if they were more seen, all these things, as the same issue and not siloed as you say they are?

David Jones: Well, I saw it firsthand, having met with many of the officials in the housing, they didn't, as you talk to them about coming up with new affordable units, did not include public housing and that discussion and yet the public housing crisis was obvious to them and obviously to everyone else as the ballooning debt and the inability to keep pace with repairs has now gotten to the point that at $40 billion, and it's racing ahead. At the moment, that becomes an even greater crisis for us because that is in some ways the mainstay of low-income housing in the city of New York. They didn't consider that as part of the whole.

The homelessness crisis, obviously, we've reached unprecedented levels. It obviously impacts the people who are mired in it, but it's also costing the city and its taxpayers almost $2 billion a year and that's before COVID. If those numbers continue to expand exponentially, we have enormous amounts of resources that are going to have to cope with people in substandard conditions. Not linking this all together has had some very devastating effects. In future, it's going to confront the new mayor, whoever he or she may be with an extraordinarily difficult problem.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting some really interesting looking callers. We'll start putting them on with you in a minute. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with David Jones, President and CEO of the Community Service Society, and Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst there. They have a new report out about the de Blasio housing legacy called Why Hasn't the "Most Ambitious Affordable Housing Program" Produced a More Affordable City? We're also talking about how to prevent the potential eviction crisis once these temporary rent moratoriums that are pegged to the pandemic end. Let's go to a caller. Nick in Crown Heights. Nick, you're on WNYC. Hi, there?

Nick: Hi, good morning, Brian. Thanks for covering this really important issue. I guess my question [inaudible 00:16:15] has to do with the fact that there's already such an existing, there's so many vacant units in the city. There are more vacant units in the city than there are on house [unintelligible 00:16:24]. I guess I wonder if an emphasis on building new housing and new units might be missing the point when there is already enough stock to house people, and I'd like to address the coming eviction crisis and to address the ongoing housing crisis, it might make sense to re-stabilize or re-regulate rents across the city.

Brian Lehrer: Nick, thank you very much. Samuel Stein, as the housing policy analyst, do you agree with him that there are so many empty units in the city? I thought affordable, I'm sorry, I thought a shortage of rental units overall is a large part of what contributes to the high prices. Obviously, scarcity pushes prices up in classic market theory. Do we have many empty units that could just be filled in the right way?

Samuel Stein: Short answer, yes. The narrative is often oversimplified around supply, demand, and vacancy. In the report, we tried to show how some of these dynamics are playing out. The overall vacancy rate in the city grew over the last period that was surveyed. Every three years, the city surveys vacancy and occupancy in the city. The vacancy rate at the top of the market is way higher than the vacancy rate at the bottom of the market.

In fact, the number of units renting for less than $1500 declined by 14% even as the demographics of the city meant that 5% more people needed apartments at those rents. We have a housing squeeze in the low rent market and housing oversupply in the high rent market. Part of that is because public policy has incentivized a certain form of large scale luxury development in many parts of this city.

Do we have a huge amount of vacancy? Yes, we have enough vacant, an equivalent number of vacant apartments as many neighborhoods in New York City, but those are sometimes owned by billionaires who don't live there. Some of them are owned by developers who are leaving them off the market waiting for conditions to improve for them and so they're not putting them for sale. There may be, especially at the state level, things that can be changed that can alter that dynamic to get those onto the market and even better, to put the people who really need housing into vacant existing housing.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Tom in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tom?

Tom: Hi, how are you, Brian? My request is that the municipal governments and the federal government should consider instilling Section 8 for all [unintelligible 00:19:21] during the crisis so that you can reduce the rents to a manageable amount and not have evictions.

Brian Lehrer: Tom, thank you very much. David Jones, Section 8 housing vouchers that go to individuals and they can use that to subsidize their rent. Sometimes they go directly to landlords. If that was a broader federal program, would that be a solution, those kinds of subsidies?

David Jones: I'm going to let Sam talk to this, but my gut sense is that obviously, during the Trump administration, they severely limited the number of Section 8 and obviously, in this new administration, the potential of broadly expanding Section 8 and its help would be I think, a significant help to the city of New York and to localities across the nation.

Samuel Stein: Sure. I'll add to that that the Biden campaign, when they were running first in the primary and then in the general, made as a central part of their housing plank, universal eligibility for Section 8. Right now, only about a quarter of the people who are considered eligible for such vouchers actually have them. They've committed to doing that. It'll take pressure from the Congress and of course from people to make it happen. I would also love to see that paired with widespread rent stabilization to make sure that landlords don't just raise the rents once they get those vouchers, but we are in a better place in New York city to control that than many other places are.

Brian Lehrer: Arena in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Arena.

Arena: Hi Brian. Thank you for taking my call. My question is maybe a slightly more general question is how affordable is a lot of this housing? The reason I'm saying this is because I have applied for many of those affordable units. The first one I won when I received the instructions, it was so incredibly bureaucratic. All of these pay stubs that I needed to bring. Everything I needed to show, proof that I had never been jailed, all this other kind of stuff and I gave up. The second time I won one, I decided to do it. I only got about halfway through and you have only seven days to complete all this paperwork and then I had my interview.

It was interesting because when I showed up at the interview, I apologized for not having all the papers yet and the guy just looked at me and he thought I was white, middle-aged Ivy League-educated, an adjunct at Columbia. He said, no problem. You can have this apartment if you want it. This is an apartment that required a minimum salary of %89,000 a year. I didn't take the apartment. It was only like 300 square feet. I have 600 square feet for slightly more money in the East Village, but my apartment is not rent-stabilized.

So I'm wondering if I had been a Black youth, a 24-year-old Black youth at my first job, what he have let me pass through like that. How many people can actually go through all that bureaucratic stuff or even understand it?

Brian Lehrer: Arena, thank you. David.

David Jones: I can only say, having been a bureaucrat myself, head of Youth Services for the city of New York, the kind of paperwork we put people through, which is so unnecessary now, is extraordinary. I think we've heard in another arena, people who are elderly or not as computer savvy trying to get COVID testing and vaccinations, people give up and I think this can be handled. This is just having a different mindset in terms of what we want people to do and how many hoops we want them to put through.

As to your caller's issue of differential treatment of Black and brown people, there's no question that there are immediate assumptions that take place often when people come into contact with bureaucrats. It's not universal and I don't mean to say it is, but it does happen. Again, this could be so streamlined with the new technology and ability to make things simplified and still get appropriate checks to make sure fraud is not taking place. I think this could be done with a stroke of a pen basically, and it should be one of the things that we ask the new administration to take on.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are a New York and New Jersey public radio, as we're finishing up with David Jones and Samuel Stein from the Community Service Society on the issue of housing post-pandemic and post-de Blasio in New York City.

Just to finish up, David, in an Amsterdam News column that you wrote last month, you wrote, "The COVID-19 crisis has made this mayoral race less about electing a big talking inspirational leader than about someone with budget proficiencies, policy smarts, coalition building skills, and the toughness to get things done." As it pertains to housing or anything else, was that aimed at anyone in particular?

David Jones: [laughs] We're nonpartisan. I'm not going to go there.

Brian Lehrer: You're all in the same party.

David Jones: I think we have to recognize that this is going to be perhaps one of the most critical elections that many of us have ever seen, and getting a leader who can sort of lead us out of this is going to take an enormous amount of effort. I just say you better vote this time. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with David Jones and Samuel Stein from the Community Service Society. Obviously, just one of any number of conversations that we'll be having that include housing as an issue in the mayoral campaign. Thank you both very much for coming on with us.

Samuel Stein: Thank you, Brian

David Jones: It's a pleasure.

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