During his preliminary budget address on Thursday, Mayor de Blasio responded to the Manhattan Institute's new report on Mandatory Inclusionary Housing by impugning the credibility of its source, rather than engaging seriously with its substance. Eric Kober, the report’s author, is a 40 year veteran of the New York City Department of City Planning and an expert in New York City land use and housing. He has devoted his career to improving life in the city, serving under many mayors—including Mayor de Blasio.
This report is not about embarrassing the Mayor or picking a political fight. Rather, it is a rigorously researched effort to evaluate the performance of the Mayor’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program and, where it finds shortcomings, to suggest constructive reforms to improve the program. Rather than preferring the prior "voluntary" program, the report contends that MIH needs to produce housing without public subsidies in strong- and middle-market neighborhoods, as the voluntary program does.
The Mayor's Office contends that the MIH program needs more time to develop. But even if that were the case, the reforms proposed in the report would lead to faster progress. The report is clear: it is not a call to end MIH or signal its imminent demise. Its recommendations contain an extensive list of suggestions for how the city and state can improve MIH and generate more housing. Among them:
- A call for the city to change MIH so that it works for all types of housing, including conversions, small buildings, condominium buildings, and buildings that provide affordable housing off-site.
- A call for the Mayor to abandon his acquiescence to giving individual City Council members a unilateral veto over rezonings in their district, and a return to the practice of building coalitions with Council members to overcome opposition to rezonings in the parts of the city with the highest land values where MIH is most financially feasible.
- A call for the State Legislature to give the city permanent authority to enact real-estate tax exemptions consistent with its affordable housing goals. The city has a strong incentive to make these tax exemptions substantial enough to work, but not so generous as to unduly curtail tax revenues.
We encourage the Mayor and City Council members who passed MIH to read this report with an open mind. With careful reform, MIH could be an important part of the city's housing toolkit for years to come.
—Michael Hendrix, Manhattan Institute Director of State and Local Policy
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