NYC Turns to Its Own Portfolio in Quest to Build Affordable Housing

New York City potentially has a solution to its housing crisis right under its nose.

A new task force made up of representatives from every city agency will examine the city’s own real estate portfolio in order to ferret out potential opportunities for new housing development, according to an executive order signed by Mayor Eric Adams Tuesday. It will be chaired by Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development and Workforce, Maria Torres-Springer.

The idea is to “bring new innovative ideas to the table” to help the city reach the mayor’s “moonshot” goal of building 500,000 new homes by 2032, Adams said in a statement.

“If there’s any land within the city’s control that has even the remotest potential to develop affordable housing, our administration will take action,” Adams said.

A spokesperson for Adams said the city currently has no definitive inventory of all the land it owns or controls, but the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which acts as the city’s real estate broker, lists a database of  nearly 17,000 properties owned by the city.

Even without a full list of city-owned land, the mayor already has a few sites in mind that could be candidates for development. That includes property owned by branches of the New York Public Library and Department of Sanitation garages on Staten Island and the Bronx, the spokesperson said.

Putting housing on city-owned land is not a new idea as the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development currently has five such projects underway, including 850 units at 5421 Center Boulevard in Queens, 570 units at 4095 Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, 116 units at 516 Bergen Street in Brooklyn, and 220 units at a pair of sites in the Bronx, according to announcements about the projects.

The newly minted “City Housing Activation Taskforce” will build on that while helping the city think like a private developer, according to one housing expert who has been promoting the idea of building housing on city land for several years. 

“These kinds of activities — looking for real estate opportunities — ought to be assigned to a panel that includes professional real estate people who know what they’re doing,” said Charles Moerdler, a New York City Housing Development Corporation board member and the longtime land use chair for Bronx Community Board 8.

Moerdler pointed to a sanitation garage near St. Barnabas Hospital in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx as a prime example.

The garage “has been sitting vacant for years,” Moerdler said. “There’s a search to build housing in the Arthur Avenue area, and there’s a perfect site, and it has not been used.”

Adams isn’t the only politician turning to their own portfolio to address the housing crisis. In her most recent budget, Gov. Kathy Hochul allocated $500 million to build 15,000 homes on state-owned land and last month announced plans to convert the former Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan into a 170-unit apartment building.

Abigail Nehring can be reached at anehring@commercialobserver.com.