Chair Sanchez on deteriorating Mitchell-Lama conditions and oversight failures
Council Member Pierina Sanchez describes physical and financial deterioration across Mitchell-Lama developments, hazardous conditions, rising rents, and demands HPD come with solutions rather than reactive responses.
All right.
Thank you so much, Chair Lee, and good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, Chair of the Committee on Housing and Buildings, and I'm pleased to co-chair today's joint oversight hearing with Councilmember Lee, as well as I'm calling him the honorary co-chair, Councilmember Dinowitz, who brought us together.
Regarding Tracy Towers.
For more than 70 years, the Mitchell-Lama program has provided an essential source of stable, affordable housing for middle and moderate income New Yorkers.
But today, that promise seems to be in jeopardy.
Too many Mitchell-Lama developments are deteriorating, physically, financially, or both.
Residents are living with hazardous conditions, deteriorating building systems, rising rents and carrying charges, and growing uncertainty about whether they will be able to remain in their homes.
This is not a minor problem at a handful of isolated buildings.
It is a deeply troubling trend across a critical affordable housing portfolio.
And it demands more than just descriptions that our buildings are aging, costs are increasing.
We need our agencies, we need HPD to come to the table with solutions that stabilize developments that are already in distress,
protect residents from displacement, and fundamentally strengthen the city's oversight so that we prevent the next crisis instead of merely reacting after a development has reached a breaking point.