Lacey Tauber of Brooklyn Borough President's Office testifies on fair housing and affordability

Hi, my name is Lacey Tauber.

I'm the Director of Legislative Affairs and Climate Initiatives for Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

And I just want to echo what Chris just said.

It was really exciting to hear you talk about the need for

comprehensive planning because that's something that the BP has been advocating for for a really long time and we would also love to work with you on potentially developing some legislation to meet that need.

And so I will summarize our comments.

So block by block states that the housing shortage is worse for those who earn the least, which is true.

However, according to what they're calling for, there would only be 25,500 new homes over the next five years available citywide, you know, assuming full implementation for those with very low and extremely low incomes.

The median household income in Brooklyn is about $84,000, which is $7,600 less than the 60% AMI threshold for a family of three.

So we acknowledge that there are structural barriers to producing deeply affordable housing, but these numbers simply won't meet the needs in Brooklyn.

On the fair housing growth strategy, we were happy to see that HPD significantly improved its methodology, but there are still some factors required in the law that

they haven't considered in getting to the numbers they put out, including displacement risk, access to employment opportunities, open space, and other neighborhood amenities and public services.

And we're just concerned that the targets continue to call upon the highest growth neighborhoods to add the most housing, while the lowest growth neighborhoods will continue to do the least.

So it calls for also local planning processes to meet these needs.

Again, we're concerned about the absence of a coordinated citywide comprehensive plan that includes spatial guidance and an implementation framework.

And without that, you know, really the targets are just ideas and politics can drive decision making.

We want to really quickly just also want to mention that we want to make sure that a housing development doesn't come at the expense of the worker.

And we want to see our M zones preserved, creating access to job opportunities.

Thank you so much.