Battery Park City Authority to give New York City $500 million for affordable housing

Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander have reached a deal with the Battery Park City Authority to steer $500 million toward building and preserving affordable housing, as the city faces a shortage its leaders have called historic.

In an email, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul, who appoints the authority’s board, said Hochul’s office expected the money would help build and preserve over 10,000 units of housing, about the same as achieved under a previous agreement for disbursement of authority funds. The authority will transfer $140.4 million to the city within a month and the remainder over the next few years, she said.

The agreement comes after Adams last year set what the city calls a “moonshot” goal of creating 500,000 new homes over the next decade.

Since its creation in 1968, the authority, which owns the land on which the 92-acre Battery Park City neighborhood in lower Manhattan was built, has contributed a portion of the rent and payments in lieu of taxes collected on buildings there to the city’s affordable housing programs.

An earlier agreement for authority funds disbursed $461 million since 2010, according to a news release Monday from Hochul’s office. Some money under the previous agreement went into city and state budgets, but the new agreement calls for all of the money to go to affordable housing.

“The need is greater than the funding that’s available, so this kind of funding helps, particularly in an environment of escalating costs where interest rates have not come down,” said Howard Slatkin, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Slatkin said he expected the impact to be significant, if not earth-shattering. “It’s another resource that can be layered in when there’s particular need or you want to reach hard-to-reach populations,” he said.

In a news release Monday, Adams’ office said his 2025 fiscal budget would invest $2 billion in capital funds over the next two fiscal years to address a “general housing crisis.”

The mayor last September announced a zoning reform proposal, the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, designed to yield more than 100,000 new housing units over the next 15 years. The zoning amendment could get a City Council vote by the year’s end.

The plan would allow more accessory dwelling units — such as an additional apartment on a plot currently zoned for just one home — the kind of building resisted on much of Long Island.

New York was behind Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C., and other big cities by permitting a fraction of the housing those cities do, even as demand surges, according to a report last year from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

In February, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development released the latest findings of a housing survey, conducted every three years in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, that put the vacancy rate at 1.4% — the lowest the measurement had been since 1968.