In partnership with leading community organizations from across New York City, we just released a new housing report: Right to a Roof: Demands for an Integrated Housing Plan to End Homelessness and Promote Racial Equity.
Our report outlines how the city’s next mayor can ensure the right to a roof for all by rejecting austerity and prioritizing housing opportunities for those who need them most.
The next administration must develop and implement an integrated housing plan to address our housing crisis.
The report has 6 core recommendations for the next administration:
- Create an Integrated Housing Plan to End Homelessness and Promote Racial Equity: this plan should bring together all the agencies involved in housing, building, and planning and be overseen by a new position of Deputy Mayor for Homelessness, Housing, and Planning.
- Prioritize Need Over Numbers: focus on providing permanent, deeply affordable housing for those who need it most and preserving public housing without privatization.
- Improve Access to Affordable and Supportive Housing: prioritize an interagency approach that streamlines the process for finding and securing affordable and supportive housing options, as well as promoting fair housing.
- End Real Estate Speculation by Supporting Community Ownership: stabilize neighborhoods by creating and preserving 100% permanent, affordable housing that is community built and community owned, and working to keep existing residents in their homes.
- Ensure All New Yorkers Have Safe and Healthy Housing: ensure that no one is permanently displaced due to poor housing conditions or harassment, secure our communities by ensuring the long-term viability of the city’s affordable housing stock, and guarantee that every New Yorker has a safe, healthy, and stable home.
- Support Planning that Centers Local Knowledge Within a True Citywide Framework: Planning must meaningfully incorporate residents’ voices and create an equitable approach that centers fair housing and neighborhood priorities so that no single community can stand in the way of critical citywide needs, such as affordable housing development and homeless housing.
Download our latest report with New York City’s leading organizations!
There is a tremendous political opportunity for our city to tackle this crisis, as New York City prepares to elect a new Mayor and City Council in 2021.
Our report urges new leadership to stand with community members in acknowledging housing as a human right and implementing creative programs to help rebuild our broken housing system.
¡Sí se puede!