Transcript: Mayor Adams Appears Live in WNYC's Forum: "The Future of New York City Housing With Mayor Eric Adams"

March 20, 2023

Josefa Velásquez: Thank you all for coming. We really appreciate you guys being out here today. And we want to give a warm welcome to Mayor Eric Adams, so please give him a round of applause.
So Mr. Mayor, we are really appreciative of your time here with us, and we know we have you for a limited time, and housing is a massive subject that probably everyone in this room cares about. So given that, I want to make sure we talk about your housing plan that you've unveiled, the topic of homelessness, which is a huge issue here, and what our city looks like in the future. So I want to start with the impact of the pandemic. We've seen the pandemic in the last three years really spur a sense of urgency and how important affordability is for all of us. It's laid bare a lot of inequities that were simmering under the surface. And because of that we saw just how many New Yorkers are really on the brink of being able to lose their house, or not being able to afford living here. So you've unveiled this plan to create half a million units of housing in the next decade. How do we get there?
Mayor Eric Adams: Well, I think that even before we engage in that conversation, being the mayor, sometimes people look at you're the mayor, you're the first Black borough president, and state senator, captain in the Police Department. That's my glory, that's not my story. And for folks like your mom, and English as a second language, I know what it's like to come up from a family coming up from Alabama, living in neighbors, sleeping on the floors, in rat infested buildings, every week we went to a new location, taking a garbage bag full of clothing to school every day because mom thought we were going to be thrown out, and she wanted us to have change of clothing 
So I'm not here because I read about homelessness, I'm here because my family lived it. And when you look at what's happening in this city right now, particularly post-pandemic, this is a city of interest and it's a city where it is getting more and more unaffordable. And so what our plan, and Jessica Katz, who has donated her life to this housing issue, is to look at let's properly define what are the problems, very clear. 800,000 people moved to the city; we built 200,000 units of housing.
Velásquez: So clearly not enough. 
Mayor Adams: The math doesn't add up. We have to build more and we have to find the pathways to build more low-income, middle-income, and market rate, all three of them, and that is what our plan is looking at. And there are three areas that Jessica, and the team, we have focused on. One, the politics of it. If you only know how many times I hear people stand on the steps of City Hall and state housing is a right. Housing is a right, okay, then you know what? How about me building it in your community? Oh no, it's not a right there. I got my park, I have my subway station, I have my Whole Foods. We don't need another building in our community.
Velásquez: So let me ask you, how do you change people's minds then?
Mayor Adams: Well, number one, we have to start asking what Borough President Levine did, at his state of the borough, he said, "Here are the places in my borough we can build." Erik Bottcher did it, Councilman Powers did it. So every City Council person, every state senator, every Assembly person should be saying to my office, "Here's what you can build in our community." We have a lot of sacred cows where communities where we have the loudest, yet they don't want to build any affordable housing in their communities. That's unacceptable. We should be building particularly in places in Manhattan where you have access to food, access to transportation, access to good schools. If we want to integrate a segregated city, then we need to start building in those communities that have access to these good qualities that we're seeing throughout the city.
Velásquez: And let me ask you, so what are the biggest barriers, aside from people saying, "No, I don't want this in my backyard."? How do we get to building or even converting places to…
Mayor Adams: Well, a couple things we need to look at. Number one, we have to protect what we have. NYCHA has been abandoned by the federal government. We are not doing the right thing on a state level. We need to think differently about NYCHA and we need to engage the tenants in doing so. We have to ensure that we make NYCHA — that is the best access to affordable housing. We have too many units that are lying vacant. It is challenging to determine who controls NYCHA nowadays with the special monitor, who's actually in control. What happened at the Riis Houses, what I didn't like, I couldn't fire the person who I believe dropped the ball in Riis Houses.
So we need to get into NYCHA, think differently about the NYCHA. I'm excited about the project in Chelsea, it's a new way of thinking. People who are stating that we need 35 billion dollars coming from the federal government, we're not getting it with a Republican controlled house, and we need to stop lying about it and keep telling NYCHA residents, "Hold on." Those bugles we hear, that's not the calvary, that's taps. NYCHA’s dying and we need to fix NYCHA. 
Velásquez: So 35 billion, $40 billion is almost an unthinkable amount of money, and NYCHA’s housing is obviously aging rapidly, so what can the city do, if anything, to make sure that some of the fixes that need to occur actually happen considering the state of NYCHA is so poor now?
Mayor Adams: You look at some of the buildings, it's more expensive to repair them than tearing down and building up. There's a concept that is being floated around in the Chelsea area where a building would be torn down, first build a building that the tenants will go right into the building you built, tear down the building that they're leaving, zero displacement, place them in brand new apartments. I've been in the NYCHA buildings, and I know that some of these buildings are dilapidated to the state of repairing them is unacceptable.
I gutted my home when I moved in and if I attempted to fix it instead of complete gut job, it would've been a waste of time. But then we need to look at some of the politics, some of the smart things, we've presented about 114 different changes we believe we need to do on how we have redundancy and repeated reviews over and over again, stating in places we couldn't build, was not acceptable to build, refusing to build higher. So we have to look at each level what we can do as a city, what we can do in Albany, and what we can do with some of the processes that needs to be redefined.
Velásquez: So going back to your housing proposal, half a million units in 10 years, that sounds great, we need all the housing we can get, but is there anything you can do now, six months, in a year, to house people who need it?
Mayor Adams: Well, a couple of things. We need to have a real conversation about 421-a, a real vision of it, we need to look at J-51. There are things that is taking place right now in Albany, and I really take my hat off even to the governor, what the governor's doing about regional. We need to look at the region because this is a regional problem. And then immediately when we got in office, we had 2,500 units of apartments that were vacant. Jessica Katz came in, immediately put in place a plan where we put 1,000 people in. I had the team give me a flow chart of the process, and the redundancy was unbelievable. There was just an antiquated method of how do you take people to move them into available units, that's unacceptable and there's an easier way to do it, and that's what the team is putting in place.
Velásquez: So just to go back on your housing proposal, one of them is to take these empty office buildings. The pandemic really brought in this era of hybrid work and remote work where people aren't spending as much time in mainland Manhattan than they were back in the day. So I'm curious to hear from you how those conversations are going with Albany. Just across the street, we have an empty office building, how do we turn those into apartments?
Mayor Adams: We did it before, we did it after September 11. I was a rookie cop in District 2 in lower Manhattan and that area was basically a nine to six environment. 6 PM it was dead downtown. We understood, after September 11, we thought differently. Now you have a thriving community in the area. Many of these buildings can be converted into housing. We have about 10 million square feet of real estate right now that's not being used. And even folks who do have office spaces, they're downsizing, they're not continuing to have the large floor plan, and so there's a great opportunity. We had a project down in Manhattan off of William Street that is a conversion, it's being converted into housing, but the problem is it's being converted into a market rate, because if we give the incentive to allow it to be converted into affordable housing, there's some great opportunities to do so.
Velásquez: How do you define affordable and how do we make sure that there is affordable housing? Because affordable to one person might be different from someone else.
Mayor Adams: Without a doubt. And that's a question that I hear all the time. It has almost become a bumper sticker. The reality is we've done a great job of increasing the minimum wage for fast food workers. If you have a full-time person working at McDonald's and his spouse or her spouse is a teacher, we've pushed them out of the low, low-income. So affordable to me is market, middle, low-income because I need my middle-income and my market individuals in the city as well. If we take away the moderate incomes, we're be forcing the market rates into those apartments that are in the low-income. And so affordable is a combination, it's a diversity of this city. I need my fast-food workers, my deliveristas, but also I need my teachers, I need my accountants. We had 200,000 African Americans that have left this city because it's too expensive, as well as with the security issues we were facing. So affordable to me is every income level, because that's what a city's comprised of.
Velásquez: You mentioned earlier 421-a and J-51, so for the folks in the crowd who don't know the wonky housing policies, these are tax programs that give incentives to developers if they set aside a portion of their housing towards affordable housing, and that expired one, two years ago now. Time is a flat circle when it comes to the pandemic. So I'm curious about how you're pushing those proposals up in Albany, and could you explain to the crowd why that's needed, why those tax programs are needed now?
Mayor Adams: Well, many people thought that if we took away 421-a, they said it was a giveaway to the developers. It was not. It was an incentive to build. You want to modify it, then do the modification, but when you look at what's in the pipeline, there's a complete drying up of the pipeline. And we can't be so idealistic that we're not realistic. Incentivizing and being smart about where you want to do the incentives would allow us to get the housing and the pipeline, and I think that's so important. And then building of our transportation systems, that's crucial. And J-51, it should not have sunsetted; it was a smart way of ensuring that we would continue the housing repairs. I grew up in Brooklyn. I knew what Bushwick Avenue looked like and how people walked away from their buildings. In some cases they started fires and burned down their entire communities, because it became too expensive to actually manage those apartments. And it's crucial that we look at, in a smart way, incentive to continue repairs and building in this city. 
Velásquez: So if you could put your state senator hat on for just a second, what does 421-a look like? Or what does incentives for developers look like in order to get affordable housing at the rate that the city needs?
Mayor Adams: Well, if you look at certain locations where it has been slower in developing, you look at places like where Donovan Richards is doing out in the Rockaways, you look at what's happening in the Bronx, we're getting ready to build out new train stations in that area, we could do some real development around that area. You look at even places in South Jamaica, Queens, in Leroy Comrie's districts and others, some of the projects near the Sutphin Boulevard station where you have the Long Island Rail Road and the train to the plane, so if you strategically lay out where you're going to do the development and the incentives, it could be a real win.
Velásquez: It's funny that you mentioned Far Rockaway because that's where my mom and I landed when we came to the U.S., and it's where my dad lives now. My brother and I drive up and down the street — Hey Danny — and always talk about how is it possible that this area has not been developed since it's a beachfront property, there's a subway close by, and it's untouched almost by development, but maybe that changes and it's such an interesting community and so robust.
Mayor Adams: And here's what I heard when I was campaigning, no matter which community I traveled in, and you think about it also, people ask two questions when they go to move somewhere. How good are the schools? How safe is the community? Public safety is the prerequisite to our prosperity, and making sure our schools are good. And when you look at the safety issue in Rockaway that we've been tackling and the qualities of the schools, when you're looking to raise a family somewhere, the first thing you want to know is how good are the schools, how safe is the community. We make the community safer and we improve upon the school system, which Chancellor Banks is doing, you will see people rushing to that beautiful waterfront community. 
Velásquez: There's one thing that always sticks in my mind and it's the words of Jimmy McMillan, the perennial candidate, saying the rent is too damn high, but it's not just rent right now, it's also home prices. So I'm curious if there's anything the city could do to bring down those costs.
Mayor Adams: Well, it's a combination of things, we have to get back into the business of homeownership. I am blown away when I was a child that mom was able to purchase a home in Queens. We lived in a fourth story, rat infested tenement, and she was able to purchase that home by cleaning the homes of others. That dream is snatched away when you look at this city, the cost of purchasing a home. So we've put around nine million dollars into assisting in down payments, in fiscal year 2022, $53 million in expanding homeownership. So the goal is to really do a combination, allow people the opportunity, the pathway of homeownership, and being creative in doing so, finding those different opportunities.
My first ownership was a co-op. I was able to have a low-income co-op, I went from renting to a co-op, to purchasing my three family home. And mind you, my three family home, I have tenants in there for the last almost 15 years. When they signed their lease, I signed into the lease, I could never raise your rent as long as you are in my building. We have to stop talking about it and being about it.
Velásquez: And actually do it. Is that everything?
Mayor Adams: Yes.
Velásquez: So we have here a question from one of the folks in our audience, Judith from the West Village, and she wants to know how do you envision the conversion of commercial buildings to residential to include very affordable housing?
Mayor Adams: Well, it's a combination. If we do the right changes in Albany, then we could have a conversation and move away from the market rate that we saw downtown. And I believe in this concept, something I saw in other countries, called, instead of WeWork, WeLive. My son lived differently. He has a stove in his apartment, I don't think he knows how to turn it on. He eats out. He loves this shared living. So why can't we do a real examination of the rules that state every bedroom must have a window. You don't need no window when you're sleeping. It should be dark. Instead of doing that, have studio apartments, then share living and working spaces. My son enjoyed that whole dormitory sort of setting. I think we have to reinvent our conversation, a modern day almost SRO concept. There's some great models I've saw across the globe, it's affordable, we could tie in real affordable prices to it, and then we allow the cross pollination of ideas and people living together.
Velásquez: Gotcha. So I want to shift gears a little bit to talk about homelessness. In the last few years alone, we've seen a rising number of homeless people, and part of that is due to the fact that we have this influx of asylum seekers who've been coming into this country over the last year, so I know you've asked for federal assistance, but absent that, what can the city do to bring down the number of people who are living without shelter?
Mayor Adams: Great question. And I think that I'm a big upstream thinker, and when you look at our policies, you'll see we are rooted in upstream. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, "Spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river instead of going upstream and preventing them from falling in the first place." So we have to think differently. That's why we are investing in foster care and also investing in those other issues that are upstream thinking. A young child growing up in a homeless shelter is three times less likely to graduate from high school. If you don't educate, you will incarcerate. And that's why we see 80 percent of our inmates at reconciling don't have a high school diploma or equivalency diploma. We're feeding the criminal justice and the homeless crisis. And so when we took office, I spent January and February in the streets, people criticized our plan. But I went to the streets January and February at night by myself, visited people in encampments and in tents and in boxes.
What did I see inside? Drug paraphernalia, human waste, schizophrenic, bipolar, stale food, unkept, it was unacceptable. And so our mission in the subway system, when I rode the subway system, we had a woman that was sleeping under the stairs in the subway system and we normalized that. We normalized people on the trains living in unkept condition, that was just unacceptable for me. 4,000 people, we were able to get off the subway system. Over a 1,000, roughly 1,200, are still in wraparound services. One of the most touching stories that I know of was a woman that lived on the street for almost 25 years. I'm hoping to go see her in the next day or so. We now have a wraparound service, she's off the street, she's been there for a while, stabilizing her. Dr. Vasan, who is a master at this whole concept, rolled out the second phase of our homeless issue. 
Many of our homeless individuals are dealing with severe mental health issues, and we have to give them the services they deserve, because you know what happens? Close to 48 percent of the people on Rikers Island have mental health issues, and 18 percent have severe mental health issues. We wait until they commit a crime and then we give them the support. So the audacity of Eric of saying, "No, I'm going to help you before you commit a crime, I'm going to help you before you go to the emergency room, I'm going to help you before you harm yourself," we have to be proactive and not reactive, and that is why we're focusing on the homelessness that we're seeing in this city.
Velásquez: And is there a point where we can claim or the city can claim, yes, this is a success? Having wraparound services and following someone through treatments, that takes a long time, right?
Mayor Adams: Yes, it does.
Velásquez: That takes a considerable amount of money. So at what point can we claim, okay, we've gotten this under control? Is there a point?
Mayor Adams: Listen, I'm hoping we can. This is a 40-year problem. Then to add on the 40-year problem, think about what happened January 1st, 2022. When I became mayor, we had about 35,000 people in our homeless systems scattered out. In one year we're now having 51,000 people. On top of that 51,000 that came in a little over a year, not only did we give them food, shelter, clothing, education, healthcare, we treated them with dignity that they deserve. And every one of them that I visited, you know what they said? "We don't want free food, we don't want free healthcare, we want to work." And when you add that on, nowhere else in the country is doing what the people of New York City is doing. Nowhere else. I visited El Paso, I visited Los Angeles, I visited other cities, we're the only place in the country that are treating people who are fleeing persecution that come here with the dignity they deserve.
Velásquez: So what happens next to all these folks? It seems that Congress has been deadlocked on immigration reform for as long as I've been alive, basically, so is there anything that the city can be doing to make sure that they're now finding work or integrating them into this neighborhood, or into their neighborhoods?
Mayor Adams: Well, they want to. And we rolled out today, with Governor Hochul, Kathy Wylde, the Partnership, We Love New York, and it's really calling us all to play our part. Go to the young person in a homeless shelter, go speak with asylum seekers and help them understand English. If we just volunteer 8.5 million people, if we just volunteer one hour a week… Every Wednesday night at 9 PM I'm on 34th Street between Seven and Eighth Avenue handing out food to people who are down on their luck, going through a difficult time. And do you know what it means for them to walk and get a plate of food from the mayor of the City of New York, knowing he's there. And then we go over to the side and I speak with them about what are their issues, engaging with them one on one, we all can do that.
Everyone can just donate just one hour a week. Everyone's talking about Rikers Island, I don't see them on Rikers, I've been on Rikers Island more than any mayor in the history of New York City. Thanksgiving Day, I spent Thanksgiving Day with a woman who just gave birth on Rikers Island. We need to all volunteer. We need to all say, "Here's where I am in my life." I'm a believer, you deposit into the social bank of life, you could draw on the equity when you need it. And while government does its job, there's a responsibility for citizens to do their job. And we need to step up, and we're not stepping up, and we have to be honest about are we stepping up? This is a Michael Jackson moment, got to look at the man and the woman in the mirror and see what you're doing.
Velásquez: We only have you for a couple more minutes, so I want to ask you, you're a native New Yorker, you're born here, grew up here, you've inherited the city in the middle of a crisis, and you're seeing it evolve in front of our eyes, how do you make sure that the New York that's coming in the next few years is equitable, and is there anything stopping that?
Mayor Adams: Well, listen, I think that Tracy [inaudible] says all the time, "You could never complain. You're the mayor of New York." And this is a great moment for us. We've taken a broken child, dyslexic, bullied, arrested, denied, watching mommy raise those six children, the city betrayed mommy. I was lucky. You should not have to be lucky in this city. So you have someone that has traveled through what people are going through, and I'm the mayor. And if you do a deep analysis of my policies and programs, there's never been a mayor that's doing what we're doing. Our team is focused. Each one of them comes with a personal story of their betrayal. This is the right time for me to be the mayor of this city. And right now you are going to see the results of a compassionate, caring, understanding mayor. It's a challenging time, it's hard for us, but we're going to get through it just as we got through the depressions, just as we got through 9/11, just as we got through Covid, we're going to get through it.
Velásquez: And mayor, just one last question for you, I know we have a limited amount of time, do you think that New York City is your forever home? Do you see yourself living here for the rest of your life?
Mayor Adams: There’s only two types of people on this planet, those who live in New York and those who wish they could. I'm going nowhere.
Velásquez: Great. Well, thank you very much for all of your time.
Mayor Adams: Thank you.
Velásquez: We really appreciate you coming out here. And thank you all. Please give us a round applause for the mayor. Thank you so much.

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