Jim Walden - NYHC

Partner at Walden Macht Haran & Williams

Housing Positions and Proposals

Part 1: Restore Incentives That Worked

Part 2: Build With Ambition

1. City Owned Properties: Proactively identify all city owned properties suitable for rental projects. Provide these to developers on a zero-cost basis.
2. Office Conversions: Create significant new incentives/abatements to convert at least 24 million square feet of vacant office space into residential over 4 years.
3. NYCHA Pilot Program: Rebuild 7% of the NYCHA portfolio. Build replacement buildings in these communities.
4. Build New Communities: Using larger tracts of available land, create whole new communities, where the housing is largely rental-based.
5. “Zombie Property” Program: Acquire long-vacant buildings, whether residential or commercial, and make them available for rental-housing projects.
6. Foreclosed Property Program: Create an initiative to give NYC a pre-auction right of first refusal, making those properties available for speedy conversion or redevelopment into Truly Affordable housing.
7. Targeted Upzoning: Where housing is needed most, upzone to spur significant new rental developments. Require 35% Truly Affordable units.
8. Cutting Red Tape: Create new agency to speed development of projects. Give it all the expertise, staffing and authority it needs to cut approval times to an average of 6 months for small projects and 10 months for large ones. Partner with REBNY to make it a public-private initiative.

Part 3: Specialized Solutions For Specialized Needs

1. Homeless Families: Use city owned or leased State/Federal land to develop modular housing communities for homeless families
2. Create a new form of rent-stabilized housing for new buildings (“Truly Affordable” units).

Part 4: Fix What We Have

1. Restore warehoused rent-stabilized units.
2. Do the same thing for warehoused NYCHA Units.
3. Fix some of the endemic problems with the rent-stabilized system to make it work better for tenants and landlords.
4. And get about 1,000 additional units online by kicking out tenants who have rent-stabilized units but don’t need them.

Part 5: Funding Solutions

1. Statewide Micro-Tax On Production: The value of goods and services produced in NYS is ~$2.2 trillion/year. Impose a production tax of ¾ of one percent.
2. Air Rights Transfer Tax: Impose upfront tax on transfers of all air rights under this program (tax does not apply to transfers under the existing rule).
3. Luxury Rental Tax: In NYC, over 150,000 apartments, condos and co-ops are considered “luxury” – between $20k-$80k/month. Impose 2% yearly surcharge.
4. Vacancy Tax: Impose graduated scale of vacancy taxes, which increase the longer a building or unit is vacant.
5. Vice Tax: Impose added tax/surcharge on a range of goods and services in NYC, including vapes and cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis and others. Impose 10% additional tax.

Part 6: Kids In Poverty Program

Give each child born into poverty $10,000. Fund with a 5% value-added tax for each property affected by these new programs.

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