New Yorkers can’t afford to live where they work. Public school teachers in Brooklyn, autoworkers in Buffalo, mechanics in Mount Vernon, nurses in Syracuse, laborers in Hempstead: They can’t afford the rent or a down payment.
It is not just a city problem. It is an everywhere problem. And it is beyond a crisis. It is a total failure of our politics, our government and the so-called free market to address such an obvious and desperate need.
Those with power need to use it.
New Yorkers have long looked to their mayors and to their governor for answers. Some look to “the market.” But no one — and I mean exactly zero people I’ve met since announcing my candidacy for New York State comptroller — looks to the comptroller. And yet the comptroller has vast powers to address this crisis. He simply hasn’t used them. That is a choice.
The comptroller is sitting on two massive levers of power — money and audit authority — that he chooses not to pull. Yet New York is short 1.4 million affordable homes and is the sixth-highest cost state to construct a home.
We can attack the availability and cost of capital to invest in affordable homes. This money will come from the third-largest pool of capital in the United States: the New York State & Local Pension Fund. As the sole trustee of the Fund, the comptroller has unilateral power to invest this $291 billion, which represents the retirement funds for nearly 1.25 million New Yorkers — public school teachers, fire fighters, cops, state and local frontline workers.
And yet their own pension fund is doing nothing to solve their single-biggest problem: an affordable place to live. In fact, their pension fund is enriching Wall Street investment managers instead. Consider that the current comptroller gives 664 fund managers billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fees to “beat the market” when they haven’t even come close.
Instead of giving away billions to Wall Street, we could invest $10 billion to create the largest housing fund in the United States. We will invest this money through lower-cost equity and debt so that developers can build and preserve homes New Yorkers can actually afford while earning a reasonable risk-adjusted return that is meaningfully higher than the pension fund’s own target return.
We are not talking about money for nothing; we are talking about an asset class with sky-high demand, all-time low vacancies, and next-to-no new supply — exactly the type of investment that will earn a solid return. This record investment will generate 100,000 homes as a starting point and unlock tens of billions of dollars more of private investment in the process.
The second lever we can pull is the comptroller’s audit authority. We will flex this power to attack the skyrocketing cost to construct virtually anything in this state by auditing every major building code administered by local governments across New York and propose a model code that we estimate will strip out 15% of construction costs through basic changes, like adopting single staircase standards, optimized sanitary plumbing ventilation, affordable elevators, and right-sized water pipes.
So that officials understand precisely what they need to change, we will perform a detailed, track-changed comparison from this model code to each one of our outdated, gold-plated building codes — the silent killer of home construction.
But to do that, we need a “housing comptroller” — not one who treats the job as a lifetime appointment — but one who will flex the full powers of the office to attack this crisis from every possible angle. We won’t create some special division or new bureaucracy to execute this mandate. We already have the mandate. We just need to use it.
In the process, we will create space where government officials, residents, advocates, developers and investors come together and have an honest conversation about how to address this crisis. Because it will require all of us working together instead of tearing each other apart.
I ran the largest affordable housing nonprofit in the country. I helped rebuild the World Trade Center after years of dysfunction. I helped develop and finance solar power plants at a time when that was thought of as too risky. So I know something about building. And we need to get to work.
The housing crisis is ultimately a choice. It is not inevitable. Let us choose differently. Because the current way isn’t working. It’s time for urgency and imagination to take powers that already exist and use them to address an affordability crisis that is crying out for leadership.
Warshaw is running for the Democratic nomination for New York State comptroller, and is the former co-CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, the largest affordable housing nonprofit in the United States.
