NY Daily News - We are currently unavailable in your region
Comment from Reddit:
Here's the beginning part with the bullet points:
New York’s affordability crisis is spinning out of control, and the mayor is the one spinning it. By now, the morbid facts are familiar:
Our city’s median income would need to double to afford the median rent.
Affordable apartments — priced under $1,500 a month — show a vacancy rate of just 1%.
Hundreds of thousands of tenants throughout the five boroughs owe their landlords back-rent.
Evictions are on the rise, and with the city deliberately under-funding legal services, some New Yorkers are forced to represent themselves in housing court, in violation of their “Right to Counsel.”
The shelter system’s population is at a record high, and the vast majority of homeless New Yorkers who get kicked out of subway stations or off the streets, finding no better options available, go right back to those same stations and streets and wait to be kicked out again.
To make matters worse, Con Ed and the MTA are hiking costs as well.
New Yorkers are at their breaking point, and every facet of their mayor’s approach to housing intensifies, rather than alleviating, their strain:
For the second year in a row, his hand-picked Rent Guidelines Board imposed rent hikes on regulated units.
His relentless series of budget cuts and vacancy eliminations have starved the city’s housing development agency of staff, forestalling affordable housing development. (He managed to cut an additional $47.3 million from that agency in the recently-passed FY24 budget.)
He allocated less than 5% of what right to counsel providers say they need.
He is fighting tooth and nail to dismantle New York’s sacrosanct right to shelter.
His “homeless sweeps,” destroying camps and forcibly removing thousands of people, wound up securing permanent housing for all of three people, according to an audit by Comptroller Brad Lander.
His direction to police to forcibly hospitalize homeless New Yorkers who pose a danger to themselves was ill-conceived from the start: How were law enforcement officials to make such a clinical determination, far outside their areas of expertise? The mayor set up a hotline for them to call — no one ever did.
He has repeatedly botched the city’s response to an influx of asylum seekers, needlessly forcing hundreds to sleep on sidewalks, secretly rejecting offers of assistance from Albany, spending finite city resources with little regard for sustainability, and more.
And to top it all off, this summer he vetoed common-sense, cost-effective legislation designed to move struggling New Yorkers from shelters into permanent housing more efficiently. (As the lead sponsor of one of the bills, I am especially proud to say we easily overrode that veto.)
The rest of the article basically demands an about face from the mayor. (Good luck with that.)
