The City Council’s budget response calls for additional dollars for new construction and preservation, to address maintenance issues at NYCHA and to staff up the city agencies that oversee housing.
NYC Council members unveiling their budget response on Wednesday. (Credit John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)
The NYC Council is pushing for billions of additional dollars in the city’s next budget deal—including extra funds for residential construction and building preservation, to address maintenance at NYCHA and to staff up the city agencies that oversee housing.
In their response to Mayor Eric Adams’ $114.5 billion preliminary budget proposal, Council members said they’ve identified $6.3 billion in “available resources” that the mayor’s plan missed, including from higher-than-expected tax revenue and underspending in the current budget.
The lawmakers want to use $4.4 billion of that “to close budget gaps and invest in services that protect and uplift working people,” Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan said at a press briefing last week. “We’re also withholding about $1.9 billion in spending for now as we continue to assess the outcome of the state budget and prepare for any additional challenges that may come our way from Washington.”
Challenges from Washington are already here: on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration cancelled $1.88 million in grants for New York City to help cover the cost of emergency homeless shelters for migrants. That’s on top of $80 million in similar funds the federal government took back in February, part of the president’s ongoing immigration crackdown.
While Mayor Adams says his staff is working to get that money returned, more funding losses are likely in store for fiscal year 2026—which starts July 1—as President Donald Trump continues to slash federal spending.
“We’re totally looking at the unknown right now,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams told reporters last week, saying their expanded budget proposal is an effort to “develop this Trump-proof city.”
“We hope that the mayor will put this budget first, the concerns of New Yorkers first,” Speaker Adams added, referencing the cozy relationship Mayor Adams has struck in recent months with the Trump administration—which was successful in getting the corruption charges against the mayor dropped last week.
When it comes to housing, the Council is pushing for $114.5 million in additional expense funds and $1.1 billion of capital funds to cover a wide range of needs, including both new construction and preservation of existing apartments.
It includes an extra $600 million to expand and revamp the Third Party Transfer program—which allows the city to seize properties from neglectful landlords who fail to maintain them or pay taxes, and transfer them to new ownership—and an added $25 million in baselined funding to fix administrative delays with CityFHEPS, the city’s rental assistance program.
Funds would also go to addressing staff shortages at the agencies that oversee housing production and maintenance, including the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD), which had 383 staff vacancies as of March 25. The Department of Buildings had 216 open posts.
At a budget hearing late last month, HPD Deputy Commissioner Kim Darga said the agency has “made a lot of progress on staffing” in recent years.
“The vacancy rate there has dropped a lot,” she said. “We also supplemented those kind of staff resources with hiring temps to help us get through some of the backlog that we saw when we lost a lot of staff during the pandemic.”
Still, the agency has a 14 percent staff vacancy rate, significantly higher than the citywide rate of 5 percent. Inadequate personnel will hamper the city’s efforts to build new apartments during a critical housing shortage, lawmakers said, and undermine the mayor’s City of Yes reforms, through which the Council previously negotiated $5 billion for housing programs and infrastructure upgrades.
That funding was supposed to include 200 new staff positions between HPD and DOB, according to City Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, who chairs the Housing and Buildings Committee. But the mayor’s preliminary budget only included funding for 132 of those roles, she told City Limits in an interview last week.
“So that’s 70 lines that we are short, and that’s only one example of commitments that were made through City of Yes that we’re not seeing materialized in the preliminary budget,” she said.
One of Sanchez’s budget priorities is to expand preservation efforts, pointing to a steep recent rise in the number of code violations across the city’s aging buildings.
“The housing stock in New York City is falling apart,” Sanchez said. She noted a 130 percent increase in the amount of units getting emergency repair funds—when HPD intervenes to make fixes directly in deteriorating properties, and charges the landlord after the fact.
“It could be twice as expensive for HPD to do a job as compared to the landlord repairing their own properties,” Sanchez said. “So we see things going in the wrong direction, and we want to push the administration on committing to preservation work.”
Housing advocates say they’re also concerned about future funding. In its analysis of the city’s capital budget plan through 2035, the New York Housing Conference, a policy and advocacy nonprofit, pointed to a stark drop-off in funding to HPD and NYCHA, from $4.3 billion next fiscal year to $2.4 billion in fiscal year 2027. That means the city will lose its momentum after two years of boosted housing production.
Credit: New York Housing Conference’s budget testimony.
“The bottom line is, as a city, we need to be baselining $4 billion a year in housing capital, or production will drop,” said Rachel Fee, the group’s executive director, in an interview with City Limits. She pointed to rising construction costs and interest rates, which are “putting a lot of pressure on the capital plan.”
“The thing about housing development is, you know, it doesn’t happen overnight. You need that out-year money for developers to take risks, to acquire sites,” Fee added.
Under the capital plan, funding for NYCHA also drops off dramatically starting in fiscal year 2027 (which by the calendar year starts in July 2026). That includes repair money for both Section 9 developments and those converted to Section 8 under the Preservation Trust and Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) programs.
“Without a steady capital allocation, NYCHA cannot reasonably plan a pipeline for either preservation strategy,” the Housing Conference said its budget testimony submitted to the Council.
In their budget response, Council members have asked for an extra $500 million a year for NYCHA for the next four years, funds that will go to “support repairs and maintenance,” according Speaker Adams, as well as rehabbing empty public housing apartments—of which there were more than 5,700 in February—for new tenants.
“The administration must also prioritize fixing and filling vacant units to get them online with the urgency required in a housing shortage,” Adams said.
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