Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

 Reinvent Albany , a NY nonpartisan organization advocating open government, has called upon the NYS legislature to allow the State's Public Authorities Budget Office (ABO) oversight over the NYC's Public Housing Authority. Who knew that the ABO did not? Most people did not know that NYCHA had been conveniently left out of the authorities for which the ABO had oversight. Only the serious policy wonks knew about this slight quirk that all municipal housing authorities had been left out of ABO's jurisdiction. How many public authorities are there in the State of New York? In December 2019, the State Senate Committee on Investigations and Government Operations led by Senator James Skoufis issued a critique of the current law s governing public authorities. "As of July 2019, there are 583 active public authorities, an increase of 298, or by 126 percent, since July 2008, when the ABO issued its first annual report." "The current inventory of covered public autho...

 In June 2021, the NYS Legislature passed a bill with a $100 million price tag that would permit hotel owners to convert their closed hotels to low income housing for the homeless. It is almost a year later and not one conversion has taken place. Housing advocates celebrated when the state legislature passed the bill. But the state legislature was only half done. The legislators needed to get rid of the needless regulations so that the closed hotels could become residences. Nothing has happened. There are two classes of hotels - those in commercial zoning and not in residential zoning so that it is not possible to convert these hotels without a zoning change. A simple fix is to suspend zoning for any hotel in a commercial zone. Such a fix has not happened. Another class of hotels are those already in residential zoning but need to come up to code. A simple fix is to suspend the code. There are almost 50,000 homeless people in the city of New York. Does it really matter if the doorw...

The federal government hasn't built public housing since the 1960s. President Johnson pushed Congress to pass the 1968 Housing Act that became a major time of construction of public housing almost doubling such units across the country. In addition, Bobby Kennedy and Senator Jacob Javits pushed through a 1966 amendment to the Economic Development Act that provided private developers with incentives payments to invest in poverty areas.   Once the Reagan era began that was the end of public housing. Instead, Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which slowed building of low-income housing further. First, the act repealed accelerated depreciation and the use of depreciation deductions to offset other ordinary income, precipitating a sharp drop in multifamily housing production. Second, the law placed a cap, for the first time, on states’ authority to issue tax-exempt bonds for multifamily housing and imposed income limits on eligible households. Third, the act created the L...