Last month, Mayor Adams released his housing plan, a broad and inclusive document designed to tackle the concurrent housing and homelessness crises that we are facing in New York City. One immediate reaction to the plan was concern that it does not offer a “unit count” — a specific number goal for the development and preservation of affordable housing units. This metric has been the center of housing plans in recent decades.

While the lack of a unit count target in Adams’ plan is being framed by critics as an omission to shirk accountability, the “missing” count is actually a deliberate and bold choice to reorient the concept of what success looks like for our government interventions in housing. While the new goals in the plan certainly need to be accompanied by a new accountability system, by removing the focus on unit counting, Adams is widening the lens of housing policy to allow for new priorities and perspectives.

When unit counting is first and foremost, resource allocation and policy priorities are shaped to meet a quantitative goal, rather than to align policy with our values as a city and meet the greatest community needs. These values include responding to the needs of our most vulnerable communities, stabilizing neighborhoods, tackling homelessness, and ensuring that all New Yorkers are safe and healthy in their housing.

Beach Green Dunes II is an affordable living facility in the Rockaways neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York, Feb. 19, 2020. The eight-story apartment building has solar panels on the roof and utilizes geothermal energy in the ground to offset electric, heating and cooling costs. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

Exclusive preoccupation with unit counting has been extraordinarily successful in driving affordable housing construction and preservation in recent decades, and has been used by previous administrations to tout the success of housing policy. However, it has reduced the focus on a number of other critical aspects of a healthy housing system — from the time it takes for an individual or family to access affordable housing, to the investing in the quality of existing housing, to the facilitation of homeownership. Quantitative goals create a fixation on units rather than actual people who need housing support.

Unit counting also results in the prioritization of policy and programmatic actions that impact large numbers of housing units, resulting in a focus on high-density areas and projects. Therefore, critical issues impacting low-density districts, such as the legal conversion of basement apartments, are deprioritized. The latter is of increasing urgency as New York City faces ever-worsening climate crises post-Hurricane Ida, and as the potential for catastrophic floods in illegal basement dwellings increases. Bringing these apartments into the legal market and up to code would save lives.

The Adams’ housing plan already embraces a variety of tactics for combating this crisis, and likewise includes a variety of metrics, from providing 4,000 Safe Haven and Stabilization beds by 2024, to developing 15,000 supportive housing units by 2028. The plan also calls for new metrics to be created, including new people-centric metrics to drive a reduction in the amount of time it takes for New Yorkers to move into new affordable housing, and commits to reforming the Mayor’s Management Report which stimulates how the agencies report their successes to the mayor.

At Citizens Housing & Planning Council, our research has long focused on how housing policy can lift up our city’s diverse communities. Drawing from this research, we know that there are many, many ways to measure the impact of policy. We look forward to working with the administration in the months and years ahead to push for purposeful new metrics that will accurately measure the housing plan’s impact on New Yorkers.

Failure to address the housing and homelessness crisis facing our city is not an option. By employing a variety of metrics to match the variety of strategies available, we can move beyond a sole focus on counting the affordable housing units we build and preserve and create a more holistic housing policy system that improves housing outcomes for all New Yorkers.

Watson is the interim executive director of Citizens Housing & Planning Council.

Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News

Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News