Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has failed to fill key positions at housing agencies, leaving its response to skyrocketing rents and the Big Apple’s worsening housing crisis hamstrung, insiders, activists and city officials tell The Post.
The mounting frustration comes as affordable housing production plummeted in recent months and as developers struggle to get key city approvals for new buildings while completed projects struggle to get needed inspections and permits to open.
“I first discovered this because I have buildings that are built and the restaurants that are ready to be open but I can’t get the sign-off,” said Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who has previously served as Manhattan borough president.
“A lot of their vacancies are in places that are absolutely necessary to build affordable housing.”
The shortfalls are evidenced in the city’s own statistics: City Hall missed its goal of building or refinancing rent stabilized apartments over the 2022 budget year by 36%. Only 16,000 of the 25,000 planned apartments were either built or preserved during the 12 months between July 2021 and June 2022.
It was the first time City Hall missed the benchmark in at least five years — a streak that held during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, even as the local economy ground to a halt.
The production miss comes as rents exploded across New York: The average cost for an apartment in Manhattan jumped by almost $1,000 over the last year alone, hitting $4,100 a month in August.
“The mayor campaigned on he was going to turn this into a ‘City of Yes’,” said one frustrated developer. “And no one is seeing that in affordable housing. It’s taking more time to get approvals.”
The person added: “And when it comes to the housing agencies, there’s general dysfunction and a staffing shortage and it’s impossible to get an answer out of the city.”
The dysfunction even extends to the city’s highest profile projects, which need rezonings approved by the City Council and would typically command significant time from any recent previous administration, sources say.
The insiders highlighted two particular projects where the Adams administration’s absence was keenly felt: the collapse of negotiations to build an apartment tower on 145th Street in East Harlem and the recent deal struck to construct three housing high-rises and a waterfront esplanade in Astoria.
“We probed and put it out there. It’s a significant project, this wasn’t a surprise,” said a lawmaker about the trio of towers now set for Halletts Points in Queens. “We got no feedback, no indication from the mayor.”
The politician added: “So we were left with having to negotiate and draw things from the developer with no incentives.”
That disengagement left Council insiders particularly irate when Adams’ staff reached out to try in July to schedule an appearance for the mayor at the ribbon cutting.
Spokesmen for the Adams administration disputed that characterization and said that the mayor is committed to attacking the city’s housing crisis in response to questions from The Post.
They pointed to a series of zoning changes Hizzoner will roll out in the coming months that aim to speed construction of housing by reducing space requirements for parking in new buildings and providing builders with new incentives to add affordable units.
And the mayor’s representatives highlighted Adams’ recent budget, which allocates an extra $500 million annually to subsidized housing and public housing. However, that money, they acknowledge, needed to keep production levels constant due rising costs.
“Mayor Adams has made clear that getting all New Yorkers into safe, high-quality, affordable housing is an urgent priority, and he laid out a bold vision for a ‘City of Yes’ in which every neighborhood does its part to build more affordable homes,” said City Hall spokesman Charles Lutvak.
He added: “This administration is making historic investments in affordable housing while also refocusing the city’s housing policy on creating homes for our most vulnerable neighbors, improving conditions for [public housing] residents, and offering safety and dignity for those experiencing homelessness.”
The ever-worsening staffing shortages at the key agencies have been fueled by a series of compounding factors, according to a dozen interviews with insiders and experts, many of whom asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.
The struggles have come at an inopportune time as rising interest rates and a plunging stock market have played havoc with markets — but insiders said City Hall’s housing struggles are of its own making.
“The city is not doing what it can do to even give people the confidence that if other aspects were different it would be doable,” said one insider.
“It just takes too long because City Hall isn’t leaning in to get it done,” the person added. “They’re not following up internally.”
Another expert said that the problems driving the drop in affordable housing production were “80-20” due to City Hall.
Adams, a dozen sources say, has empowered just a tiny circle in his administration to make key hiring and policy decisions, often leaving his deputy mayors and commissioners shut out of the process.
“He’s running City Hall like he ran Borough Hall,” said one veteran of city government. “He consolidates power into two or three people and they’re not experienced managers.”
“It becomes micromanaging because they don’t know how to manage. They’re making decisions four weeks after they have to be made,” the person added. “It’s the largest municipal workforce in the country, you have to manage.”
That has been further exacerbated by Hizzoner’s requirement that minority candidates be given preference, a policy City Hall enforces by requiring agencies to provide photographs of finalists. Competition for highly qualified minority candidates is especially fierce because the overall pool of potential recruits is small.
The Department of City Planning and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development start any battle for talent against the private sector with steep disadvantages, both new and old.
The two agencies have always struggled to match the salaries offered by companies and firms, while residency requirements effectively force municipal employees to spend more of their smaller salaries on rent by barring them from living in New Jersey.
Those longstanding challenges have been compounded by Adams barring agencies from providing any hybrid work accommodations and his failure to empower agency chiefs to cut through the city’s byzantine hiring process, which can take months to complete without a top-level intervention.
“It’s a really competitive market out there and the city is so uncompetitive. The City takes so long, it’s required to go through the civil service list, the City starts with a real low-ball offer,” said one insider. “It’s just making things really, really tough.”
Take City Planning, where the staffing crunch is so severe that currently there is only a chief of planning for one borough right now: Queens. The positions for Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island are empty and currently held by acting staff.
The vacancies at the top have been further aggravated by Adams’ decision to appoint longtime politicians to run the agencies, instead of veteran planners or administrators who could immediately delve into the bureaucracy and help pick up the slack.
City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick and HPD Commissioner Adolfo Carrión are both former city councilmen.
“It’s bad leadership at the agencies, which is the crux of the issue,” said one frustrated official. “We hired friends to run city agencies and not administrators. You can find administrators who are friendly, but if we had done that we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.”
Sources said the problems are even worse at HPD, where the vacancy rate is a comparatively lower 15% — but there are so many empty positions in the key divisions that oversee the financing and approval of affordable housing that projects are stalling out.
“HPD is the real f—ing mess,” said one longtime observer. “People are starting to complain because they can’t get their deals financed.”
“This is Eric Adams’ mess,” the person added. “Adams got his management in and then they didn’t fill anything out.”
HPD quietly chalked up its failure to hit its housing targets to its staffing crisis in a mandatory annual report released in September.
“Lower production levels in Fiscal 2022 were largely due to increasing construction costs and agency staffing challenges,” officials wrote in the report. “HPD is committed to investing in staff and resources to support the creation and preservation of as many affordable housing units as possible.”
Its target for 2023 is 18,000 units either built or refinanced — just a fraction of its previous goal of 25,000 and the high of 32,517 apartments built or refinanced in 2018.
“If they don’t have the people there to process the loan closings, then we’re not going to get the closings,” said Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York Housing Conference, which advocates for housing subsidy programs. “But what’s really concerning is that they’re still losing staff and they’re not turning it around.”
She added: “We don’t want to be spiraling downward when we have a pressing housing crisis in New York.”