Faith-Based Housing Act Loses as Hochul Submits Timid Agenda

If you keep walking halfway to a wall, you’ll never get there. But eventually, you’ll get close enough. That seems to be Gov. Kathy Hochul’s strategy on the housing problem.

Two of pro-housing group Open New York’s three legislative priorities made it into Gov. Kathy Hochul’s new agenda. But on one of them, Hochul went less than halfway, and the Real World picture for New York housing remains bleak because of locally controlled zoning.

The group’s 2025 wish list:

Empower religious organizations to develop affordable housing
Create a state fund to support equitable, mixed-income projects
Fix the State Environmental Quality Review Act to streamline housing approvals

Hochul ignored No. 1 — probably to avoid blowback after suburban opposition helped persuade her to exclude the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act from her 2024 housing deal with the legislature. More on that below.

No. 2 was there, on page 73 of Hochul’s agenda, in the form of a revolving loan fund for mixed-income housing. The legislature’s version is this bill. Rachel May of Syracuse is carrying it in the Senate, where Brooklyn socialist Julia Salazar is the only listed co-sponsor. Manhattan’s Micah Lasher has it in the Assembly.

On No. 3, Hochul dipped her toe in the water. She proposed to streamline reviews for “modestly sized home development, such as certain multi-family housing with no more than 10,000 square feet of gross floor area.” That’s about 12 units — not exactly a moonshot.

The development-streamlining bill backed by Open New York has much larger thresholds: up to 199 units in localities with 90,000 or fewer people, up to 499 units in cities and towns of 90,000 to 1 million, and up to 999 units in New York City.

The point is not just to speed up the process, but to remove opportunities for NIMBY types to gum it up with litigation and other tactics.

Overall, Hochul’s 2025 housing agenda is too timid, according to Open New York.

Faith-Based Housing Act Loses as Hochul Submits Timid Agenda — Annemarie Gray of Open New York

“No housing strategy can succeed without addressing the restrictive local zoning rules that block new homes in communities across our state,” executive director Annemarie Gray said in a statement. “While the revolving loan fund will help finance affordable housing, these desperately needed homes can only be built where local zoning allows them. Too often, that’s nowhere.”

The bill to let churches, synagogues and mosques build mixed-income housing — with size limitations, and only on land they own as of the bill’s passage — should be low-hanging fruit. Yet it failed last year because Long Island officials, mostly Republicans, prompted constituents to send objections to Hochul. She got cold feet and didn’t want to risk the collapse of the large housing package in a repeat of 2023’s debacle.

The bill is needed because many religious institutions own land that is not zoned for housing, and getting it rezoned is often difficult or impossible. The bill says at least 20 percent of their housing development’s floor area must be affordable to households earning up to 80 percent of the area median income.

That generally allows for projects that pencil out and do not concentrate poverty. However, it can run into a political Goldilocks problem, where no compromise can satisfy both sides of a debate.

In communities dominated by single-family homes, some people will object to any affordable housing — and to any apartment projects, regardless of the income mix.

And in progressive areas, some deem 20 percent affordable as too little. They scream “gentrification” at the prospect of any market-rate units.

May’s revolving loan fund bill says 20 percent of units must be affordable to people making 50 percent of the area median income, but the legislature would likely allow more market-rate units if the governor insists, as she probably will.