Building on the Best of New York’s Social Housing Policy

The New York state legislature is calling for the revival of Mitchell-Lama, a program that built over 160,000 affordable housing units in the mid-20th century. It’s a welcome proposal — but we need bigger ambitions for social housing policy today.

This year’s budget season in New York State, running through and likely past the coming April 1 deadline, is taking on a familiar contour to years’ past: a devastating housing crisis rages, certain promising legislative proposals are put forward to address it, and prospects for their passage appear murky. Some if not all are likely to be shot down by the governor and real-estate money.

Among the refrains coming out of the legislature this year is the annual call for a “Mitchell-Lama 2.0,” a revival of the revered state and city program that funded the creation of an impressive number of middle-income rentals and co-ops across New York from the 1950s up until the fiscal crisis of the late ’70s. This is good news: Mitchell-Lama is one of the most successful social housing programs in US history, and its still-robust ranks of apartments in New York City and beyond are vital bulwarks against the ongoing decimation of affordable homes for regular people.

Mitchell-Lama originally set out to fill a gap in the state’s housing supply. Households faced a dearth of homes postwar, and many working- and middle-class people were too well-off to qualify for public housing or too cash-strapped to afford market-rate homes. To address this, the program offered developers low-interest-rate mortgages covering up to 95 percent of project costs, ongoing property tax breaks to reduce operating costs, and occasionally a ready-made site prepared with federal urban renewal funds — in exchange for what was supposed to be permanently affordable housing and a cap on developers’ profits.

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