The bribes pose just another monetary loss for an essential housing system that has been woefully underfunded for decades. According to a 2018 NYCHA assessment, federal capital funding has met only a fraction of capital needs since 2006. In the agency’s 2017 physical needs assessment, a five-year financial trajectory for improvements, NYCHA determined that it’s short $31.8 billion to return its campuses to a “state of good repair.” Failing remediation, by 2023 that number had shot up by 73 percent, with the agency declaring it needed a new 20-year capital investment of $78.3 billion.
Meanwhile, the city is in the thrall of a housing crisis, woefully failing to produce enough homes for its growing population. According to Governor Kathy Hochul’s office, the state will need an investment of 800,000 new homes over the next 10 years—double the rate of production—in order to “make up for decades of underproduction.”
After killing Hochul’s Housing Compact in April, a cohort of progressives within the state legislature are refocusing their attention from rent control and eviction bans to the dire housing need. A new bill, set to be introduced on Thursday, would create a new agency that would build housing using its own money or money raised in the bond market. The shift in conversation is an “acknowledgment from the left that solving the housing crisis will inevitably mean building more homes,” per The New York Times.