Eric Adams wants more New Yorkers to be homeowners — and stay that way

This article was originally published on Jul 18 5:00am EDT by THE CITY.

Jamaal Bailey grew up in a building his family owned on Paulding Avenue in the North Bronx, in an area where it’s common for Black households to own their own homes.

Now a state senator, he’s part of a group of elected officials of color who are pushing for more help for New Yorkers who want to become owners. “It made me who I am,” he said. “I know New York City is a city of renters, but I want it to be a city of homeowners too.”

For the entire eight years of the de Blasio administration, the driving force of affordable housing programs was to build as many affordable rental apartments as possible. Now Mayor Eric Adams has embraced a housing plan that puts greater emphasis on “affordable homeownership” designed to increase the distressingly low numbers of New Yorkers of color who are homeowners — and by doing so making a dent in the city’s yawning inequality.

“Homeownership got pushed aside in previous housing plans,” said Jessica Katz, Adams’ chief housing officer. “Across the country it’s the main source of wealth creation and we have a much lower rate of homeownership, especially for people of color. If we are ever going to confront that issue head on and create some intergenerational wealth, we have to focus on homeownership.”

To be sure, the construction and ongoing affordability of rental apartments remains the centerpiece of the Adams plan, which also breaks with the de Blasio administration by emphasizing improvement of NYCHA public housing.

But the Adams effort comes as homeownership is gaining importance especially for elected officials of color, who are seeking a turnaround more than a decade after the foreclosure crisis led to steep drops in Black and Latino homeownership. Boosters of homeownership programs who spoke with THE CITY include Bailey and State Sen. Leroy Comrie (D-Queens).

The mayor has offered a few concrete steps to get his effort underway — and committed $44 million in new money over four years — while outlining many aspirational goals with specifics yet to be unveiled.

The city’s homeownership rate in 2019 declined to 31.9%, down from a little more than 33% a decade ago, according to the most recent NYU Furman Center State of the City report. That is half the national rate of 62%.

Only a quarter of Black New Yorkers own their own homes, as do only 16% of Hispanic New Yorkers. Middle-class Black neighborhoods, especially in Queens, were targeted by exploitive subprime lending in the middle of the last decade and saw thousands lose their homes in the foreclosure crisis.

But in previous decades, promoting homeownership offered economic stability for communities that had seen widespread housing abandonment and decay. Nonprofit groups and the city teamed up to build and sell affordable homes to revive neighborhoods such as East New York in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, through the Nehemiah Plan and New York…