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Nearly all New York City agencies have been instructed to cut their budgets by 4% for three years starting in fiscal year 2024, a mandate that has raised concerns for housing advocates.
Mayor Eric Adams' budget director, Jacques Jiha, told agency heads in a letter that they would have just 10 days to explain how the cuts would be made, The New York Times reports. Jiha wrote in a letter to leaders they should avoid "meaningfully impacting services where possible."
The Department of Education and the City University of New York are the only agencies facing smaller cuts of 3%. Adams is pushing the cuts as the city projects an increasingly dire fiscal picture, with fears that its budget deficit could go as high as $13.9B by 2027.
The criticism was swift. The New York Housing Conference called for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is the city's main funder of affordable housing, and other housing-related agencies to be exempt because of the housing crisis.
“The Adams administration's call for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and most other city agencies to cut their budgets by 4% is the wrong idea at the wrong time — and may make a severe affordable housing shortage even worse,” Housing Conference Executive Director Rachel Fee said in a statement.
“Already, this administration is producing less affordable housing each year than its predecessor, and inadequate staffing levels at key housing agencies is a major factor behind that trend.”
She noted HPD’s budget has been cut by almost 6% over the last two years, which has meant job cuts. Last August, HPD had 2,244 staffers, 7% fewer than it had before the pandemic and 16% below the level in the city budget this year, The Real Deal reported at the time. City Planning staffing was down 18% from what was allotted in the budget, according to the Citizens Budget Commission. Kimberly Darga, the deputy commissioner for development at HPD, said at a Bisnow event last year that HPD has been the hardest hit with personnel shortages.
“We've been rebuilding staff, so we're hoping by [the middle of] this [fiscal] year, we'll be in a better position to go back to more normal operations,” she said in August. “But some of the reason that we're looking for ways to change the process is because the constraint on our end right now for preservation is largely people.”
A spokesperson for Adams said budget cuts are necessary because of costs associated with migrants coming to the city, labor contracts and contraction of the city’s tax revenue. Some members of the city council have a more positive view of the state of the budget, with the council response to the mayor's preliminary budget pointing to $2.7B in funding the mayor has not accounted for, per the Times. The response, for its part, called for $1.3B in new investments.
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