Community Op-Ed: Seasons change, but our priorities remain the same: Building record amounts of housing to make New York City more affordable

This autumn, the leaves aren’t the only things that are falling. The Adams administration has brought down the cost of child care, cut taxes for working-class families, and lowered unemployment for New Yorkers. Last week, we kicked off our “Affordable Autumn’ initiative to highlight our work to save New Yorkers money and roll out new initiatives to make New York City more affordable — which starts with building the homes New Yorkers need and deserve.

We’re advancing bold, ambitious solutions to our city’s housing crisis. Last Monday, New York took a massive step towards an affordable future for our residents when the Brooklyn Marine Terminal Task Force approved a $3.5 billion vision plan for the future of Red Hook. Not only will this project deliver 6,000 housing units on the waterfront — with 2,400 of them being permanently affordable — but it will turn a crumbling marine terminal into a modern maritime port while creating tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. This initiative isn’t just for the New Yorkers of today — we’re turning our waterfront into a ‘Harbor of the Future’ and unlocking opportunity for generations to come.

We’re also thinking creatively about how to use every open space for the housing New Yorkers need, in Brooklyn and across the entire city. Where past administration saw vacant lots and old office buildings, ours saw an opportunity for housing equality. Last year, we issued Executive Order 43, requiring every city agency to review their properties and find places where we could build new housing — because you can’t solve a housing crisis when city government is holding onto underutilized land.

Now that it has been a little over a year, we are ready to report the results of our work. Thanks to our executive order, we have already advanced nearly 10,000 homes across 11 different city-owned sites. At just one site in Queens, we’re turning the abandoned Flushing Airport into 3,000 new homes and 60 acres of open space. At another site in Manhattan, just steps from City Hall, we’re tearing down a deteriorating city office building and turning it into over 1,000 new homes. And in the Bronx, we’re building a whole new library at the Grand Concourse and adding homes alongside it.

Just last week, we added three new sites to that growing list. In Bensonhurst, we are redeveloping the New Utrecht Library — creating a new, state-of-the-art branch, and adding 100 percent affordable housing on the city-owned parking lot next door. In Williamsburg, we’re turning one of the area’s last underutilized waterfront sites into 900 new homes with vibrant open space along the river. And in East Harlem, we’re turning a city-owned parking lot next to a public hospital into 800 new homes.

When you put all of our work together — the homes we’ve created, preserved, and planned — it adds up to over 426,800 homes to date. That’s almost half a million families who will have a place to build their lives, to make memories, to plant roots in a community — and it is the Adams administration who are fighting for them.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: we are the most pro-housing administration in city history. Not just because we invested record amounts of money into new housing or because we created a record number of new homes — although we are doing both of those things; not just because we connected a record number of New Yorkers to affordable housing or passed the most pro-housing zoning proposal in city history — although we accomplished both. But because no one has fought harder and built more for the people of our city than we have.