The Citizens Budget Commission (and others) offer better ideas:

Make deeper budget cuts: Even the 22,000 planned layoffs will leave the city with 9,000 more workers than when de Blasio took office.

Insist on union givebacks: Private-sector workers have seen layoffs and pay cuts — why should government workers be spared?

The most effective budget fix? Get the economy going. Fast. Allow indoor dining. Crack down on crime to make businesses safe. Don’t raise taxes — lower them.

Yes, COVID remains a threat. But it’s no longer New York’s biggest worry. The economy is. Focus on that.

Like the rest of the city budget, spending on contracts has skyrocketed since de Blasio took office. In fiscal year 2015, the city allocated nearly $12 billion to contracts. By the last fiscal year, the spending had reached $17.3 billion.

The Citizens Budget Commission has decried the city’s contract process, saying most bids are not awarded competitively, among other problems. The civic group called for reforms including a streamlined approval process.

“Of course, it’s more imperative now,” CBP’s Ana Champeny said of reforming the contracting process. “The city needs to be taking a long view about how to really bring expenses and revenues in alignment and contracts is definitely a place they should be looking for savings.”

De Blasio has said the city will have to fire or cut pay for thousands of workers if the federal government doesn’t send bailout funds or the state doesn’t authorize borrowing.

Layoffs and other workforce reductions could save $125 million per 1,000 positions eliminated.

Denise Richardson, a vice president of the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, called on the MTA to increase tolls by a greater percentage given that toll traffic has returned at a faster rate than subway ridership.

Foye told reporters that real estate selloffs and executive-level salary cuts are also possible.

Others believe that the housing crisis that the pandemic has exacerbated can be fixed by adding more housing through zoning changes. A new report by the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit organization, found that housing production in New York City has decreased in the past decade, leading to “higher rates of overcrowding, persistently low vacancy rates, and a rapidly declining number of housing units that are affordable to low- and moderate-income households.”

Between 2010 and 2018, the number of jobs grew by 22% in the city and housing stock increased only 4%, according to the report released by Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog organization. The city issued fewer permits for new housing units in the last decade than in the 2000s and most of the new growth was concentrated in a few neighborhoods, the report found. The city’s per capita rate of issuing building permits was about 25 units for every 1,000 residents in that time, far below other cities, including those that already have high population densities. For instance, Seattle approved 126.9 units per 1,000 residents, Washington D.C. approved 71.2 and San Francisco approved 41. The report also found that housing production rates in suburbs such as Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk were some of the lowest across the U.S.

CBC’s report, authored by senior research associate Sean Campion, recommends that New York City create a comprehensive citywide housing plan rather than take a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach, update zoning codes to encourage more density and fix building codes to reduce the cost of construction. It also urges the state to pass laws that can mandate zoning for growth, reform the property tax system and amend laws that limit affordable housing production.



Following the report’s release, CBC hosted a panel of experts who weighed in on the problems with housing in New York, and the findings and recommendations in CBC’s report. The panel included Vicki Been, deputy mayor for Housing and Economic Development in the de Blasio administration; Hal Fetner, President & CEO of Fetner Properties; Jessica Katz, executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC); Jenny Schuetz, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution; and Barika Williams, executive director of Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD). CBC President Andrew Rein moderated the discussion.

After weeks of massive protests in the streets following the death of George Floyd, the Mayor and the City Council pledged to cut the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion and reallocate money to underserved communities. But a Citizens Budget Commission report found the department only lost about $345 million, about a 6.6 percent decrease. Commissioner Shea said more police officers would work weekends, in an effort to increase police presence in neighborhoods with the most gun violence. The NYPD didn’t return a request for further comment.

New York City built just 19 housing units for every 100 new jobs from 2010 to 2018, a new report shows.

The disparity between housing and job growth is caused in part by low-density zoning throughout the city, a paucity of sites which do not require political approval for projects and a property tax system that penalizes multifamily properties, according to the report.

The analysis, by the Citizens Budget Commission, also pointed to restrictions on density, high construction costs and a lack of state policies to encourage dense development in the suburbs.

CBC released a report Wednesday on the city’s slow rate of housing growth, and recommended a series of policies to help increase housing supply, including a citywide housing strategy, updating the zoning code to increase capacity, updating building codes and reforming the city’s outdated property tax system.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, is against borrowing as well, though is more opposed on the grounds that it simply won’t be enough to close growing budget gaps and substitute for revenue losses. Maria Doulis, the vice president of the CBC, believes de Blasio can do more to seek savings through worker attrition, asking municipal unions to contribute more to their health plans, and trimming various bureaucratic costs.

On Tuesday, de Blasio signaled his willingness to freeze or reduce the pay of municipal workers to avoid layoffs.

“The city has not done enough to use the powers it has to bring the fiscal situation into control,” Doulis said. “Borrowing should be a last resort. It shouldn’t be seen as an easy option that absolves you from making other hard choices.”

Like Cuomo and a new business organization fronted by former Governor David Paterson, a close Cuomo ally, Doulis is opposed to raising taxes on the wealthy, arguing the economy is too frail to sustain any increases and the richest taxpayers could decamp for other states.

New York state facing a $14.5 billion decline in revenues bodes poorly for these cities. The state has already been withholding 20% of its payments to cities, including Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, since June, which will likely transform into permanent cuts unless the federal government sends aid. New York City also anticipates a $763 million shortfall in state aid in this year’s budget, though the most significant hit to the city has been its decline in tax revenues – especially from sales tax – which accounts for about 87% of its shortfall in fiscal year 2021, according to the Citizens Budget Commission’s analysis of the city’s budget in June.

The mayor has asked the municipal unions to come up with $1 billion in proposed savings to avert a threatened layoff of 22,000 city workers in October. But he also seems to indicate that if the federal government provides aid or if he is able to borrow he will no longer insist on the savings.

“Borrowing will likely be used to prop up unaffordable spending, leaving gaps in subsequent years,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission. . “This sets the stage for more borrowing, and more borrowing — the dynamic that got New York into so much trouble 50 years ago.”

Neither Rein nor Berger thinks such measures would be sufficient — invoking a principle known as “intergenerational equity.”

“The resulting debt service shifts costs for current services to future New Yorkers and locks up future resources resulting in less money available for services and/or requiring even higher taxes,” Rein said.

Housing builders and policy pros on Wednesday laid bare some hard facts about New York City’s affordability crisis.

Politicians don’t get the math. Construction costs too much. Neighborhoods reject development.

The result is a mismatch between what most New Yorkers need and what gets built, the policymakers and developers said at a discussion convened by the Citizens Budget Commission.