Cuomo claims that “housing is a prime precedence.” A dig into his monitor report says one thing very totally different.
Simply 43 seconds into the video that first introduced his 2025 mayoral run, Andrew Cuomo reduces town’s present disaster into considered one of homeless folks: “Our New York Metropolis is in bother,” he says, “you are feeling it whenever you stroll down the road and take a look at to not make eye contact with a mentally sick homeless individual.” Solely he, his marketing campaign insists, can restore town to sanity. He invitations voters to hitch him in sweeping the issue—alongside together with his personal report on housing and homelessness—out of sight.
Cuomo’s mayoral hopes appear to depend on a mixture of title recognition and amnesia; that voters will recall his job titles however not what he did. Throughout adverts and interviews, he cites his former roles as Housing and City Improvement secretary and governor of New York, contrasts his years of expertise with the upstart socialist Zohran Mamdani—who has been projected to beat him by one latest ballot—and chides rivals, together with NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, Metropolis Council Speaker Adrianne Adams, and former NYC comptroller Scott Stringer, for chasing Mamdani’s coattails. However like his pledges to restore the public-sector pensions he as soon as minimize, Cuomo’s marketing campaign guarantees on housing and homelessness ignore the affect of his personal previous political choices. Cuomo devised, applied, and nationalized insurance policies that haven’t solely proved to fail at retaining folks housed however have additionally actively grown the ranks of the homeless.
Cuomo’s most substantial coverage affect over the course of his half-century-long profession is probably going his least reported: reshaping homeless companies. In 1986, after managing his father’s marketing campaign for governor, Cuomo founded and served as president of Housing Enterprise for the Much less Privileged. HELP’s technique was novel in each financing and design: It leveraged the sale of public tax credit in addition to loans secured by bonds on income from state contracts to fund the corporate’s operations, and it targeted on short-term over everlasting housing—with obligatory behavioral therapy for residents, a strict code of conduct, and a ten pm curfew. HELP’s reply to the social query of shelter was to self-discipline people who lacked it. As Cuomo put it, “The very time period ‘homeless’ is a misnomer.… An residence doesn’t remedy a crack dependancy.”
Apart from his father’s profession, it was that undertaking that fashioned the idea of Cuomo’s affect in New York Metropolis. (He took his first spouse to go to a HELP facility on their first date.) In 1991, as town expanded its congregate shelter capability however did not meet up with the rising want, and as poor folks’s actions escalated calls for for enough, everlasting housing for all, NYC Mayor David Dinkins appointed Cuomo to guide a fee—the “Cuomo fee”—to reevaluate town’s method. The authors of the ensuing report denied that town had an obligation to accommodate all of its residents. They instructed that extra was in charge for homelessness than a scarcity of reasonably priced housing—specifically, the deficiencies of homeless folks themselves. They surveyed assessments of psychological sickness amongst shelter residents and extrapolated charges of alcohol and drug abuse from anecdotal proof and a urinalysis take a look at they commissioned in a single facility. All the system, they argued, wanted an overhaul to “discourage dependency.”
The fee proposed two main reversals for town, each modeled after Cuomo’s HELP: First, privatize all metropolis shelters; second, reorient companies to route folks by way of a disciplinary system of short-term, transitional housing. “‘Jail, jail, jail’ is simply as a lot a false treatment as ‘housing, housing, housing,’” Cuomo later summarized. His fee provided one thing within the center: a “continuum of care.” By means of it, homeless folks may earn entry to everlasting housing by demonstrating what would later be referred to as “housing readiness,” that’s, by passing fraud screenings and drug assessments, assembly work necessities, attending “life administration” lessons, and accepting counseling and prescribed drugs. Cuomo’s “continuum of care” served an ideological function and a monetary one: to institutionalize classes of individuals deserving of public help and to justify austerity.
Recruited by President Clinton as assistant secretary of Housing and City Improvement after which promoted to secretary, Cuomo nationalized the “continuum of care” framework. Echoing Reagan’s assistant HUD secretary, who said his administration can be “getting out of the housing enterprise. Interval,” Cuomo promised that Clinton’s administration would “get authorities out of the service enterprise.” The federal authorities provided new contracts to personal nonprofits and prioritized short-term, transitional housing consistent with its disciplinary necessities. Cuomo’s affect fed again into the success of the group he helped begin. By 1994, HELP was the biggest non-public supplier of “transitional” housing for the homeless within the nation. (HELP remained a household enterprise for many years; his sister Maria Cuomo Cole served as chair of its board from 1993 to 2021.)
Present Challenge
Cuomo’s affect on homelessness coverage can nonetheless be felt throughout the nation. He oversaw the intensive privatization of homeless companies, which bloated right into a cottage business of personal, nonprofit subcontractors. Whereas he defended privatization within the title of cost-cutting, the method has had the other impact: Nonprofit companies usually exceed their preliminary budgets, not least as a result of they have to cowl the exorbitant salaries of their govt officers. (By 2011, the highest wage at HELP had reached $500,000 a yr.) Ceding placement choices to personal business has segregated shelters and interim housing; services are sometimes situated in poorer neighborhoods and outdoors metropolis limits, away from transportation and different assets unhoused folks want. Lastly, a scarcity of accountability in non-public lodging has led to abominable circumstances. HELP’s personal properties have earned a number of code violations from warmth outages, mildew outbreaks, and sewage leaks.
Whereas the unique Cuomo fee report admitted that “‘transitional’ housing succeeds solely when there may be ‘everlasting’ housing to enter,” Cuomo’s singular concentrate on transitional housing helped produce lasting imbalances within the nationwide shelter system. As his mayoral rival Comptroller Brad Lander’s pressing experiences usually note of NYC’s ratio, a scarcity of everlasting housing serves to lure unhoused folks in transitional limbo or finally eject them again into the streets. As early as 1999, analysis on HELP’s shelter mannequin revealed that its disciplinary strategies promoted social isolation amongst residents that exacerbated moderately than alleviated psychological well being struggles. Whereas some native and federal insurance policies have helped reverse his actions, delinking behavioral modification necessities from housing entry, analysis continues to show that compelled therapy, whether or not for psychological well being or substance abuse, not solely fails to maintain folks housed but in addition drives folks from assets.
Maybe Cuomo’s gravest affect on homelessness coverage has been stigmatizing homeless folks and ceding floor to right-wing narratives and coverage interventions. He helped flip legislators away from systemic options and towards individualized therapy, and switch the general public’s understanding of the homelessness disaster towards legislation and order moderately than affordability. In 1993, the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Metropolis Journal celebrated the insights of the Cuomo fee report. Now, a few of the most ardent defenders of the strategies Cuomo invented embody Donald Trump and his supporters, who’ve spent a near-decade rallying round “therapy first” options. When Christopher Rufo, a Metropolis Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute fellow, asserted that homelessness is a “human downside—not a housing downside,” he took the phrases out of Cuomo’s mouth: Homelessness is a “human downside…not an financial downside,” Cuomo as soon as mentioned.
Individualizing the homelessness disaster has likewise protected Cuomo from accounting for his personal position as an architect of the failures of our housing system extra broadly. Within the extra acquainted facet of his HUD report, Cuomo helped oversee one of many foremost causes the nation’s housing turned so wildly unaffordable: the decimation of its public housing inventory. Right here too, his suspicion of utilizing public assets to unravel public issues drove privatization schemes, and his paternalistic disdain for the company of the poor inflected new admission insurance policies, similar to work necessities, drug testing, and fraud screening, in addition to bans on residents with prison information. As an alternative of public housing, Cuomo pressed for privately owned, publicly backed housing—a technique that failed to fulfill the wants of probably the most weak tenants—in addition to “empowerment zones” that gave tax breaks and public land to actual property speculators.
Cuomo’s years in the true property business might finest reveal his loyalties. In his time as HUD secretary, Cuomo assisted federal fits towards actual property corporations in violation of honest housing practices, fundamental dwelling requirements, and the legislation. One case, towards Insignia, then the nation’s largest proprietor and supervisor of multifamily property, headed by Andrew Farkas, settled with a $7.4 million wonderful. Two years later, when Cuomo’s HUD time period ended, he went to work for Farkas’s new enterprise. Quickly, Farkas became a prime donor to Cuomo’s failed marketing campaign for governor (which Cuomo introduced from exterior his first HELP shelter) and his bid for lawyer basic, the place he was usually accused of favoritism in approving new developments.
As governor of New York, Cuomo repeatedly slashed the funds for serving homeless New Yorkers. Within the first yr of his time period, he cut $65 million of state appropriations for folks leaving homeless shelters, triggering a $27 million lack of federal matching funds. Two years later, town’s shelter inhabitants had increased by 35 %. He additionally shrank New York State’s contributions to town’s homeless companies. In his first 5 years in workplace, these contributions had been practically halved. In 2016, towards the steerage of the unique Cuomo fee and even towards the counsel of police commissioner William Bratton, Cuomo issued an govt order to develop involuntary dedication legal guidelines to carry unhoused folks towards their will in the event that they refused shelter placements throughout freezing temperatures. However on the identical time, he was eliminating locations to place them. Over the course of his governorship, from 2011 to 2021, Cuomo oversaw a 28 % discount in state-run psychiatric hospital beds within the metropolis.
Widespread
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Nor did Cuomo work to maintain tenants housed. As an alternative, he defunded the state company tasked with overseeing town’s rent-stabilization legal guidelines—by 62 % after his first two phrases as governor—and declined to gather the fines landlords owed for negligence and tenant harassment. Every year of his tenure, town misplaced extra rent-stabilized residences—greater than 66,000 in 2021 alone—and his guarantees to revive laws went unkept. The one Democratic candidate in addition to enterprise capitalist alum Whitney Tilson who is not going to decide to a lease freeze for rent-stabilized tenants, Cuomo not too long ago expressed regret for signing NYC’s 2019 lease legal guidelines, a landmark growth of lease stabilization, in a personal assembly with the chief committee of the Actual Property Board of New York.
Cuomo made his title in New York by insisting that town ought to intervene within the non-public lives of poor folks, however not within the non-public housing market. Throughout the nation, his legacy persists in insurance policies that self-discipline the victims of that market moderately than its beneficiaries, and in austerity budgets that withhold public help and diminish regulatory energy. For his many years of service, actual property companies have poured $2.5 million to his mayoral tremendous PAC. Not less than $410,000 of that comes from corporations presently being sued by town for persistent and obvious violations of its habitability codes.
On the main mayoral debate final night time, requested what a part of New York Metropolis’s authorities he would goal for cuts, Cuomo said he would begin with the company accountable for imposing that housing code and for creating new reasonably priced and everlasting housing—as a result of “housing is a prime precedence.” Both he forgot the query, or he’d choose that the remainder of us did.
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