Producing housing is only half the challenge. Government must help people climb the economic ladder.
How do we make New York City housing more affordable? As “Block by Block,” the recently released Mamdani administration’s housing plan underscores, housing is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and one on which everyone has an opinion: Freeze rents, subsidize rents, protect tenants, support landlords, build more, create new housing models, speed processes and so on. But we too rarely talk about people and the resources they have to spend on housing, despite the fact that housing affordability and the crisis New York City faces are a function of both cost and income.
There is no economic justice without safe, quality, affordable housing — and there is no durable housing stability without economic justice and rising incomes. “Block by Block” notes that there is no “singular solution” and that an “all of the above” approach is warranted. That “all of the above” approach to true affordability must include driving incomes up, enacting better tenant protections and holding costs down. These are not separate policy lanes. The Mamdani administration has the mandate, and New York City already has the assets — and many of the tools — to treat them together and ensure New York remains a globally competitive city where housing is affordable and prosperity is increasingly shared.
The plight of renters
New York is a city of renters, with almost 70% of households renting their homes, compared to 30% nationally. Rental housing is quite literally a contract between landlord and tenant. For the housing itself to be sustainable, tenants need to pay rent, but that can be impossible when incomes are stagnating while costs go up. In New York, rent collection in affordable housing has dropped almost 5% since 2017, and the share of projects with rent collections under 80% has more than tripled. Rental arrears not only put specific households at risk of eviction but also impact housing conditions for everyone in the building, as landlords have fewer resources to maintain properties.
Many of these tenants are not paying their rent because they simply lack the resources to cover all living costs. For decades, across the United States, wages for low- and middle-income workers have failed to keep pace with the cost of living. Productivity has grown steadily since the 1970s, while real wages for the bottom half of earners have remained largely flat, meaning workers are producing more but taking home proportionally less. In high-cost cities like New York, this national trend is dramatically amplified: The gap between what working families earn and what it costs to live, eat, commute and raise children is not a marginal inconvenience; it is a structural crisis. According to the New York City True Cost of Living report, 62% of city residents, or more than 5 million people, do not have the resources to cover basic costs.
Affordable housing is supposed to solve at least a piece of this problem. At move-in, most tenants pay no more than 30% of their income in rent. But nationally, 40% of residents in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit properties are rent-burdened, suggesting that, even in affordable housing, rents regularly rise faster than income.
This is a crosscutting challenge. Certainly, low-wage workers, who tend to be concentrated in health care, food service and personal care, are particularly vulnerable. Too many of these workers lack benefits, face irregular hours and cycle through job and housing instability. Nationally, more than 50% of affordable housing tenants lack health insurance, almost 50% have no paid time off, more than 40% have jobs that do not pay overtime, and about 25% do not have regular working hours. But the issue is not limited to the lowest-income households. According to the New York City Comptroller’s Office, 62% of New Yorkers are economically insecure; only 1 in 3 hold a “good job” with benefits and family-sustaining wages.
Housing costs, childcare, health care and transportation have all outpaced wage growth, leaving low- and middle-income families in a permanent state of economic precarity even when they are fully employed. This is a reality that disproportionately affects people of color and women, who are more likely to live in poverty. Because rent payments can be deferred without immediate consequences to the household, this is becoming an increasingly frequent trade-off. We can expect rent collections to suffer as long as a significant number of tenants struggle without enough income to make ends meet.
Changing course
This trade-off between rent and other living expenses — and the associated harm to both low-wage workers and the housing sector — is not inevitable. We can build off our local strengths to foster income growth.
First and foremost, we have a diversified economy that is projected to grow — albeit slowly, given the overall weak U.S. economy. And while the proliferation of AI is likely to disrupt entry-level job markets, key priorities of the Mamdani administration — particularly increased development of affordable housing and universal childcare — are likely to create additional job opportunities in construction, property management/maintenance and education, all of which will require human workers. In particular, the groundbreaking commitment to new construction made in the administration’s “Block by Block” plan will create tens of thousands of jobs.
Second, New York City’s complex public-private workforce-development sector already serves many New Yorkers. Multiple agencies, including Small Business Services (SBS), Human Resources Administration (HRA), the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Department of Parks and Recreation and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) operate targeted programs. New York City Public Schools, the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY), serving over 1.5 million New Yorkers daily, have ramped up a focus on career readiness and student career success over the past five years. Hundreds of nonprofits add depth and expertise in specific areas, including industry, population and neighborhood. All of these agencies, institutions and organizations manage complex funding and regulations.
The New York City Office of Talent and Workforce Development was established to coordinate this vast ecosystem to fight fragmentation and meet diverse needs. It recently reconstituted the Workforce Development Board and Workforce Development Council, uniting leaders from industry, education, nonprofits, associations and philanthropy for essential public-private partnerships. The city’s size and complexity require coordination, capacity and expertise at the mayoral level to leverage and braid together the multiple public and private funding sources and stakeholders to ensure the needs of both New York City’s workers and employers are well served.
A stronger system would work with New Yorkers to deliver these resources using a shared lifelong career-development framework that looks at a person’s needs depending on their time in life, circumstances, interests and experience. The framework could build on CareerReady NYC, developed under the de Blasio administration — taking into account the many lessons learned from talent-development providers who support targeted populations and industries — to better position New York City students to launch successfully into careers.
A lifelong career-development framework could serve as the shared operating system to deliver the right level of support through the best entity or entities at specific points in life: school-based career exposure, postsecondary pathways or workforce training matched to employer needs, plus childcare, language access, flexible schedules and credentials for better jobs. For example, New York City Public Schools initiatives like FutureReadyNYC and Career Readiness and Modern Youth Apprenticeship are redesigning the high school experience to include career-readiness curriculum, school-supported work-based learning opportunities and apprenticeships. The Mamdani administration’s expansion of early childhood education supports working parents during their early and mid-careers or while they participate in paid training opportunities funded through City programs.
Technology like the City’s Workforce Data Portal can be expanded to track the many programs, monitor spending against outcomes, spot gaps/overlaps and guide smarter allocation for an integrated, accountable ecosystem focused on results. For people with low incomes or affordable housing tenants, this means meeting people where they are with the resources they need to advance at every stage. The pieces are ready; it just takes coordination and investment.
Third, New York City’s annual budget of over $100 billion can be leveraged in multiple ways to increase opportunities for low-income New Yorkers. Thanks to the passage of a State law in 2024, New York City has strong community hiring mandates; most vendors with City contracts for construction, human services, professional services and standard services are required to hire individuals who are low-income or who live in low-income communities. The existing community hiring requirements went into effect in January 2025 and, once fully resourced and implemented, promise to be a powerful tool for economic advancement.
New York City also needs to consider local employment placement and mobility as central goals of its economic development incentives and capital investments. We need to ask not only “How many jobs were created?” but also “How are New Yorkers getting those jobs, keeping them, earning enough to live here and building toward something more?” This reframes the City’s entire economic development and capital investment apparatus around a single North Star: Are all New Yorkers, especially those in low-wage, benefit-poor jobs, measurably better off?
Urgency can be an asset here. At the federal level, House Resolution 1 imposed new work requirements on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid recipients. Without action, these requirements create real risks for low-income households and could easily leave many substantially worse off. But given that this is now law, we should use the opportunity to link recipients to career-path jobs. The moment is now to make relatively small investments to better coordinate the system and target resources rather than risk the significant downstream costs of inaction.
As technology and AI result in rapid changes to the labor market, jobs are moving to other markets, requiring more experience or being replaced altogether. Without a nimble, continuously improving talent-development ecosystem that can proactively anticipate changes, plan for the future and smartly invest resources, New Yorkers — especially low-income renters — risk unemployment, underemployment and working in jobs that don’t keep up with the cost of their rents. This puts more buildings at risk, increases demand for benefits and results in fewer resources to build new and preserve existing affordable housing.
Ten next steps
It will take time to create a unified framework for career development that addresses the full scope of low-wage workers’ needs — and the challenge of accessing key resources in this climate. For the near term, we offer a 10-point plan on specific steps the City and its partners can take.
1. Streamline access to and implementation of the City's workforce development programs to make it easier for job seekers to access training and placement support and reduce redundancy across programs. As noted, a half-dozen different City agencies and our publicly supported educational institutions are involved in workforce development. Individuals in need of support can struggle to connect with the right agency, and the fragmentation contributes to both gaps and overlaps in services.
As part of this process, formally elevate, fully staff and fund the Office of Talent and Workforce Development to coordinate the multiple systems and sectors. This is a mayoral office with explicit cross-agency authority and strong private and nonprofit relationships, and it can think holistically about how best to connect housing, education, workforce and economic development into a single, accountable strategy and career-development framework. With the mandate and partnership of the Workforce Development Board and Council, the City can align curriculum, credentials, hiring pipelines and initiatives across City agencies, CUNY, SUNY, Public Schools, labor, community-based organizations and industry to create a more effective, cost-efficient talent-development system with better outcomes.
2. Prioritize and expand talent-development programs, such as apprenticeships, that provide pathways to quality jobs and living-wage careers, rather than rapid attachment to jobs that have limited opportunities for advancement and don’t result in industry-valued credentials and transferable skills. To realize this goal will require, wherever possible, providing people with stipends or wages as well as other support while they are in training so they don’t have to choose between acquiring the skills they need and paying rent.
3. Expand and enforce community hiring mandates across all major City contracts — with benchmarks tied to resident outcomes such as wages, benefits, retention and advancement — leveraging the City’s purchasing power as a direct tool for closing the wage gap in the communities that need it most. Expand the mandate to include City loans as well as contracts to capture Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and key New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) projects.
4. Create and expand public-private training programs, including apprenticeships, to position low-income residents for jobs, beginning with mayoral priority fields, particularly housing development, operations and early childhood education. Employers should be involved in shaping these programs to ensure viability. An analysis of SBS training programs released in 2020 showed the 10-year ROIs for participants, taxpayers and society were, respectively, $292.68, $2.02 and $18.80 for every dollar spent on workforce development — making investing in training a very cost-effective economic development strategy.
5. Invest in HRA and NYCHA career-services programs and hold providers accountable for connecting public-benefit recipients to career-path jobs rather than simply the bare minimum engagement to maintain benefits. Work with the New York State Department of Health to set up a Medicaid work program that also prioritizes “good jobs” and encourages greater integration with SBS’s Workforce 1 system.
6. Leverage the City as an employer. Public-sector jobs have historically been a pathway to economic growth. Although starting salaries may be low, City jobs typically have good benefits and opportunities for advancement. The City has an aging workforce; for example, at the New York City Department of Social Services, 40% of staff are 55 or older. Over the coming years, the City will need to hire to maintain services. There is an opportunity to work with City unions to educate and prepare diverse communities for civil service exams, building on existing initiatives such as CUNY Civil Service Pathways and the new civil service youth apprenticeship title.
7. Focus on ensuring students launch successfully into careers and hold our educational institutions accountable to this goal. This includes providing academic credit for learning that happens in the workplace and leveraging summers for students as paid work-based learning opportunities. For example, summer work, including Summer Youth Employment Program placements, should explicitly link to career ladders, stackable credentials and promising pathways so that summer employment builds transferable skills and professional networks, rather than being a one-time transaction.
8. Center affordable housing residents in workforce strategy. Partner with NYCHA, HPD, HRA, the New York City Housing Development Corporation and affordable housing providers to embed career-pathway services directly into buildings where the wage gap is most concentrated; this is where housing and income policy must meet in practice, not just in principle. The administration’s ambitious “Block by Block” plan recognizes the importance of tenants and tenant organizing, which can serve as a platform to support workforce engagement.
9. Establish talent outcomes as the central goal of economic development. Reorient EDC investments, sector partnerships and City contract incentives around whether New Yorkers are obtaining quality jobs with living wages and benefits. The measure of success is not job creation in the abstract but whether the wage-cost gap is closing for working New Yorkers; this concept was developed in the “Green Economy Action Plan” released by the City in 2024.
10. Invest in and expand data tools and reporting needed to track progress and make strategy changes as needed:
a. Create a transparent inventory of all publicly funded talent-development programs and initiatives that includes navigation support for New Yorkers seeking opportunity and industry seeking workers.
b. Develop a borough-level income-mobility index tracking wage growth, benefits access and advancement among low- and middle-income New Yorkers, making the wage-cost gap visible, measurable and politically accountable.
c. Establish a Shared Prosperity Dashboard that is publicly accessible and regularly updated, tracking rent burden in affordable housing, income growth, benefits access and workforce-credential attainment side-by-side, to understand and invest in what works, increase accountability and innovate to improve outcomes.
We cannot solve housing affordability or address the instability facing both tenants and landlords without tackling income. The traditional focus on rent levels as the sole driver of housing affordability has helped create the challenges facing the affordable housing stock today.
The false choice between “pro-business” and “pro-worker” is counterproductive and prevents the public-private partnerships that are critical for a robust, globally competitive economy, especially if we are seeking shared prosperity. In 2026, a diverse, skilled and stably housed talent pool is itself a competitive advantage, because global companies choose cities where they can find and keep talent that can afford to live and grow there. The New Yorkers living in affordable housing who are multilingual, resilient, community-rooted and motivated are not a social-services challenge; they are overlooked talent in which New York City needs to invest.
Investing in the career growth of low-income tenants helps these families thrive, improves the stability of affordable housing, creates a skilled talent pool for employers and reduces the demand for public benefits. The health of both our residents and our housing, not to mention our city, depends on thinking beyond rents and reducing costs when it comes to affordability.
