New York, NY, September 9, 2026 – Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) submitted the following testimony to the New York City Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings for its oversight hearing on the Mayor’s housing plan, “Block by Block.”

Testimony of Kim Darga, Vice President and New York Market Leader, Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.
Committee on Housing and Buildings
Oversight: The Mayor’s Housing Plan
September 9, 2026

My name is Kim Darga, and I am Vice President and New York Market Leader at Enterprise Community Partners. Enterprise is a national nonprofit that exists to make a good home possible for the millions of families without one. We support community development organizations on the ground, aggregate and invest capital for impact, advance housing policy at every level of government, and build and manage communities ourselves. Since our New York office opened in 1987, we have committed more than $4.9 billion in equity, loans and grants to affordable housing and community to create or preserve over 71,300 affordable homes across New York City.

On behalf of Enterprise, thank you Chair Sanchez and the Committee on Housing and Buildings for the opportunity to submit testimony on the Block by Block housing plan, an important roadmap to address New York City’s most pressing housing challenges. The plan is ambitious, with a wide range of priorities that are as multifaceted as New York’s housing crisis demands. We applaud the administration for focusing on crucial areas, like preserving and stabilizing existing affordable housing, expanding our housing supply, and supporting housing stability for all New Yorkers.

A number of the recommendations within the plan represent longstanding Enterprise priorities that we are thrilled to see included. In other areas, the issues and challenges that we see will require solutions that go beyond what has been offered to date. Below we take six of the focus areas from the plan to provide feedback and recommendations for how to go further.

The success of Block by Block will ultimately depend on how its proposals are designed, funded, implemented, and measured. Thank you to the Council for taking this important step to gather feedback and ask questions to get at the heart of these important questions.

Focus Area 1: Empowering Tenants and Strengthening Enforcement

Residents are the bedrock of the affordable housing. Through our capital, programmatic and policy work, Enterprise strives to put the concerns and lived experience of the tenants at the forefront of how we view success.

Too many residents in New York’s housing stock are living in unacceptable conditions. We support the strengthening of tools like HPD’s 7A and Emergency Repair Program to bring faster relief for residents in dilapidated properties. We also urge reform and relaunch of the Third Party Transfer program, under carefully considered and balanced new terms.

The expedited litigation process for repair issues first announced in Block by Block and subsequently rolled in more detail is an important step. However, more must be done to solve serious issues around nonpayment cases, which far exceed HP and 7A proceedings. We are yet to hear a plan which fully contends with how much nonpayment issues and legal costs are saddling affordable housing operators and contributing to significant distress. Upstream eviction prevention efforts to get tenants with arrears assistance prior to court filings should be more aggressively pursued, alongside Housing Court system reforms.

Finally, the emphasis on housing conditions, violations and troubled properties must consider that the issues cannot be reduced to a bad owner/good owner dichotomy. Many nonprofit and mission-driven organizations have been vocal about serious challenges with violation clearance, operational strain, resource constraint, rent collection, and other issues. A more holistic approach around the financial strength of our housing stock and the resources to complete renovations and clear violations quickly are needed. We would encourage the City to make sure preservation programs are resourced to meet demand effectively and efficiently.

Focus Area 2: Preserving Affordability and Improving Housing Quality

Our city’s affordable housing stock is facing a growing operational crisis, with increased costs, declining rent collection and aging buildings. One year ago, we released a report analyzing over 37,000 affordable units in Enterprise and National Equity Fund’s portfolio and found an alarming increase in distressed housing, with more than half of all projects experiencing negative cash flow.

Insurance is a particular area of concern, and the most significant cost driver in affordable housing, with 169% increase in New York City projects since 2017. We support the administration’s plan to launch a city-backed insurance program, which has the potential to meaningfully reduce costs for affordable housing owners. We look forward to working with the city to ensure the program is structured for success, with a well-balanced portfolio of buildings and meaningful risk mitigation measures. We also invite city stakeholders to partner with us to pursue meaningful reforms at the state level. To bring down insurance costs we need to tackle the rise in claims and lawsuits impacting housing.

Our housing preservation crisis is the result of many factors, from expense increases like insurance and utilities, to reduced rent collection rates, to burdensome processes like those around lease up which have contributed to strain and which we are pleased to see addressed in the SPEED set of reforms. These factors must all be addressed with policy reforms, but also resources and staffing will be needed to meet projects with funding in a faster and more efficient way. Enterprise will be vocal in communicating this need in Albany this year as a new 5-year capital plan for housing is drafted, and we encourage the city to put these needs at the forefront of its housing legislative agenda.

Focus Area 3: Boosting NYCHA’s Future

We support the emphasis on NYCHA public housing as a standalone set of priorities in the report, including ways to build off the PACT, RAD and Public Housing Preservation Trust programs. All creative solutions must be on the table as we stabilize our critical public housing stock, provided resident engagement and self determination remain explicit components.

Focus Area 4: Building Neighborhoods for Working People

While New York’s housing crisis is complex, one root cause is simple: the city isn’t building enough housing. Block by Block proposes creating 200,000 new affordable homes over the next 10 years.

Enterprise strongly supports new creative financing strategies to reach this goal, including the proposal to create a revolving loan fund to finance mixed-income housing. This should be a priority for the city to produce more housing in a cost-effective and administratively efficient manner, while accelerating our pipeline of shovel-ready projects. Enterprise has been deeply involved in conversations around the country to scale these kinds of tools and can be a partner to the Council in making sure these tools are designed for maximum impact.

We agree with the plan’s framework to build affordable housing in all communities across the city, as detailed in the city’s new Fair Housing Growth Strategy. Utilizing the Affordable Fast Track approved by voters last year, the city can target affordable housing growth in neighborhoods that need it most. We look forward to working with the city to fully understand the reporting targets in the growth strategy, and ensure the strategy is paired with adequate resources to enforce fair housing laws.

We are also supportive of the plan’s inclusion of nontraditional development partners to reach our housing goals, including supporting Community Land Trusts and connecting them to public land. We also appreciate the city’s recognition of the role that faith organizations can play in providing affordable housing for their communities, with a $1 million commitment to Enterprise’s Faith-Based Development Initiative.

We strongly applaud the proposal in the plan which reduces rent burden for those earning less than 30% of AMI and eagerly look forward to reviewing the results of that exciting policy change.

Focus Area 5: Reducing and Preventing Homelessness

A comprehensive housing plan must address the cycle of evictions and homelessness that impact far too many New Yorkers. In July 2026, an average of 82,000 New Yorkers slept in city shelters each night, which is far above the average numbers in 2022. At the same time, evictions have crept up to their highest rate since before the pandemic, with more than 8,000 households being evicted so far this year. Block by Block offers some meaningful steps the city can take to end homelessness, including new eviction prevention strategies and creating more direct pathways out of shelter.

In April of 2026, Enterprise released its Let’s Move! Report, which found that it took a median time of 439 days to lease up an affordable building in New York City, three times longer than the national median. This prolongs the amount of time New Yorkers are spending in shelter, and the amount of time that affordable housing sits vacant. The city’s plan offers meaningful steps to speed up placements that we included in our report, including an overhaul of the Housing Connect lottery system and allowing direct shelter referrals through the new MATCH pilot.

As the city develops a forthcoming homelessness plan, bolder streamlining and efficiencies in the CityFHEPS program should be on the table. Our report recommends building-wide registration and revamping the income verification and rebudgeting processes.

Enterprise supports the plan’s proposal to invest in the Homebase program, which is stretched beyond its capacity. The program must be sufficiently funded, with separate RFPs for existing scopes of work that have been tacked onto the Homebase program over the years, including rental assistance processing and aftercare.

Beyond Homebase, we encourage investment in new resident support like that provided through the Home 4 Good program, an upstream eviction prevention program that partners housing providers with service providers to proactively reach out to households experiencing housing instability before eviction. This program helps tenants navigate resources to stabilize from the immediate crisis and long term. The city can bolster its reforms proposed in Block by Block by scaling this program and expanding partnerships between DSS’s Rental Assistance Unit and participating service providers.

Focus Area 6: Achieving Public Excellence

As one of the organizations which contributed recommendations to the SPEED task force, we are very thankful that a robust plan is now in place which intends to streamline, modernize, and expedite government processes in many key areas. From predevelopment processes like ULURP precertification and environmental review, to construction, all the way through lease up and housing placements, we have simply stacked too many well-meaning rules and regulations on top of one another over the years. It has led to projects taking too long and costing too much for us to ever meet our housing needs without significant reform.

To that end, the 53 elements of SPEED represent an important step forward in chipping away at these processes leaving only those which are more critical.

We cannot allow the SPEED report, or even implementation of its initial recommendations, to be the end of the story. We can go further – for example, our lease up report found significant streamlining opportunities in the premarketing process which was untouched by the SPEED task force. The city should see these findings as the beginning of the process rather than the end, and be committed to tracking progress to ensure there is meaningful and measurable reduction in timeframes.

Int. 1015-2026: Abatement for Taxation for Alterations and Improvements to Certain Multiple Dwellings

Enterprise strongly supports Int. 1015 to extend J-51, a tax abatement program that helps finance major capital improvements while keeping rents affordable. Our city faces serious issues around housing quality and operational health, and J-51 is one of our most important tools for resourcing building improvements and stabilizing properties. Extension is critical.

Int. 0905-2026: Giving Qualified Entities a First Opportunity to Submit a Statement of Interest and a First Opportunity to Purchase Certain Properties

The limiting of the universe of buildings subject to this legislation’s provisions from prior versions was an important and necessary step to ensure that New York’s real estate market was not broadly impacted by potentially burdensome new restrictions, transaction delays and liability exposure. A more targeted program aimed at distressed properties is a more responsible and sensible approach.

Nonprofits and other qualified entities will require resources to be able to execute on transactions; providing timelines and an opportunity to submit offers is only a small component in achieving the goal of stabilizing housing. We encourage conversations with these entities and intermediaries like Enterprise about the need for flexible, early stage capital, along with making sure that HPD’s preservation programs are resourced and staffed to be able to help owners renovate the housing.

Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony.