Known as the Climate Change Super Fund, the legislation was included in the Senate’s one-house budget proposal, but didn’t make it into the Assembly’s proposition. Lawmakers are pushing for the bill to make it into the final budget due April 1.
“For many asylum seekers like me, the United States is a beacon of hope, providing refuge and safety from the violence many of us experience at home. Yet the sense of relief and security we find here quickly evaporates as we navigate an expensive and confusing court system by ourselves.”
A new data tool by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University breaks down a trove of housing-related data for each of the state’s Senate and Assembly districts. It comes just over a week before the state budget deadline, in a year dominated by debates over how elected officials should address New York’s affordable housing shortage.
In a budget resolution unveiled last week, the State Senate earmarked $389 million for public housing and Section 8 tenants statewide who applied for, but were left out from, New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP). The Assembly proposed $385 million for the same purpose.
The Senate and Assembly on Tuesday released their annual budget resolutions, responding to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $227 billion spending proposal unveiled last month. They rejected the bulk of Hochul’s strategy to increase housing production statewide, while entertaining eviction protections the governor has ducked.
The governor’s proposed budget did not include funding for the state-run Homeowner Protection Program, or HOPP, a network of legal service providers and counselors aimed at preventing foreclosures. Program supporters say the omission ‘makes no sense’ as New York grapples with a housing crisis, which Hochul’s administration has centered as a policy focus this year.
“It’s pretty dreadful,” one housing advocate said. “The governor decided to-go drinks and a stadium in Buffalo were more important than housing the homeless and marginalized New Yorkers.”
The settlement comes as legislators and organizers in New York rally for proposed legislation called Fair Pay for Home Care, which would increase the minimum wage for home healthcare workers by 150 percent.
In years past, the governor and leaders of the Senate and Assembly—the proverbial “three men in a room”—worked the tangle of bills and resolutions into a budget, an often opaque process. While the optics are different this time, some budget experts say they don’t expect the process to change dramatically.
How did relief funds for immigrants and excluded workers work in California and Chicago, and what lessons can New York learn as it prepares to launch its own aid program?
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