Cuomo claims that “housing is a high precedence.” A dig into his monitor document from his time as governor says one thing very completely different.
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Former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo.(John Nacion / Star Max / IPx)
Simply 43 seconds into the video that first introduced his 2025 mayoral run, Andrew Cuomo reduces the town’s present disaster into one in all homeless folks: “Our New York Metropolis is in hassle,” he says, “you are feeling it once you stroll down the road and take a look at to not make eye contact with a mentally ailing homeless particular person.” Solely he, his marketing campaign insists, can restore the town to sanity. He invitations voters to affix him in sweeping the issue—alongside together with his personal document 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 Growth 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 current 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 impression of his personal previous political choices. Cuomo devised, applied, and nationalized insurance policies that haven’t solely proved to fail at holding folks housed however have additionally actively grown the ranks of the homeless.
Cuomo’s most substantial coverage impression over the course of his half-century-long profession is probably going his least reported: reshaping homeless providers. In 1986, after managing his father’s marketing campaign for governor, Cuomo based 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 non permanent 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 house doesn’t treatment a crack dependancy.”
Moreover his father’s profession, it was that mission that shaped 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 the town expanded its congregate shelter capability however didn’t 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 the town’s strategy. The authors of the ensuing report denied that the town had an obligation to deal with all of its residents. They instructed that extra was guilty for homelessness than a scarcity of inexpensive 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. The complete system, they argued, wanted an overhaul to “discourage dependency.”
The fee proposed two main reversals for the town, each modeled after Cuomo’s HELP: First, privatize all metropolis shelters; second, reorient providers to route folks by way of a disciplinary system of non permanent, transitional housing. “‘Jail, jail, jail’ is simply as a lot a false treatment as ‘housing, housing, housing,’” Cuomo later summarized. His fee supplied one thing within the center: a “continuum of care.” By way of it, homeless folks may earn entry to everlasting housing by demonstrating what would later be known as “housing readiness,” that’s, by passing fraud screenings and drug exams, assembly work necessities, attending “life administration” lessons, and accepting counseling and prescribed drugs. Cuomo’s “continuum of care” served an ideological objective and a monetary one: to institutionalize classes of individuals deserving of public assist and to justify austerity.
Recruited by President Clinton as assistant secretary of Housing and City Growth after which promoted to secretary, Cuomo nationalized the “continuum of care” framework. Echoing Reagan’s assistant HUD secretary, who stated 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 supplied new contracts to personal nonprofits and prioritized non permanent, transitional housing according to its disciplinary necessities. Cuomo’s affect fed again into the success of the group he helped begin. By 1994, HELP was the biggest personal 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.)
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Cuomo’s impression on homelessness coverage can nonetheless be felt throughout the nation. He oversaw the in depth privatization of homeless providers, which bloated right into a cottage business of personal, nonprofit subcontractors. Whereas he defended privatization within the title of cost-cutting, the strategy has had the alternative impact: Nonprofit providers typically 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 positioned in poorer neighborhoods and outdoors metropolis limits, away from transportation and different assets unhoused folks want. Lastly, a scarcity of accountability in personal lodging has led to abominable situations. 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 stories typically notice 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 quite 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 display that pressured therapy, whether or not for psychological well being or substance abuse, not solely fails to maintain folks housed but additionally drives folks from assets.
Maybe Cuomo’s gravest impression 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 regulation and order quite than affordability. In 1993, the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Metropolis Journal celebrated the insights of the Cuomo fee report. Now, a number 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 stated.
Individualizing the homelessness disaster has likewise protected Cuomo from accounting for his personal function as an architect of the failures of our housing system extra broadly. Within the extra acquainted aspect of his HUD document, Cuomo helped oversee one of many fundamental causes the nation’s housing grew to become so wildly unaffordable: the decimation of its public housing inventory. Right here too, his suspicion of utilizing public assets to resolve 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 legal information. As an alternative of public housing, Cuomo pressed for privately owned, publicly sponsored housing—a method that failed to satisfy the wants of probably the most susceptible tenants—in addition to “empowerment zones” that gave tax breaks and public land to actual property speculators.
Cuomo’s years in the actual property business might greatest reveal his loyalties. In his time as HUD secretary, Cuomo assisted federal fits towards actual property firms in violation of honest housing practices, fundamental residing requirements, and the regulation. 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 tremendous. Two years later, when Cuomo’s HUD time period ended, he went to work for Farkas’s new enterprise. Quickly, Farkas grew to become a high donor to Cuomo’s failed marketing campaign for governor (which Cuomo introduced from exterior his first HELP shelter) and his bid for lawyer common, the place he was typically accused of favoritism in approving new developments.
As governor of New York, Cuomo repeatedly slashed the finances for serving homeless New Yorkers. Within the first yr of his time period, he minimize $65 million of state appropriations for folks leaving homeless shelters, triggering a $27 million lack of federal matching funds. Two years later, the town’s shelter inhabitants had elevated by 35 %. He additionally shrank New York State’s contributions to the town’s homeless providers. In his first 5 years in workplace, these contributions had been almost halved. In 2016, towards the steering of the unique Cuomo fee and even towards the counsel of police commissioner William Bratton, Cuomo issued an govt order to increase 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.
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Nor did Cuomo work to maintain tenants housed. As an alternative, he defunded the state company tasked with overseeing the 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, the 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 hire freeze for rent-stabilized tenants, Cuomo lately expressed remorse for signing NYC’s 2019 hire legal guidelines, a landmark enlargement of hire stabilization, in a non-public assembly with the manager committee of the Actual Property Board of New York.
Cuomo made his title in New York by insisting that the town ought to intervene within the personal lives of poor folks, however not within the personal housing market. Throughout the nation, his legacy persists in insurance policies that self-discipline the victims of that market quite than its beneficiaries, and in austerity budgets that withhold public assist and diminish regulatory energy. For his a long time of service, actual property corporations have poured $2.5 million to his mayoral tremendous PAC. Not less than $410,000 of that comes from firms presently being sued by the 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 stated he would begin with the company chargeable for imposing that housing code and for growing new inexpensive and everlasting housing—as a result of “housing is a high precedence.” Both he forgot the query, or he’d favor that the remainder of us did.
Tracy Rosenthal
Tracy Rosenthal is a cofounder of the LA Tenants Union and creator of the viral “Two-Evils” voter guides.
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