Overview
New York is in the throes of a widespread affordability crisis. At the heart of the issue? Housing. From an ever-shrinking pool of an aging housing stock, New Yorkers are often forced to choose between affordability and livability, all while the costs of healthcare, groceries, and utility bills continue to rise. Even for homes that can be upgraded, the residential construction market is rife with low-road labor practices, in which workers on these projects receive disproportionately lower pay and weaker benefits than their union counterparts and face worker misclassification and wage theft—effectively locking these workers into lower-quality housing with few pathways to improve. The status quo is not working, and New York must act. New York has an opportunity to tackle both the affordability and climate crises by turning to one of its most underutilized resources: homes. How? Union labor. Unions are the backbone of a skilled construction workforce across dozens of trades. With the right programmatic levers that trigger high-road labor standards and deploy workers to entire neighborhoods at scale, labor is the linchpin of a statewide housing improvement strategy. We have the tools to repair housing right. Now, it’s time to get organized.
