February 19, 2020Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you all for being here. This is an important moment not just for this community but for what it says for the future of our city. I’m going to talk about everything we need to do to keep New York City, New York City – to keep our people here, to keep the life of this place. And I want to tell you that what we’re seeing here today is an exact example of what’s going to be needed to protect our future. I want to thank everyone who is here who has been a part of this. You’ll hear from the Deputy Mayor in a moment but so many people in this room played a really energetic role in making sure that we get to today. I want to thank, of course, our Commissioner for HPD, Louise Carroll, for her great work. I want to thank our elected officials, Senator James Sanders Jr. and Council Member Donovan Richards. Thank you both for always being so supportive.[Applause]They are both obsessed with affordable housing. That’s my accusation.[Laughter]Are you guilty?Unknown: Guilty.Mayor: Guilty. Senator, guilty?Unknown: [Inaudible][Laughter]Mayor: You heard it here first.[Applause]And thank you to all who – many people here who have been a part of bringing us to today. I want to thank all of you.So, two weeks ago I put out this plan at my State of the City and I really thought about what words to use to make the point we had to make and I chose ‘Save Our City’ for a reason because I’ve gone all over the five boroughs and I hear the same thing from people. When it comes to affordability, when it comes to a city that people know they can stay in, more and more New Yorkers are afraid and there’s a deep, deep concern that their own city may be slipping away from them. I hear it everywhere. I hear it from folks of every kind of background, every kind of neighborhood. I hear it from folks who are lower income and struggling. I hear it from folks who are working class. I hear it from folks who used to consider themselves middle class but now they’re not so sure about what the future brings. But what unites everyone is their love for this place, their sense of connection to the city they love.Everyone feels that they’ve been part of making New York City great but they feel tremendous fear that it may not be for them for much longer, and a real concern that they may be the last generation to be able to live in the place they love. So, we have to do more than we have ever done before and I want everyone to understand what people experience. And I imagine a lot of people in this room can relate to this. When you think about your own city that you have put your sweat and tears into, all your hard work into, then you go by a building site, you don’t see this kind of building but you see luxury condos. And I got to tell you I have felt that sinking feeling when I go by one of those signs for luxury condos and it says starting at $2 million, starting at $3 million, starting at $5 million per apartment and I know that’s not for me and that’s not for any of us.And that creates a real fear in people. What will be for all of us? That’s why today is so important – to be some place that is really meant for working people, to be some place that’s meant for everyday New Yorkers, because you can’t take the New Yorkers out of New York City and expect it to be the same place. I really want us – this is about our heart and soul. This place is the envy of this nation and this world. It’s a beacon. But it’s not because of the buildings, it’s not because of the tourist landmarks, it’s because of the people, it’s because we have people from every place on Earth come together – hard working people, striving people – that has created this extraordinary culture. If you take that away, if this is only a place for the elite, it will not be New York City anymore, it will lose all its meaning, all its heart, all its soul. So, where we’re standing today, it’s one building in one neighborhood but to me it represents much more. This is part of fighting back. This is part of ensuring that it will really be a city for everyone. So that’s why I wanted to be here to really thank everyone who is a part of this and to celebrate what it looks like to keep New York City, New York City.So, I’ll just say a few more things. We tried a lot of things. We’re in the middle of the biggest affordable housing creation program in the history of New York City. There has never been a time when more affordable apartments are being built or preserved than this. We did things like rent freezes, things like giving lawyers to folks to stop illegal evictions, a new law to require developers to build affordable housing or else they don’t get to build anything at all – and I thank the City Council for that – but all these things are not enough. So, it’s not typical that someone in leadership says to you, hey, I put my plan into place but I’m going to tell you it’s not enough. That’s exactly what I’m doing here today. We did a lot of the things that we knew to do and they are important but it’s not enough. That’s why we have to go farther.We need help from Albany. We need universal renter protection so that two million-plus New Yorkers who, right now, have no protection against rent gouging would get it, who can – right now, people that can be evicted for no reason need protection. There are millions of people who right now don’t know if they’re going to have their housing going forward or if they’re going to be able to afford it. They need protection. We need to help people get into affordable housing by taking away burdens like security deposits. We need to unleash a whole lot of housing that so far we haven’t been able to tap into but we see it with our own eyes – all those basement apartments all over New York City that aren’t legal. Too many aren’t safe. There’s almost 100,000 apartments that could be opened up and made affordable housing. We have to do a whole lot of things we’ve never done before to keep this a place for everyone.But it also means, of course, continuing to build not just affordable housing but this kind of affordable housing. This is the very best kind – one hundred percent affordable housing. The very best kind.[Applause]And I always get the question wherever I go – what does affordable mean, affordable for who? This housing was built for working people, for low income folks, for folks who needed that alternative. It was built to be there for them at a price they could afford. And that’s exactly what we’re going to have to a lot more of. And you’re going to see more than ever for tens of thousands of New Yorkers in the next two years we’re going to keep them in their apartments. People are living in apartments right now they can afford, we’re going to keep them in their apartments, we’re going to provide the support so they can stay there long term and pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent. It’s the best way to address the gentrification and all the other challenges that we have, it’s to preserve that affordable housing we have right now. So all of these things are going to be happening.But we’re here to celebrate what this means because this gives you hope. When you see something – a beautiful new building for everyday people, it gives you hope. We have a new name that we are putting out here and it’s a new approach. And this is really important – we want people to know that New York City is still for all of you. So we are not just talking about affordable housing some day for some people. We have a sense of urgency. You need to know that you can live in your city. Your Home NYC says to you we are person-by-person, family-by-family going to make sure that people can afford to stay in the city they love. You’re going to be seeing this all over New York City – wherever we preserve an apartment for working people, wherever we build a new one, wherever we stop an eviction, you’re going to see this sign to show you the City of New York is standing up to keep this a place for everyone.So, it’s as simple as this, everybody. If New Yorkers cannot afford New York City, then we’ll lose something absolutely precious. If this is not a place that actual new Yorkers can afford, something great will slip away from us. It does not have to be that way though. There is still time to save this city, and today is an example of what we need to do. So to everybody who helped us get to this day, to everybody who believes in New York City and believes in our people, I want to congratulate you, I want to thank you. This is how we keep New York a place for everyone. Thank you so much.[Applause]I’m going to say a few quick Spanish sentences and then to our Deputy Mayor –[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]With that, I want to thank her for her extraordinary leadership. She is a true, true believer in building a city for everyone and she works tirelessly to achieve that. Our Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, Vicki Been.[Applause]Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, Housing and Economic Development: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It’s really a pleasure to see so many of the people who have been instrumental in making this happen. I want to emphasize for a minute the sort of enormity of our housing plan. The Mayor committed us to build or preserve 300,000 homes across New York City by 2026 and we are on target to do that, completely on schedule. That’s the size of Seattle, the size of Denver, the size of Washington, D.C. – created or preserved in just 12 years, right, and that’s an amazing feat.[Applause]It takes so many strategies to do that. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. It requires so much work on so many different levels. And this project represents many of those. This is a project built on City land and we’ve done everything we can to push City land into production to build more affordable housing for New Yorkers. It’s a project that brings – because it’s a passive house, because it’s built as resilient and energy efficient, it helps to lower housing costs not just in terms of your rent but also in terms of your utilities and upkeep. So, that’s yet another strategy. When we don’t have City land, right, we have to use our land more efficiently and more effectively. So the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing that the Mayor mentioned, making sure that wherever we’re building we’re building more efficiently, more effectively, and building affordable housing is critical to that plan.And then I want to mention one thing that I think is especially important about this particular project in this particular neighborhood and that is that one of the many strategies that we use is really to invest in communities across the board to make sure that as we’re providing a house, we’re providing a home in a neighborhood that supports the families that live in that neighborhood. And this is a great example of that. This is a neighborhood that for decades really suffered disinvestment and then come the 2000s, and it suffered again because the foreclosure crisis hit this neighborhood really hard. And then a triple whammy, here comes Sandy and Irene, and did enormous damage throughout these communities. So from all that we realized we’ve got to invest heavily in this neighborhood.We’ve got to bring this neighborhood not just housing but all of the things that support housing. And I remember while walking the neighborhood with Donovan in 2015 and us agreeing, let’s really pull this community together, engage in community-based planning and try to bring back to this neighborhood the kinds of amenities that it needs starting with housing to be sure. And this represents one of about 500 units of affordable housing that we’ve built so far in this neighborhood – not to mention all that we’ve preserved – it represents rebuilding 118 homes that we’ve rebuilt using FEMA dollars and City dollars to rebuild them in a more resilient way. It represents rebuilding the green infrastructure from investment in parks, investment in protections, flood protections throughout the community, it represents all kinds of investments in the amenities that make this place some place that everyone is proud not just to come home to but to be part of the neighborhood. And that’s what is so critical about all that we’re doing, is we’re trying to make New York City the fairest city in New York, trying to make New York City a city where you can feel secure, that you’re going to be able to raise your kids here, that your kids are going to grow up here and bring their kids here. And that’s what’s so critical about our affordable housing work. And I thank everyone in the room who contributed so much to that. And it’s really a moment we’re celebrating because between all of the things that this project brings to a community that has seen massive investment to make it – to invest fairly in the families that live here.So, I really just want to thank everyone for being here, for contributing to this amazing project. And now, I’m going to turn it over to Sara Levenson to talk about the project.[Applause]