New York state Sen. Sean Ryan discusses housing plan for upstate (Capital Tonight)

New York City’s housing crisis has been covered for years, so it’s easy to forget that upstate New York cities face similar challenges.

But Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany and Binghamton saw a major victory in the recently passed state budget. Parts of New York state Sen. Sean Ryan’s four-part housing plan received funding, including $40 million to build one and two family homes.

Ryan, who chairs the state Senate’s Economic Development Committee, spoke with Capital Tonight’s Susan Arbetter about the issue.

Click here to watch the interview.

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Susan Arbetter  
Welcome back to Capital Tonight. New York City gets a lot of coverage because of its housing crisis. But other parts of the state are also in crisis, including the City of Buffalo and other upstate cities. But Western New York State Senator Sean Ryan, chair of the Senate's Economic Development Committee, has introduced a four-part housing plan that ticks off a lot of the boxes needed. Senator, welcome back. It's so good to see you.

Senator Sean Ryan  
It's great to be here, Susan. Thanks for your attention to this important issue.

Susan Arbetter  
Yeah, so, just describe for our viewers the kinds of housing issues that Upstate New York faces that New York City may not.

Senator Sean Ryan  
Well, in Upstate New York, we've had a generation of population shrinking, vacant and abandoned homes, which led to, really, a program of demolitions. And now that we have a problem where, in a city like Buffalo, we have over 10,000 vacant residential lots. It's a very similar story to Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Binghamton. And most of the housing programs that the State offers are really based on the needs of New York City: Too many people, not enough open land. So they took the programs that worked for New York City and said, "Well, this should work in Buffalo and Syracuse also." But what it led to is, those programs are based on scarcity of land. So the state would give you money to build a five-story building in Buffalo with 20 units in it, but they wouldn't give you money to do 20 new housing units on empty lots.

Susan Arbetter  
And that's what's needed, those single family homes.

Senator Sean Ryan  
Yeah, we need singles. We need doubles. But you want to rebuild neighborhoods. And you don't do that by building one big building on the corner of a block that has gaps in its smile, like missing teeth. Every fourth house is demolished. So the infill program will concentrate on filling in the missing gaps in neighborhoods. And it won't just provide a good affordable housing option; it will also provide a way to grow the entire neighborhood and restore the entire neighborhood. And that's really what we were able to break through this year, is that we won the fight that there can't be one cookie-cutter housing program for New York State. We need we need different ones. So we were able to break that logjam with infill housing.

And then our second dilemma is, we have a lot of people live upstate [who own] two- or three-family homes. You (historically) don't need a lot of money to enter into the housing market. So we found situations where two civil servants have a double, they raise their children in that double -- one husband, maybe, has perished and a senior citizen alone owns the two-family home. She no longer has the financial wherewithal to fix the upstairs apartment when things go bad. We found in Buffalo that we have over 4,000 rental units that are just offline because they won't meet code requirements. So we put together a pot of money, $75,000 per apartment, to bring apartments back up to housing standards to get those apartments back on line.

Susan Arbetter  
Is this just for Buffalo, Senator?

Senator Sean Ryan  
No, we're spreading this out to Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Binghamton.

Susan Arbetter  
What's the total pot of money look like? $40 million?

Senator Sean Ryan  
It's $40 million for infill, $40 million for rental repair, and then the third program is money to help people pay their back rent. New York City's had a program where they'll pay up to six months back rent to prevent homelessness for over 20 years. But that program never extended to the upstate counties. So we are starting to have a homelessness problem in Buffalo. And would you believe that the average amount of people are being evicted over in Buffalo is $1,200? Generally that costs the county well over $8,000 to temporarily house that family.

Susan Arbetter  
Oh, that's crazy. Right.

Senator Sean Ryan  
Yeah, so we came up with this program. It's called a one shot. Once a year, you can be eligible for a one shot to help pay your back rent -- usually someone who's already in the court process. Because what's really changed, Susan, is that back in the day when I was an attorney in legal services doing landlord-tenant (work), when people got behind on their rent, and they were in court, they would often ask the judge and the landlord, "Can I have two weeks? And in that two weeks, I'll go find another apartment in my neighborhood." But with all the demolitions over the years, and the fact that our populations are rising in our upstate cities, there's no longer the surplus units.

Susan Arbetter  
It's a problem, absolutely. So now, was this also funded in the budget?

Senator Sean Ryan  
It was and that's a $10 million (pot) for, once again, the upstate cities that have the highest eviction rates. We think we can drive the eviction rates much lower with a very small amount of money.

Susan Arbetter  
Alright, so there's a lot in the budget for upstate housing, something that was sort of missing from the conversation for several years. What else is left to accomplish on the housing front?

Senator Sean Ryan
The fourth point of the agenda is insulation. If you're living upstate in an apartment, the chances are that the heating bill goes right to the tenant.

Susan Arbetter
And it's cold.

Senator Sean Ryan
And it's cold. And it gives no incentive for landlords to [improve] insulation because they don't pay for the cost of heating. So we find that there's a lot of apartments that seem affordable in September and October, but when the first gas bill comes in January, then they can no longer afford the apartment -- it leads to evictions. So we have a program that we're trying to get started in the last three weeks (of the legislative session) here that would allow the utilities to work with the Public Service Commission to set up programs to do utility scale insulation.

Susan Arbetter  
So where is this? Are we going to see this before the end of session?

Senator Sean Ryan  
That's my goal, is to see this one before the end of session because, you know, we're working towards our climate goals. We're trying to reduce carbon.

Susan Arbetter
And this fits right in.

Senator Sean Ryan
Yeah, we're spending a lot of time talking about how we can make new electrons, right? Windmills, solar panels -- but the best way is through conservation. And if we can insulate these homes, we're going to drive down the carbon burned in our upstate cities, we're going to save a lot of people money, and people [will] live in homes that are comfortable.

Susan Arbetter  
We are out of time. I want to thank you very much. State Senator Sean Ryan of Buffalo, Chair of the Economic Development Committee. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, as always.

Senator Sean Ryan  
Great talking to you.