What Micah’s Done
As an aide to Congressman Nadler, Micah rallied against rent increases at the Rent Guidelines Board and fought the sale of Trinity House, a Mitchell-Lama, to a private equity firm. As Director of State Legislative Affairs for the City of New York, Micah helped pass legislation to crack down on illegal hotels that were taking thousands of affordable apartments offline. As Chief of Staff in the Office of the New York State Attorney General, Micah helped establish a City/State Tenant Harassment Prevention Task Force, and forced 128 landlords to return 1,800 apartments to the rent stabilization program after they had been fraudulently removed. He also helped draft legislation to make it possible to criminally charge landlords with harassment of rent regulated tenants. And as New York State’s Director of Policy, Micah helped enact the State’s $4.5 billion affordable housing capital program — its most ambitious in history — and helped develop a plan that The New York Times called the “first serious attempt by a New York governor since the 1960s” to tackle racist, exclusionary zoning and build hundreds of thousands of units of housing.
What Micah Will Do
Micah supports a comprehensive response to the shortage of affordable housing facing our city and our community:
- Make homeownership more affordable for city workers through an innovative new co-purchasing program
- Increase funding for the preservation of existing Mitchell-Lama, HDFC, and rent-stabilized housing
- Establish a new social housing fund to create truly affordable, middle-income housing
- Provide for the construction of hundreds of thousands of new housing units by increasing density around transit hubs and ending exclusionary zoning rules that are modern-day redlining
- Create Housing Access Vouchers to provide housing to people who are homeless or on the brink
- Expand access to legal representation for tenants facing eviction
- Enact a tax on luxury pied-a-terre units with out-of-state owners and use the revenue to fund improvements in NYCHA housing