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The Big Apple's housing market is booming, which has left the city with an affordability crisis.
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At the same time, the state's foreclosure and eviction levels are climbing.
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New York state's so-called "zombie law" can help turn foreclosed properties into affordable housing.
New York is facing a crippling housing shortage, but there are thousands of vacant homes across the state that could help ease its affordability crisis.
One group has a solution to turn these so-called "zombie" homes into affordable housing by forcing banks to complete the foreclosure process and return the housing to livable conditions.
Zombie homes are everything they sound like — decrepit, dangerous, and abandoned properties. But they are also a relic of the subprime-loan gold rush of the mid-2000s — a time when many communities of color fell victim to predatory lending practices that often ended in foreclosure.
The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national nonprofit organization, has funded and provided guidance to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — which is responsible for developing and maintaining New York City's stock of affordable housing — to ensure banks follow the state's "zombie law" to restore vacant homes into affordable units.
There are an estimated 1.3 million zombie homes across the US, and New York state has the highest share. As of 2022, thousands of these vacant homes are sprinkled throughout the state, especially in communities of color. They are not only dampening property values and fostering local crime — the wasted housing stock is also contributing to the state's worsening housing shortage.
But there's a solution in the works, said Jenny Weyel, the director of Neighborhood Stabilization at New York City's HPD. "We've brought successful lawsuits against banks who have let vacant homes deteriorate, and now we are finding ways to renovate and resell them to low-income families," she said.
New York is overrun with zombies
HPD estimates that more than 2,000 zombie homes stand vacant in NYC alone.
As New York's housing crisis escalates, prices are spiking and — in an eerie similarity to the Great Recession — people are losing their homes through evictions and foreclosures.
In 2013, a wave of foreclosures hit New York, resulting in a surplus of vacant houses and homes hanging in the foreclosure process. When the state became home to the second-largest housing-foreclosure inventory in the nation, the state attorney general's office introduced the Abandoned Property Neighborhood Relief Act, which became known as the zombie law.