City of New York Releases Final Where We Live NYC 2025 Fair Housing Plan

October 2, 2025

Adopted under the City Council's Fair Housing Framework, the plan builds on the 2020 strategy, responds to historic housing pressures, and highlights the City's continued commitment to equity, opportunity, and housing access

NEW YORK, NY - Today, New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is proud to announce the release of the final Where We Live NYC 2025 plan, the City's comprehensive fair housing strategy. The release of the final plan follows extensive public engagement, the publication of new draft commitments, and new data and data tools that are broadly useable and accessible.

Building on Where We Live 2020, this plan demonstrates New York City's continued and unequivocal commitment to confronting segregation, fighting housing discrimination, and ensuring every New Yorker has access to a safe, stable, and affordable home in the neighborhood of their choice. The release comes at a moment of extraordinary pressure in New York City's housing market, leaving far too many New Yorkers struggling to find housing in the neighborhoods they prefer or remain in communities they have long called home. With this plan, the City is committed to ensuring every New Yorker, regardless of their race, disability, age, or other protected characteristic, can choose to live in a home and neighborhood that allows them to thrive.

The City Council codified New York City's commitment to affirmatively furthering fair housing into local law in 2023, underscoring our broader dedication to advancing equity, opportunity, and housing access across all neighborhoods. As part of this Fair Housing Framework, the City updates its fair housing plan every five years.

"From shattering affordable housing records to turning old city sites into new homes, we are proud to be the most pro-housing administration in city history," said New York City Mayor Eric Adams. "But we're not just building more housing right now; we're laying the groundwork for more housing and fairer housing in the decades to come with policies like 'City of Yes,' our five neighborhood plans, and the Where We Live NYC report. This crucial report has already helped spark change over the last five years and I know will once again help build a more affordable New York City for the decades to come."

"The housing production records this administration has broken would mean nothing if New Yorkers aren't guaranteed a fair chance at accessing housing," said Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development, and Workforce Adolfo Carrion, "That is why I am proud to see HPD release the final Where We Live NYC 2025 plan. After immense public engagement and research, Where We Live lays out how our city will continue its commitment to confronting housing segregation and housing discrimination while ensuring every New Yorker has access to housing regardless of their race, disability, age, or other protected characteristics."

"In 2020, our City released the first comprehensive fair housing plan, Where We Live NYC, that set out ambitious goals to advance equity, opportunity and housing access across New York City," said Executive Director for Housing Leila Bozorg, "Today, following extensive engagement and analysis, we are updating that plan as part of the Fair Housing Framework, with new strategies and actions to further enshrine the City's commitment to creating meaningful housing opportunities for our diverse population in every neighborhood."

"Through Where We Live, the City has made clear that we will not shy away from confronting segregation and housing discrimination head-on," said Ahmed Tigani, Acting Commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development. "We've built on the first plan from 2020 by engaging New Yorkers across the five boroughs and turning their feedback into concrete strategies for change. The 2025 plan, guided by the Fair Housing Framework, builds on that progress and responds to today's extraordinary housing pressures with new strategies and commitments. Together, these efforts form a roadmap we are already putting into action to ensure that every New Yorker, regardless of race, income, age, or disability, has the opportunity to live in a home and neighborhood of their choice."

"NYC is undergoing a housing crisis that hits the lowest-income New Yorkers hardest," said NYC Council Member Pierina Sanchez, Chair of the Committee on Housing and Buildings. "For far too long, just a handful of neighborhoods have created the majority of new affordable housing in New York City. The Where We Live commitments make it clear: every community must do its fair share and no New Yorker should face discrimination when searching for a place to live. We must ensure our City's housing budget brings these commitments to life with additional investments and resources for the lowest-income New Yorkers. At a time when the federal administration is drastically rolling back fair housing protections, local government must step up to protect those who face discrimination and deliver safe and affordable housing for all."

What's New in the 2025 Plan

The Where We Live NYC 2025 plan is a strategic vision and roadmap to advance fair housing over the next five years. It builds on the significant progress the City has made since the 2020 plan in helping to reframe the public discourse around fair housing while also responding to the realities New Yorkers face today. The 2025 plan refines and updates the City's fair housing commitments and profiles the fair housing experiences of different groups of New Yorkers, such as immigrants and people with disabilities in greater detail than the previous plan.

The 2025 plan also introduces new and updated commitments that reflect today's housing challenges while keeping the six original fair housing goals at its core. First announced in August, our new commitments include implementing a public awareness campaign for the Fair Chance for Housing Act, fighting for expanded access to rental assistance, exploring interventions to address rising operating and rehabilitation costs for multifamily housing, identifying solutions to improve accessibility in existing buildings, and ensuring the City's climate adaptation efforts are shaped by fair housing principles. More about these commitments can be found here. In shaping these commitments, HPD engaged New Yorkers over the past year through workshops, stakeholder briefings, a public engagement campaign at 21 local libraries, "office hours," and an online questionnaire, gathering reflections that are woven throughout the final plan.

Additionally, we included updated data and maps in the 2025 plan, which track how housing access and neighborhood conditions have changed and created a new interactive tool available on the Where We Live website. The New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey Data Explorer allow New Yorkers to dive into housing and demographic trends and compare differences between neighborhoods. It enables readers to see for themselves the insights that are driving this report and to advocate for equitable housing policies using real-time data. The plan features five in-depth reports using data from the NYCHVS that present a portrait of various NYC communities-who they are, where they live, and the housing barriers they face. The reports are available thanks to the HPD Center for Research on Housing Opportunity, Mobility, and Equity (HOME).

To further spotlight the fair housing challenges New Yorkers experience, the City also released a new short film, Where We Live NYC: Voices from the Fight for Fair Housing. Produced by youth filmmakers, the documentary captures what housing discrimination looks like in New York City through the real stories of New Yorkers denied housing because of race, disability, gender and sexual identity, source of income, and partnership status. These stories highlight how overlapping forms of discrimination create deeper housing barriers, especially for people of color, older adults, people with disabilities, and Section 8 Voucher holders and showcase strategies for how New Yorkers can fight back.

Together, these updates ensure Where We Live NYC 2025 both carries forward the City's original fair housing goals and adapts them to meet today's realities. The plan ensures that fair housing principles remain at the center of the City's housing agenda for years to come. The administration continues to break records in affordable housing production and preservation, and the City is pushing to build more housing in every neighborhood through policy initiatives like City of Yes for Housing Opportunity.

The work to build a fairer, stronger New York and start implementing the new commitments has already begun. Just a few weeks ago, in the lead-up to today's final Where We Live 2025 announcement, HPD and the Department of Buildings launched Opening Doors, a new citywide innovation challenge that invites architects, engineers, advocates, accessibility experts, and the public to submit forward-thinking ideas to shape the future of accessibility in all five boroughs. Submissions can range from enhancing accessibility in multifamily housing and retrofitting older buildings, to improving commercial storefront access, modernizing design standards, and rethinking vertical access solutions such as elevators, ramps, and lifts. The challenge also encourages ideas for neurodiversity, sensory accessibility, cognitive inclusion, and the use of emerging technologies.

"The New York City Commission on Human Rights is proud to partner with the Department of Housing and Preservation Development on the Where We Live 2025 plan, a key step towards ensuring that every New Yorker - no matter their background, source of income, or any other protected category - can live in a home and neighborhood where they will thrive. This work reflects our continued commitment to the protection of residents' rights and highlights the vital role of the Commission in combatting housing discrimination across the city," said Annabel Palma, Chair and Commissioner, NYC Commission on Human Rights

"The fight for fair housing remains critically important to building a city where every New Yorker can succeed, and this plan lays out a roadmap to deliver safe, stable, and affordable homes across the city," said Dan Garodnick, Director of the Department of City Planning. "The goals and strategies laid out in Where We Live 2020 informed the historic zoning reforms achieved last year, and these new commitments will inform our work in the years ahead."

Building on Progress Since 2020

The City released its first Where We Live NYC plan in 2020, reframing the housing policy agenda from a focus on quantity to a broader emphasis on access and location. That plan established six goals, 19 strategies, and 81 actions to advance fair housing. Over the last five years, the City has completed 50 percent of those actions and advanced 90 percent of them, embedding fair housing principles across housing and neighborhood development, preservation, and policy.