Casinos, emission laws, housing crisis, oh my.

Those are just some of the themes our newsroom will be tracking in the New Year, and some of what the city will contend with in 2024.

Big challenges that dominated the past year will no doubt persist, including the ongoing migrant crisis and obstacles to legal cannabis sales. Others will come to a head in the coming year, including landmark energy-reduction rules that will affect thousands of buildings in the five boroughs.

Here’s what THE CITY newsroom is watching in 2024, from the reporters covering the biggest stories:

Where Will Migrant Families Live?

New York City homeless shelters stretched to the brink over this year, with the arrival of more than 140,000 migrants from the southern border and other cities and states over the course of a year and a half. While many of them have since moved on, more than 66,000 remain in city shelters, including more than 51,000 parents and children, according to city data through the end of November. 

The city opened up hundreds of emergency shelters to accommodate them and Mayor Eric Adams and his istration says their top priority is not to have families with children sleeping on the streets. But as the city has said it’s running out of hotel rooms for parents and children, it’s begun sheltering them in “semi-congregate” settings, like the sprawling tent shelters at the remote Floyd Bennett Field. 

With city spending on the crisis ballooning to $1.6 billion so far this fiscal year,, with limited relief from the state and federal government, Adams ratcheted up the pressure on migrants to leave shelters, setting a time limit of 30 days for adults in the system, while phasing in 60-day time limits for thousands of families with children, which will begin to expire in the New Year.

— Gwynne Hogan

The Future for Rikers

Will the city jail complex on Rikers Island ever really close, and will a federal receiver take over in the meantime?

Mayor Eric Adams initially ed the $8 billion project to close the island’s lockups and replace them with four jails, one in each borough except Staten Island. But with the jail population still bigger than planned capacity and construction facing setbacks, he has since wavered.

“Idealism can’t collide with realism,” the mayor said in mid-December on NY1. “We want Rikers closed, but it has to be done correctly.” 

Criminal justice reformers and elected officials, including City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens), are concerned the mayor will stall or backtrack on closing Rikers. 

As a result, Speaker Adams in October relaunched a task force, known as the Lippman Commission, to make sure Rikers closes by 2027 as required by law. Jonathan Lippman, the state’s former chief judge, headed a similar commission that in 2017 first detailed a proposed close-Rikers plan. 

The first challenge is to reduce the jail population to 3,300 — the capacity of the four planned jails. That figure has trended in the wrong direction over the two years since Mayor Adams took office in January 2022, with more than 6,100 people currently in custody. 

The effort to close Rikers slowly moves ahead as the possibility of a federal takeover looms. While Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, State Attorney General Letitia James and many advocacy groups have urged a third-party receiver, pointing to failures to decrease violence or properly care for people locked up, Mayor Adams has remained staunchly opposed, arguing his istration should be given more time to implement reforms initiated under a court-appointed monitor. 

— Reuven Blau

Public Housing Running Out of Reserves

The year 2024 will find the 500,000 residents of the New York City Housing Authority at a crossroads.

The troubled authority emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with huge rent arrears topping $500 million. It faces budget deficits over the next few years that will likely hit $56 million in 2027, and its repair request backlog has grown exponentially in the last year.

As of last month, NYCHA was expecting to spend all of its reserve fund, despite the recommendation of its main funder, U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), to keep three to four months worth of operating expenses in reserve.

It was not supposed to be this way. In 2019, NYCHA was placed under the oversight of an independent monitor with the hopes that within five years, management could finally upgrade its aging portfolio of 177,000 apartments by abating dangerous lead paint, cleaning up toxic mold and fixing chronically faltering elevators and boilers.

That didn’t happen, so the monitorship will continue, switching hands from the consultant group Guidepost Solutions to an international law firm, Jenner & Block.

The solution will continue to be taking apartments out of traditional public housing and turning instead to federal voucher subsidies that rely on annual congressional approval.

Under Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), NYCHA retains ownership of its buildings but  turns over management to private developers who pay for building upgrades and then collect all the rent.

Meanwhile, a new funding mechanism called the Preservation Trust allows NYCHA to use its properties as collateral to float bonds. NYCHA would still manage the buildings but tenants would now rely on Section 8 funding.

Mayor Eric Adams has championed the trust as a key to turning NYCHA around, and encouraged tenants — who must approve entry into the program — to vote in favor of it.

That happened last month in the first test case at Nostrand Houses in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A significant majority of 453 voted yes to the trust.

Between RAD and the Trust, NYCHA plans to place 87,000 apartments out of traditional public housing and into Section 8 — just about half its portfolio.

— Greg B. Smith

The Energy Battle in Our Buildings

This coming year, Local Law 97 takes effect in earnest, about half a decade after its 2019 age. The law aims to slash planet-warming emissions from the city’s largest source by limiting the amount of carbon buildings larger than 25,000 square feet can spew.

Apartments, offices, grocery stores, hospitals and more must comply or else property owners could face fines of $268 annually for every ton of emissions above the limit.

Owners can comply by making physical changes to buildings — installing solar s, switching from fossil-fueled appliances to electric ones and integrating efficiency measures — or by symbolically offsetting their emissions through the purchase of renewable energy credits that clean energy projects.

Some building owners can apply for a two-year reprieve before the fines hit if they show a “good faith effort” — that is, create a detailed plan to reduce emissions.

The city Department of Buildings estimates only 11% of buildings (about 1,500) will be out of compliance in 2024, but questions remain about whether building owners will be able and willing to finance improvements, how many will obtain “good faith” exemptions, and how many will buy energy credits to offset their emissions.

And this is only just the beginning, as the carbon emission limits under Local Law 97 become stricter in 2030 and 2050. What happens in 2024 will preview the real work that’s to come.

— Samantha Maldonado

How Housing Gets Built — or Not

A year ago, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams each unveiled ambitious housing proposals designed to deal with soaring rents and home prices. Housing advocates and politicians seemed to be on the same page: New York’s housing crisis is the result of not enough housing being built and the way to deal with it is to increase supply.

But nothing happened in 2023 as the legislature balked at a proposal to require all communities in the state to increase residential construction, refused to reinstate the 421-a tax break for residential construction in the five boroughs that the city says is crucial for new rental units, couldn’t agree on ways to convert office buildings to residential use, and insisted on expanded tenant protections that are anathema to real estate groups.

Politicians continue to talk about a grand deal in 2024’s legislative session, but skeptics say nothing will realistically happen in an election year.

The Hochul istration has signaled it won’t resubmit legislation that would require all communities to build housing. Instead, it has put together a $650 million pool that will fund infrastructure in communities that voluntarily increase construction, with City officials will return to Albany demanding a replacement for 421-a and measures that would allow office conversions by eliminating some design requirements and allowing more density. 

But the city has also adopted a go-it-alone strategy.It has proposed a citywide rezoning amendment that would allow more housing construction in currently low-density neighborhoods. It will promote more office conversions, especially in Manhattan’s Garment District.

Key legislators insist that it is possible to significant housing legislation that could spur construction as long as it doesn’t override local control and includes some version of “good cause” tenant protections that limit a landlord’s ability not to renew leases.

“I remain optimistic,” Senate housing chair Brian Kavanaugh (D-Manhattan) said earlier this month.

Hochul has generally been aligned with real estate interests, who have been major donors to her campaigns. And they are very pessimistic about the prospects for this year.

Nothing is likely to happen in 2024, said James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board in New York, at a Crain’s New York Business breakfast earlier this month, because few New York lawmakers understand the economics of housing development.

“We’ve tried to put facts on the table,” he said.

 — Greg David

Congestion Pricing Hits the Road 

Expect to finally see the long-delayed plan to toll motorists driving into the congested core of Manhattan. The plan to raise billions of dollars for mass transit improvements is on track for a mid-2024 start.

Originally approved by state lawmakers in 2019, the first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan — officially known as the Central Business District Tolling Program — has, for years, run into repeated roadblocks that have yet to be fully cleared.

Congestion pricing still faces multiple lawsuits from New Jersey officials, in addition to the completion of a state review process and more public hearings on the long-running effort to toll motorists driving into Manhattan south of 60th Street.

“Right now, May is our start date, it may be early June,” Janno Lieber, MTA chairperson and CEO, said after the transit agency’s December board meeting. “But it does depend on those other two variables.”

Under Traffic Mobility Review Board recommendations released in late November, enger vehicles that go south of 60th Street would be tolled $15 once a day between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. After 9 p.m., tolls would be lowered by 75%.

Depending on size, trucks would pay either $24 or $36 during peak hours, with recommended 75% toll reductions during overnight hours. The discounted-toll idea is at the heart of curbing congestion.

“Having that toll be reduced by 75% at night is really motivated by the desire to try to get people to make deliveries in the middle of the night,” Lieber said.

The tolls have another key purpose: to raise up to $15 billion for transit system capital upgrades that include new trains and buses, station accessibility improvements and system expansion.

Lieber said MTA officials remain “confident” that congestion pricing will eventually become a reality.

“It’s enacted by the legislature, we’re counting on that,” he said.

— Jose Martinez

A Big Year for Cannabis Expansion

The past year has been a rocky one for the legal cannabis market in New York. About a year from the first legal sale, there are only nine legal dispensaries in the five boroughs and 32 in the entire state. 

The slow pace of legal dispensary openings was in part because, since August, a special class of licensees known as CAURDs had been restricted by a lifted the injunction which allowed 436 licensees to move immediately forward with their plans.

In 2024, THE CITY will be following a potentially much-wider launch of the legal cannabis market in the state. In addition to hundreds of CAURD licensees now free to open, the Office of Cannabis Management will also begin awarding licenses to the general public for retail operations, micro business and cultivating cannabis this year. 

Finally, the state approved six large multi-state marijuana companies that entered the New York market years ago solely as medical operators to begin recreational sales at the end of 2023. 

As the legal market expands, we will also keep our eye on what happens to the thousands of unlicensed stores that have cropped up around the city in the nearly three years since cannabis possession and consumption became legal. How will the legal market perform against these stores and how well will enforcement efforts by city and state officials work to curb them?

— Rosalind Adams

Will the City Cash in on Casinos?

As deep-pocketed ventures vie to secure one of three downstate casino licenses, expect a lot of hubbub over the future of gaming facilities in 2024.

That’s because before state regulators can even begin to evaluate casino proposals, ad-hoc groups called Community Advisory Committees (CACs) must first evaluate applications.

For casino applications in the city, the six-member committees will consist of representatives of Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, as well as designees from the respective state legislators, the local Council member and the borough president. 

The committees must hold public meetings and eventually cast a vote — with two-thirds approval before a state board can consider the location. 

While there’s already been community pushback to several proposals, the CACs will in theory create a more official avenue for respective communities to say why a casino would — or would not — be beneficial to them. They will replace the traditional city-level land use review process, known as ULURP.

Though three downstate licenses are up for grabs, the assumption among lobbyists is that two of those full gaming licenses will go to the Aqueduct Racetrack and MGM Resorts International’s Empire City Casino in Yonkers because they’re best positioned to transition to full-on gaming. 

If so, that’ll leave all the other hopefuls competing for the one remaining license. The State Gaming Commission has already received nine proposals in the city: five in Midtown, one in Coney Island, another along a golf course in The Bronx, and two in Queens, including the Aqueduct Racetrack. 

— Gabriel Poblete

Mayor Down, But Not Out

Mayor Eric Adams would have good reason to greet the New Year a bit glum.

It was a rough second half of 2023 for the mayor. In the summer, six men were indicted over an alleged straw donor scheme to donate money and gain influence with Adams. A month later, THE CITY’s reporting highlighted clusters of apparent straw donations to the mayor. In September, Adams’ buildings commissioner was indicted on bribery charges. 

And that was all before the home of the mayor’s top fundraiser was raided by the FBI on Nov. 2, and days later Adams’ own phones and devices were seized by the feds in an expanding investigation of whether the mayor’s previous campaign is tied to money from Turkish nationals. 

All eyes will be on how these inquiries move forward – and how it plays out politically for the mayor, who has not been directly implicated or charged with any wrongdoing. 

Several candidates are already at least considering the possibility of a challenge to the incumbent in 2025.

And last month, a Quinnipiac University poll showed the mayor had the lowest approval rating, at 28%, of any mayor since the pollsters started asking in 1996. 

In typical Adams fashion, however, the mayor is not letting any of that get him down. When asked by THE CITY what he thought of candidates who may be preparing to run against him, he brushed off the thought.

“Wait before you hate,” he said.

— Katie Honan