New York City to Spend $4 Billion From Pension Funds on Affordable Homes

The $4 billion would help pay for mixed-income projects, conversions of offices to apartments, renovations to aging buildings and new middle-income apartments built by union workers.

Credit…Vincent Alban/The New York Times

By Mihir Zaveri
April 16, 2026

A 33-story mixed-income high-rise in Midtown Manhattan, with rents as low as $1,000 for one-bedroom apartments. A 30-unit apartment building in the Bronx for survivors of domestic violence who have struggled with homelessness. A Brooklyn building for formerly incarcerated women and their families.

These are some of the affordable housing projects that have been financed in the past several years with money from New York City’s public pension funds, which provide retirement benefits for the city’s police officers, teachers, firefighters and more.

Now, the funds are set to invest more than $4 billion in affordable developments over the next four years, the city comptroller, Mark Levine, will announce on Thursday.

The significant infusion of money, which will more than double the funds’ current real estate portfolio, could help build or rehabilitate thousands of homes in and around the city, Mr. Levine said.

“It’s a pretty dramatic expansion in investment of housing in New York City — far beyond what we’ve been able to do historically,” said Mr. Levine, who is the legal custodian of the funds.

The city has five separate pension funds, totaling around $320 billion in assets. In addition to investing in real estate across the city and around the world, the funds invest in stocks, bonds and private equity.

The $4 billion would help pay for mixed-income projects, conversions of offices to apartments, renovations to aging buildings and new middle-income apartments built by union workers, among other types of development.

Mr. Levine, a Democrat, said the city had made progress on getting new projects approved. The next step was figuring out how to pay for them.

“The big fight now is to actually get that housing built,” he said. “That’s going to require a dramatic increase in the financing available. This really is our No. 1 battle right now.”