During her 2024 State of the City address, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announced that the City Council is committing to an initiative to “support housing development opportunities on existing library branches and city-owned land."

This proposal echoes a key Center for an Urban Future recommendation in our 2014 report, Re-Envisioning New York’s Branch Libraries, which stated the city should “co-develop libraries with affordable housing.” We highlighted this idea in a 2017 op-ed in the New York Times, and reiterated the recommendation in our 2021 report Branches to Recovery, which called for rebuilding and modernizing many of the city's undersized libraries while making space for other high-priority community needs. 

The Speaker's announcement builds on important work already underway in the Adams administration to co-locate modernized libraries with new affordable housing through the "24 in 24" program, starting with the Grand Concourse library in the Bronx. That location was cited specifically in CUF's previous research as a top candidate for this type of redevelopment.