Fresh off a state budget that delivered long-awaiting housing reforms, a new battle will begin today over a city-level package that could significantly boost construction in the five boroughs, testing Mayor Eric Adams’ ability to push the policies through against likely opposition.
After months of preparation, the Adams administration’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan will be formally referred today to the city’s 59 community boards, starting the clock on a roughly seven-month review that will culminate with a vote by the City Council near the end of the year.
The housing plan is considered the most significant — and controversial — of the three City of Yes plans that the Adams administration is advancing separately, which all seek to loosen decades-old zoning rules. By allowing denser housing to be built nearly everywhere in the city, the administration says the rule changes could produce between 58,000 and 109,000 new homes over 15 years, putting a dent in the apartment shortage that has caused rents to soar.
But much will depend on the whims of the City Council, especially members from low-rise districts outside Manhattan who are likely to object to provisions that would legalize 3- to 5-story buildings near transit and remove requirements for new developments to have parking spaces. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who represents one such district in Southeast Queens, has come close to outright endorsing City of Yes, but noted that it will be a challenge to get some lawmakers on board.
Supporters of the plan are generally optimistic about its chances of passing, given the rapidly shifting politics of housing that have seen calls for more construction become generally accepted. The new state budget also makes several parts of the plan more feasible, and its new tax incentives for housing construction mean more projects could get underway quickly if City of Yes passes.
The bigger question may be whether the council passes the plan in full, or dilutes it significantly.
“There’ll be a lot of discussion around exactly which neighborhoods certain parts of the plan should apply to,” said Manhattan council member Keith Powers, who supports City of Yes. “But the one thing I think we really can’t do is to wholesale carve entire neighborhoods out of the plan and only focus on places like Manhattan.”
Many lawmakers will pay close attention to the symbolic votes taken by neighborhood community boards in the coming weeks as a sign of how strong the opposition may be. But community boards are well-known for resisting change, and lawmakers sometimes defy them: a zoning change to permit casinos passed the council this month despite opposition from several of the neighborhood panels, and the council also appears likely to pass another City of Yes plan focused on small-business growth in May despite dozens of boards having voted against it.
The Adams administration frames the proposals as undoing the harms of the city’s 1961 zoning code, which officials now blast as car-centric and produced in an era when some planners sought to segregate cities by race. But City of Yes could also be thought of as undoing more recent changes: the mid-2000s rezonings under Michael Bloomberg that restricted housing in swaths of the city. Many of those neighborhoods would be in line for added density if Adams gets his way.
“This may sound simple, but it is a radical premise,” said City Planning Chair Dan Garodnick, the administration’s chief cheerleader for City of Yes, during a reporters’ briefing on Friday. “For the first time in a generation, we are making it clear that our housing crisis is underpinned by a housing shortage, and that every neighborhood must help solve the problem and share in our city’s growth.”
‘No single silver bullet’
Other consequential policies in the City of Yes housing package include giving a building-size bonus to developers who include affordable housing in certain dense neighborhoods; legalizing small apartments in backyards and garages; allowing housing above retail space on outer-borough “main streets”; and legalizing shared amenities like kitchens, which could ultimately allow for the return of single-room occupancy-style housing.
Several parts of the plan got boosts from the newly enacted state budget. The budget’s tax incentives to encourage office-to-residential conversions dovetail with a proposal in City of Yes that aims to make such renovations more widespread, by permitting them in more outer-borough neighborhoods and in buildings built before 1991. And the state’s lifting of a cap on residential density in the city will let the administration move forward with another City of Yes provision that would create new high-density zoning categories for bigger apartment buildings.
Mayor Adams first announced the City of Yes housing plan in a September 2023 speech at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. The administration did not fully detail the proposals until this month, when it released the full 790-page document spelling out every proposed change to the zoning code.
Council Speaker Adams notably praised the full plan, which answered a key question about the affordability of the homes created through the size bonus that the plan would grant developers in high-density neighborhoods. For a developer to get the bonus, the administration revealed it would require those affordable units to be set at 60% of the area median income — equating to a monthly rent of about $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment — which the speaker hailed for “prioritizing deeper affordability.”
More than 100 groups supporting the plan formed a coalition in February aimed at putting political momentum behind City of Yes. Led by the nonprofit New York Housing Conference, other members include developers like L+M and Slate Property Group, industry groups including the New York Building Congress and Real Estate Board of New York, and supportive housing providers such as Goddard Riverside and Project Renewal.
Howard Slatkin, executive director of the nonprofit Citizens Housing & Planning Council, predicted that the City of Yes reforms would slow rent growth relatively quickly if enacted, by allowing more housing to come online within a few years and reduce pressure on the hot housing market. But, he added, zoning is only part of the puzzle.
“There is no single silver bullet for the housing crisis,” Slatkin told Crain’s. “Many steps are needed to give us a functioning housing system, including tax incentives to make new privately financed housing work, expanded resources to support housing for people at the lowest incomes, and efforts to limit the escalation of construction and operating costs.”
Nick Garber , 2024-04-29 15:03:03
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