On Monday, April 29, New York City Mayor Eric Adams kicked off the public review process for “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” a proposal aimed at tackling the city’s housing crisis. The plan, which is the most pro-housing proposal in the city’s history, aims to create more housing in every neighborhood through substantial zoning changes.
The New York City Department of City Planning estimates that the proposal could produce as many as 108,850 new homes over the next 15 years. The proposal includes lifting parking mandates for new residential construction, introducing the Universal Affordability Preference, which allows 20 percent more housing in developments if the additional homes are permanently affordable, enabling transit-oriented development and Town Center zoning for apartment buildings near transit and along commercial corridors, and allowing homeowners to add accessory homes like backyard cottages.
Photograph from ‘City of Yes’ review kickoff event, via nyc.gov
The proposal also facilitates the conversion of non-residential buildings to housing, re-legalizes small and shared housing models, and creates new zoning districts to allow more housing, including mandatory affordable housing.
Before beginning the public review process, the Department of City Planning and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development conducted extensive outreach and engagement with New Yorkers. The proposal will now be reviewed by community boards, borough presidents, and borough boards before the City Planning Commission holds a hearing and a vote this fall. If approved by the CPC, the City Council is expected to vote on the proposal by the end of the year.
“To solve our severe housing crisis, the solution is simple: we need to build more homes,” said Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development, and Workforce Maria Torres-Springer. “The ‘City of Yes for Housing Opportunity’ proposal is a bold plan to create the most pro-housing changes in the history of our zoning code by an equally simple solution of distributing new housing more equally across the city. Kicking off the public review process is a critical milestone in moving this impactful work forward, ensuring that working-class families can continue to live in the greatest city on Earth.”
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Wonderful! However, Housing policy in the New York area is missing the point. Very few apartments are being built on Long Island. It takes years to build anything there.
15 years? still not going to be enough new housing
Affordable housing that there will be many more to come to the city, which is a very interesting option: Thanks.
Lower taxes, lower fees, decrease red tape and approvals so developers can build in New York. There is no break even unless you build luxury. New York has to try to be more business friendly.
You’re naïve if you think developers aren’t gonna keep building bland unaffordable luxury units regardless of how little red tape there is.
That is what I said. Only luxury units are profitable. Affordable and stabilized units lose money.
108,000 homes in 15 years is a total joke. Brooklyn alone added 80,000 housing units from 2010 to 2020. What is the incentive for property owners and developers to build these units unless they provide high-cost market rates which most people cannot afford?
Look at Vienna for the model to follow. Most everyone there can afford decent housing and the city keeps growing.
lower taxes and increase rent-stabilized units’ annual cap so that more supply comes to the market