Sorry, NIMBYs: Your opposition to New York housing creation has just been drowned out by a resounding $5 billion of “Yes.”
A City Council subcommittee on Thursday approved Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to build 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years, lowering the cost of rent for New Yorkers amid one of the worst housing crises in city history. Dubbed “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” the rezoning proposal aims to spur the creation of affordable housing in all five boroughs, along with upgrades to critical infrastructure. The approval by the City Council Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises and Committee on Land Use was secured following a $5 billion pledge from the city and state.
According to the city, the proposal exceeds the housing creation total of all rezonings pushed out by the administrations of Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio.
“Thanks to our shared commitment in building critically needed housing, we have reached an agreement on a historic plan that could open the doors to a little more housing in every neighborhood in our city,” Adams said in a statement on Thursday. “If passed, New York City will once again serve as a model to the nation on government’s infinite ability to take challenges head on, set forth a bold agenda, and get the job done.”
The plan, first announced in April, originally sought to facilitate more than 100,000 new housing units. It also included provisions for lifting the parking space requirement for new residential construction, which developers claim adds an undue cost burden, and for unrestricting property owners’ ability to create accessory dwelling units in spaces like basements, attics, and garages.
Thursday’s amended proposal involved concessions on all three points. Rather than dropping the parking requirement wholesale, it will instead divide it into three zones, preserving the mandate in boroughs like Staten Island and Queens where local lawmakers deemed it necessary. Further, accessory dwelling creation will remain restricted in many areas, particularly in historic districts and flood zones, but will be permitted in transit-proximate areas.
Despite the more than 20-percent reduction in its overall housing creation goal, the plan nevertheless marks the most significant improvement to the city’s zoning structure since 1961 and is poised to deliver much-needed breathing room to a rental market stifled by a razor-thin 1.4 percent vacancy rate.
Council members’ support for the proposal hinged on the provision of $4 billion from the Adams administration and the last-minute pledge by Governor Kathy Hochul to earmark another $1 billion of state funds from the 2025 budget, according to a report by Bloomberg.
“New York has a housing affordability crisis and there’s only one way out: build more housing,” Hochul said in a statement. “Now, we’re adding a $1 billion state commitment to support affordable housing in New York City. We need all hands on deck to build more housing and make New York more affordable for all of us.”
The Adams administration’s share of the contributions includes $1 billion for housing capital, $2 billion for infrastructure projects, and $1 billion in expense funding to cover tenant protection, voucher assistance, neighborhood planning, and more. If approved in the state budget, Governor Hochul’s commitment will provide $1 billion in housing capital over the next five years.
Following this week’s approval, the proposal will now go to a vote before the full City Council in December.
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Any analysis on how this will affect property taxes and the City’s budget?
This plan will do nothing to create affordable housing. It will permit larger luxury condominium buildings to be constructed where they cannot be built at the moment. Whether this is good or bad is a debatable point. But calling this a plan to create affordable housing is just plain false.
It’s a plan, not a miracle..
You forgot to mention in your grossly biased post that the 80,000 “homes” is only 20% of the housing that will be developed, 80% will be for market rate apartments, it’s still the same horrendous housing plan set forth by Bloomberg and de Blasio, who like the currently indicted mayor Adams, almost got indicted himself for accepting bribes and giving access to real estate lobbyists to influence housing policies
Speaking of 80%, you also didn’t mention how that’s going to be the lowest qualifying AMI, so hundreds of thousands of working class rent burdened people still won’t have a chance to get a new affordable place to live where they can save money an build wealth, but the City Of Yes only assures developers and venture capital/hedge fund investors can only do that.
Oh one more thing, this is all going to get kiboshed once the Eric Adams trial begins and it’s revealed that developers from Turkey, China and other international LLCs were going to get first dibs to build the City of Mess
Cope
Uncope
“… so hundreds of thousands of working class rent burdened people still won’t have a chance to get a new affordable place to live where they can save money an build wealth…”
What?
“hundreds of thousands of working class rent burdened people still won’t have a chance to get a new affordable place to live where they can save money an build wealth”
If folks who qualify for the affordable housing fall into the lowest qualifying AMI, folks who do not qualify will not have to compete for limited housing space with those who do, helping them find housing elsewhere that meets their needs. Again this plan is no panacea, but it helps to this effect!
LOL HILARIOUS BACK SLAPPING !! THEYRE SPENDING ALMOST 10 BILLION ON BUILDING JAILS !!
Hopefully they design a good one for Adams!
Excellent humor and nod to the Wizard of Oz in the photo 😂👌 love it!!
As a real estate agent and Brooklyn homeowner, I am so concerned about the detrimental effects this will have on our city and residents.
Eat sand, NIMBY! Those of us who are young enough to not be in Depends can’t afford a home to raise a family. Upzone NY!!
Yeah, it’s so horrible to build new housing. Especially with the lowest vacancy rate in recorded history. What a tragedy.
You’re not the greatest RE agent if you don’t understand that more housing supply will be extremely beneficial to the city and to your occupation.
“a rental market stifled by a razor-thin 1.4 percent vacancy rate”
According to the Census versus current estimates, NYC has lost 700,000 people. Something isn’t right.
Correct. What’s not right is just about everything, starting with the 8.8 million in 2020.
Look at jobs, we are at the same number as pre-Covid, indicating no population loss.
Look at vacancies, same % as pre-Covid, indicating minimal loss (for units off the market).
Look at housing prices, houses, condos, coops. Up everywhere in the City, indicating no losses.
Look at tax revenues, up. Inclusive of income and sales taxes, indicating little losses at most.
One good guess for a bunch of this? People with two homes now listing the second home as primary, spending less time in the City than before but not giving up the City home.
Another? The thorough count in 2020 (to De Blasio’s credit) isn’t being replicated in the “estimates,” missing people doubled and tripled, missing people in illegal basements, etc.
Perhaps 8.8 million was an overshot, but it’s likely the current 8.1 million ‘estimate’ is off, by quite a bit.
It’s not really a mystery. Household sizes continued to decline and the rise of work from home means more people are forgoing roommates and using extra bedrooms as home offices, so the same number of apartments units now houses less people.
Add in the fact that our systemic long-term underbuilding of housing means those at the bottom of the economic ladder are displaced (i.e. people who are living in overcrowded apartments with entire families sharing a bedroom), by more affluent families(where kids have their own bedroom) its very easy to see how we can have both a declining population, and growing housing shortage.
The vacancy rate for low end affordable housing is what is abysmally low. Since trickle down housing does not happen, this neoliberal plan is just another gift to your REBNY friends. Stufies shiw that this is a plan that will result in gentrification and displacement.
Just how many more luxury towers can be crammed onto W 57th? 🤔
It will look like the Giant Sequoia National Park pretty soon! 😅🤣
That photo isn’t showingBillionaire’s Row…
will there be more truly affordable housing getting built this time around, or will it be more high price apartments with a grain of salt truly affordable units like always, which will keep the housing crisis worse and worse, I hope this not another big gift to the big greedy real estate profit over people developers which seems to run and ruin the city housing with its rotten politicians, will they start building truly affordable housing in better off neighborhoods, by the water fronts etc, will they finally end NYC AMI housing segregation policy, for now THE RENTS IN THE AMI ARE TO DAM HIGH.
This plan will make it easier to pencil in affordable housing in a wider swath of the city! It’s no panacea but a promising first step.
This is a great first step to addressing the housing crisis! Here’s to pushing through more comprehensive reforms in the coming reforms—including ending minimum parking requirements city-wide!
I HATE those severely outdated minimum parking requirements and the way it creates alienates the base of a building with the street life
When my area of co-ops was built in the 1950s, many found they could not rent their garage spaces as street parking was plentiful. Many residents did not have cars at that time, and only one if they did. Today, street parking is very scarce and the waiting list for indoor parking is over a decade. Many families now have two or more cars.
Uh-huh. U.S. Census shows that 40% of Flushing residents have no vehicle, and 40% of Flushing households have one vehicle. So the vast majority of Flushing households have no vehicle or one vehicle. Street parking is obviously “very scarce” bc it’s free.
In addition to upzoning these neighborhoods, the city needs to end free parking on public streets. Ban overnight parking, and price the daytime parking according to demand.
You cannot end this citywide unless you run the subways to the City Line. People in areas with 1 & 2 family housing won’t sit still for larger developments if they fear that their streets will be flooded with cars from residents of the new housing.
And people won’t move to apartment buildings 1+ mile from a subway without a viable option for a car, if not at the present then sometime in the future.
Minimums in those buildings takes a NIMBY argument off the table.
The plan as passed accounts for this and will ease development in places like Eastern Queens.
There are multiple U.S. cities without minimum parking requirements that do not have anything close to the level of bus service and commuter rail of places like eastern Queens, let alone a single subway line in the city. There are also plenty of people in NYC living 1+ miles from a subway line in apartment buildings without cars. There is no reason to accept the NIMBY argument at face value, especially when it makes developing much-needed housing all the more difficult.
The Housing New York program started in 2014 by Mayor Di Blasio has created over 90,000 affordable units (snicker snicker) in new buildings in 10 years ( based on HPD approval of project and listing in HPDs Open Data HNY database), So 80,00 seems to be lowering the bar.
Great news!
Can someone please define “affordable housing”?
Every occupied apartment in the city is “affordable” to someone.
The city uses up to 130% of Area Median Income (AMI), but of course, that is above average income (100%) and unaffordable to most people. It means affordable only in the strict sense of cheaper than the mostly unaffordable housing in the city.
Genuinely affordable housing is hard to pin down, but most housing advocates seem to settle around 50%-60% AMI, with some units going as low as 30% AMI.
Of course, this is only RENTAL units. There is no current affordable plan for condos/co-ops, though I just yesterday proposed one to my former CM and current head of the Dept. of City Planning Dan Garodnick, whom I met to discuss my company’s proposal for the RiverArch (look it up on Youtube – >10,000 views to date). We couldn’t get the land, but the RAMP plan could work elsewhere too. The RAMP – Reduced Apartment Maintenance & Purchase (and taxes) – plan would cut all those by 50% from market rate, permanently, legally enforceable through future sales. This would produce 60% AMI in the RiverArch, possibly as low as 50% elsewhere. It would be the first affordable option for condos.
The watered down plan is bad. It keeps parking minimums in most of the city
Welcome to the roaring 2020’s! Time to pop some champagne and watch our city grow❤️🙌
The idea to develop above objection that accompanies defeat, please invite the next proposal: Thanks.
This is generally a good plan, though not a great one. It is probably the best plan possible, given the political opposition, which was fierce in the outer boroughs where city council members think they live in the suburbs with Single Family Homes only, even near subway lines. It has preserved their privileges where there are only bus lines. For some reason, they think cars are affordable, but homes should not be.
The full city council still has to vote, then even if approved, it’ll be a decade before we see if this really created new housing to meet the goals.
What we need is more bridges and tunnels into NJ to expand the NYC Metro area. It would open up so much more space
All housing starts as “Luxury” and then slowly drops down the market. The only difference is the material of the kitchen countertops.
Build, baby, build. If you want more housing, get rid of the green BS.