Mayor Eric Adams’s citywide rezoning proposal and the city council’s equitable housing plans have finally passed, working in tandem to combat the city’s rampant housing crisis.
The goal is to combine the mayor’s ambitious zoning changes with investments that will create and preserve affordable housing especially on New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) campuses, homeownership, neighborhood infrastructure for sewers, streets, and open space, tenant protections, housing agencies, and new neighborhood planning efforts.
In sum, it is one of the most significant housing plans in New York City history, with an estimated 82,000 new units to be developed over the next 15 years.
The city is currently facing a severe housing crisis, with a citywide housing vacancy rate of 1.4% — the lowest percentage since 1968. The lack of housing is greatest for the most affordable homes, and most New York City renters are rent-burdened (paying 30% or more of their income on rent). Record homelessness, rising evictions, and widespread housing insecurity are impacting New Yorkers across the city, resulting in less safety and stability for communities.
Adams first announced his City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (CHO) in 2023, which was met widely with skepticism from other electeds and the public. The proposal called for citywide zoning reform to allow various entities to build more housing in every city council district. The City Council held a two-day hearing on Oct. 21 and 22, thoroughly reviewing the CHO proposal.
As part of the CHO agreement, city leadership committed $5 billion in funding for their City for All housing plan, which includes a $1 billion contribution from Governor Kathy Hochul. The funding also includes $2 billion towards Mitchell-Lama developments and NYCHA housing, $2 billion for stormwater and drainage systems upgrades, $3 million to assist the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in designing new flood maps that guide flood mitigation, $215 million for City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) vouchers, and $7.6 million to sustain the Anti-HarassmentTenant Protection (AHTP) program.
The city council voted to pass a modified version of the Mayor’s City of Yes plan and the city council’s City for All plan on Thursday, Dec. 5.
“After 63 years since the 1961 Zoning Code, after 200 community board meetings, after 1,064 pages of an environmental impact statement, after more than 150 beautiful member organizations of the Yes to Housing Coalition came together,” said Adams. “After 35 hours of testimony at the City Planning Commission and at the City Council, after 80 percent of New Yorkers made clear they wanted action, and of course today, after 31 positive votes, we can finally say that our city, New York City, is a City of Yes.”
Many city electeds and mayoral hopefuls are in support of the pro-housing reforms, but some have reservations about the proposals.
Former Bronx Assemblymember Michael Blake, who just announced his official bid for mayor next year, said that the City of Yes proposal is “commendable,” if implemented effectively. Blake is a homeowner and a small business owner, who founded the KAIROS: Democracy Project. He said he’s committed to ensuring that more New Yorkers can purchase homes and revising the area median income (AMI).
“We must protect tenants and renters, while we equally increase the opportunities for people to become homeowners and for responsible developers to truly create working class and affordable housing options,” said Blake. “To build more housing, which is essential because we do not have enough homes and rooms for our New Yorkers, the city and state must create fair and conscious-minded incentives for developers to prioritize keeping working New Yorkers in their communities and equally utilize labor union members who are paid livable wages.”
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso spoke out about the decision to exempt R1-2A, R2A, and R3A contextual districts from City of Yes — or low-density neighborhoods of large, single-family detached and semi-detached homes on spacious lots. He said there will be effectively no new housing options for people to live in these communities as a result, keeping certain neighborhoods exclusive and segregated.
According to data from Village Preservation that analyzed neighborhoods between 2010 and 2020, “areas of the city with higher increases in new housing overwhelmingly tended to become whiter, less Black, and less Hispanic — both in the aggregate and in the overwhelming majority of individual neighborhoods.” The data also showed that the areas with lower or more moderate increases in housing units were less likely to displace Black and Brown residents. Nearly all the “high housing growth areas” went through rezoning changes to stimulate greater housing development, said the data.
“Mayor Bloomberg contextually zoned already low-density neighborhoods, making it even harder to build new housing, and now, by exempting the same neighborhoods from the City of Yes proposal, Mayor Adams and the City Council are choosing to make the same mistakes,” said Reynoso in a statement. “The housing pressure on every other neighborhood will go up – which means if Queens or Staten Island doesn’t grow, Brooklyn is asked to do more than our fair share.”
This week at a press conference at City Hall, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and housing advocates highlighted their funding commitments to their City For All housing plan and discussed City of Yes. Deputy City Council Speaker Diana Ayala said that it was imperative for council members to come up with a complementary housing plan to City of Yes because passing zoning changes alone couldn’t address the housing crisis as a whole.
“I am especially proud that our City For All plan prioritizes funding for public housing residents, whose living conditions have not been enough of a priority. That was really important to us. We really pushed for that,” said Ayala. “I represent the largest public housing stock in the entire city and continue to be very disappointed by the state of our public housing.”
Barika Williams, the executive director at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), said that it was crucial to include every single neighborhood in the solutions for affordable housing, homeownership, housing production, building conditions in NYCHA, and affordable rents. She credited the city council and advocates for fighting for more deep affordability citywide.
“The council really fought for so that we could get the full affordability that we needed, including mapping [Mandatory Inclusionary Housing] MIH Option 3, which is deep affordability as a standalone,” said Williams. “I know that seems numbers and wonky but that’s the difference between rents that are $2,500 or $2,800, which no one in the South Bronx is affording, versus units that are down below $1,800 that actually reaches our families.”
Public attorneys and housing advocates also commended the City for All plans for bolstering tenant protections and combating discrimination against CityFHEPS voucher holders.
“The historic inclusion of critical tenant protections in the Council’s ‘City for All’ plan represents a significant step in combating the displacement that has long accompanied rezoning and development in New York City,” said Chief Attorney of the Civil Practice at The Legal Aid Society Adriene Holder. “By strengthening and expanding CityFHEPS to keep tenants housed in communities and restoring funding to the Anti-Harassment Tenant Protection program, alongside other tenant-focused initiatives, ‘City for All’ offers the holistic and responsible housing plan that New Yorkers deserve and expect from their leaders at City Hall.”
[updated Fri, Dec. 6]