Update: The “City of Yes” housing plan has been approved since the initial publication of this story.
Today, the City Council is expected to pass Mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” housing plan, the last and most important plank in a three-pronged effort that also includes economic opportunity and carbon neutrality components. This comes after months of public hand-wringing that included some heavy opposition from some community boards and local NIMBY activists, plus weeks of closed-door negotiations between legislators and city officials.
In the end, what gets voted on today is substantially similar, but less robust, than the first version of the plan, keeping in some parking mandates on a tiered system and shrinking some other bits like transit-oriented development. Ultimately, the plan in its current form is expected to create about 80,000 additional units over the next 15 years, around a fifth less than the initial target of over 100,000.
Even as the plan’s shepherds bask in the light of victory, there’s one little inconvenient factoid that most are keen to paper over: this plan that the administration had to fight tooth and nail over for months — which ran the gauntlet of long City Council negotiations, outer-borough protests, and emerged battered and debilitated to fall across the finish line — is just not that expansive. Yes, it is the city’s most ambitious pro-housing legislation in a very long time, not just an individual rezoning or project but a fundamental change to the city’s zoning approach and construction philosophy, but that was a very, very low bar to clear.
City leaders have spent decades doing little to spur housing construction citywide, which was at least better than what happened before that: to actually restrict the ability for developers to build more housing and engage in the type of mixed-use development that had characterized NYC’s urban landscape. As City Planning Director Dan Garodnick — a popular former Council member who helmed the push to get “City of Yes” passed — eloquently wrote in Vital City, lawmakers and city officials in the middle of the last century, driven by a variety of aims (ranging from well-meaning concerns over quality of life to racist and classist efforts to keep neighborhoods static), panicked and moved to squash development.
This culminated in the 1961 zoning resolution that “City of Yes” is in many ways geared to overturn. By consequence, a lot of the legislation’s main objectives are to some extent turning back the clock, not moving us forward to a particularly bold vision commensurate with the scale of the crisis, which has seen us under-construct housing for decades and hit a vacancy rate of under 1% for all apartments under $2,400 in monthly asking rent. Effectively, NYC has almost nothing on the market at any given time in a realm that low or middle-income bands could afford.
We tend to think of the consequences here on a somewhat individual level — I’m venturing a guess that almost everyone reading this knows at least one person or one family that has left or is considering leaving the city on account of rent costs — but there are significant long-term social and political consequences. A city with a relatively trapped low-income class that can’t afford to move but is increasingly squeezed of its quality of life, paired with an existing middle class that can’t afford to live here but can afford to leave, is not a sustainable model.
This also has political consequences. As journalists, analysts, and commentators ponder how Trump managed such a sharp increase in vote share in NYC — at 30%, certainly still far from a majority, but an over-ten-point swing from his results in 2016 — one explanation is cost. Across the country, voters pointed to high costs of living as one of the primary reasons that they voted for Trump, and NYC was no exception. To state the obvious, housing is the most salient and significant cost for many New Yorkers, which is another way of saying that you could draw a line between lack of housing and an anti-incumbency right-wing turn among the city’s voting population, especially when the anger over these costs can be supercharged with other weaponized narratives — that migrants are taking up housing, and so on.
I don’t say all this to rain on anyone’s parade. These realities don’t change the fact that this is still the most significant step forward in over half a century in terms of pushing the proliferation of housing that the city so desperately needs. My point is this is just one tack in what should be a broad and aggressive push to fully reverse course and treat a lack of housing more as an emergency than just a long-term policy goal. To their credit, despite watering down parts of “City of Yes,” the Council seemed to recognize that zoning is just one of the cylinders that have to get fired to get us where we need to be and put forward a more funding- and affordability-heavy framework they titled “City for All.”
That proposal was sometimes called a Council response or alternative to “City of Yes,” but I always thought of it more as a complement or an expansion. Indeed, the Council won some $5 billion in investments from the city for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and infrastructural updates, among other things, along with some affordability-focused policy shifts, while also moving forward with ‘City of Yes.’ I continue to think that the killing of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ambitious 2023 housing initiative was a significant error and a big missed opportunity to compel the building of more housing, not just in the city but around the state.
Lawmakers and city officials can take a victory lap, sure. It’s a hard-fought win. But let’s not forget this is the first few miles in a marathon, one we need to complete to maintain the viability of the city as a whole.
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