Only policy nerds like myself are really familiar with the acronym “ULURP,” for “Uniform Land Use Review Procedure,” the process by which significant land-use changes necessary for development have long been enacted. But it’s time to get excited for a new, buzzy term: ELURP, the expedited version of this process, brought to us by New Yorkers’ approval of housing-related ballot proposals in last year’s election.
Already, a proposed development in Mott Haven is going through the expedited process, which is meant to condense timelines to about 90 days for potential approval. This is both a test and potential win for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned hard on housing affordability. Mamdani made another big move this week in appointing Sideya Sherman, the former head of the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, to be director of City Planning and to chair the City Planning Commission.
If Mamdani and his deputy mayor for housing, Leila Borzog, are the big-picture planners for the mayor’s ambitious housing goals, Sherman is now the executor, tasked with shepherding the actual projects and initiatives intended to realize this vision. Along with coordinating actions by a multitude of city agencies, she will have the somewhat unenviable job of selling local communities and the City Council on actual developments — not theoretical “housing” but this building, in this spot, with this many units. This will involve wrangling both housing advocates, neighborhood groups and developers to arrive at sensible decisions on the details that count: densities, affordability set-asides, tax breaks and so on.
That the lack of housing in the city is a dire problem is well-understood and broadly accepted – but that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to be on board with the solutions. I can envision protests both from denser neighborhoods that will argue that they’re already doing their fair share, and from less-dense neighborhoods that will argue that adding units will ruin their neighborhood’s character and drive people out. Both may have valid complaints but neither is exactly right, for the simple reason that a problem of this magnitude requires everyone to chip in. That is, no neighborhood is off the hook.
Another potential pitfall could come if Mamdani and Sherman focus the bulk of their attention on the creation of affordable housing. This might seem a little counterintuitive, since affordable housing is what is most needed and what Mamdani ran on addressing. But research has consistently shown that the creation of housing across all income levels, including market-rate housing, is the most effective way to drive down spiraling costs for everyone.
The mechanics of this are relatively straightforward. New York City, like all large cities, has a sizable population of people who make more than its middle class but still face financial constraints when it comes to housing. Think of a couple who jointly earn $250,000 a year, have some debts and are thinking about children. They may not have $60,000 in cash for a down payment to outright buy an apartment, and they’re not going to drop $9,000 a month on an ocean view luxury rental. But they can probably pretty easily afford a $4,000 one-bedroom in Manhattan.
In a head-to-head bidding war between this couple and one making $90,000, the more affluent couple is, obviously, going to win, perhaps by offering $4,100 per month. That means that the $90,000 a year couple then has to either face higher rents for that same category of apartments, or to move down to the next lower tier of housing, where they outbid families making $75,000 a year, and so on, all the way down. Put another way, if upper-middle and high-income families are competing for the same housing stock as middle and low-income families, the price for the latter will be higher even if they can get the housing.
This is why even new luxury housing can put downward pressure on rents – all additions to supply change the workings of supply and demand more broadly. Think of it this way: New developments might have some designated affordability set-asides, but most housing will still be market-rate. And rent-stabilized apartments in the city are not income-capped, which means that higher-income people can still compete for these affordable homes, icing out lower-income tenants while the market-rate rents are driven up by competition at large. One way to counteract that is to build more homes for wealthier people as well as for the middle class. The affluent households who can afford to pay more for more space or better amenities will gravitate to the new luxe developments, easing the squeeze on housing that could be more accessible to middle- and low-income people.
A push for more upper-end housing is probably not going to land well with segments of Mamdani’s political base and the tenant organizing sphere, for whom luxury developments are seen as engines of gentrification. It is, of course, true that the development of only high-end or luxury properties is not by itself going to do much for most tenants, but the reality is that these buildings going up is still good news for rental housing costs across the board. The Mamdani administration is going to have to be ready to defend the idea, not just from community organizers and advocates but the local councilmembers who channel them.
On this front, one of the other housing amendments appears to already be showing some success in curtailing the power of recalcitrant individual councilmembers to derail proposed developments. One of five Republicans on the City Council, Vickie Paladino, surprised observers this week by changing course and supporting a rezoning to build an eight-story tower in the Bay Terrace neighborhood in her Queens district. In a video explaining her decision, Paladino explicitly referenced the new affordable housing appeals board — made up of the mayor, Council speaker and borough president — created by the fourth ballot question, which is able to overrule Council votes against such developments.
Individual members never had any formal ability to kill projects, but the Council had long operated under an informal local member veto, meaning that members could block projects in their districts. There were already cracks in that system, with some members reversing opposition as it became clear that the full Council was going to move forward on a project anyway. But the appeals board practically renders a Council rejection of an affordable housing development not fully moot but at least much less definitive.
All in all, this leaves Mamdani with a notable confluence of factors. He has concrete additional powers to force additional housing development, coming not just from the ballot measures but from the sweeping “City of Yes” pro-housing zoning changes adopted under Eric Adams. At this early point in his term he has a wellspring of political capital to spend and no favors owed (yet) to the city’s corporate and real estate interests. He has a supportive governor in his corner and a Council that understands the way the winds are blowing. And practically speaking he has a mandate from his own voter base to aggressively pursue this housing agenda, which he ran on and which they expect. Issues like the luxury housing point will take some finesse to navigate, but the iron is hot.
If Mamdani can strike it hard and fast enough, using the tools left to him by voters and his predecessor, he may be remembered as the mayor that began wrenching NYC back from the housing brink.