The just-departed City Planning chair tells us what he learned in his time shaping the cityscape.
Dan Garodnick, a former city councilman who represented Manhattan’s East Side for 12 years, led the Department of City Planning under Mayor Eric Adams. Seen by many as a bright light in the administration, he shepherded through the City of Yes rezoning — the most significant set of zoning reforms in decades — and pushed for a suite of charter reforms designed to make housing production easier.
In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s victory, Garodnick announced he was stepping down from his position. Last month, Mamdani appointed Sideya Sherman to the role. On his way out, Garodnick spoke with Vital City about what he’d tell his successor, what comes next for housing and the policy levers that matter most.
Vital City: Imagine we had a tradition like presidents leaving notes to their successors. What would you want to convey to someone stepping into your role?
Dan Garodnick: I’d strongly encourage someone in my seat to go deep into the details and substance of the work. Zoning and everything else we do is dense and complicated. But at the same time, you need to speak with moral clarity and at a level of detail that’s accessible to most New Yorkers. This stuff is hard. It needs a translator. You need to be steeped in the details but also able to communicate them to a wider audience.
I’d also encourage them to invest time in the relationship with the City Council. They’re important players in the land use process, and that dynamic ideally works well. And I’d encourage them to build on our recent successes. We just took some of the biggest swings on housing that have ever been taken, and we got them done. There’s an opportunity to build on that.
Vital City: Is there anything you learned the hard way?
Dan Garodnick: One thing I learned walking into a city agency is that just because you give an instruction doesn’t mean it will be carried out in the way you anticipated — or at all. Managing an agency is itself a political process. You need single-minded purpose and determination to make sure things keep moving.
Vital City: City of Yes was a big swing — three pieces of legislation, plus charter reforms to make housing production easier. Does the Mamdani administration now need more policy changes, or is this mostly about executing with the tools already in hand?
Dan Garodnick: It’s a bit of both. There are definitely ways to take the important precedent of City of Yes and continue to add opportunities for housing supply through zoning. The mayor has been clear that’s a priority — whether it’s transit-oriented development or other approaches.
At the same time, you need to activate what you’ve already got. You need to make things easier to get built. That includes changes at the state level to environmental review, which will speed up the process before you even enter public review. And it includes changes the new mayor should make on the other end — regulatory approvals that would make it easier to get a building built or add an accessory dwelling unit after the public review process. So part of it is continuing to enable more supply, and part of it is making things easier and faster.
Vital City: Is there a big regulatory or legislative fix that you wanted to pursue but couldn’t?
Dan Garodnick: A really big one is now on the table: reform of the environmental review process, in the governor’s budget. That’s something that materially slows things up. When I was in the City Council, I thought the main risk for someone considering a big investment in New York was the politics — the volatility of the political environment. I now understand that while that’s true, there’s an equal amount of risk in the passage of time. Finding ways to shorten the process overall has an enormous impact on what projects actually proceed.
Vital City: The de Blasio administration picked specific neighborhoods for upzoning, and they happened to be lower-income neighborhoods where some residents feared development. The Adams administration went citywide. Now Mamdani is looking at various upzonings. What are the strategic considerations — and how big an obstacle are historic districts in wealthier parts of the city?
Dan Garodnick: It’s important for the city’s fair housing goals to enable housing in parts of the city that historically haven’t seen it. That was central to City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, and it should continue to be central to the Mamdani administration’s mission. In recent years, 10 of our 59 community districts produced as much housing as the other forty-nine combined. There are neighborhoods that have been functionally shut off to housing production. That will now start to change.
The way to build a thoughtful new program is to state some principles, like we did with City of Yes, and make them big and broadly applicable. That could mean focusing on areas with great transit access, or areas that have been the lowest producers of housing over time. There are a variety of ways to think about it, but stating a principle and applying it broadly is very useful.
Vital City: New York City contains what are essentially suburbs — parts of Staten Island, eastern Queens and sections of the Bronx that are indistinguishable from Westchester. Is single-family zoning compatible with being part of New York City?
Dan Garodnick: You want to respect the character of neighborhoods. People have a certain expectation for where they live, and I think that’s worth acknowledging. On the other hand, there are lots of ways to enable some amount of housing even in lower-density neighborhoods that aren’t harmful and that open doors to opportunities that don’t exist today. We need to do that because we’re in a longstanding crisis that’s been going on for so long that people have accepted it as a fact of life.
Vital City: People say two things that seem contradictory: “It’s so expensive nobody can afford to live here,” and “We have far too little housing to meet demand.” How do you square those?
Dan Garodnick: They’re easily squared. With housing scarcity, you get high demand and everything that goes along with it: exorbitant rents, displacement pressures, homelessness and a real imbalance of power between landlords and tenants. When you’re looking to negotiate your lease and you have no other options, you’re out of luck. When you need a basic repair, you have very little leverage. We need to add considerably more supply to relieve that pressure and create options for people who live here now and who want to live here in the future. We’ve gotten so far away from a healthy environment that we need to take significant steps to address it.
Vital City: Is all housing that’s produced essentially equal, or does it need to be tagged “affordable” with income bands and protections to truly count?
Dan Garodnick: It’s important to create affordable housing to ensure that people of low and moderate means have a place to live. But it’s also important to create market-rate housing — because otherwise you have people with resources chasing after homes where people are already living, driving up costs and creating gentrification pressures. And the city can’t just subsidize its way out of this crisis. We need all the tools, both market-rate and affordable.
Vital City: What drives construction costs up in New York? Nobody can wave their hands and make Manhattan land cheaper. What’s actually in a policymaker’s control?
Dan Garodnick: The things that are in the public’s control are the opportunities the law presents to build, the incentives that exist for housing creation and the speed at which you can enable something to go from idea to actualization. Those have been central in what has or hasn’t happened over time.
Vital City: Should union labor be required for City-subsidized affordable housing construction?
Dan Garodnick: In an ideal world, you can do it all. But there are obvious challenges, and the math will answer the question.
Vital City: There’s a lot of discussion about 485-x and whether its labor standards are incentivizing buildings of 99 units and below to avoid the higher pay rates that kick in at a hundred units. What’s your read?
Dan Garodnick: We need to give this one some time. Time will tell what is viable and what the results of the tax policy are. We need to be clear-eyed about what it does. But it’s too early to come to any clear conclusions.
Vital City: In the old world of spot rezonings, a developer would go to the City Council with a proposal, the council would demand more affordable units at lower income bands, and the developer would say it doesn’t pencil out — even though their first offer probably more than penciled out. The public never really knows the real math. Do you agree?
Dan Garodnick: It’s also true that different projects have different considerations for what makes them viable. So yes, in some circumstances it’s hard to suss out the real picture and the absolute final line between viable and not. But if a single dollar of public money is going into a project, the public should have absolute transparency as to what’s going on.
Vital City: Henry Grabar wrote a piece for us about how much in the building code inflates costs and adds complexity. Have you had a chance to scour the code for the small things that add up?
Dan Garodnick: We did some of that when I was in the City Council — looking at a set of rules that each individually made sense at one time, but taken together started creating unnecessary obstacles and felt ridiculous. That should be a constant part of the agenda, and I’d encourage it to be a priority for this Council, too.
Vital City: Forget about the incremental approach of City of Yes for a moment. If you were starting from scratch and building a new zoning code, what would it look like?
Dan Garodnick: You’d start from a great transit system that works and is reliable, and you’d build most densely where transit was most accessible. You’d prioritize housing over cars in construction and make sure your neighborhoods were walkable, filled with parks and schools and everything you need within a small radius of your home.
Zoning has a purpose — to ensure that uses that don’t belong together stay apart. But it’s also had a real limiting effect, which we’re now starting to address. One thing we found with City of Yes for Economic Opportunity: the definition of manufacturing has changed enormously since 1961. Back then, manufacturing was, for all intents and purposes, a cement factory. Today it could be a 3D printer or a jewelry maker — something that could easily live in a commercial district. We made that change, the largest expansion of manufacturing in sixty years. Zoning has a purpose, but it needs to evolve with the times and reflect a modern economy.
Vital City: New York puts a heavy share of the property tax burden on commercial property and tries to lighten the load on residential. But within the residential classes, renters bear a disproportionate burden — they just don’t see it broken out because it’s passed along in their rent. Is the way we tax rental apartment buildings itself a drag on housing production?
Dan Garodnick: It’s one of the reasons you need tax incentives to make housing production happen in New York.
Vital City: What are the realistic prospects for property tax reform? People have been talking about it forever.
Dan Garodnick: Any time you change the property tax system, it’s a zero-sum experience. Any mayor who takes it on will need to do so sensitively and carefully because it affects real human beings with certain economic expectations for their families.
Vital City: Mamdani is embracing a lot of pro-development, abundance-style policy ideas while also pushing for a rent freeze and using landlords as a punching bag — think about the boxing-style posters for hearings about “Rental Ripoffs.” Good strategy?
Dan Garodnick: I happen to think that tenant protections and housing supply go hand in hand. It’s good to advocate for rules that make sure tenants aren’t being abused or taken advantage of. And at the same time, adding housing supply is another form of tenant protection, because when tenants have a little more leverage, they’re not subject to the same sorts of mistreatment.
Vital City: Talk to a hundred economists and 99 will tell you rent stabilization isn’t great economic policy. Talk to a hundred New York politicians and all of them will defend it. Is there any world in which it gets meaningfully scrutinized?
Dan Garodnick: It’s here to stay.
Vital City: Right now, vacancy is around 1.4%. But if we were suddenly at 10%, the system would still be defended, wouldn’t it?
Dan Garodnick: We are far from being out of our emergency condition. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which anyone would advocate for rent stabilization to end.
Vital City: We’ve published pieces by Alex Armlovich and Howard Slatkin that both argue for a less blunt instrument than the Rent Guidelines Board’s single increase or freeze. There are many different types of rent-stabilized buildings and landlords. Is the current tool too simplistic?
Dan Garodnick: If the city had the tools to do this with more nuance, it certainly would help, because right now everybody is treated exactly the same, and that may or may not be fair. I remember representing 30,000 rent-stabilized tenants in Stuyvesant Town. The owner of those buildings — whether it was MetLife or Tishman Speyer — was in a very different condition than a small landlord in Brooklyn or Queens who owned one or two buildings. They’re only the same insofar as the law that covers them happens to be the same. Everything else about their circumstances is quite different.