New York City’s notoriously long development approval process could get sped up for some projects if city voters back a handful of measures that will appear on their Election Day ballots in November.
New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Majority Leader Amanda Farías at an Oct. 7 rally against the ballot measures.
The ballot questions have the support of the real estate industry and have been championed by Mayor Eric Adams. But they have been the source of a power struggle with the New York City Council, which would lose some of its power to block what gets built.
“It’s a fairly consequential moment, because these opportunities don’t come along often,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, CEO and founder of developer MAG Partners. “We are in a housing emergency.”
The city has had its sights set on accelerating housing production throughout Adams’ administration, from his “moonshot” goal to build 500,000 new homes over 10 years to the citywide zoning reform dubbed City of Yes that passed last year.
Adams, who announced last month he wouldn’t seek reelection after a bribery scandal and running fourth in the polls, is making his final push to speed up housing production in the form of three questions on the ballot. The impetus to create more housing comes as the city’s supply of free-market units stands at its lowest level in decades, at 1.4%, and rents are near all-time highs.
The second ballot measure expedites the zoning process for city-funded affordable housing developments and forces city council districts that have contributed the lowest numbers of housing units to allow for more development. The third measure creates an accelerated land use review process for smaller developments and infrastructure projects.
The fourth ballot measure — and most controversial — creates an appeals board for affordable housing developments, removing the back-and-forth between the city council’s votes and the mayor’s veto for some projects that require rezoning.
The appeals board would be made up of the mayor, the city council speaker and the local borough president. It would review rezoning applications that were rejected or changed by the city council for affordable housing developments. A 2-1 vote could reverse the council’s decision.
The measure undercuts the existing process of member deference, under which council members follow the local representative’s vote. Critics of the policy argue it has led to imbalanced housing developments in neighborhoods where affordable housing is politically unpopular but necessary to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis.
“In many cases, it really starts and ends with that local city council person. They have a huge weight in the process,” Ariel Property Advisors founding partner Victor Sozio said. “If you don’t get that initial support, it’s kind of dead on arrival.”
The measures have faced noisy opposition from the city council, which has unsuccessfully attempted to get them removed from the ballot. Led by the council’s largely Republican Common Sense Caucus, some city council members claimed in a lawsuit that was dismissed last month that the measure violates state laws around environmental review.
“Ballot proposals 2, 3 and 4 are a threat to our communities getting what they deserve,” Majority Leader Amanda Farías said at a rally Tuesday outside City Hall, according to Spectrum News NY1.
Democrats, including council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Farías, who chairs the Progressive Caucus, also oppose Question 4. They implied that the measure takes away from local representatives’ leverage to influence what gets built in their communities as recently as this week.
That sentiment has already been reflected by some New Yorkers, who have previously said they don’t get enough input into rezonings. In the case of one Sheepshead Bay development, residents said they were tricked into signing agreements with one developer for a site to be turned into mixed-income housing, but it was later changed to become a homeless shelter.
Developers say it will make it easier for them to build affordable housing in more parts of the city, said Justin Pelsinger, CEO of housing developer Charney Cos.
“What we tend to see is neighborhoods that have strong opinions about not building more housing tend to probably also have strong politicians that mimic the voice of their communities,” he said. “What that ends up doing is just stopping housing from getting built.”
The second measure on the ballot creates an expedited process for affordable housing by allowing the Board of Standards and Appeals, an independent board designed to resolve zoning disputes, to waive zoning restrictions for city-supported affordable housing developments.
That same measure also allows the City Planning Commission to mandate that the 12 city districts producing the least housing would also be subject to the fast-tracked process.
The proposal reduces the influence of local politics for building income-restricted apartments in different neighborhoods, Pelsinger said.
“Getting bogged down to the Board of Standards and Appeals and City Planning is twofold,” he said. “One, it is a deterrent for people to even go seek anything, but it also is just an elongated process that takes even longer for housing to, generally speaking, get built.”
Ballot Measure 3 replaces the lengthy uniform land use review procedure for smaller housing projects in low-density neighborhoods that require rezoning with an expedited process.
The new procedure compresses zoning reviews into a 90-day review period, split into 60 days for the local community board and the borough president, plus a 30-day review by the City Planning Commission, which will have the final say.
That change could have the biggest impact of all the ballot measures, Regional Plan Association Vice President of Housing and Neighborhood Planning Moses Gates said.
“If you have to build a giant skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan or if you have to build a four-story apartment building instead of a three-story apartment building in Sheepshead Bay, it’s the same process,” he said. “As a result, we don’t get a lot of that missing-middle, small development that we could have gotten.”
The change to ULURP wouldn’t apply to major projects like the $2B Innovation QNS development that included 3,000 planned housing units in Long Island City. That development faced stringent local political opposition in a bruising ULURP campaign that resulted in approval after its developers agreed to keep more units affordable. But now, the project’s builders say it doesn’t work financially and have shelved it for the foreseeable future.
The fifth ballot measure would digitize and centralize the city’s map, which is fundamental to zoning and development decisions but currently only exists on physical paper and is split among the offices of separate borough presidents.
“Centralization would allow for greater efficiency, consistency and predictability,” said Casey Berkovitz, director of external affairs for the Charter Revision Commission, which put together the ballot measures. “The outdated nature of the city map adds delay, and thus cost, to the city’s operations.”
Even the sixth and final proposal — switching NYC’s elections from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, based on research showing higher voter turnout in election years that coincide with federal elections — will have consequences for housing, Gilmartin said.
“Housing policy is really shaped by who we elect,” she said. “When you increase participation, I think it makes the decision-making at the city level more accountable and more representative.”