New York faces a dire affordability crisis. It costs far too much to live here, and the biggest expense for most New Yorkers is housing. The Mamdani administration is laser-focused on creating a more affordable city, and affordable housing is at the center of our affordability agenda.
Our state policymakers in Albany have an opportunity to make a real dent in the housing crisis. Reforming the state’s environmental review process sounds wonky, but it is fundamentally about a critically important question: whether we are able to deliver a more affordable city.
Today, the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQRA, slows down desperately needed housing and makes housing more expensive when it is built. Even medium-sized housing proposals spend roughly two years in environmental review — a process that has been estimated to make each new apartment $82,000 more expensive. That’s more than $12 million for a relatively modest 150-apartment building!
Modernizing SEQRA as part of the state budget would ensure that we can deliver on Mayor Mamdani’s affordability agenda quickly, while preserving important safeguards and real environmental protections.
New Yorkers know we need to move quickly: every day that we spend on unnecessary paperwork or litigation is a day that New Yorkers suffer from the housing crisis. And the required studies — which stretch thousands of pages long – only tell us what we already know: that new housing near jobs, stores, and good transit is a win-win for the economy and the climate.
An analysis of proposals that would be streamlined by the governor’s proposal for SEQRA reform shows that less than 1% of projects in New York City had any environmental impacts at all. That same analysis found that not a single one of those proposals over the past 10 years had an impact on sewers, schools, or traffic conditions.
The state is considering a proposal with clear criteria for housing projects in New York City that would be exempted from the onerous environmental review process — proposals must be outside of coastal flooding and industrial zones, be less than a specific number of homes, depending on where in New York a project is, and with a limit on how much commercial space can be included in mixed-use projects.
In New York City, we have been hard at work to speed up affordable housing. We moved quickly to implement the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure and the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track earlier this year, which together can cut more than two years off the timeline to build affordable housing on our own land. But we cannot do it alone: only Albany holds the power to modernize SEQRA.
If the state approves these changes, New York City will be able to speed up too — our administration will ensure that rezoning applications can begin public review in six months or less. That means less time waiting, and giving local communities the ability to make their voices heard sooner. Just like the governor’s proposal to speed up environmental review, speeding up the city’s “pre-certification” timeline wouldn’t automatically approve anything — just help us get to the starting line sooner.
Modernizing SEQRA is a commonsense step to bring our regulations — which have not been meaningfully updated since the 1970s — into the 21st century. It will help add housing, fight sprawl, and create good jobs.
The mayor and our administration have been clear that we need these reforms to deliver a more affordable city. Now it’s time for state policymakers to act.
Bozorg is New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and planning.