New York City mayor Eric Adams’s indictment on September 26 came just a day after the City Planning Commission approved, by a ten to three vote, the signature land-use initiative of his mayoralty, the “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity” (CHO) zoning proposal. CHO would moderately liberalize zoning restrictions to achieve incremental progress towards Adams’s “moonshot” goal of constructing 500,000 housing units in the city over a ten-year period.
The city council must now vote on CHO before the end of the year. With Adams under indictment and his administration facing numerous investigations, it’s hardly a propitious time to present a controversial zoning proposal to the council. Adams is both unpopular and tenuously clinging to office. Under these circumstances, council members are less likely to fear future retribution if they cross the mayor, and more likely to be attentive to critics demanding changes that would gut the proposal.
On the other hand, CHO has many supporters. The “Yes to Housing” coalition includes 140 non-profit and for-profit signatories, coordinated by the New York Housing Conference, an influential advocacy group for affordable housing. Several council members joined the coalition at a rally for CHO on the day of Adams’s indictment.
There is also a substantive case that, however flawed this proposal might be, the city government must take action to increase housing production. Preliminary data show that New York City added 100,000 in nonfarm employment in the year ending August 2024.
True, market rents fell slightly in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and western Queens, compared with last summer’s record levels. That’s because the rush to secure building permits before the “Section 421a” property tax exemption program expired in June 2022 is now leading to a moderate bump in housing completions, boosting supply.
But market rents remain very high, and vacancy rates are at rock bottom. New housing permits fell off sharply in 2023 as the real-estate industry awaited a 421a replacement that made new rental housing economically feasible. The tax benefit ultimately enacted in 2024 by the state legislature, called “485-x,” was not as generous as 421a and was designed to work effectively with the specific provisions of CHO.
Getting housing permit levels to rise requires relaxing rigid zoning restrictions on building new housing, enabling 485-x to work. One hopes the city council is not wholly unaware of the need to reform zoning. New York, supposedly a beacon of progressivity, would not want to be outshone by so many other city governments in making meaningful reforms.
All that suggests the council will allow CHO to pass, with changes that respond to the most vocal critics. Some of the revisions the council might make are foreshadowed by dissenting City Planning Commission members’ comments. Gail Benjamin, a former staff director of the council’s Land Use Committee, voted yes but criticized the proposal to eliminate off-street parking requirements for residences. Her concerns will probably be shared by council members from low-density parts of the city, where auto ownership is high. The same council members may also agree with Fred Cerullo, a Staten Islander and “no,” who argued for “protecting neighborhood character.”
Those concerns can be addressed by neighborhood carve-outs. Retaining high off-street parking requirements in some areas makes new housing costlier and less likely to be built. That makes the proposed zoning changes allowing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and small multifamily buildings in low-density areas infeasible on many lots. There would not be much further impact on housing production to carve out those provisions in the same areas as well. However, such carve-outs would continue to exempt New York’s mostly white, mostly affluent outlying areas from sharing the burden of housing the city’s growing number of households. Self-proclaimed progressives on the council will need to consider whether they want to uphold arguably exclusionary zoning.
A second negative vote at the Planning Commission came from Leah Goodridge, the appointee of Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. He will become mayor pending a special election if Adams resigns, so Goodridge’s dissent may take on added significance. Goodridge, backed by Juan Camilo Osorio, appointee of the Brooklyn Borough President, characterized the plan as a giveaway to real-estate developers and demanded that the proposed Universal Affordability Preference (UAP) provide for a guarantee that “affordable” units would be included in new buildings.
Under the proposal enacted by the Commission, the UAP provides a 20 percent increase in permitted floor area, in exchange for making 20 percent of new units “affordable” to households at an income threshold called “60 percent of AMI,” which is currently $83,860 for a family of three. Goodridge would also like to see the affordable units targeted to households at even lower income levels.
The bind the council finds itself in is that if it lowers that threshold, the result might be less, not more affordable housing. Property owners always have the option of reverting to the current zoning, which allows them to build without any “affordable” units at all or, what is more likely, only the affordable units required to obtain a tax exemption under 485-x, which sets a higher income threshold. Less housing would be built overall. The council may make Goodridge’s suggested change anyway, to demonstrate ideological purity, but the city’s renters will lose out as a result.
In summary, Adams’s political weakness makes him unable to deploy threats and inducements to achieve city council approval of his CHO zoning amendment. Rather, the council will likely try to craft a set of changes that please opponents without alienating supporters. That revision would leave the city worse off than if the City Planning Commission’s approved amendment had simply been passed. Still, the mayor’s plan seems to have enough political support to ensure some of its potential benefits will be achieved.
New York City’s housing crisis staggers on and awaits the election next year of presumably a new mayor. Let’s hope that politician understands better than Adams the need to conserve his or her popularity, successfully manage relations with the city council, and accomplish meaningful change.
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