Opinion: A vote for more homes

In a contentious mayoral race in New York City, one of the few things all serious candidates vigorously agree on is the need to build housing. Half a million homes seems to be the magic number – and Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, has said he wants to build “Tokyo-levels” of density. 

Getting there will require the next mayor to confront the city’s feisty NIMBY interests, who have exhibited a stranglehold over new development in their districts for decades.  

While New York may be defined by its skyscrapers, much of its land mass is still only zoned for one- to two-family buildings. From 2014 to 2024, 12 of New York’s Community Districts added as much housing as the other 47 combined. The numbers are particularly sobering for affordable housing: in the past two years, the top ten City Council districts added 751 units of affordable housing on average each year, while the bottom ten averaged only three units. 

In November, New Yorkers will get a rare direct say on the future of housing production across the city. In addition to electing a mayor, New Yorkers will vote on a package of revisions to the City Charter, a document informally known as New York City’s constitution. The revisions make it easier and faster for City Hall to get housing built across the five boroughs – yes, even over the objections of the NIMBYs. 

The revisions are a necessary course correction to a broken land use process in which neighbors with enough time, or money, can in effect kill new buildings.

The city’s zoning code determines what can be built where. Last year, the Adams administration orchestrated an up-zoning of much of the city through its “City of Yes” initiative, eking out 80,000 more homes. But we are still a long way off from half a million.

To get there, developers will inevitably have to apply for zoning changes for their projects, through the city’s laborious Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP): a seven-month roadshow in which neighbors, community boards and local politicians all weigh in. The process culminates in a vote by the City Council, in which the Council “defers” to the local member’s decision on whether the building should proceed.

Anything that changes the City Map – amazingly, still a collection of 8,000 paper maps from the 1890s – has to go through ULURP. The same process applies to luxury mega-towers, low-rise affordable housing and even simple changes to the street grade.    

This well-intentioned system was codified through successive revisions to the City Charter in 1975 and 1989, in part as a reaction to the top-down urban renewal schemes championed by Robert Moses and his contemporaries. While local control sounds like a good thing in theory, there were concerns from the start about how decentralizing power to neighborhoods might undermine the mayor’s ability to meet citywide needs. Where would essential facilities like jails – which neighborhoods tend to reject – be placed?

Fast forward 35 years: these fears were well-founded, and if anything, understated. It’s not just jails that neighborhoods might oppose – but also senior housing, blood banks, solar panels, and anything that changes local “character,” which is often just a thinly-veiled euphemism for preserving homogeneity. The 1975 and 1989 City Charter updates stopped brown and Black neighborhoods from getting bulldozed. But they also inadvertently asphyxiated new development in the city’s wealthier and whiter enclaves, in effect perpetuating segregation across the city.  

The ULURP process places City Council members in a difficult bind: those that support new housing are often penalized in the polls by small but highly motivated groups of NIMBYs. In 2023, Democratic Council Member Marjorie Velázquez infamously lost her seat in the Bronx to a Republican challenger, after she supported a mixed-use housing development that would create 349 units, including 168 permanently affordable homes. She also received death threats, was burglarized and had to obtain police protection.

The Velázquez incident was a wake-up call that forced the question of how we balance neighborhood-say with city needs. In December 2024, then-First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer convened a Charter Revision Commission – stacked with respected affordable housing experts – and asked them to come up with a plan to change the City Charter to enable more housing production. 

Some opponents tried to frame the Commission as a misguided power play from a weak Adams administration. But the Commission has repeatedly asserted its independence and has now come back with a set of four clear housing reforms, which will help the city’s housing market operate more efficiently and equitably. 

Question 1 creates a fast-track approval for publicly funded affordable housing, including a mechanism to bypass City Council members in the twelve districts that produced the least affordable housing over the last five-year period. 

Question 2 creates a fast-track approval for “modest” housing projects – think new buildings under 45 feet – allowing small developers to take on projects that would never be possible today.

Question 3 creates an appeals board, consisting of the mayor, the City Council speaker, and the borough president, any two of whom can override the objections of a local council member. 

Question 4 finally digitizes the city map, so developers and city staff don’t have to waste hours going back and forth on hand-drawn maps from the 19th century. 

No one proposes returning to the dictatorial Moses era, but it has become clear that the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction and some well-crafted limits on local control are vital for New York City to succeed. 

New York is now the world’s second-most expensive housing market, following only Monaco, a playground for the ultra wealthy. In this time of deep crisis, New Yorkers must see through the party infighting and vote yes on all four questions. If we want half a million units, that will mean new homes in every neighborhood. We should welcome those neighbors with open arms and give the next mayor, whoever that will be, the power they need to get building.