URBAN AGENDA: A City of Yes and a City for All: The Mayor and City Council’s grand zoning bargain

Today, the City Council will be voting on the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, one of the mayor’s citywide zoning reform proposals. If passed, it would be the largest reconsideration of the city’s zoning code in more than half a century: no small feat for a politically embattled, deeply unpopular mayor. 

The City of Yes has been making its way through the city’s notoriously complex land use review process for over a year. At the onset, the zoning package included many commonsense reforms to the city’s zoning code: tweaks to residential zoning that would allow for modest apartment buildings along commercial corridors; removal of minimum parking requirements for newly built apartment buildings; an allowance for slightly bigger buildings across the city if they include new affordable housing; lessen the barriers for office to residential conversion; modest increases in density around transit in low density areas; and the legalization of “accessary dwelling units (ADUs)”, the wonky term for basement or attic apartments that many New Yorkers already live in. 

The Adams administration’s PR blitz around the City of Yes has painted it as a solution to the city’s housing crisis and its extremely tight (1.4 percent) vacancy rate. 

Individually and together, the zoning changes in the package would have made the city more livable over time. But, on their own, zoning reforms cannot address our housing crises. Even in an ideal market environment, construction takes time, meaning that it will be years until units built as a result of the City of Yes will be ready for move in. And very soon, we will enter an uncertain market environment, to say the least: threats to impose tariffs on construction materials and conduct mass deportations, as well as stubbornly high commercial mortgage rates will make it difficult to build, no matter how welcoming a local zoning environment may be.

Further, even if those post-City of Yes units actually get built, they will inevitably be too expensive for low- and even many middle-income New Yorkers, without added tax incentives or subsidies. As the Community Service Society of New York demonstrated in a recent report, a typical renter household in New York City earns just 59 percent of the Area Median Income, meaning most renters are low-income. The package does include a small affordability provision, which allows developers to increase the size of their buildings by 20 percent, if the added apartments are permanently affordable. But the share of affordable units it would generate, even under ideal conditions, would not make much of a dent in the city’s rent burdened and unhoused population.

In order to push the City of Yes through, Mayor Adams had to garner buy-in from the City Council. The post-negotiation package, which the Council will be voting on today, reflects both the best and worst political impulses of our city.

First, the good—and it is very good, indeed: Under Speaker Adrienne Adams’ leadership, the City Council was able to leverage the mayor’s need for a political win to trade its support for more immediate fixes to the city’s affordability crisis. 

Dubbed “City for All,” the City Council’s addition to the City of Yes is a massive $5 billion commitment for housing and infrastructure capital and other spending that will protect residents long before the 80,000 units promised in City of Yes materialize. It includes $2 billion for development and preservation of the city’s existing affordable housing stock, like Housing Development Fund Corporation co-ops, Mitchell-Lamas, and public housing. 

City for All will help keep people in their homes with funding for public housing rental arrears and initiatives like the Anti-Harassment Tenant Protection program. It will also re-house people who are homeless with additional funding for CityFHEPS, the city’s rental assistance program.

While this $5 Billion commitment addresses some of my concerns about the City of Yes’ lack of immediate relief for low-income New Yorkers, the negotiation between the Mayor and City Council unfortunately resulted in some negative changes to the package. Yielding to its most conservative and protectionist members, the Council watered down some of the best aspects of the mayor’s proposal. The final package limits where ADUs can be legalized, leaving countless basement apartments in legal limbo, resulting in unsafe living conditions for many tenants. It also preserves parking requirements and limits on multifamily construction in the city’s low-density neighborhoods, severely curtailing the impact of both proposed changes. 

If the City of Yes passes the City Council today, it will take a long time for us to see its impact, especially in the impending era of political uncertainty, which will undoubtedly have an impact on the city’s real estate market. However, many of the City for All’s spending priorities—like additional rental assistance and rent arrear relief—should have a more immediate impact. 

Still, the question remains: with likely withdrawal of already insufficient resources, are City of Yes and City for All enough?

David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.

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