Mayor Eric Adams directed a commission to create a blueprint that would allow development projects to happen faster and cost less. The NYC Economic Development and Housing committee, a known entity that creates opportunities for the use of public assets to assist the real estate industry in the creation of projects to make money, working with Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) a nonprofit organization, organized a report to address Adams’ agenda.
They made recommendations regarding changes in both the law and City and State policies regarding rezoning applications for development. Their main justification for such changes is to allow developers to build faster and cheaper development projects that are subject to review and to allow more projects to be “as of right” which requires no review at all. Their thinking is the 100,000 homeless population is a result of not enough housing, completely ignoring the fact that most new development projects have an average of 30-50 percent vacancy rates and the rise in homeless population is correlated to the rise in development projects.
Sidebar: There is a new study out which shows that development actually exacerbates unaffordability in urban housing markets. “Upzoning is far from the progressive policy tool it has been sold to be. It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations.” “…the ultimate beneficiaries from zoning and building deregulation are landlords and developers.” “A recent study by Yonah Freemark found that upzoning in Chicago led to higher, not lower, housing prices, while having no discernible impact on local housing supply. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-09/-build-more-housing-is-no-match-for-inequality.
The Commission also used time periods between 2014-2107 (eight to five years old) for data analysis purposely ignoring the more recent projects which showed substantial growth of real estate development compared to the continued rise in homelessness. Again, showing their reasoning is faulty, for clearly the boom in housing development has no correlation with how NYC is able to house its people or address the needs of the average New Yorker to obtain housing that is one third or less of their income.
Before it was finalized, a draft of this report was reviewed by the Department of City Planning HR&A Advisors, NYS Home and Community Renewal, The NYU Furman Center, the Deputy Mayor for Economic and Workforce Development and the Office of the Governor.
Based upon their feedback the Commission has proposed 12 changes to the land use process. The below link includes a summary of their suggested changes, along with their rationale and our response.
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