NYC Council proposes housing construction targets for every neighborhood

A set number of apartments would have to be built in every New York City neighborhood as part a housing plan rolled out Thursday by Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.

The plan is the Council’s response to the city’s deepening housing crisis, and aims to boost affordability by drastically increasing housing supply in every corner of the five boroughs — even in areas where, historically, the city has been met with resistance from residents.

“We have too few homes for New Yorkers, which disproportionally burdens those who truly need affordable housing,” Adams said. “To best address the housing crisis, we need both sound housing policies and an improved planning and land-use process.”

The neighborhood-based housing production benchmarks envisioned under the Council’s so-called “Fair Housing Framework” would be tailored with certain area factors in mind, like transit access and displacement risks for low-income residents.

But the speaker noted that there are not yet specific neighborhood-by-neighborhood goals for the amount of housing to be built, saying that part of the purpose for her announcement is “getting this on everybody’s mind.”

“It really isn’t about singling out any neighborhood,” she said. “It’s really about the recognition that all of us have to do our part as a city.”

Unlike the “Get Stuff Built” plan announced by Mayor Adams last week, the Council’s blueprint is a legislative package that would have to be passed into law to take effect. The fact that it would hold legislative power also gives the plan more teeth, Council leaders said.

Still, beyond the housing development benchmarks, most components of the Council package are actions requested by Mayor Adams.

One of the most significant provisions requested by the mayor that made it into the Council’s agenda is a citywide zoning text amendment that’s supposed to make it easier to build housing.

The amendment, which would have to go through various Council hoops to take effect, proposes to increase the permitted floor-area-ratio of affordable housing. The thinking goes that by doing that, it would become easier to build affordable housing outside of complex new developments, for instance by repurposing underused commercial spaces.

The amendment would also scrap strict parking space requirements for residential housing that the mayor and the Council agree needlessly hamper new construction.

Part of what it would accomplish, though, is dependent on Gov. Hochul and state lawmakers.

To get more density through expanding the legally allowed floor area ratios, the state would have to repeal the so-called 12 F.A.R. cap on residential developments, which is also an important component of a blueprint laid out by Hochul and Mayor Adams on Wednesday.

The cap sharply restricts permissible floor ratios in relation to the size of a residential building’s lot size in high density areas. By repealing it, creating housing in areas currently dominated by commercial space, like Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, would become easier.

On some other fronts, though, the mayor and the Council are not on the same page.

As part of its plan, the Council calls on the mayor to increase staffing levels at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the agency tasked with maintaining the city’s affordable housing stock. The Council also says HPD must be allotted $2.5 billion in capital housing spending every year, on top of $1.5 billion in annual capital spending for the New York City Housing Authority.

The Council’s combined capital funding demands are $1.5 billion larger than what the mayor dedicated this year for the two agencies, and he may be hard pressed to boost those spending levels in future plans, given the city’s projected budget deficits in the next five years.

The Council plan also pushes for HPD to increase production targets for “extremely low-income” and “very low-income” households, which are considered the most rent-burdened and housing-deficient groups in the city.

The plans for more housing from the mayor and the Council come as the city saw its affordable apartment production rates plummet in the past year, all while rents and homelessness kept skyrocketing.

According to Council data, the city only built 200,000 new housing units between 2010 and 2020, while gaining 630,000 new residents and adding nearly one million jobs.

The slow clip of housing production has prompted stakeholders across the political spectrum to agree that a lot more construction is needed.

“We’re excited about having citywide housing needs part of local decisions,” said Brendan Cheney, policy director of the New York Housing Conference. “We’re really excited about the speaker reinforcing and wanting to put into action the need for affordable housing in every neighborhood and for every neighborhood to be part of the plan.”