Four Ballot Items to Unlock More New York City Housing

On Monday, the City’s Charter Revision Commission held its final vote on the ballot proposals to amend the charter. In November, New Yorkers choosing their next mayor will also get to decide whether to vote “yes” or “no” to five separate ballot measures, four of which are designed to improve the process to create new housing. 

Approving these revisions is imperative.

The housing crisis in New York City should be treated like an emergency; vacancy rates are at an unthinkable 1.4%, which is why rents have been going up and up and up for decades. Homelessness has been increasing for so long, we’ve stopped treating it as a crisis. 

The single best way to improve housing affordability and bend the housing-cost curve is to increase housing supply. Instead, we have a process that makes building new homes a Herculean and even Sisyphean effort. The ballot provisions will finally give us a chance to push the boulder all the way up the hill.

The current process takes — well, it takes as long as it takes. While technically each step in the process has a prescribed timeframe, the cost of entering into the process is so significant that a housing developer would never take on the financial risk unless they had a very strong indication that it would turn out in their favor. The process creates risk that no developer — much less a nonprofit or minority- or women-owned business enterprise — would ever take on without first having some certainty of how it will turn out. 

I have followed the Commission’s deliberations with no small interest. That’s because for more than a decade, working at HPD’s Division of Special Needs Housing, it was my job to go before community boards and make the pitch for supportive housing projects for chronically homeless New Yorkers in an attempt to win their advisory approval. I have stood in school auditoriums and senior center cafeterias in every borough, including a couple of times pregnant and in heels, answering questions and hearing community concerns, sorting out fact from fiction. I have been shouted at in every neighborhood in this city and been called every name in the book.

I truly appreciated the moments when things got heated in those meetings, because it gave me the opportunity to set the record straight about the challenges faced by New Yorkers experiencing homelessness and to build some empathy and understanding, in hopes that when the building ultimately opened, the community would welcome their new neighbors. 

I have seen the way the current process stacks the deck against our homeless neighbors and against new housing in general. For every project that had a small but vocal army of opponents, it was my job to help build a base of support. I knew that if the opponents could just meet some supportive housing tenants, they would see that their fears were unfounded. But I also always had my misgivings about this strategy. In an effort to win a little grace for the next homeless New Yorker who desperately needed a place to live, I’d ask formerly homeless New Yorkers who had just achieved a measure of stability to appear publicly before an angry crowd, to tell their traumatic stories and describe how they overcame the worst times in their lives. I was uncomfortable about putting them in this position — but the system we have forced me to do so. The burden of proof is on those desperate to find places to live, going up against stably housed New Yorkers with time and money to spare.

“Housing is a Human Right” is a lovely phrase and a powerful one, but if you want that right to ever have any hope of being realized, you need to actually build some housing. We shouldn’t ask for a show of hands to determine whether our homeless neighbors live stable lives or die in the street. Yet a show of hands is what the current land use process requires. 

The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure or ULURP (pronounced YOU-lurp, for the uninitiated) is the process by which land use decisions get made in New York City, and it has been around since the mid-1970s. To sell city land, make zoning changes or effect other decisions, ULURP dictates that each project must be reviewed by the City Planning Commission, City Council, Community Board, borough president and the Mayor’s Office, each holding separate public hearings and debating the project at every step along the way. In running this gauntlet, hundreds of thousands of dollars are typically spent on attorneys and consultants to make sure every procedure is followed. The discussions in these hearings range in depth and quality, but once the process begins, the same steps have to be followed regardless of whether you are making a small change to a single-family home or building a giant new skyscraper. 

The current ULURP process was designed before there were term limits for public officials, so the process was generally steered by elected officials who had been in office a long time and would continue to hold their seats long after the controversy about any particular project had died down. In most cases, the principal players in the process would be around to see a project go from idea to implementation, from an angry community board meeting to a round of applause at a ribbon-cutting. This made it bruising but still somewhat manageable.

Today, term limits mean that even the most pro-housing council members will likely not be in office to see the new development projects they can bless or kill come to fruition. This combination of short term limits and long development timelines perverts incentives. It is a structural problem that inhibits the production of new housing in a way that was not the case when New York City’s current land use rules were first created. 

The tradition of “member deference” — an unwritten rule that the City Council will rarely override an individual member who wants to reject a project within their district — makes things harder still. Indeed, over the past generation, there have been only a handful of instances where the Council has overridden a member and greenlit a project in their district, despite the fact that the housing shortage is a citywide issue. 

The moment is ripe to amend our land use process to adjust to the current times — and the language proposed today by the Charter Revision Commission will go a long way. 

Question 1 would create a fast-track public process for affordable housing by creating a new zoning process administered by the Board of Standards and Appeals, and an expedited review procedure specifically in the community districts that produce the least amount of affordable housing. 

Question 2 would create a simpler, faster and more predictable review process (Expedited Land Use Review Procedure or “ELURP”) for modest changes, to address the fact that under the current system, tiny changes are subject to the same level of public review as the largest skyscraper.

Question 3 would eliminate the mayor’s veto power in the ULURP process, and replace it with a land use appeals board consisting of the borough president, the Council speaker and the mayor. This would better address citywide and boroughwide voices in the land use process, since affordable housing is a citywide concern.  This change maintains the role of the local council member and community board, but also gives a last look to the newly created appeals board who will have more of a citywide and borough-wide lens.   

Question 4 would modernize the City Map, an uncontroversial but sorely overdue change. It may come as a surprise to many voters that there exists an arcane system with 8,000 paper maps administered separately by each borough that represents the official record of the location and grade of streets where housing and infrastructure can be built and dictates the procedures for development. So every time the City Map needs to be updated, it feels like we are carving out new stone tablets, and the time it takes to make the change reflects this prehistoric requirement. Even Fred Flintstone would agree that it’s time for an update.

(Question 5 proposes moving citywide elections to even years, to improve turnout. That isn’t technically about housing, but engaging more New Yorkers in the process of selecting their leaders is likely to have a positive effect on the climate for producing new places for people to live.)

No charter reforms will solve New York City’s affordable housing crisis overnight, but these are the types of modest but meaningful land use changes that will move us emphatically in the right direction. A more affordable, more livable and more participatory city is within reach.