The ideas of the Charter Revision Commission could turn out to be more important than the race for mayor in New York City.
The New York City mayoral primary election has been interesting for lots of reasons — redemption arcs, celebrity socialists, the battle of Zabar’s. But the actual policy proposals of the candidates are not among them.
The candidates all agree that the city faces substantial challenges, but then have far too little to say about how to address them. Despite the fact that it is widely acknowledged that the City faces a substantial structural fiscal deficit and the possibility of huge cuts in federal aid, there are almost no substantial proposals to address these budget problems (with the partial exception of a good idea from Comptroller Brad Lander).
And, despite the fact that all of the candidates agree that the city faces a dramatic housing shortage, the candidates’ proposals to allow new building are weak tea, with the exception of State Sen. Zellnor Myrie’s ambitious housing plan. None of the candidates have proposed workable ideas about how to address problems facing the local economy, like declines in tourism, cuts in scientific research or parts of the finance industry leaving the city.
What are we left with? Front-runners who either propose a fiscally unsustainable package of tax cuts and spending increases (Andrew Cuomo) or enormous tax increases that are targeted not at shoring up the budget but rather at enabling spending increases that are even larger (Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani); populist moves that do not consider tradeoffs; and a few good small-bore proposals. Along many dimensions of urban governance — crime, garbage, most education policy — most of the candidates’ platforms are pretty similar to what the current mayor, Eric Adams, has offered the last few years. It’s unlikely the fall election will prove much more compelling.
Failures of democracy
This does not mean that the election won’t offer at least one set of major policy ideas for voters to chew on — at least when they go to the polls in November. That’s thanks to the ideas coming out of the Charter Revision Commission, an entity charged with proposing changes to the City’s charter, which essentially serves as its constitution.
The mayor-appointed Charter Revision Commission, chaired by former Deputy Mayor Rich Buery with the help of executive director Alec Schierenbeck, has not yet announced the specific reforms that it will put on the ballot. But its staff report of preliminary recommendations, which came out in April, offers a systematic challenge to the ways New York City has been governed for the past 40 or so years. While it addresses a number of issues — housing mostly, but also election reform, non-profit procurement and climate policy — it is best understood as a critique of the way democracy works, or rather doesn’t work, in the city.
The central argument of the staff report is that changes in government structure in post-fiscal crisis New York (and indeed beforehand) limited the ability of both the mass public and citywide interests to influence policy. This effectively left narrow groups of people — notably, neighborhood homeowners opposed to new housing and incumbent politicians seeking reelection — in charge. The power of narrow interest and incumbent politicians in turn systematically undermined the ability of the city to grow. Neighborhood groups didn’t want new residents who would change their neighborhoods and politicians didn’t want new voters who they didn’t know to influence election outcomes.
Put differently, the housing crisis is downstream from the failures of New York City’s democracy. That’s an essential insight, and one that the commission aims to fix.
Specifically, the Charter Revision Commission plans on proposing reforms that broaden participation. Instead of most land-use decisions involving neighborhood-level negotiation and deference to individual councilmembers, the commission argues that the mayor and the City Council should set a binding target for the total number of needed housing units by neighborhood and streamline projects until those targets are met. At the same time, it argues, the most relevant city elections shouldn’t be primaries held in odd-numbered years with little turnout, but general elections in even-numbered years (the same time as the presidential or gubernatorial elections) that feature higher turnout.
The goal is to make the whole city consider big questions, rather than leaving decisions to the types of activists and highly-engaged voters who dominate community board meetings and weirdly-timed primary elections.
This is a big idea — that reforms to the structure of government will lead to a more democratic and faster growing city. Further — as I and many others have argued for many years — this is the right way to think about land use politics and urban politics more broadly.
We will see what the actual proposals of the Charter Commission are. But its report contains a set of concepts that are actually responsive to the challenges of New York City governance, and this is worthy of applause.
The housing crisis
The Charter Commission’s understanding of the housing problem the city faces is straightforward: “New York City faces what may be the worst housing affordability crisis in its history.” It is also extremely clear about why the city faces this crisis. “In recent decades, New York has built far less housing than is needed to keep up with demand to live in the city, driving gentrification, displacement, segregation, and tenant harassment.”
That’s exactly right: Since the 1990s, demand to live in New York City has skyrocketed, but the supply of new housing has not increased enough. Further, almost all new housing is built in a small number of neighborhoods, with high-demand areas like Greenwich Village or Park Slope barely contributing at all. The result is high prices and a stagnant population.
While the Charter Revision Commission notes that there are a number of reasons for slow housing growth, it points to land use controls — density controls, use zoning, historic preservation and other tools — as the primary culprit, consistent with a vast academic literature. Since the 1960s, New York City has imposed an “increasingly restrictive set of zoning regulations that have reduced housing production and reinforced inequitable patterns of production.” Just across the Hudson, Jersey City produces nearly three times as much housing per capita as New York City does; across the country, Seattle more than double.
Why has New York City choked off growth with such restrictive land use controls? The academic literature is clear about why suburbs do this: They are controlled by homeowners who want to ensure they do not have to share their property tax base with poorer new residents and want to make sure that new homes do not decrease the value (or increase the variance in the value) of their homes.
The housing crisis is downstream from the failures of New York City’s democracy.
But New York is a big city, not a small, exclusive suburb. Most residents are renters who would benefit from an abundance of housing. Powerful citywide interests like banks, technology companies and unions would all benefit from more population growth.
The commission report argues that New York City’s land use procedure has led it to adopt slow-growth policies, something I have argued is true across many cities. The Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) creates a lengthy set of procedures that privilege local control.
Prior to 1989, ULURP’s processes — including advisory opinions given by community boards — offered a localist balance to the land use powers of the Board of Estimate, where city- and borough-wide officials were the key players in deciding whether a rezoning was necessary. But after the Supreme Court found the Board of Estimate unconstitutional (it gave equal votes by borough, in violation of the one-person one-vote principle), a new City Charter had the ULURP process end with a vote by the City Council. Rather than serving as a balance to the centralizing tendencies of the Board of Estimate, the ULURP process now ends with a vote of a body composed of neighborhood-level officials.
The end result is “member deference” — a norm that each councilperson has the final word on rezoning in her district. (This took a little while to develop, as in the early post-1989 era, City Council Speaker Peter Vallone was able to control the council, but with the passage of term limits, that kind of centralizing force passed from the scene.)
As a result, land use in New York City looks a great deal like land use in the suburbs. Homeowners and rent-stabilized tenants dominate low-information primaries for city council races and participation in public meetings. The land use process amplifies their voices, effectively giving them a veto on rezonings, while providing little incentive for citywide officials and interests to get too involved. In practice, Greenwich, Conn. and Greenwich Village have the same land use politics, even though one is a separate town and the other is part of a major metropolis. Only a few neighborhoods agree to accept growth, which explains the uneven record of housing production across the city.
How should the City address this? The Charter Revision Commission points to two possible paths for reform. One is simply giving citywide elected officials a greater say in the process by changing the order of decisions in ULURP or even giving the City Planning Commission power to override vetoes by the City Council. The other is asking the Council and the mayor to decide on a citywide target for total new units and for each district, and then streamlining projects until that target is met. (Rick Hills and I called for something similar.) Another way to achieve this goal would be to require semi-regular citywide comprehensive land use plans that address the whole city, not just district-by-district amendments, following both academic work and successes in cities like Seattle and Minneapolis.
Exactly what direction the commission will go in is still uncertain. But their basic ideas are clear: The City Charter and ULURP make land use decision making hyperlocal, which empowers NIMBY groups, while disempowering groups and officials who want to see growth generally. The Charter Revision Commission wants to move the level of decision making up — to borough-wide and citywide officials — so that citywide interests and the mass public can weigh in.
That’s a powerful idea whose time has come.
Beyond housing
The Commission’s report broadens out from housing and sees the same problems everywhere. It shows that turnout in general elections has declined to 23% and is even lower in the primary elections, where all the action is in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. Some elections are decided by a ridiculously small number of people; a Democratic primary for City Council was won with the votes of less than 1.5% of the registered voters in the district.
The housing crisis and election turnout are connected. Research shows that the people who show up to vote in low-profile elections are older, richer and more likely to be white than the broader population. (People who show up for public meetings are even more so.) But most importantly, they are much more likely to be homeowners rather than renters, with clear outcomes for housing policy.
What can be done? Elections could be held at the same time as gubernatorial or presidential elections. (This would probably require state legislative support as well as a change to the Charter.) The result would likely be much higher turnout. That’s not just good on its own, but has clear policy implications: Sarah Anzia has shown that off-cycle elections increase the power of narrow interest groups that can organize people to show up even for oddly-timed elections, and Zoltan Hajnal and others have shown that holding elections in odd-numbered years results in legislatures that are less demographically representative.
The Charter Revision Commission is also considering suggesting that New York City elections move from a closed primary (only Democrats can currently vote in Democratic primaries; Republicans in Republican primaries) to an open primary system with a “top two” or “top four” format. Under these systems, all voters participate in a single primary, and the top 2 (or 4) advance to the general election (where turnout is higher).
The idea behind both of these reforms is to broaden the electorate and hold the most crucial election at times when turnout is the highest. Again, if these wind up on the November ballot, they’ll be some of the most important ideas that voters have been asked to weigh in on in years.
Towards a greater New York
Regardless of who wins the mayoral race, the politics of New York City are structurally biased towards producing a slow-growing city dominated by insiders and incumbents. While mayors come and go, the City’s charter locks in a politics that encourages the existing powers that be to divide the resources, rather than growing the pie.
The Charter Revision Commission is pushing structural changes to the city’s politics that will make it grow faster and make it more open to more and more varied voices. Those afraid of change — both physical and political — will oppose its proposals. Regardless of who wins City Hall, its recommendations may be the changes that matter most.