Building housing is a top Mamdani priority — so how to expedite it?
As Mayor Zohran Mamdani himself seems to understand, the job of mayor is about more than laying out grand visions. It’s about improving small- and medium-bore management to make New York’s government work better. Just Fix It is Vital City's running list of concrete, nonideological ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.
The pace of building things is a top contender, especially given the administration’s understandable focus on producing more housing. It can take one to two years for as-of-right development to acquire the appropriate permits. For the biggest and most complex projects — those requiring rezonings or other discretionary city approvals — three years can pass between the first application and final city sign-off. And that’s before construction even commences. Recent research found that each year saved would shave roughly 5% to 8% off the total price tag. And with the city facing a historic housing shortage and growing calls to build infrastructure of all kinds, every minute counts.
The problem has been getting a good deal of attention and action in recent years. In November, voters gave the City’s protracted land-use process — which it takes projects two-and-a-half years, on average, to get through — a speed boost for certain projects. A push underway in Albany to reform the state’s environmental review process (SEQR) could put a particularly big dent in reducing timelines. And early announcements from the Mamdani administration, like an interagency task force to hasten affordable housing production, are encouraging. “This administration is willing to move at the speed of need to make this a city New Yorkers can continue to call home,” the mayor said at a recent press conference.
But there are other moves that City Hall can make to speed things up. This column lays out eight.
1) Streamline agency reviews
The problem: Permitting approval is subject to a series of wholly separate agency reviews, which stretches timelines.
The Mamdani administration should: Enforce maximum permitting periods so no one agency can hold up the process.
The fine print: From pre-filing to occupancy, a building’s permit needs sign-off from a total of 10-plus city agencies, including the Department of Buildings (DOB), the Department of City Planning (DCP), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Fire Department (FDNY) and others. Projects cannot advance to the next phase until the green light is given from the specific entities involved in that part of the process.
But each agency follows its own timeline, which is often left to its discretion. Thus, permitting can get stuck in a rotation of reviews with little to no motive to move it along.
City Hall should hold its own agencies accountable by ensuring that each review adheres to a strict schedule, with timelines set in reasonable accordance with responsibilities. Maximum wait times could be enforced to accelerate reviews — for example, DOT could be given a certain number of months to conduct its traffic analysis, and a sewer sign-off from DEP could take days, not weeks. Or else face consequences.
Other cities and states have shown what potential nudges exist. In Minnesota, zoning applications are automatically approved if an agency doesn’t respond within 60 days, and a request for extension must be justified in writing. Pennsylvania's PAyback program refunds applicants’ permit fees when state agencies miss their statutory review deadlines. The City of New York should immediately explore the options available to get its agencies working together, and on deadline.
2) Get rid of redundancies
The problem: Siloed processes and overlapping jurisdictions lead to repetitive, time-consuming inspections.
The Mamdani administration should: Conduct an exhaustive review of the city’s permitting process for redundant approvals.
The fine print: Each city agency is empowered to review projects under a specific legal code, but agencies rely on systems that are unable to communicate with one another and share findings in real time. The result of those blurry lines and inadequate information-sharing is that officials sometimes carry out tasks that mirror work that came before or after.
Case in point: Currently, two city agencies review buildings for fire safety — the Fire Department and the Department of Buildings — and both under separate codes. A process meant to be concurrent is often fragmented; first it’s FDNY, then DOB and then FDNY again, but not until DOB has approved plans. Re-inspection can take months, and is rife with issues: In late 2024 and early 2025, two former fire chiefs pled guilty to creating a “VIP lane” for building inspections in exchange for bribes, with developers hiring illicit ‘expediters’ to secure approval.
In recent years, the FDNY deployed new technology and revamped hiring practices for fire inspections. The results were promising — wait times eventually fell from 18 weeks to four weeks, according to City Hall — but were later reversed by budget cuts and political setbacks from City Hall. Efforts like that should be revived and furthered.
Similar to the work of the newly designated “chief savings officers” tapped by City Hall, the administration should ask each agency involved in permitting to scan its respective processes for spots to streamline, and deliver responses in the next 90 days. And as we’ve seen in Guadalajara, fully digitizing the process, with a one-stop shop for permits, is long overdue.
3) Right-size the traffic studies
The problem: No matter the building size, construction requires traffic analyses that haven’t kept up with recent policy changes and mobility advances.
The Mamdani administration should: Re-evaluate the criteria for traffic impact studies in terms of location and building size.
The fine print: During the environmental review process, DOT conducts a study to assess what a proposed development’s impact will be on local traffic flow. For most projects, the analysis can take up to two months.
But the way we get around has changed dramatically, calling into question whether such studies are still needed today. The passage of City of Yes lifted mandatory parking minimums in most of Manhattan, western Queens and northern and western Brooklyn, meaning that future developments sited there will no longer have to provide on-site parking, a major source of vehicular traffic. (They were reduced or diluted elsewhere.) South of 60th Street in Manhattan, where the required analyses are already a lighter touch, congestion pricing prevails and has substantially reduced traffic. Meanwhile, New Yorkers are biking and scooting more than ever before, so the assumption of a sometimes 1-1 ratio of units to parking spaces and potential drivers may not hold the same weight as it once did. Besides, a growing body of evidence casts doubt on the engineering standards the analyses are based on in the first place.
At the same time, fully recognizing that a stadium isn’t the same as a single-family home, City Hall should direct its DOT to “right-size” its traffic code, with limits on buildings with 500 units or below. Reforming SEQR will help — the city DOT is often following its state counterpart — but the City should explore what’s within its own power to clear the bottlenecks.
4) Flex the building code
The problem: Most of the city’s building code was written decades ago, with standards that still drive up costs and timelines for construction.
The Mamdani administration should: Launch a task force to quickly identify and advance amendments in accordance with international standards and new zoning laws.
The fine print: New York City’s Building Code was adopted in 1968. Heralded then for its modern overhaul of the 1938 edition, it placed heavier regulations on mixed-use and taller buildings. It was then updated in 2008, 2014 and 2022, and a new Existing Building Code goes into effect next year. Yet still, New York City’s rules and regulations for buildings are considered some of the most byzantine in the country, especially when compared to European and Asian counterparts with similar densities.
The City should immediately initiate an effort to further modernize its building code to match modern sensibilities and the new zoning rules put into effect by City of Yes.
Here are a few places to start. The live-in super rule, which requires an on-site or nearby hand for buildings with nine or more units, was codified when coal-fired boilers — most of which have since been phased out — had to be monitored 24/7. The City regulates the use of certain building materials, like copper for wiring or concrete and steel for building, even though cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternatives — like hemp, recycled plastic and mass timber — exist. Elevators, which once unlocked the potential of skyscrapers, are now often a deterrent to building vertically, because the rules require them to be wide enough to accommodate a standard 24-by-84-inch ambulance stretcher in the horizontal position. And in the last two years, seven states across the political spectrum have rewritten rules that require one, rather than two, staircases in buildings of a certain size for fire safety purposes. While our unique building code exists as yet another extension of a New York-or-nowhere exceptionalism, lawmakers are actively studying what else can be done to smartly loosen the rules.
5) Empower the project managers
The problem: There is little accountability for project progress, with responsibilities shared — and often lost — between agencies.
The Mamdani administration should: Designate point people within City Hall to guide construction projects across the finish line. Create a publicly available tracker to bolster transparency and identify roadblocks.
The fine print: Once an application is filed for a building permit, its fate is largely left to the process. This puts the onus on the private citizen or company to navigate through an alphabet soup of agencies (hence why many hire an expeditor), favoring those with expertise and resources. A general lack of accountability allows projects to wallow, their completion being both everyone’s and no one’s problem.
City Hall should convene a team within the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development’s office that can effectively project-manage the permitting for private projects above a certain size, offering both an attentive eye and the authority to find fixes to hurdles that may arise. These outcomes-focused roles are particularly needed when working with private stakeholders, like utility companies.
To aid in those efforts, the City should launch an online project tracker — like what exists for parks and mass transit projects — that can tell any New Yorker what is going on with that project on their corner, and who is responsible for its delay. Today, the best information most New Yorkers often have is months-old, uninformative notice posted at the construction site.
6) Get the new rules on the books
The problem: New York City voters just approved a number of far-reaching ballot proposals related to construction. But some are still not law.
The Mamdani administration should: Expedite the rulesmaking processes for the referenda passed last November.
The fine print: In November, a majority of New York City voters approved three measures meant to speed up construction. The first — Proposition 2 — fast-tracks affordable housing projects, with particular grease for “the bottom 12,” or the community districts that produced the least amount of affordable housing in recent years. Proposition 3 puts smaller projects through a less-intensive land-use process, while Proposition 4 creates an Affordable Housing Appeals Board, which may intervene if a development is blocked or diluted.
These measures will ease bureaucratic and political gridlock that can trip up permitting. So no more time should be wasted getting them going. The Affordable Housing Appeals Board is still just a concept, although even just the threat of it has already led one council member to reverse their stance on a new development.
To its credit, the Mamdani administration has already announced the first ELURP projects: an 84-unit affordable housing development in Mott Haven and a climate-resiliency acquisition on Staten Island. This speedier runway for City-owned land consolidates Community Board and Borough President reviews into a single 60-day window and removes City Council review for certain categories, cutting the roughly seven-month public-review timeline to 90 days. The City launched the Affordable Housing Fast Track rulemaking shortly after.
But rulesmaking can notoriously drag. To maximize potential, these processes should be expedited given the moment’s urgency, so city officials can start to tap into the benefits and opportunities the new powers pose. A particular focus should be placed on the bottom 12. If the City now wields greater powers to catalyze construction there, it shouldn’t be afraid to use them.
7) Staff up
The problem: Many of the offices critical to approving construction projects are not operating at full capacity.
The Mamdani administration should: Focus on filling vacancies at DOB and expand headcount at the Board of Standards and Appeals and the City Planning Commission.
The fine print: The Program to Eliminate Gaps (PEG) cuts implemented by the Adams administration shaved a quarter of the DOB workforce between 2022 and 2024, leading to an increase in wait times across inspections. While the City should simultaneously pursue efficiencies that don’t require bolstering staff, a hobbled workforce will ultimately hamper permitting reform.
The City should consider options to restore headcount, which will include increasing salaries to compete with the private sector. Hiring for necessary roles is ultimately an investment — a faster rate of inspection helps bring down price tags, which allows projects that ultimately benefit the city coffers to advance.
Beyond DOB, the City should move to quickly staff up the offices with recently expanded authorities. The Board of Standards and Appeals, which will now oversee the affordable housing fast-track, has five commissioners and a support staff of several dozen people. Similarly, the City Planning Commission has a range of new and expanded responsibilities, yet still is composed of only 13 members with a similarly squeezed second bench. These entities will become much bigger players in how the City builds in the years ahead, and will need a workforce that reflects this brave new world.
8) Use AI more, and do it smartly
The problem: The City has thus far been averse to leverage AI as a potential tool for permitting efficiency.
The Mamdani administration should: Aggressively explore all the ways in which AI could be used to streamline processes.
The fine print: In 2023, the City of New York released its first-ever AI Action Plan, which laid out potential opportunities to incorporate generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to improve daily operations. Success thus far has been mixed. Innovative pilots persist at the agency level: The Department of Education recently permitted AI in lesson planning, DOT is studying traffic patterns with AI and FDNY recently used AI to chart more efficient ambulance routes. But deployment is still fragile, with City Hall recently shutting down a chatbot launched by its former occupant after it notoriously offered incorrect advice.
Permitting was not mentioned in the AI Action Plan, but there are two areas where it could yield real dividends. The first is interagency communication, where AI would make it easier for separate systems to share data with each other to reduce those redundancies mentioned earlier. (Another popular mayor, Boston’s Michelle Wu, signed an executive order in August to do just that.) The second is what’s known as predictive analytics, where AI can pre-scan documents to alert applicants to potential problem areas later on, as well as forecast timelines so they can realistically plan ahead. This doesn’t remove humans from the critical job of reviewing work sites documents; it just helps them target limited resources where the data shows them to be most needed. In California, San Jose is piloting the technology to hasten approvals of Accessory Dwelling Units (or ADUs), where 90 percent of applications are returned for missing information.
New York City should do the same. Privacy concerns and worries that AI will unintelligibly approach issues without context are no doubt valid. But the City should actively explore areas where the technology could be deployed for overly analog processes that currently take up an excessive amount of time and staffing.
This installment was prepared with the help of John Surico. Sarah Feinberg and many others provided essential guidance and will continue to inform our work on this project going forward. In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to surface practical suggestions from people who know the system best — current and former agency staff, nonprofit partners and the everyday New Yorkers who routinely deal with, and often trip up trying to navigate, New York's bureaucracy.
Vital City will continue to surface practical suggestions from people who know the system best — current and former agency staff, nonprofit partners and the everyday New Yorkers who routinely deal with, and often trip up trying to navigate, New York's bureaucracy.
Send your ideas to justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org; if you wish to remain anonymous, we will honor your request.
