“City of Yes” Housing Overhaul Has Contentious City Council Hearings

The “City of Yes” housing amendment faced added scrutiny, and an extended period of public comment, in a pair of City Council hearings held in late October. The proposed zoning overhaul will boost the development of much-needed affordable housing in every NYC neighborhood, its proponents in city government claim, citing a tight apartment vacancy rate of 1.4 percent.

The first hearing, on Oct. 21, featured debate amongst City Councilmembers only. Dan Garodnick, who is overseeing the amendment as Chair of the City Planning Commission, explained the parameters of “City of Yes” and exhorted the assembled politicians to approve it. He reiterated the fact that 93,000 homeless people were counted in NYC last year, 33,000 of whom were children, which he said makes the provision of cheap rental units a humanitarian necessity.

”We can create a city that New Yorkers can afford where there are options for housing in every neighborhood, so you can rent or buy, stay in your own community, or move closer to your family or your job,” Garodnick told the City Council.

The high-density provisions of the amendment are the ones applicable to Manhattan. The largest change would involve the adoption of something called the Universal Affordability Preference, which is supposed to incentivize developers to boost their affordable units-per-building by 20 percent.

Some skeptics of the City of Yes, such as City Councilmember Christopher Marte of Lower Manhattan, believe that UAP will not sufficiently mandate affordable construction. He emphasized that concern at the Oct. 21 hearing, and pointed out that “rent-stabilized units continue to be demolished in the name of supply.”

At the Oct. 22 hearing, which was open to public comment, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine expressed strong support for the measure: “We are facing the worst shortage of housing in living memory, and maybe the worst this city has ever seen...we have a zoning code that outlaws the kind of shared housing that can give an affordable option for a young person starting out, or someone that’s just down on their luck, and may end up on the street. City of Yes fixes all of that, and much more.”

Another “City of Yes” provision, which is slated to apply citywide, would eliminate parking minimums for new developments. Current zoning rules ensure that every developer must create six parking spaces to complement every ten residential units. Under the “City of Yes,” the creation of parking spaces would become optional, rather than mandatory.

Lincoln Restler, a City Council Member from Brooklyn, spent part of the Oct. 21 hearing arguing that the end of parking mandates should lead to different types of development in different boroughs. In a “transit-rich” area such as Manhattan or his corner of Brooklyn, he said, “we don’t need to be building as much parking.” He then said that some Queens City Council districts, such as one represented by Democratic politician Linda Lee, have “zero subway stations...it shouldn’t be one size fits all.”

The prospect of eliminating parking mandates ended up leading to headline-grabbing conflict during the Oct. 22 hearing. Jackson Chabot, a public transit advocate, heralded the possibility of ending the minimums everywhere. “Parking mandates foster car dependence, promote urban sprawl, inflate housing cost, and undermine public transportation,” he said.

This led Councilmember Vickie Paladino–a Republican representing Queens, and an advocate of car usage in her district–to seemingly accuse Chabot of being a fake New Yorker, leading Hellgate to pointedly describe her remarks as “nativist”: “You’ve only lived here for 8 years,” Paladino said to Chabot. “You don’t know a thing about New York or how we work. Okay? How dare you come to this panel with your so-called expertise!”

Kevin C. Riley, who was overseeing the hearing, then said that the proceedings needed to be more respectful. Chabot eventually retorted that he had once taken a bus into her district, and that “it would have been a lot faster to get there if the bus had had not been backed up by vehicles.”

It remains to be seen whether such flare-ups will alter the “City of Yes” by the time it comes up for a final vote, or whether they will kill the entire package altogether.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who is a proponent of the plan, acknowledged that not everybody liked its current iteration after the initial Oct. 21 hearing. “When I talk to all those [City] Council people, even the ones who are saying ‘we don’t know if City of Yes is the exact thing for us,’ they will acknowledge we have a housing crisis. So we need a solution, and this is a great solution that Dan Garodnick and his team have put in place.”