Last December, the Brooklyn borough president and a Manhattan City Council member sat down for a catch-up lunch.
The conversation between Antonio Reynoso and Erik Bottcher, both Democrats, quickly moved to the city’s housing crisis and how none of the proposals to spur more construction that had been announced with such fanfare by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams had been acted on by the state legislature.
“We felt pessimistic about anything happening, and talked about how lawmakers here haven’t been getting together, strategizing about how to get the policies passed to get us through this crisis,” remembered Bottcher, the Council member, whose district includes Chelsea and the West Village.
“In other states around the country pro-housing lawmakers have been organizing for quite some time. That’s one reason they have seen some successes in places like California,” Bottcher added.
“The city thrives on the divide-and-conquer strategy, and what we want is to be together,” Reynoso told THE CITY.
The result: They are forming a “housing league” of elected officials, to push a pro-development agenda backing a litany of changes that will produce more housing in the city.
They are not alone, and the emergence of groups like these comes at an opportune time for the Adams administration, which is at a crucial point in its efforts to change the zoning code to meet its economic and housing production goals.
Historically administrations have proposed changes with the support of big business and real estate groups but have had to navigate and cajole elected leaders who thought their best approach was to appeal to anti-development voters by demanding each proposal be downsized.
Now the so-called YIMBYs (for “yes in my backyard”) are trying to make it politically necessary to be pro-development.
In addition to the housing league, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine is holding rallies in support of the administration’s development plans. Even City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is making it clear she supports the efforts, even if she makes sure not to explicitly say she will push them through the Council.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit affordable housing trade organization New York Housing Conference has put together a coalition of 120 groups to make the case for the Adams proposals. “We are ready to counter not-in-my-backyard voices at community board meetings and people don’t want to see any change,” said Rachel Fee, executive director of the conference.
Late last year, the Council approved the first Adams “City of Yes” zoning text amendment by a vote to 38-8, making 18 changes to speed the installation of green technology and retrofit buildings.
Tuesday the City Planning Commission approved the second amendment that will make it dramatically easier for businesses to expand into adjoining spaces, for individuals to operate micro businesses from their homes and allow light manufacturing such as food, jewelry and pottery-making in now-prohibited areas that are the size of the entire area of Manhattan. It involves 18 separate revisions and is expected to be overwhelmingly approved by the Council in the next two months.
But the biggest challenge for the Adams administration will be to pass the amendment on housing, which is on schedule to reach the Council by the end of the year.
Among its far-reaching changes are eliminating many requirements for parking set-asides, a hot-button issue outside Manhattan. It would provide an automatic 20% density bonus for adding affordable apartments. And it would make it easier to construct smaller apartment buildings and add small dwelling units to single family homes — all designed to push every neighborhood to accommodate more housing.
To back the effort, the Housing Conference’s “City of Yes” coalition prepares to carry its message to every Council district. The coalition includes other pro-housing groups like Open New York, community service organizations and anti-poverty groups like Robin Hood, and many affordable housing developers. First up is a meeting with Councilmember Shahana Hanif of Brooklyn next week.
“We plan a huge amount of engagement to make sure people understand the proposal and not consider it from a place of fear of what it may do,” said Annemarie Gray, executive director of Open New York.
‘Overcoming Misinformation’
Officials who would have normally stayed above the fray until it was their turn to weigh in are now making the case for a proposal they will eventually have to vote on.
Reynoso and Bottcher convened a group of 40 elected officials or their representatives last Friday at Brooklyn Borough Hall to take the first steps toward creating their YIMBY housing group. They are now drafting a statement of principles and will then ask other elected officials to sign on. If done in time, it would likely be strongly in favor of the provisions in the text amendment.
Reynoso notes that as borough president, he will have to issue a recommendation on the text amendment and says he doesn’t want to foreclose his options. But Bottcher, who will have to vote on it when it reaches the Council and calls himself an all-of-the-above supporter of efforts to increase housing supply, doesn’t hide his support.
“I am excited about the City Council deliberations over the ‘City of Yes,’” he said. “One of our challenges is going to be overcoming misinformation and scare tactics that usually accompany any meaningful reforms.”
Also fully enlisted in the fight is Levine, the Manhattan borough president.
He not only has come out strongly for the text amendment, he held a rally in Manhattan recently to specifically boost the provision he thinks would help Manhattan the most: the automatic 20% increase in allowable density as long as the additional space is used for affordable units.
“We have the worst housing affordability crisis in Manhattan with rents over $5,000 a month forcing out low-income people, some of whom become homeless, and working class people like nurses and bus drivers,” he said. “It’s impossible to separate that from the fact we are not creating enough housing,”
The politics are rapidly changing, he adds. He focused his 2023 State of the Borough speech on the housing crisis and when he did the same this year, the applause he received was louder than the year before.
In any event, he added, “I’m tired of playing it safe.”
Also different is the all-but declared support of the powerful Council speaker. At a conference sponsored by NYU Furman Center last month, Speaker Adams voiced only support for increasing housing production if not quite saying she would vote for the City of Yes text amendment when it reached the Council.
But she was also clear in her commitment to the major objective and what may become the most controversial aim of the test amendment — getting every neighborhood in the city to accommodate more housing, especially those that have successfully resisted construction in the past.
“We have to normalize a shared responsibility of addressing the housing crisis across all neighborhoods and establish clear expectations and targets that are localized and transparent to all of us,” she said.
Gray of Open New York notes that since the city’s formal seven-month review process hasn’t officially started, it is hard to measure the extent of any opposition. But if elected officials show up to oppose it, Reynoso has a warning.
“We want elected officials who are doing things that are cutting housing supply to know that we want to hold them accountable,” he said.