The Housing Status Quo

To understand the debate over the ballot initiatives, it’s important to understand the context in which they intervene: a land-use system that is against new housing by default. In New York, as in many US cities, the city’s zoning code generally reflects the view that neighborhoods should not become denser than they already are. Thus in a neighborhood of detached single-family homes, it’s typically illegal for a developer to build duplexes; in a neighborhood of duplexes, it’s typically illegal to build town houses; in a neighborhood with three-story apartment buildings, it’s illegal to build five-story buildings; and so on.

Roughly 40 percent of the land area of New York City is zoned for one-family or two-family buildings, meaning that by default apartments can’t be built there at all; a further 30 percent is zoned for low-density multifamily construction, meaning that larger apartments can’t be built there. Residents of New York City’s densest and fastest-growing neighborhoods may find this surprising — if you live in Williamsburg or Crown Heights, it’s easy to get the impression that a new ten-story apartment building is planned every day in the city — but vast areas of the city remain semisuburban in built environment, and this reflects not market choice but regulatory fiat. This situation has persisted for decades but worsened under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who downzoned vast low-density areas of the city during his mayoralty even as he upzoned neighborhoods like Williamsburg, creating a surge of development in a few neighborhoods while constraining housing production citywide.

Given this anti-densification status quo, many new residential projects require a special one-off exemption from existing zoning. The process for receiving such exemptions in New York is called “the Uniform Land Use Review Process” (ULURP), and it’s a long, expensive, politicized process involving multiple rounds of community input. Crucially, ULURP decisions are ultimately up to city council, and by long-standing tradition, when considering a specific exemption, the city council follows the lead of the member representing that district, a practice referred to as “member deference.” In effect, each city council member is in a position to veto housing development in their district — a power they can use either to extract concessions from developers or to simply block new construction.

Affordable for Who?

Each of the ballot propositions under discussion would modify this process, making it somewhat easier for certain specific projects to get an exception from the default ban on denser construction. Most of the provisions are aimed specifically at clearing the path for affordable housing, and for this reason a great deal of the controversy over them has centered on the meaning of the word “affordable.”

Simply put, “affordable” is a term of art in New York City housing regulation, and units that are affordable in this technical sense are often not affordable to working-class tenants in the ordinary sense of the term. To count as affordable in the technical sense, units must be income-targeted (available only to households within a specific income band) and rent-stabilized. But the incomes they target don’t need to be low incomes. It is common, therefore, to see units designated as “affordable” that are targeted to households earning $100,000–$165,000 a year and rent at, say, $2,900 for a one-bedroom apartment. Those apartments aren’t renting to corporate lawyers and investment bankers — a young couple consisting of, say, a nurse and a public-school teacher would qualify for that apartment and in today’s rental market would likely be happy to get it — but they’re certainly not affordable to many working-class New Yorkers.

This use of the term “affordable” has caused no end of consternation, but to avoid confusion it’s best to simply be aware that “affordable” generally means middle-income rent-stabilized, not low-rent.

Making It Easier to Build

Each proposition would make small but meaningful changes to how exceptions are granted:

• Proposition 2 would do two separate things. First, it would allow 100 percent affordable, publicly financed projects to avoid ULURP citywide and instead seek approval from the mayoral-appointed Board of Standards and Appeals. (These projects are affordable in the colloquial sense, including things like senior and supportive housing.) Second, it would allow projects that are at least 25 percent affordable to avoid ULURP in the twelve community areas that have produced the lowest number of affordable housing units in the previous year. (Here “affordable” is to be understood in the technical sense, meaning middle-income rent-stabilized.) The latter provision would primarily impact outer-borough single-family neighborhoods and wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods like the Upper East Side.
• Proposition 3 would allow relatively small projects to avoid ULURP — those that increase density by less than 30 percent and are less than forty-five feet in height. So, for example, building a three-story apartment building in an area zoned for two-story apartment buildings would no longer require city council approval. Such small projects generally don’t happen at all under current rules, since only large developments are worth the time and expense of going through ULURP.
• Proposition 4 would allow developers to appeal city council ULURP decisions for projects that include affordable (that is, middle-income rent-stabilized) housing. Appeals would go to a new “board” consisting of the mayor, the city council Speaker, and the borough president. In effect, this provision would end member deference.

Taken together, these measures would make it modestly easier to build housing in New York City, particularly in areas like southern Brooklyn and eastern Queens that are currently zoned for low density and represented by city council members who oppose new housing. They wouldn’t spark a housing revolution, because they wouldn’t change the default anti-new-housing status quo; only large-scale upzoning could do that. But they would make a difference, particularly in the fourteen city council districts that produced seven or fewer total units of affordable (rent-stabilized middle-income) housing so far this year.

Strange Bedfellows in Opposition

The opponents of proposals 2, 3 and 4 fall into three broad camps. The most significant opposition is also the most straightforward: it comes from people in low-density areas of New York City and the politicians who represent them. These people have a straightforward goal — to prevent apartment buildings from being built in their neighborhoods — and they recognize that ULURP combined with member deference is a very effective way to achieve this goal, and that any weakening of ULURP will result in more housing construction. This group is often ignored in intraleft debates about housing because their politics skew conservative, but they are by far the most powerful political force defending status quo zoning. Last year, it was conservative outer-borough city council members, not anti-gentrification activists, who voted against and significantly weakened the city’s modest upzoning plan, the City of Yes initiative.

A second group of opponents is not opposed to new housing per se but has a stake in preserving the anti-housing default in New York because they can extract unrelated concessions in exchange for supporting exceptions to the default. This group includes some unions, which can weigh in to support projects in exchange for labor agreements with developers, and many city council members, who can use their leverage over zoning to demand other community benefits.

Finally, some tenant organizations oppose the proposals because they too can use vetoes as leverage. Tenant activists often oppose land-use approval in order to push developers to include more affordable units in new developments; while most would agree that these deals generally fail to produce a meaningful amount of genuinely affordable housing, tenant groups worry that making it easier to build housing would generate even less.

It’s an odd coalition, uniting conservatives who systematically oppose virtually all construction, including affordable construction, with tenant activists who support massive city investment in social housing.

Strange Bedfellows in Support

The coalition supporting the ballot measures is only slightly more straightforward. Support for ballot measures 2, 3 and 4 on the Right and Left reflects an emerging consensus that this system is basically dysfunctional for a growing city in the midst of a housing crisis. In this view, the city needs more apartments, and it makes little sense to impose a broad ban on building larger apartment buildings, require developers to engage in a lengthy and expensive process to seek exemptions from this ban, and allow local elected officials to completely close the door on new construction in their districts.

Agreeing that the status quo isn’t working doesn’t mean that proponents agree on what to do about it, of course. Quite the contrary. Many in New York’s business lobby believe that addressing the housing crisis requires straightforward deregulation — ideally alongside the weakening of tenant protections.

Those on the Left who support the ballot initiatives take an entirely different view, supporting something closer to Zohran Mamdani’s housing platform: a massive program of socially financed housing, in combination with ironclad tenant protections. Leftists in this camp tend to see new privately financed housing as generally positive to the extent that it moderates market rent increases, but not remotely adequate by itself to produce the housing we need.

Left-wing supporters of large-scale social housing nevertheless have a strong stake in creating a regulatory regime less hostile to new housing. One has only to look at projects like Creedmoor, in which a state-financed effort to build thousands of units of senior housing on the site of an abandoned psychiatric facility was delayed for years and then shrunk by over eight hundred units to appease local elected officials, to recognize the enormous obstacles faced by those who support building social housing on a meaningful scale.

Mamdani has proposed building two hundred thousand units of social housing — a plan ambitious enough to genuinely begin to address New York’s massive housing crisis and prevent the steady displacement of working-class people from New York. Building that much housing would be a tall order in any case; the current ULURP process with member deference will make it near impossible. If the city’s social housing program is subject to the unappealable veto of every individual city council member, every development will require months of negotiation over building heights and parking minimums, and much of the city’s land area will be quite simply off limits to social housing. Socialists who want to see Mamdani’s program given a fair chance to succeed should certainly vote yes on these proposals.

Opponents of the proposals have argued that even if Mamdani becomes mayor next week, he won’t be mayor forever; do we really want to empower future mayors to permit more housing? Shouldn’t we keep member deference and extended ULURP processes in place to protect us from future administrations?

The answer is straightforward. We know what New York City’s current land-use regime has to offer: anemic housing production citywide combined with displacement-driven development in a handful of neighborhoods, an approval process that’s manageable for politically connected developers pursuing megaprojects but slams the door on modest efforts to build three-story walk-ups in low-density neighborhoods, a political environment in which tenant advocates campaign for years to win concessions from developers and wind up with a handful of barely affordable units, and a crippling housing shortage that gives landlords the upper hand against tenants.

Low-density zoning and ULURP were not designed to protect tenants, they haven’t protected tenants in the past two decades, and they won’t protect tenants in the future. If we want the social housing tenants deserve, we need to build it — and we need to change the rules to make that possible.