Mayor Adams Announces 500K New Homes to Be Built in City Over Next 10 Years

Mayor Adams Announces 500K New Homes to Be Built in City Over Next 10 Years

 

By:  Hadassa Kalatizadeh

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has outlined ambitious goals for housing construction in the city.

As reported by Crain’s NY, on Thursday the mayor made a speech announcing the goal to add some 500,000 more new homes to the city over the next 10 years.  The city has been grappling with a housing shortage, and the new initiative aims to accelerate the rate of residential construction.  “In the last decade New York City grew by nearly 800,000 people, but we added just 200,000 homes to our city,” Adams said. “It’s not complicated: We have more people than homes. This shortage gives landlords the power to charge any price they want and leaves too many New Yorkers with no place to go.”

The administration’s strategy, eloquently named “Get Stuff Built,” advocates speeding up the development process by cutting red tape, rezoning and converting commercial space into residentials, and partnering with the state government as well as the White House to enact pro-affordable housing policies. The plan lays out a total of 111 reforms, some 20 of which would also need the state or federal government to sign off on.  Some of the proposed reforms include expediting smaller housing projects by exempting them from the city’s environmental review process.

The lengthy review usually takes eight months or more and cost tens of thousands of dollars, and in most cases the smaller developments don’t really affect the environment significantly, Adams said. Hizzoner also hopes to put an end to certain requirements from the city’s notoriously lengthy land-use review process, although land-use changes will still need to be approved by the City Council.  Large real estate projects also typically lag because of community resistance, and the mayor addressed this by saying that New Yorkers in all neighborhoods need to start saying yes to new developments more often.

As per Crain’s, Mayor Adam’s administration wants to start off by focusing first on neighborhood-level rezonings in the East Bronx and in Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue.  He said more neighborhood rezonings would be forthcoming. The Bronx rezoning will be centered around the four new Metro-North stations slated to open in 2027.  Adams said he’d like to add 6,000 new homes to Parkchester, Van Nest and Morris Park—or which at least 1,500 units would be rent-regulated.  In Brooklyn, the plan is to add thousands of new housing units to the Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio had similarly prioritized rezoning, but redevelopments were stalled or abandoned due to resistance from city hall and the local communities. State governor Kathy Hochul also recently made her own speech similarly pledging to place an emphasis on housing production in the state.

“If New York is to remain the city we love, we must have places for the people we love,” Adams said. “We need more housing, and we need it as fast as we can build it.”