For decades now, progress in solving New York’s housing crisis has stagnated amid the contest between two dominant visions: one that would have the city build up and up and up as if it were Hong Kong, and another that would privilege intimate scale — in some parts of the city meaning the charming traditions of European urbanism and in other parts, farther from the center, meaning the traditions of Levittown. Binary solutions nearly always present a trap. But last month the city took a historic step toward breaking out of it. After 175 community board meetings and two public hearings, each of which unfolded over nearly 15 hours, the City Council passed the most extensive set of zoning changes in more than 60 years.
The Zoning Resolution of 1961 radically altered the contours of the city in a way that was described in one academic analysis as reflecting “a disdain for the existing built form.” Famously labyrinthine, the codes, in the simplest understanding, prioritized high-rise office buildings over housing as the city’s population went into decline. The new rules — packaged as City of Yes for Housing Opportunity — roll back arcane restrictions that have long stifled housing supply in an era of staggering demand, and they have come about largely under the radar of New Yorkers, a vast majority of whom do not immerse themselves in the wonkier corners of planning and policy.
City of Yes does not — and isn’t intended to — resolutely end the city’s housing emergencies, which policymakers have estimated would require 500,000 additional units of housing. But it represents a vital new approach, one that shifts the focus away from the current paradigm, where the answer seems to consistently and tenaciously lie in building glass towers in high-density neighborhoods in Manhattan, northern Brooklyn or the waterfront in Queens and making some percentage of them “affordable,” a term subject to multiple interpretations. Again and again, this model tends to invite fierce community opposition — as it has with proposed projects across from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and in Gowanus — that plays out over years and mountains of litigation.
The guiding principle behind City of Yes is to distribute the responsibility of creating housing more evenly, essentially extending it to every neighborhood in the city. Say you are a homeowner with an underused backyard. Under certain conditions, you can now build or repurpose a structure of up to 800 square feet to rent out long term (Airbnb use is not approved) or generously hand over to your aging parents. The crux of the plan, though, is an emphasis on modest structures of five or six stories rather than 30.
This is meant to address what urban planners characterize as “the missing middle,” the void of a certain housing style that cities across the country are now trying to fill. Zoning changes do not mandate where and how much housing ought to be built; they open up (or foreclose) possibility. In this case, they unlock a catalog of opportunities to facilitate development; converting office buildings to apartment buildings around the city, long suggested as a way to create housing, now has a much easier path.
According to the calculations of the city’s planning department, City of Yes will create more homes accessible to those at lower income levels over the next 15 years than all of the city’s other inclusionary housing programs since they first came into being in the mid-1980s. The plan further incentivizes development of all types of housing by relaxing — and in some places eliminating — the expensive requirement that a certain number of parking spaces be allotted for new apartment complexes. It is a requirement that urban planners and ordinary car antagonists have complained about for decades.