A critical City Council committee vote over the mayor’s City of Yes housing proposal was delayed Thursday as officials finalized the details, with lawmakers negotiating over contested aspects of the plan and Gov. Hochul agreeing to put up $1 billion in state money to help make it happen.
Hochul, who has been supportive of the plan, stepped up late Wednesday night with the $1 billion in funding from the state budget at the request of City Hall, sources told The News. This came after the Council pushed for new funding commitments from the administration. The state money brings the total funding coming from Mayor Adams to $5 billion for various improvements and other expenses.
The Department of City Planning, which has spearheaded the plan, initially estimated it could lead to between 58,200 and 108,900 new units being built over 15 years. The final version is expected to fall around 80,000, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Some of the most controversial components of “Zoning for Housing Opportunity,” as it’s known, were scaled back as city officials hammered out specifics on funding, the number of units to build, accessory dwelling units and parking mandates hours past when the vote was scheduled to start.
The plan was pitched as a badly needed overhaul of decades-old zoning rules exacerbating the city’s dire housing shortage. The packages of reforms would help build “a little bit more housing” in every neighborhood by loosening restrictions on what can be built where.
In the eleventh-hour negotiations, officials from the Council speaker’s office, the Department of City Planning and the Mayor’s office hashed out a new version of the parking component, making it a tiered model where mandates will either stay unchanged, be reduced or eliminated entirely depending on location, sources familiar with the matter told The News.
Councilmembers from car-reliant areas in the outer boroughs have raised concerns for months about parking mandates, which would have lifted minimum parking requirements for new developments citywide — but not banned new parking.
“If the City of Yes passes, we will have done so much to bring relief to New Yorkers across the five boroughs,” First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer said at an unrelated news conference on Thursday.
City of Yes has faced strong resistance since its introduction last September from more development-averse outer borough neighborhoods, where residents voiced concerns about how the plan would change the fabric of their communities.
The committee vote comes after months of arduous, often heated evaluation from community boards, borough presidents and other stakeholders during the city’s review process.
Zoning for Housing Opportunity is set for a final vote by the full Council early next month.
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