With ‘City of Yes,’ New York Finally Gets Real About the Housing Crisis

A new rezoning plan for the city aims to remove long-outdated barriers to building housing and to spread development across all the city’s neighborhoods

By Ginia Bellafante of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"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"

"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."

"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"

"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."

"What is striking about the debate, no matter how contentious, is the shape it has taken and that such a message has really resonated. “The push to build housing in neighborhoods that haven’t is very strong,” Shahana Hanif, the local councilwoman for Windsor Terrace, who now has the most significant say in the fate of the project, told me. Many people who live in the neighborhood, which has plenty of single-family houses owned by gentrifiers, have argued for a development entirely made up of affordable apartments. The tension has not been between those who want all and those who want nothing."