Yesterday the City Council voted 31-20 to approve Mayor Adams’ “City of Yes” citywide rezoning plan. Local City Councilmember Christopher Marte voted no, while local City Councilmembers Erik Bottcher and Carlina Rivera voted yes. That plan will:

• Substantially increase the allowable size and height of new market-rate (luxury condo) developments in our neighborhoods and citywide, especially in areas with contextual zoning, which are supposed to ensure new development matches the scale of its surroundings 
• Take zoning bonuses allowing additional bulk and height that had been reserved for developments that included affordable housing and give them to those that are purely market-rate (luxury condo) with no affordable housing
• Allow the vastly increased transfer of air rights from the scores of individual landmarks in our neighborhoods to surrounding blocks, with very little oversight or public review 
• Allow new development (or expansion of existing developments) to encroach much further into the limited precious open space in backyards and rear yards 
• Allow new development on currently required open space on NYU superblocks, religious institutions, schools, and other properties covering larger spaces under common ownership 
• Allow the City to rezone residential neighborhoods with new superdense zoning districts that permit development 50% larger than the maximum currently allowable anywhere in NYC

The core premise of this plan is that NYC is not building enough market-rate housing (i.e., generally expensive and unaffordable to most New Yorkers), and that building more of it, no matter how expensive, will have beneficial trickle-down effects for everyone. This in spite of the fact that, as we showed:

• New York City is expected to add 33,000 new units of housing this year, another 150,000 by 2028, and has the capacity to add another 2 million more under the pre-existing zoning rules. 
• Neighborhoods that have experienced the kinds of upzonings and stimulated increased housing development that “City of Yes” will enable citywide have overwhelmingly tended to become less Black and Hispanic, and more white.
• Our city does not suffer from a housing shortage, but a shortage of affordable housing, and our current approach only exacerbates this problem by adding more housing that only the wealthiest New Yorkers (and non–New Yorkers) can afford, and by encouraging the demolition of existing affordable housing.
• Other cities that have gone this route of adding tons of new market-rate housing have not found that it brings prices down for everyone; frequently prices go up for everyone, or in a best-case scenario, prices go down for the most expensive housing and up for the least expensive — hurting those who need help most. 
• The City’s predictions about the impact and effect of its rezonings are consistently wildly inaccurate, especially when it comes to claims about housing and affordability. 

This outcome is extremely disappointing. The battle is not over, however. “City of Yes” allows the City to rezone residential neighborhoods at vastly greater densities than the maximum previously allowable. We expect to see such proposals in our neighborhoods in the not too distant future.