The NYC Department of City Planning allows the public to submit testimony on this item through July 22, 2024 via its online comment form rather than any direct email contact.

To submit written testimony online:

1. Visit the department’s online form.

2. Under “Borough,” click “Citywide.” Under “Project,” select “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity.”

3. Fill in all personal information as required.

4. For the 500-word comment section, copy and paste the following:

Mayor Adams’ “City of Yes” plan is premised in large part on the notion that New York suffers from a housing shortage making housing more expensive for everyone, and that adding more market-rate housing, no matter how expensive, will bring those prices down. Our city clearly has an affordable housing shortage. But building more unaffordable housing won’t help solve that problem, and the fiction that it will not only diverts valuable attention and resources from doing so, but potentially may make the situation worse.

I therefore strongly oppose several provisions in the plan. This includes:

• Increasing the allowable size and height of purely market-rate residential developments in various contextual zoning districts in Manhattan Community Boards 1–8.
• Allowing developers to build larger purely market-rate residential developments in Voluntary Inclusionary Housing Zones throughout New York, such as Hudson Square and the East Village/Lower East Side.
• Allowing the transfer of air rights from individually designated landmarks over a much larger area, and with greatly reduced public review and approval, vastly increasing potential development in neighborhoods like ours which contain over a hundred individual landmarks.
• Allowing deeper encroachments into rear yards in medium and high density districts, reducing and destroying the precious very limited interior green space in our neighborhood/ which provide vital light and air and environmental and storm runoff mitigation
• Removing important provisions from special districts throughout the city (such as SoHo/NoHo and Hudson Square) designed to maintain neighborhood character — supposedly to avoid “redundancy” with “duplicate” provisions City of Yes would add to the citywide text — leaving such areas vulnerable to the loss of these protections altogether in the future.
• Creating a raft of new special provisions to allow expanded market rate housing and other development on what it refers to as “campuses,” which is likely to include the NYU superblocks, West Village Houses, multiple NYCHA developments, and several church properties in our neighborhoods, among other locations, without providing any clarity on what this would mean in practice or how it would affect our communities.

I strongly urge you to remove these provisions from “City of Yes,” or oppose it if they are not.

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4. Complete the submission — and thank you for your advocacy and support!