The New York City Department of City Planning has released a list of 12 neighborhoods where rezoning requests for affordable housing will be fast-tracked for approval. This move aims to accelerate housing production in areas that have seen little development in recent years.
The list includes community boards in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, which collectively account for just 1.1% of the city’s affordable housing production over the past five years. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said, “New York’s housing crisis is not going to be solved by asking the same neighborhoods to do all the building.”
Affordable Housing Fast Track
The Affordable Housing Fast Track will cut the time developers spend waiting for rezoning approvals down to 90 days. The measure is expected to take effect on January 1 and will apply to 12 community districts, including Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge and Upper East Side in Manhattan.
The community districts selected for the fast track are: Brooklyn CD 10, Brooklyn CD 12, Brooklyn CD 18, Manhattan CD 7, Manhattan CD 8, Queens CD 4, Queens CD 5, Queens CD 10, Queens CD 11, Queens CD 13, Staten Island CD 2, and Staten Island CD 3.
Streamlining Approval Processes
The two-pronged policy aims to distribute housing development more evenly throughout the city by identifying areas that have produced little affordable housing in recent years and speeding up the process by trimming the time that rezoning applications take. The city has created over 65,000 affordable housing units over the past five years, but just 724 have come from the selected districts.
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By contrast, 51% of new affordable housing produced during that period came from 12 districts in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.
Expedited Land Use Review Procedure
Proposed developments providing permanent affordable housing will now go through the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure. The 90-day period will replace the seven-month wait that developers normally face. Eligible projects will have to produce levels of housing that align with Mandatory Inclusionary Housing standards or better.
Under MIH guidelines, projects with more than 10 units must set aside between 20% and 30% of residential floor area in new developments, enlargements, and conversions to residential uses as permanent affordable housing. The area median income eligible for affordable units can range from 60% to 115% under the program.
The city will review and recalculate the 12 districts where the fast track will apply every five years. The DCP won’t mandate a specific number of units that each community district needs to produce. Instead, ELURP will speed up the public review process for certain housing and resiliency projects, plus city-owned land disposition actions.
Though welcomed by developers, ELURP has faced opposition from some city council members. Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer has advocated against the measure, saying that Manhattan should be taken “off the list.”
