NYC Mayor Sets Housing Goal of 500,000 Units in Decade
Adams promises to cut red tape but does not specify percentage of units that will be affordable.
New York Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday that the city is undertaking what he called a “moonshot” housing program that aims to create 500,000 housing units over the next decade.
Adams issued a report entitled “Get Stuff Done” listing more than 100 ways NYC’s “administration of development is broken.”
The mayor offered a bevy of solutions, most of which involve cutting red tape, including speeding up the precertification process of the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure that clears the way for zoning changes, and exempting housing projects with fewer than 200 units from environmental reviews.
NYC’s Department of Buildings also will streamline its computerized permit application and tracking process, Adams said.
“We need more housing and we need it as fast as we can build it,” Adams said in a speech at City Hall. “That means affordable housing for working families, it means apartments for young people and places for people to grow older.”
“It’s not complicated: We have more people than homes,” Adams said. “This shortage gives landlords the power to charge any price they want and leaves too many New Yorkers with no place to go.”
“This is our mission, our moonshot, a bold effort that must fire ambition and inspire teamwork,” the mayor declared.
While he stressed the need for affordable housing, Adams did not indicate how much of the new housing envisioned in the plan—which will double the amount of apartments NYC expects to build—will be designated as affordable and how much will be market-rate.
The 500K new homes and apartments set as the goal of the new plan is more than double what the city produced in each of the past two decades: an estimated 169K in the 2010s and 198K in the 2000s, according to statistics tallied by the NYC Department of Planning.
The biggest previous surge in housing units occurred in the 1960s—when an estimated 369K units were built—before the imposition of a lengthy approval process for zoning changes that can take several years.