With the City Council expected to pass a modified version of Mayor Eric Adams’ package of development reforms Thursday, New York City will join a growing list of cities around the country that have updated rules in a bid to spur more housing.
But while Adams and his city planners acknowledge that their City of Yes for Housing Opportunity builds on ideas implemented elsewhere in the U.S., left unsaid is a harsh reality for the nation’s biggest metropolis: smaller cities that recently revamped their zoning codes far outdid New York City’s changes.
“What we did is a gentle density plan designed to solve the housing shortage of a medium-sized city or a small city,” said Alex Armlovich, a senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, citing Raleigh or Durham in North Carolina as examples. “The sheer size of New York means that the citywide thing adds up to a bunch of units, but in terms of, like, how bold is it in any one spot? Columbus outgunned us on this one, the Minneapolis comprehensive plan outgunned us.”
Some parts of the original City of Yes proposal were from the onset less ambitious than elsewhere, while changes made as part of negotiations further scaled back the agenda.
Columbus, Ohio, now allows for residential buildings up to 16 stories tall on certain streets near existing and future transit. New York City’s proposal, by contrast, would allow buildings of up to five stories near transit in low-rise residential neighborhoods.
“That shocks the hell out of me,” said Mindy Justis, co-founder of pro-housing group Neighbors for More Neighbors Columbus.
Minneapolis lets builders construct duplexes and triplexes on lots that had been restricted to single-family homes. New York’s City of Yes would not.
Plus, Minneapolis — along with Austin, Buffalo, San Francisco and other cities — made it optional for developers to include parking spaces with new apartments, anywhere. New York City opted instead to continue requiring parking for housing development in most parts of the city.
The City of Yes plan constitutes the first revamp of the city’s zoning code in over six decades and has the potential to create up to 80,000 new units of housing over 15 years, according to City Hall. Some housing experts said Council modifications that are likely to preserve low density in suburban-style outer borough areas run counter to the initial promise of City of Yes to create “a little bit more housing in every neighborhood.”
“In many ways, what those other cities have been doing is what City of Yes proposed to do in our lower-density neighborhoods,” like eastern Queens and Staten Island, said Vicki Been, faculty director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “I would like to see those neighborhoods step up and produce more housing. It’s the fair thing. It undermines the whole [idea of], we are one city where everybody needs to do their share.”
Austin’s Powers
Adams administration officials framed City of Yes as a sweeping plan to address the city’s housing crisis while having a modest impact on individual neighborhoods. And, they said, it would help address growing inequities between neighborhoods that have produced a disproportionate number of new housing units and others that have been shielded by tight zoning restrictions.
But some City Council members, especially in outer-borough neighborhoods where home and car ownership are common, objected to changes they warned could dramatically alter their communities while straining streets and sewers. The measure going to a final vote on Thursday was the result of compromises worked out in negotiations between City Hall and Council leaders.
Elsewhere in the country, cities that have sought to make it easier to build housing by tackling land use rules have similarly contended with community concerns around changes to neighborhood character, impacts to quality of life and lack of infrastructure.
Different cities — each with its own political climate — took varying tacks to making those updates.
Austin in 2018 had passed CodeNEXT, a package of land use changes citywide — in many ways, similar to City of Yes — but it was struck down in court.
In response, city officials approached zoning changes measure by measure, fighting to pass one element at a time. This approach resulted in changes that were bolder and less watered down than CodeNEXT, said Luis Osta Lugo, a board member of the pro-development organization AURA: An Austin For Everyone.
“Because it was one single thing, it became this rallying cry against the housing stuff. It became a point of political opposition for NIMBYs,” Osta Lugo said. “Nothing in CodeNEXT comes close in ambition to what we passed now.”
For instance, in 2023, Austin got rid of requirements to add parking spaces to new housing, a mandate that made building more expensive and some locations unsuitable for development. CodeNEXT had merely sought to reduce, but not eliminate, those parking requirements.
Minneapolis’ 2020 citywide update of its zoning codes included a slew of changes, including making the creation of parking for new housing units optional everywhere. A bid to “end” single-family zoning by allowing developments of up to four units on each lot distracted many from what were expected to be other contentious elements of the proposal.
“Almost no one paid attention to the parking minimums piece because they were so focused on the piece that you could put four units on every lot,” said Anna Nelson, board president of Twin Cities-based Neighbors for More Neighbors. “In retrospect, parking was a huge game-changer and made a lot of developments possible in a way the three to four units did not.”
The final version of the plan reduced the maximum number of units that can be built on a single-family lot down to three. Nelson said the idea might “sound silly in the context of New York City,” but in fact City of Yes leaves single-family lots largely untouched — only allowing for the possibility of an additional small apartment, like in a garage or basement.
Where Minneapolis took a citywide approach, Columbus, Ohio zeroed in on a more targeted area when in July it passed a set of provisions known as Zone In, which could yield up to 88,000 new apartments. Officials focused the zoning changes on just 4% of the city, on parcels close to existing or planned transit.
“That meant we could go with what felt like more aggressive or more assertive policies because the city of Columbus is a very wide, sprawled city,” said Justis, of the Columbus chapter of Neighbors for More Neighbors. “We can say out loud, ‘We’re not coming to your neighborhood, but we want to talk about that in the next phases.’”
Justis said housing advocates pushed for higher height limits for buildings on those transit corridors, up to 16 stories high (or 12 without affordable housing), understanding developers wouldn’t necessarily build to the max.
Ultimately, what New York will likely end up with after the Council vote won’t be the last of its land use changes, since city officials have tweaked parts of the zoning code every few years.
Andrew Fine, policy director of the pro-housing group Open New York, said that creating a plan to accommodate New York City’s scale and widely ranging types of neighborhoods on a relatively quick timeline, as City of Yes did, necessarily meant compromise — and will still result in new housing.
“We have sort of suburban style housing alongside the densest, most built-up parts of the country, and so when you do things citywide here, like City of Yes, you have to incorporate a lot of different pieces and a lot of different strategies,” Fine said. “That is a big challenge and a big lift. I think the City Council has done a great job in this plan of including benefits for all different types of areas.”
