Adams’s City of Yes Still Popular as Mayor Grapples With Federal Indictment

New York Mayor Eric Adams may be embroiled in a federal investigation for an alleged bribery and straw donor scheme, but his signature housing proposal still has immense support.

New York City Council members and civic organizations kicked off a hearing Monday on Adams’s ambitious proposal to modernize the city’s zoning code, dubbed “the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” with the admission that, while City of Yes is not an affordable housing plan outright, it will increase the housing supply.

“We recognize the importance of updating the city’s zoning from the last major change decades ago to help contribute towards addressing the current housing needs in our city,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in her opening remarks. “At the same time, this council knows that zoning reform alone cannot fully address the wide-ranging housing needs of New Yorkers. 

“Zoning reform is one important component, but New Yorkers also need deeper affordability, expanded pathways to affordable homeownership, strengthened tenant protections, the removal of barriers to housing vouchers, investments in their neighborhoods, and more,” Adams added.

And it wasn’t just in the City Hall chambers that Adams’s zoning text amendment was receiving support. A Slingshot Strategies poll commissioned by the pro-housing group Open New York and released Monday found that 80 percent of 900 voters polled were in favor of the City of Yes.

Mayor Adams’s City of Yes plan aims to relax certain zoning rules to spur the construction of more housing by making it easier to convert office buildings to residential, removing parking requirements in certain neighborhoods, and allowing projects with affordable housing to build denser. However, the crucial City Council vote is due to come after federal prosecutors late last month indicted Adams on charges of bribery and soliciting illegal campaign contributions, leading some proponents of the zoning changes to worry that a weakened Adams could cause the proposal to burn out.

The plan also faced pushback from some local community boards. New York City Planning Commission Chairman Dan Garodnick, early on in Monday’s hearing, pushed back against suburban misconceptions of what the City of Yes could do to communities, particularly in Northeast Queens where groups were calling the proposal an “extinction event.”

Neighborhoods like those in Eastern Queens would likely see more modest housing growth with a height-limited apartment building every couple of blocks in the coming decade and a half, and only on commercial streets, according to Garodnick. 

It is unclear what kind of changes — if any — the council speaker will propose to the final version of the City of Yes. But Kevin Riley, chair of the council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises, said he would push additional infrastructure funds and affordable homeownership opportunities to ultimately come out of the finished product.

Eric Adams’s successor as Brooklyn borough president, Antonio Reynoso, said in his formal recommendation for the City of Yes “should be best understood as a housing supply strategy rather than a housing affordability strategy.”

“The proposals would also help us catch up with cities across the country that are working to end exclusionary zoning and further fair housing goals, correcting for dozens of rezonings over the past 20 years that limited new development in neighborhoods with strong access to public services,” City Comptroller Brad Lander, a mayoral hopeful himself, said in a statement. “In particular, allowing new development in transit-rich neighborhoods will help increase New Yorkers’ economic mobility and access to opportunity.”

Flooding a market with new homes, however, could saturate the market and bring down prices for housing naturally, according to Tom Wright, president and CEO of think tank the Regional Plan Association.

“The restrictive zoning in many neighborhoods in New York City poses significant obstacles and costs to building new homes — for both affordable and market-rate — even in places with good transportation and access to jobs,” Wright said in a statement. “This drives up prices, drives out working and middle-class residents, and constrains flexibility and choices for renters and prospective homeowners.”

The text amendment would eliminate parking requirements for new multifamily buildings, raising concerns from City Council members on the zoning subcommittee that an infusion of housing without major mass transit upgrades could negatively impact the ability of all New Yorkers to get to work.

“New Yorkers are hurting for more housing, and that pain makes the struggle to grow public transit ridership harder. At the same time, we need better transportation options, especially in communities without subway stations,” Danny Pearlstein, policy director for the Riders Alliance, said in a statement. “There’s no excusing leaders who deny new housing saying that public transit hasn’t kept pace. The answer is fast, frequent, reliable buses and more homes, right now — not more obstruction, homelessness and brutal commutes.”

Transportation happens to be a sore spot for the transit advocacy group, which is still reeling from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s inexplicable pause of congestion pricing in June, leaving the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bereft of about $15 billion reserved for upgrades to the city’s subways and buses.

The City of Yes will have another day of hearings on Tuesday, this time with the public able to give testimony, before it moves to the subcommittee for a vote. It will need to then be approved by the full City Council before Adams can give the final thumbs up on it.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.