MANAGEMENT UPDATE.

A GIANT HOUSING ACTION PLAN FOR A GIANT CITY

“New York City’s housing crisis is the defining challenge of our time,” wrote the City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani in an early May report, in which his office describes the introductory efforts the city is making to address this pressing issue. As he wrote, “For most New Yorkers, rent is the single largest expense in their lives. It is forcing families out of the neighborhoods they built, pushing working people further from their communities and, too often, out of this city altogether. We must use every tool at our disposal to confront this crisis – building far more housing at every level of affordability, protecting tenants and cracking down on bad landlords.”

In order to come up with some potentially workable plans, the city’s so-called SPEED Task Force “conducted roundtables with over 100 industry experts, advocates, developers, builders, and trade organizations to uncover the largest roadblocks and obstacles in the affordable housing production process; met with over 100 individual City employees involved in the administrative and permitting processes for affordable housing; and received over 500 official recommendations from roundtables, agency working groups, and online submissions to better encourage the development of affordable housing,” according to the report.

The report lumped the challenges to readily available affordable housing into four categories – which are common in most other large cities as well.

For example, “any projects must go through a review process that requires analysis and disclosure of any potential significant environmental impacts that a project may cause. . . However, duplicative, outdated, and ineffective processes have resulted in review requirements that stall projects for years without offering additional benefits to residents or their surrounding environment, and without considering the consequences of inaction such as sprawled housing development away from transit.”

Another issue raised is the inefficiency of pre-development and financing. As the report explains, “To obtain City financing and begin construction, affordable housing projects must undergo a pre-development process that includes design and budget approvals from more than a dozen City agencies and utility companies. Inefficient coordination and communication has resulted in a disjointed process, which creates costly delays before shovels can enter the ground.”

Permitting and Approvals are also an obstacle. According to the report, “While projects are going through environmental and planning reviews and completing financial due diligence, builders must also undergo a permitting and approvals process with multiple agencies before construction can begin. As construction nears completion, projects go through another round of permitting and approvals from a number of agencies before residents can move in. Critical understaffing and overly onerous requirements waste time and can yield significant delays that add considerable costs as a project is being built.”

Finally, “once an affordable housing project is nearing completion, tenants go through a lengthy lottery process to prove they meet the eligibility requirements for the project and to obtain a new home. If a tenant is coming from the shelter system or receiving an income-based subsidy or voucher, additional steps may be necessary before they can move in.”

Here were the reports’ seven concrete recommendations, which the administration currently believes will cut the timeline for all affordable housing projects by eight months, and if the projects require a zoning change it will abbreviate the timeline by two years.

“Cut the city’s pre-certification timeline for many zoning actions from two years to six months so housing projects can be reviewed and approved faster.”

“Assign a dedicated central project management team to every city-financed affordable project to shepherd projects through the up to 15 agencies that are responsible for permitting, environmental review, and financing.”