There are some elected officials who have taken heroic steps to approve housing and the zoning to enable it.
We should celebrate this leadership. But if it takes heroes to get housing built, we will never build enough housing.
New York City has finally begun acknowledging the damaging consequences of its inability to supply new housing – unaffordability, homelessness, diminished economic competitiveness, and numerous other ills. The Mayor’s “moonshot” goal of a half-million new housing units, and the Speaker’s Fair Housing Framework both emphasize the need for more housing.
Yet the path ahead is often blocked by a land use review process that delays, defers, and rejects the actions needed to make new housing possible.
To make progress toward these important goals, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the process by which New York City makes land use decisions – the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP.
ULURP has many strengths, but it also contains political incentives skewed against housing. It allows Council members who oppose housing to effectively bar the door. And for members who are amenable to housing, ULURP drops them into a Thunderdome-style battle with opponents of local proposals, where it can be politically hazardous to advocate for citywide needs.
The political incentives of this process make it harder for an official to say “yes” to housing than “no” (or “not now”). The failure to balance local and citywide priorities in ULURP has curtailed the Citys ability to change zoning, undermined the citys Fair Housing objectives, increased the price of housing and depleted public subsidies.
Read the full report, or see highlights below.
Highlights
ULURP’s skewed incentives are rooted in the intertwined factors of NIMBYism and member deference. But we shouldn’t regard these as irrational behaviors or personal failings that can be resolved through individual effort. We need to understand them as rational, systemic phenomena that we need to account for in the design of our decision process.
The key question for land use decision making is not whether residents in opposition are behaving rationally, but whether decision processes are designed rationally. Do they privilege the views of impassioned local opponents, or do they seek to reconcile them with consideration of the broader public interest? Under a system that defers to local opponents, we should expect that overall, land use decisions will fail to meet citywide or societal needs, and will reproduce geographical inequities as individual communities opt out of changes they resist.
This is a fair description of the housing outcomes New York City has experienced.
The 1975 Charter established ULURP, as part of a set of reforms that set aside old-fashioned, top-down master planning in favor of community-informed decision making. The logic of the process was (and remains) elegant: proposals would be reviewed first at the local level by Community Boards, then at the borough-wide level by Borough Presidents, with advisory input from both. Then the City Planning Commission would review these local recommendations, reconcile them with broader policies and objectives, and vote on them. This was followed by a vote by the Board of Estimate, comprised of citywide and borough-level elected officials. The premise can be summarized as “local voice, citywide responsibility,” with the idea to make decision making responsive to local perspectives, but not to devolve decision-making authority to the local level.
The 1989 Charter Revision Commission scrapped the Board of Estimate and assigned its various roles to other bodies, primarily to a newly empowered and expanded City Council. But reassigning the final vote on land use items from a body constituted of borough-wide and citywide officials to one composed of legislators representing small districts unleashed the practice of member deference.
It’s important to highlight here that land use items are an outlier within the Council’s authority – they’re the only actions of a strictly local nature on which the Council votes.
CHPC’s analysis of data on ULURP shows that indeed, there have been fewer rezonings since the 1989 Charter revisions, and that neighborhoods that have resisted rezoning have typically added less housing in recent decades.
Our housing shortage today is vastly more severe than it was in 1989. The city’s main housing challenge in the 1980s was restoring neighborhoods following the devastation of the 1970s. Today, decades of population growth and limited housing production have produced sky-high housing prices and vanishingly low vacancy rates. It’s understandable that the 1989 Commission might not have seen the addition of housing as a top priority, but today it is an issue that cannot be ignored.
Demographic changes put the equity implications of the 1989 Charter revisions in a different light today. The 1989 changes were animated by the imperative of improving representation of minority communities of color in a majority-white city. Today, however, the demographics of the city’s population have changed dramatically, as has the composition of citywide elected officials. The “minority” communities protected by member deference today are often whiter, more affluent homeowners.
The following principles are offered to guide Charter reforms on housing and land use:
- Return to the original ULURP concept of “local voice, citywide responsibility.”
- Build into the process a check against member deference.
- Promote cooperation rather than stoking conflict or rivalry.
- Make minor actions faster and less resource-intensive.
- Accelerate urgent affordable housing investments with procedural relief:
- Disposition of City-owned land for affordable housing, and
- NYCHA campus investments made through a resident partnership model
ULURP Completions over Time
Net Housing Production Mapped
Private Residential Rezonings Mapped
This policy brief is part of CHPC’s This is How We Do It?!initiative, which explores how the processes we rely on to reach our housing goals too often take us further from them.
