City Council Rep Shares Concerns about Adams Housing Plan
Lower Manhattan’s representative at the City Council, Christopher Marte, is voicing reservations about the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan being pushed by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, which came before the municipal legislature on Monday and Tuesday for the first time. (This is one component of a triad of Adams policy initiatives, which also includes City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality and the City of Yes for Economic Opportunity. The former was enacted by the Council last December, while the latter was ratified in June.)
“This is the broadest citywide text amendment ever,” Mr. Marte began, with a reference to the fact that New York planning and development is governed by law enacted in 1961, which is periodically updated with new “text amendments.”
“It runs to more than 1,400 pages, which my staff and I have reviewed line by line,” he continued. “It doesn’t contain a single new provision about mandatory affordable housing. Instead, the Adams plan only gives developers the option to include affordable units if they want to take advantage of incentives,” such as tax abatements and financing on more attractive terms.
“The biggest need throughout the City, but especially in my Lower Manhattan district, is affordable housing,” he said. “We have lost more affordable housing here over the last 25 years than any other community in the state. So we need to mandate it, rather than ask for it. This plan gives away a lot, such as additional floor-area ratio,” or FAR: a regulatory limit that caps the allowable space within a building as a multiple of the size of the lot on which it is built. “We need to get something in return for what is being given away.”
In the years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he reflected, “we created an entire new community in Lower Manhattan. To make that happen, we gave away a lot to developers, but we also got new schools, community centers, and some affordable housing. We need to replicate that model now, but on a larger scale.”
Mr. Marte wants to revise the Mayor’s proposal to deepen the average of “area median income” (AMI) bands allowed in new buildings. (AMI is federally determined metric comparing the costs of living in various parts of the nation, and affordable housing developments often specify what percentage of the local AMI residents can earn.) He also wants to require a greater share of deeply affordable units in each development, and “increase the number of allowed income bands to ensure that a range of lower incomes are evenly targeted.”
Much of the new housing planned for Lower Manhattan will come from the conversion of former office buildings into apartment towers. “This community has a lot of experience in commercial-to-residential conversions,” Mr. Marte noted. “None of that has produced permanent affordable housing.” For this reason, he wants to insert a requirement that in all office buildings converting to apartments under City of Yes, any extra FAR be devoted entirely to affordable housing.
In a similar vein, Mr. Marte is concerned about vacant land within current or former affordable housing complexes, which developers increasingly want to use for new residential towers. Known as “campus infill,” these proposals envision new buildings on what were once plazas or gardens. A local example of this phenomenon is the 90-story apartment building proposed for a former schoolyard in the Independence Plaza complex in Tribeca. (That development was once a citadel of affordability, before exiting New York State’s Mitchell-Lama subsidy program in the early 2000s, and reverting to market-rate rents.) Mr. Marte wants such buildings to meet a 100 percent affordability requirement.
“This Mayor assumes that if we let developers build more, the increase in housing supply will automatically translate into more affordability,” he said. “This is a pro-market, supply-side mindset that reflects an overly landlord-friendly orientation at City Hall. But it isn’t borne out by the facts. Just look across the East River at Williamsburg, where massive development has led to an exponential increase in local housing inventory, but this has been accompanied by drastic rent increases.”
“Our job in the City Council is to make sure this proposal works for every New Yorker,” he added. “I care about many issues, but affordable housing is my moral compass. I am hopeful that the City Council can negotiate changes to the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan. But the Mayor’s version needs a lot of work.”