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And if you think this leftist chicanery will stay within New York, think again.Crime, the high cost of living, depopulation, and endless waves of illegal aliens are the widely acknowledged reasons for declining fortunes of the New York City. Instead of addressing these obvious problems, New York City’s politicians are celebrating the passage of the “City of Yes,” a massive rezoning plan that claims to create 80,000 new upscale rental units over 15 years, but actually benefits developers to the detriment of owner-occupied single- and two-family housing.
The City of Yes is the culmination of progressive politicians’ long-term strategy to replace stable, low-density owner-occupied neighborhoods with high-density rentals. The City of Yes allows the progressives to achieve two goals: act on their ideological animosity for home ownership and repopulate the city to regain congressional seats.
The City of Yes explicitly targeted the low-density areas of the outer boroughs to allow Transit Oriented Developments (TOD), end-of-block high-rises, and Accessory Development Units (ADUs) on single-property zones as new legal rights for developers. Eliminated are established standards for lot sizes, building heights, set-backs, and off-street parking requirements.
In 1916, New York City was the nation’s leader in instituting the first zoning code to remove industrial and tenements from prosperous residential areas, while allowing development of upscale residential and commercial structures along Fifth Avenue. Now the city is using the police power inherent in zoning as a weapon to destroy residential areas outside of Manhattan.
The political deceit is that the housing supply is grossly inadequate. In fact, New York is losing residents. New York City’s population dropped 6% from 2020 to 2023. The city’s population has been stagnant since 1960, when it was 7.9 million. Today it is 8.26 million, down 1% from 2023, according to the latest Census report: the Bronx lost nearly 2% of its population, and Queens and Brooklyn each lost around 27,000 residents. Only Manhattan gained a pathetic 3,000 souls.
The most significant source of increased population has been illegal aliens: over 220,000 have arrived in the city since 2022, according to ICE.
New York City’s housing pipeline was over 170,000 units at the end of 2024, to be completed by the end of 2028, according to the Real Estate Board of New York. This is in addition to the City of Yes. New housing units have averaged 25,000 per year since 2015. In addition, New York City could rapidly release 80,000 to 100,000 lower-priced rental units being held off the market by landlords who cannot afford to provide mandated upgrades to vacated apartments due to antiquated WWII-era rent controls.
Obviously, the politicians’ phony math doesn’t work. But New York’s Democrat politicians would rather do giveaways to powerful developers rather than addressing the underlying regulatory problems.
What many do not realize is that New York City’s housing stock ranges from the high-rises of Manhattan to the single-family and garden development suburbs of eastern Queens, parts of the northern Bronx, and all of Staten Island. Owner-occupied one- and two-family and garden apartment housing constitutes one third of the city’s housing units. It is from these areas that the opposition to City of Yes was and is the greatest.
The New York City Council approved City of Yes in December 2024 by a 30 to 21 vote, despite fierce opposition of residents in the areas most affected. In Bay Ridge, Bayside, and Little Neck in Queens, the geographically largest of the city’s boroughs, hundreds of people attended community board meetings to protest. No wonder that 12 of the 14 Queens community boards voted against it. The majority of community boards in each borough were strongly opposed, with the exception of Manhattan.
By voting in favor of the City of Yes, the City Council abdicated its most important powers – representing the will of constituents and their control over local zoning.
The structural assault on the suburban-like neighborhoods consists of reduced lot widths, increased building heights, allowing ADUs on one- and two-family properties, permitting religious organizations to develop high-density structures, and allowing garden-style communities to turn their greenery into cement and steel multi-family homes.
Paul Graziano, an urban planner and the founder of Save1FamilyNY.org, asserted, “Neighborhoods that carefully contextually rezoned their communities 10 to 20 years ago to control allowable square footage in order to maintain homeownership affordability, including communities of color in southeast Queens, southeast Brooklyn and the north Bronx, will have all of that work reversed and beyond, bringing them back to the 1916 Zoning Ordinance that favors speculators and absentee landlords over owner-occupied stakeholders.”
City of Yes may be the spark that ignites calls for the secession of eastern Queens and Staten Island from New York City. Residents of these areas understand that the long-term neighborhood stability depends on local control over what is built within their borders.
Community organizations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are marshaling forces to overturn the City of Yes on a number of grounds, including the lack of an adequate Environmental Impact Study. For example, the City of New York identified only 28 of the city’s 313,000 properties, a risibly miniscule (0.004%), cherry-picked sample. New York State law permits secession under certain circumstances. Staten Island has already tried to divest itself from New York City, an effort rejected by the New York Legislature. There is a referendum question process for New York City that was successfully utilized in 1993 to force term limits.
Zoning is one of the essential elements of self-governance, which in turn allows residents to shape the character of their immediate environment to their unique needs. Community self-governance is the source of livability, safety, and continuity. It must remain local to the degree practicable and cannot be dictated by a centralized government over regional sprawl.
City of Yes abrogates the basic contract between government and its citizens by denying citizens control over their homes and immediate environment. City of Yes has little to do with adding needed lower-cost housing to New York and everything to do with an ideological aversion to home ownership.
Linda R. Killian is a retired financial analyst and a local Republican chairman.
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