NYC Moves to Fast-Track Affordable Projects
The new step is the latest in a series of initiatives focused on city-owned land.
In a bid to ease the city’s affordable housing crisis, New York City unveiled a plan on Wednesday designed to speed up development on city-owned land. Officials say that the initiatives would significantly reduce development time, Over the next two years, the new program could help produce as many as 1,000 new homes, according to the city.
Under the new program, dubbed Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development will cut the request for proposals process by as much as eight months.
In conjunction with the initiative, the city’s Housing Preservation and Development department is issuing a Request for Qualifications to prequalify developers, with an emphasis on minority- and women-owned businesses and nonprofits. As examples, officials named sites in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx that could lead to the development of 300 new homes.
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Neighborhood Builders Fast Track will join another significant change in the city’s approval process. Last November, voters approved the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP). That process is designed to reduce the public review period to 90 days from the previous seven months. In February, the city started its first expedited approval for an 84-unit affordable housing project in the Bronx.
A step in the right direction?
In earlier moves, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed executive orders creating task forces to identify City-owned sites that can be locations for housing and to improve the production process, including such issues as financing, approvals and lease-ups.
The creation of affordable housing is a top priority in the nation’s largest city, as it is in most major metropolitan areas. In an MHN Viewpoint published on Wednesday, the veteran real estate attorney Stuart Saft suggested such measures as an alternative rent‑regulation model would set rents at the lesser of fair‑market value or 30 percent of the total income of all occupants.
“To accelerate development, New York must also reduce regulatory barriers, limit local veto power, allow more conversions of commercial and hotel properties, and restore incentive programs that actually produce housing,” Saft added.
“If policymakers truly want affordability, they must treat developers as partners rather than adversaries. History proves that increasing supply is the only way to lower rents,” Saft said.
