Dan Garodnick says there’s nothing to fear about City of Yes

New York City Department of City Planning Director Dan Garodnick has had his work cut out for him this week. 

After over a year of pitching the Adams administration’s proposal to change land use rules across the city to spur housing construction, Garodnick and other officials leading City of Yes for Housing Opportunity are fighting to get the proposal across the finish line. He and Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Adolfo Carrión fielded hours of City Council members' questions Monday in the first of two public hearings. The City Council has received the proposal with mixed reactions. While there is general agreement that more housing is needed, some members – particularly those representing lower density communities in the outer boroughs – are fearful that the proposals will completely alter the very nature of their communities. Others wish the proposal would go even further in securing affordable housing commitments. New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has said that zoning reform is not enough to solve the city’s housing crisis and promised members would create their own separate housing plan to enhance the zoning effort. The fate of the proposal as it faces City Council consideration is a matter of great public interest. Over 700 people – supporters and opponents alike – signed up to testify Tuesday and the hearing stretched well into the night. 

The zoning proposal is essentially a package of land use changes that the Adams administration has said will lead to the creation of 58,000 to 109,000 new housing units over the next 15 years. Some key aspects of the proposal include the elimination of parking spot mandates for new residential developments, allowing two to four stories of apartments above businesses in commercial areas and near transit-rich areas, allowing homeowners to add accessory units on parts of their properties, and letting developers build more housing if additional units are affordable. 

City & State spoke with Gardonick about this week’s marathon City Council public hearings, some of New Yorkers’ biggest apprehensions about City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, wooing City Council members, and whether the indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams has complicated getting the proposal across the finish line. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

You’ve just survived two long, grueling days of City Council hearings. What were your big takeaways from your time testifying before the City Council and from the hours of public testimony?

What was very clear to me was that council members understand the moment that we are in. This housing crisis has not crept up on us. It is many decades in the making, but it has gotten considerably worse. Their questions to me reveal that they are taking this proposal and evaluating it with the seriousness that it deserves. I expect that they will do what the council does best, which is to take a complicated proposal, socialize it among 51 members with various interests and deliver a thoughtful and meaningful result.

Some City Council members and members of the public have said they feel they weren’t given the opportunity to weigh in on the proposal before it was released. How was the plan crafted? 

There is the formal and official process for evaluating a land use application, as defined by the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. We most certainly fulfilled all of our obligations there. What is not recognized is that we have been preparing for this moment for years before the ULURP process even began. It started with the city's development and engagement with its own fair housing report, which was published back in 2020. The recommendations in that report gave rise to the details of this proposal. 

We announced in the summer of 2022 that we were going to embark upon a city-wide zoning text amendment to spur housing production in New York City and began our process of engagement on this proposal at that point. We took well over a year and a half thinking about shaping, engaging with the public, responding to feedback, even before we hit the official start of public review. Since then, we've had 175 meetings with our 59 community boards. Over the past year, we've had 10 public town hall meetings. Everything we could think to do to make a complicated proposal easier for the public, we did. That includes an illustrated guide to the proposal, multiple one-page descriptions of the various components, annotated zoning, text, videos, town halls, and we even sent the text to community boards a full month earlier than the certification date. We have done everything that we could think to do to make this as robust a public engagement as possible.

One of the big concerns about the proposal we’ve heard expressed repeatedly is that some of the proposed zoning changes would alter the fabric of low-density neighborhoods. Is there legitimate reason to fear this? 

I don't think so. This is a proposal that was designed to be incremental and modest at the community level, while allowing us to deliver a significant amount of housing citywide. The new housing that we would enable in low-density neighborhoods, very much mirrors existing buildings that were constructed before 1961 in every corner of the city. We have 14,693 multi- family buildings in one and two family districts today. They are well-recognized and embraced building forms, but they are simply unable to be built today. We are looking to re-legalize this form of housing in a modest way – with a maximum three, four or five stories at the most ambitious, but nothing beyond that. To us that very easily matches existing character, and we've done it In a nuanced way so as to not create unnecessary impacts or disruptions in local neighborhoods.

How do you expect people will look back on the proposal 10, 20 years from now?

I expect that the changes that would be enabled by this proposal will prove that many of the fears that people have were unfounded. I understand why people are concerned about change. It is natural, but with a 1.41% vacancy rate – the lowest since 1968 – inaction is just not an option here. The proposal is designed so that, looking back on it in 10 or 20 years, I believe we will be proven correct that it enabled a little more housing in every neighborhood, but nothing so dramatic that it caused harm.

The proposed elimination of parking mandates is another aspect of the proposal that’s drawn controversy. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams recently came out against fully eliminating parking mandates. Mayor Adams has in turn said he’s willing to negotiate. Could you talk a bit about the intentions of this aspect of the proposal? 

What we have seen over time with our overly prescribed parking mandates is that too often we have delivered parking in places where it is clearly not needed, and have done so at the expense of housing. We don't want to force that choice anymore, but we also recognize that there are many areas of the city where parking is quite essential. We have introduced a policy that has the level of flexibility needed to prioritize housing where you don't need parking and allowing parking where it is absolutely needed. It matches what other cities have done, and it has borne out that parking continues to be provided in places where it's needed, but it is not serving as a direct conflict with housing creation. We understand that this is an issue that has a lot of opinions on it, but it is an important piece of this proposal. 

What compromises could we see? 

We have presented a 1,400 page set of zoning text amendments to the City Council. As much as I stand behind what we have proposed, I recognize that the City Council will make amendments to this proposal to be responsive to community needs and to prioritize their own interests, the extent that anything is incompatible. That is expected, that is normal. We look forward to working with them as they think about those modifications.

How has the indictment of Mayor Adams impacted how the administration is approaching this next phase of City of Yes as it faces City Council consideration? Has it complicated things?

This proposal is a serious attempt to take on a decades long housing scarcity problem. It has been in formulation for years, and it is consistent with the City Council's own fair housing framework. To their great credit, most council members understand the seriousness of the moment we are in and the fact that too many New Yorkers are struggling with the cost of housing today, and want to act. We look forward to working with them in these final weeks. It's an important moment for the future of the city.