A city of yes to get behind

Mayor Adams announced last week he wants to make New York a “City of Yes” when it comes to new development, but he doesn’t specify what kind of development he has in mind. Does he want more supertalls with Class A office space that is already a glut on the market with a whole assortment of new ones already under construction around town? Or, does he want more upzonings of neighborhoods with the promise of more affordable housing and diversity that, studies show, instead eliminate existing real affordable housing and don’t diversify the neighborhood, the exact opposite of the promises offered with the rezonings.

The mayor implies that NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) are standing in the way of all change. The implication is that more good things would happen if everyone would just say yes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In many neighborhoods, new apartment houses have gone up without any — or very little — dissention in the community. A new report by the Furman Center at NYU says nearly 200,000 apartments were built between 2010-2020, one third of them affordable. This is probably more housing than any city in the nation produced over that period.

Many buildings have gone up within the existing zoning, not sought egregious tax breaks or subsidies, and they’ve brought a modest infusion of new blood to an area. They have added to, not disrupted, the ecology of the neighborhood.

But in other cases, what we see are proposals not for appropriate change but for cataclysmic change, the kind that pushes out limited-income people, erases existing rent regulated apartments and brings in a much more upscale population.

What most so-called NIMBYs oppose is not change itself, but that kind of disruptive and disrespectful change.

While the mayor doesn’t make a distinction between good and bad change, many New Yorkers do. Thus, vociferous opposition to overwhelming development will continue unabated.

Those opposition voices could, be transformed into YIMBYs (Yes In My Backyard) under the right conditions.

Here are suggested “yeses” to new development that the mayor probably does not have in mind. These yeses could lead to his city of “Yes in my backyard, yes on my block and yes in my neighborhood.”

We can say yes to new development that doesn’t overwhelm a neighborhood but fits in in a way that doesn’t unravel the equilibrium of the community.

We can say yes to new density while understanding that height and density are not the same thing. A brownstone block in Brooklyn with 20 houses that sometimes have two, four or more units can be denser a 70-story supertall apartment tower.

We can say yes to new diversity that does not push out the current diversity living in existing housing, like the SoHo upzoning risks doing to Chinatown residents.

We can say yes to new development that adds to the existing thriving truly urban neighborhood around Penn Station instead of demolishing at least 40 buildings (according to the state proposal), while jeopardizing thousands of jobs, 2,000 small businesses and 6,000 residents, which the proposed new Hudson Yards-style buildings will do.

We can say yes to new development that goes through the city environmental review process (ULURP), which gives neighborhoods a modicum of input and requires an honest assessment of existing conditions.

We can say yes to upzoning of the single-family neighborhoods that the Bloomberg administration downzoned, so that a second living unit can be added either within the existing home or as a small additional unit in the backyard or garage.

We can say yes to amending the zoning to allow basement apartments in neighborhoods where low-income families already live in illegal, often dangerous, units, while also providing financial support for the low-income homeowners to make necessary safety upgrades. City programs help finance big developers; let them also help homeowners in need.

We can say yes to reducing parking requirements for new developments. Yes to converting old hotels to permanent housing, both for affordable and market-rate units, while ensuring that landmark-worthy buildings are so designated. Yes to preserving existing affordable housing by prohibiting all buildings with eight or more rent-regulated units from being either torn down or converted to a condominium.

Yes to independent studies of proposed rezonings. Prior independent studies of Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn show both neighborhoods to be “whiter, wealthier, and more crowded than ever.”

And yes to a special tax on equity firms’ bundled ownership of apartments and individual houses, which artificially raise rents and sale prices. Mass equity ownership of dwelling units is one of the little-known causes of the nation’s housing crisis. It’s a political hot potato because of the paralyzing influence of campaign-donating corporate America.

If the mayor were to embrace this approach to new development, we could reach consensus on his “City of Yes.”