New York City needs to double the amount of apartments it builds to solve a decades-long housing crisis that has caused rents to soar, Mayor Eric Adams vowed Thursday in a daring speech that echoed President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 “man on the moon” vow.
Adams promised in the extraordinary address — his most detailed housing proposal of the nearly year he’s been in office — that his administration will slash the paperwork and speed the approval process all with the goal of pushing rents down by dramatically increasing the housing stock within a decade.
“We need more housing and we need it as fast as we can build it,” Adams said in a speech at City Hall. “That means affordable housing for working families, it means apartments for young people and places for people to grow older.”
“It’s not complicated: We have more people than homes,” he emphasized. “This shortage gives landlords the power to charge any price they want and leaves too many New Yorkers with no place to go.”
Adams declared that New York City should aim to build 500,000 new homes and apartments over the next decade — more than double the 169,000 units produced in the 2010s or the 198,000 units built during the 2000s, according to an exhaustive report from the Department of City Planning from 2021.
It would be the greatest number of units built in a single decade since 369,000 units constructed during the 1960s — before the imposition of the city’s current years-long approval process for zoning changes and the end of the Mitchell Lama program.
The slew of proposals aims to slash the needed paperwork and approvals for new housing developments and speed the issuance of building permits — all with the goal of building an additional 50,000 apartments and homes over the next decade.
The biggest changes include:
- Exempting developments with fewer than 200 units from the months-long environmental review;
- Speeding the Department of City Planning process for reviewing housing project applications that require changes in neighborhood zoning;
- Improve the Department of Buildings computerized permit application and tracking process
Adams also committed his administration to supporting major new housing developments in The Bronx that would be located next to four new MetroNorth stations and rezoning portions of Brooklyn along Atlantic Avenue near the border of Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant that are currently home to warehouses and industrial businesses.
Even with the changes, the city would remain well short of the mayor’s self-described “moon-shot” goal.
Rents in Manhattan crested this summer at an eye-watering median of $4,100 a month this summer, up from an average of $3,255 over the same time period in 2021.
Rents were barely better in Brooklyn or Queens, which saw averages hit $3,500 a month and $3,065 respectively.
