Dive Brief:
- New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week unveiled a package of sweeping housing reforms that he says could trim affordable housing development timelines by eight months and by as much as two years for some projects requiring zoning changes.
- The Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development report, created by a task force formed earlier this year, tinkers with each stage of the city’s development process, including environmental reviews, pre-development financing, permitting and move-in.
- “New Yorkers cannot afford to wait years for affordable housing while projects sit trapped in bureaucracy,” Mamdami said in a news release. “SPEED is about making government deliver — faster, fairer and at the scale this crisis demands.”
Dive Insight:
Faced with a widespread affordable housing crunch, many cities are turning to code and procedural reforms in an effort to encourage and speed up development.
In New York City, the housing vacancy rate sits at a historically low 1.4%, and housing cost burdens have ranked among the highest in the country.
Mamdani launched the SPEED task force earlier this year to examine procedural road blocks causing what the report calls “anemic housing production” and identify potential reforms.
In one of the largest proposed changes, the task force recommends trimming the Department of City Planning’s pre-certification process, which takes an average of around two years to complete and can add as much as $41 million to the cost of a building with 500 apartments, according to the report.
To whittle the two-year pre-certification timeline down to six months, the task force urges the city to rely on state changes to environmental reviews that exempt housing projects under a certain size; modernized construction, air quality and transportation analysis; and bring in a new dedicated review team.
The city also aims to reduce permitting timelines for its growing number of office-to-residential conversions by approximately five months by increasing review staff and improving the fire alarm inspection process. The city is anticipating as many as 12,000 new apartments from office-to-residential conversion projects in the coming years, according to the report.
The plan also seeks to reduce the time between completion of affordable housing and move-in from around 210 days to under 100.
None of the reforms in the package require legislative action, according to the mayor’s office.
