Gov. Kathy Hochul used her executive powers to roll out a series of tweaks to the state’s housing regulations on Tuesday, resurrecting a small portion of the large package of reforms she pitched this spring that were eventually rejected by lawmakers.
The governor’s executive orders will also move communities that agree to build more housing to the front of the line when applying for grants from Albany to help finance projects like downtown redevelopments and transit improvements, which are budgeted at $650 million in the 2024 budget.
“Those other states are wide open, they’re building just across the river; they’re building more and they’re saying ‘come here, come here, you can afford it,” Hochul told the audience at her announcement in Brooklyn. “I’m going to stop that, I want us to be more affordable.”
“We’re going to jump start housing now,” she added.
Hochul’s actions on Tuesday will allow housing developments planned as part of the rezoning of Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood to qualify for a controversial tax incentive that developers say is needed to make the project’s finances pencil out.
The program had expired but Hochul’s action provides an end-run around the deadline by having the state’s economic development arm purchase the property for a nominal fee from the developers and then lease the land back for construction.
The Gowanus rezoning approved by the New York City Council in 2021 called for the construction of as many as 8,500 new apartments in the once-industrial neighborhood — with roughly 3,000 units set aside for middle-income and working class households.
“These actions are necessary, important, and yet insufficient to address the scale of our housing crisis,” said Annemarie Gray, who heads one of the most vocal groups pushing for the construction of new housing, OpenNew York.
Some of the opposition that helped sink Hochul’s proposal last spring quickly re-emerged after she announced her executive order.
State Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens) hit Hochul for again not requiring union labor build the projects, while the Legal Aid Society said that the governor “continues to ignore the urgent needs of tenants.”
Rents have largely returned to their pre-pandemic trajectory and soared across Big Apple and in the suburbs as economic growth massively outpaced the construction of new housing.
The average rent for a Manhattan apartment hit an astonishing $4,200 in April, while Long Island home prices have shot up 66 percent.
Recent city studies have estimated that 700,000 jobs were added across the five boroughs in the 2010s while just 170,000 new homes and apartments were built. A report issued by city officials in 2020 revealed that New York has not built more than 200,000 homes in a decade since the 1960s.
The slow pace of construction in the Big Apple is only exceeded by Long Island, where fewer than 20,000 homes got built in Nassau and Suffolk counties combined in the 2010s.
Experts and housing advocates attribute the massive decades-long slowdown to strict state environmental reviews, the city’s complex zoning and building permit approval processes and stiff opposition from current residents to any new development.
The program Hochul submitted to lawmakers in early 2024 aimed to speed up and simplify the state-required reviews while giving Albany significant new power to saw through local opposition and approve housing projects provided there was no risk to health or safety.
The stick-heavy approach was endorsed by housing experts, but generated fierce opposition across the political spectrum.
Lefty Democrats who claimed measures described the plan as a giveaway to developers for failing to include requirements that new construction be built with union labor and a dramatic expansion of the state’s rent regulation statutes to cover most apartments. They found allies with other members of the city’s Democratic Albany delegation opposed it because it would end caps in state law on building sizes in New York City.
Suburban Democrats described Hochul’s proposal to override local opposition as a ‘extinction level’ event and pushed back hard. Meanwhile, Republicans campaigned hard on the issue, seeing it as a way to regain standing on Long Island and in Westchester.
Hochul signaled she planned to return to lawmakers next year to push again.
“If we don’t step up now and take bold action,” she asked, “who will?”
– Additional reporting by Sophie Gardiner