Yes on Yes: Despite modifications, City of Yes win is worth celebrating

After heated negotiations, we can all breathe easier that the bulk of the City of Yes zoning changes survived the gauntlet of the City Council with its major provisions untouched, with only some concessions to the jittery outer-borough members who most balked at its approach of a little more housing in every neighborhood.

Among these concessions were the inclusion of a three-tiered system for parking mandates, leaving some sparser parts of the city with similar levels of parking requirements and others with heavily reduced mandates.

Additional tweaking around the type of allowable accessory dwelling units and other matters cumulatively reduced the total number of expected resulting units from nearly 110,000 to 80,000 over the next 15 years. Mayor Adams also pledged $4 billion to shore up additional affordable housing construction and improve the city’s infrastructure to accommodate the additional development, with Gov. Hochul promising to add another $1 billion.

Ultimately, do we wish that the zoning updates had not at all been watered down? Certainly. We understand fully that this seemed to many like a relatively drastic turn, and the specter of change is often frightening. For a city that had gotten used to doing things one way for a half-century, what were relatively targeted and common-sense zoning shifts could seem heavy-handed by comparison, even if they were often just designed to revert to types of housing development that were once commonplace.

Yet it is precisely because things have stagnated for so long, and the emergency has grown so acute, that a higher-bore solution was necessary. We do not have the time to fight through every single neighborhood-by-neighborhood rezoning at a moment when we’ve reached a crisis point on housing availability and costs — mixed with general cost of living expenses — that have begun driving out the city’s middle class and making it that much more difficult for people to come and make the city their home.

The consequences of failure are economic, social and political, as lack of housing feeds discontent and a loss of vibrancy.

New York City’s strength has long been that a lot of people want to build lives here and have long seen it as a place to anchor themselves where they’ll find opportunity, culture and community. If ordinary people can no longer sustain or create lives here, or if those lives become so dominated by the effort to merely pay rent that it no longer seems worth it, then the viability of the city itself is at risk, and this is a spiral that is difficult to recover from.

So, even if we end up with some 30,000 fewer apartments than the initial plan projected, that still leaves us with a net gain of 80,000 units across income bands, and that’s cause for celebration.

Some lawmakers might grumble that a good chunk of these units might not be affordable, but the city needs dwellings at different prices; old and new wealthier residents will gravitate towards the higher bands and be less likely to compete with everyone else for the lower-cost options. Plus, the Council got its way in increasing the affordability requirements for the additional size allowance for affordable developments. With this, the legislation is sailing for passage next month.

Call it an early Christmas present to the city and its people.