The City of Yes, At Last—or Just Beginning?
Achieving the Art of the Possible in New York and Beyond
I stole the name of this publication from New York Mayor Eric Adams’s “City of Yes” reform agenda. In my view, the phrase encapsulated the right attitude that city leaders and lovers needed to take to address modern urban issues: one that is pro-progress, solutions-oriented, and abundance-minded. New York—facing a historically low rental vacancy rate, huge numbers of rent-burdened households, and rising homelessness—had not made real progress on land use reform in decades, was suffering from housing scarcity, and desperately needed solutions. The mayor’s proposal would “make it possible to build a little bit more housing in every neighborhood.” After a lot of public hearings and negotiations, a scaled back program was finally approved by the City Council last week, unlocking up to 80,000 new homes. For the first time in a long time, New York said “yes” to meaningful land use reform.
But did it miss an opportunity to do more?
Austin’s recent reforms offer a useful contrast. One-eighth the size of New York, Austin rolled back height restrictions that alone unlocked 60,000 new apartment units—6x the number of units as City of Yes on a per capita basis. Austin also increased the number of homes allowed on all single-family lots to three; City of Yes allowed for accessory dwelling units (ADUs, or “granny flats”) in only some neighborhoods, but it largely left single-family neighborhoods untouched. Car-dependent Austin managed to abolish parking minimums outright, while New York clung to theirs in most areas outside of Manhattan and parts of Queens and Brooklyn, even though 55% of households do not own a car.
The Adams administration agreed to concessions to ensure that City of Yes had enough votes to pass City Council, where it needed a simple majority of 26 votes out of 51; it won with the support of 31 council members, a more than solid margin of victory. Altogether, the compromises reduced the potential number of homes by 25% from the mayor’s initial proposal. While some concessions were surely necessary, others seemed aimed at appeasing those who were just never going to get with the program, reducing the impact of City of Yes without gaining support.
Take parking mandates. The mayor agreed to keep these minimums intact to placate council members from lower density parts of the city. Council Member Vickie Paladino, who represents a suburban section of Queens, told a parking minimum opponent that people like him who weren’t born in New York shouldn’t get to weigh in on policy changes. Someone with that attitude was likely never going to vote to allow more housing for newcomers—and if you compare the maps below, neither did other council members in districts where the mandates were maintained. So what was the point in attempting to mollify council members like her, especially when the margin of victory was so large?
Politics, of course, does not happen in a vacuum, and some compromise is usually required to get important legislation over the transom. The political context at any given moment contains real constraints: existing laws, constitutional limits, public opinion, pressure groups, budgets and economic conditions, administrative capabilities, elections, even moral values. The process by which a bill becomes a law does not (usually) include a song and dance, but instead negotiating these constraints. If, as Bismarck said, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best,” then the “City of Yes” package that passed was the next best to the original version that might not have been possible to pass.
But one senses the mayor conceded too much to the wrong people.
After electing a super-majority of pro-housing candidates, Austin advocates were still only able to pass major reforms by building coalitions and making strategic compromises to get to the next best bill rather than sticking with a perfect, unpassable one—and not by doing something worse, undermining passable reforms to placate implacable opponents. We knew who the two “no” votes on Council were, and despite their last-minute attempts to negotiate amendments that would water down key provisions, when they explained their opposition reading from previously prepared remarks, it was evident that they never intended to vote for the reforms with or without their amendments.
They were negotiating in bad faith.
Unfortunately, bad faith arguments have become a hallmark of opposition to land use reform. In my experience in Austin, the most intransigent opponents seldom engage with the realities of the housing crisis, instead relying on denial, scapegoating, and smears.
A common refrain is that land use reforms are merely “developer handouts” or ploys to build luxury apartments—yet in a supply-constrained market, building any new housing, luxury or not, reduces demand pressure on older, less luxurious housing. Others argue that new housing will strain resources like our drought-depleted aquifers and reservoirs, ignoring that 32% of Austin’s water goes to watering homeowners’ large lawns.
Sometimes the rhetoric veers into absurdity. I’ve heard critics condemn reforms as neoliberal conspiracies or even claim to support more housing, but that they cannot support this reform because it doesn’t overthrow the global capitalist imperialist system. (I wish I was joking.) Occasionally, it’s downright ugly, as when those like Vickie Paladino argue that the problem isn’t housing scarcity—it’s the newcomers, the tech bros, the Californians, the migrants: if we could only keep them out, the problem would go away.
Unfortunately, every city has its Vickie Paladinos.
While there are serious issues to consider when managing complex public policy issues, these are not the legitimate concerns of a constructive person who earnestly wants to solve the problem. Instead, such arguments share a basic rejection of reality and the dignity of real people, offering no real solutions. You can’t negotiate with somebody whose only acceptable position is the total negation of yours.
So, what should we do about them?
In my view, the energies of reform proponents are better spent on building and shoring up a coalition that can win durable majorities, which may involve some concessions to get partners on board with the next best thing. But for the non-negotiables, so long as we insist that land use is a matter of public opinion and neighborly vetocracy, let us give these folks their chance to speak, to be heard—and to be ignored. If they aren’t offering real, workable solutions, they have nothing to offer.
In the lead up to City of Yes’s passage, two separate polls found that between 71% and 81% of New Yorkers across all five boroughs supported the original plan that would have unlocked more than 100,000 homes. If one wonders whether New Yorkers would have supported a more ambitious reform package, it seems there might be an opportunity to find out in next year’s mayoral election.
State Senator Zellnor Myrie just announced his candidacy for mayor with a plan to “Rebuild NYC” with one million homes. Rebuild NYC is the first plan put forth that attempts to address New York’s housing shortage at the scale of the problem. His program would allow, for instance, redevelopment of New York public housing projects, a major upzoning of Midtown Manhattan, and residential development in interstitial industrial neighborhoods. It’s a bold agenda—one that would likely not be taken seriously if City of Yes had not been approved.
And therein lies the lesson: City of Yes broke a 60-year political impasse, demonstrating that incremental reform is possible within the context of political realities and constraints; Myrie’s announcement shows that those constraints are not fixed across time. City of Yes has opened a golden door for New York’s mayor—or the next one—to more boldly advance an agenda that speaks to the scale of the problem and the will of the voters, rather than conceding to bad faith actors who only say “no.”
Hopefully, the next mayor will say “yes” to more.
Bad faith actors is exactly right. I’m happy to sit down with people who disagree with me in good faith and on the merits; but when someone has no interest in a fair compromise and is only trying to scuttle everything, it’s much better to just hear them out and say no, politely.
Good one Ryan. We need more housing