Maspeth, Upper East Side among 12 NYC districts put on an affordable housing fast track

Maspeth, the Upper East Side and central Staten Island are among the 12 community districts the Department of City Planning has identified as producing the least affordable housing in New York City. From January, affordable projects in those districts that require a land-use change will move through a quicker approval process.

The city measured each district’s affordable housing output over the last five years against the size of its housing stock. The dozen at the bottom delivered 724 of the nearly 66,000 affordable apartments added citywide in that time, about 1%. That works out to roughly a dozen homes a year in each district. At the opposite end, the 12 most productive districts, largely in the Bronx, accounted for over half of the total, city figures show.

How the affordable housing fast track works

Charter revisions that voters approved give qualifying projects in the bottom 12 a shorter review and let them bypass the City Council. The final call belongs to the City Planning Commission. In five years, the planning department will redo the analysis and reassess each district based on growth.

“We can’t concentrate affordable housing in just a handful of neighborhoods,” said Sideya Sherman, who leads the department and chairs the commission, at a briefing Wednesday. She described the designation as a tool for speeding up affordable housing in places where production is falling behind. The mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wants 200,000 affordable units created within ten years.

The districts on the list vary in character. The Upper East and West sides are densely built, while in other districts stand-alone houses with yards outnumber big apartment buildings.

Upper West Side pushback

Councilmember Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, said she was livid and rejected the city’s conclusion about her district. She cited the Upper West Side’s SRO buildings and a number of newer affordable developments. “We have tons of affordable housing and we want more,” she said.

Backers of the fast track argue that resistance to development in some districts has lasted so long that developers stopped proposing housing there at all. Council members, whose districts resemble community districts without lining up with them exactly, fought the measure hard.