Affordable Housing Ballot Fight Pits Council Against Charter Commission as $3 Million Fund Forms

As New Yorkers prepare to vote on sweeping housing-related ballot measures, a pitched battle spotlights the city’s chronic affordability woes—and who commands the levers of power in its solution.

When the New York City Council and heavyweight unions called a press conference outside City Hall last week, they were not simply denouncing a few ballot measures—they were, in effect, fighting for the home rule prerogatives that have long defined politics in the nation’s largest city. Such is the intensity of the current standoff over whether New Yorkers, come Election Day next month, will adopt a trio of proposals intended to expedite affordable housing—measures whose provenance runs straight through the city’s fractious, byzantine land-use machinery.

On November’s general election ballot, voters will decide whether to embrace proposals two, three, and four, all aimed at greasing the skids for building income-restricted housing stock. At issue: whether to fast-track select projects, curtail layers of public review for modest developments, and create an appeals board empowered to override the Council. For housing advocates and the Charter Revision Commission—the City Hall-appointed guarantor of process—this is overdue reform. For the Council’s leadership and their union allies, it is an erosion of cherished influence, one that, they insist, threatens to strip communities of their last real voice.

Both sides are wielding considerable clout. The Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, building workers’ union 32BJ SEIU, and the District Council of Carpenters have lined up alongside Speaker Adrienne Adams and her colleagues, arguing that structured negotiations—known in the vernacular as “community benefits”—have allowed them to win jobs and guarantees for working-class New Yorkers. As Manny Pastreich, 32BJ’s president, warned voters, “We all know we are in a housing crisis. We support housing. But these ballot proposals aim to exploit New Yorkers’ real concern and hide what they actually do.” In the opposing corner stands “YES on Affordable Housing,” a coalition recently invigorated by a $3 million war chest and an endorsement roster including Comptroller Brad Lander and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

The stakes for New York are, by any measure, daunting. More than half of city renters are rent-burdened, pouring unsustainable portions of household income into housing that is, for many, increasingly precarious. The city’s catch-up rate on constructing new affordable units barely dents its yawning deficits; a 2023 report from the Furman Center put the city short by some 500,000 units—a modest estimate, some reckon. With shelters at capacity and new arrivals placing fresh pressure on housing stock, the tempo of reform is no longer a matter of policy preference. It is a test of the city’s economic future and its social fabric.

Should the ballot measures pass, the core implications would be a more centralized, streamlined process for mid-size affordable housing developments, particularly in neighborhoods that have hitherto evaded new construction. Supporters insist that, by putting up speed bumps for nimbyism and political obstruction, New York will at last align with cities such as Minneapolis, which in 2019 scrapped single-family zoning and is now producing apartments at a clip that would have seemed fanciful to Gotham’s planners. Critics counter that such changes risk rubber-stamping uninspired projects, shortchanging communities on parks, schools, and union jobs—assets often squeezed from developers during protracted approvals.

There is perhaps something parochial, or at least peculiarly New York, in the Council’s defense of veto points within the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). The system, devised in the late 1970s, was meant to democratize planning and prevent top-down displacement, but in practice has spawned a ritualised “horse-trade” that many developers describe as tortuous and opaque. Ironically, as the city’s affordability crisis metastasised, the power to block housing has become just as valuable as the power to build it. Both unions and district representatives have become accustomed to exacting concessions in fiefdoms where opposition, not consensus, sets the prevailing price for political survival.

Who gets to build, and where: Unions, accountability, and the shadow of the past

The current ballot wrangling portends more than a squabble over how many meetings bureaucrats must hold before shovels hit dirt. It raises the question of who gets to distribute the city’s most valuable resource—land—amid mounting evidence that process is both culprit and victim. Even the lawsuits now chest-thumping in the courts, led by conservative Council members and the City Club of New York, indicate that those accustomed to wielding land-use vetoes see a genuine threat. Indeed, the attempt last month by the Council to convince the Board of Elections to strike the measures from the ballot—rebuffed for being “not misleading”—showed a rare bipartisan panic at the prospect of ceding influence.

Beyond the five boroughs, the issues animating New York’s housing battles echo in other global cities at a different scale and tenor. From London’s labyrinthine planning permissions to Tokyo’s laissez-faire zoning, the tension between nimble building and local input forms a continuum of urban policy. Yet while Tokyo’s astonishing housing affordability rests on permissive national codes, New York’s stasis is an artifact of balkanized, district-by-district politicking. In Stockholm or Vienna, the mayors take pride in high housing output and vast non-market stock. In New York, the highest-profile reforms usually amount to a handful of upzonings and years of litigation.

The need for expediency, however, bodes ill for nostalgia. Economic dynamism demands both shelter for workers and an urban commons that does not degenerate into an archipelago of privilege. The risk for New York—in the absence of reform—is that talent leaks westward, investment withers, and only the wealthiest enjoy the “city that never sleeps.” Yet, as ever, the fear of unchecked development, poorly designed or unaccountably sited, is hardly baseless, and unions are neither alone nor wrong to ask: Who benefits from a swifter process, and on whose terms?

In our view, the reforms on offer—hardly radical by global standards—merit a tepid but firm embrace. Democracy requires that decisions be made and defended in public, but not that every application pit neighbor against neighbor for years on end. The Council and its union partners are right to insist on transparency and worker protections, but wrong to treat procedural complexity as a birthright. For too long, the balance has tipped toward sclerosis; it is time, albeit cautiously, to let New York test whether less is more.

As next month’s election approaches, the real victory will be if voters force both sides to reckon with a simple, unwelcome truth: that a city unable to house its workforce holds little future for itself, let alone its growing ranks of hopeful newcomers. The ballot box may not magically conjure cheap homes, but it could at least prod the city to begin arguing about the right things. ■