New Housing Appeals Board Pushes Bayside Project Through Paladino’s Opposition—Member Deference Falters

As New York’s housing crisis grinds on, ballot-box reforms may at last be shaking up the city’s ossified planning politics.

In the chary enclaves of Bayside, Queens—where the skyline’s serenity is zealously preserved by residents and their representatives—the unlikeliest victory has been scored by advocates for more housing. This week, the City Council approved a 248-unit apartment building on 24th Ave., a development previously destined for routine defeat. But Councilmember Vickie Paladino, noted for her housing scepticism and penchant for member privilege, reluctantly advanced the proposal anyway.

The immediate cause of her Damascene transition was not an ideological epiphany but rather political arithmetic. A newly established appeals board—created by voter-approved ballot measures last November—now holds the power to override councillors who block affordable housing projects. The upshot: Paladino supported the project to retain some say in its design, rather than be sidelined altogether. “I’m really not happy about any of this, but this is what the props were designed for—to force our hand on unpopular projects,” she observed with bracing candour.

It is an unambiguous illustration of the ballot measures working as their architects intended. For decades, New York’s City Council has operated on a system of “member deference”—a gentlemen’s pact in which councillors back the local member’s stance on any land use changes. This model, intended to promote collegiality, has instead calcified into a recipe for inaction, subjecting essential housing projects to the veto of individual politicians whose constituencies benefit least from growth.

Affordable housing advocates, grasping the threadbare supply in the city, have argued that such local gatekeeping has rendered the process not merely slow but sclerotic. The three 2025 ballot measures introduced substantive changes, including the formation of an appeals board comprised of the mayor, the borough president, and the City Council speaker—empowered to overturn obstructive council votes so long as two of the three agree. Voters, exasperated by ballooning rents and a homelessness crisis whose numbers are only exceeded by Los Angeles, passed the measures handily.

In the case of Bayside, the board’s mere existence was enough to prod Ms Paladino to bargain rather than block. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards signaled his support early, as did housing groups. For Annemarie Gray, head of Open New York, a pro-housing (or “YIMBY,” for yes-in-my-backyard) group, this is policy shift incarnate: “No neighborhood is too rich for affordable housing and here is a council member who otherwise is saying they would have voted no, who now has to contend with a new landscape.”

The project itself is unremarkable by global standards—248 apartments, divided between market-rate and income-restricted units, with provision for elderly long-term care. But in the context of New York’s feeble pace of housing growth—fewer than 30,000 new units permitted last year, against an annual need of nearly double that—it is momentous. If the threat of override galvanises even the most reluctant politicians, then the city’s ambitions may at last catch up to its demography.

New Yorkers, rightly cynical about grand promises, may wonder what actually changes. In the short term, council members will be forced into a climate of negotiation rather than obstinate defiance. Paladino’s manoeuvre, voting yes out of strategic necessity, is likely to become a template in districts where housing construction has typically been stymied by vocal, entrenched opposition.

The broader implications are more bracing still. Member deference, once an immovable staple of council politics, faces extinction. If the appeals board regularly wields its authority, the calculus shifts: council members risk being bypassed and rendered powerless in shaping local development. The effect may be to embolden developers (and their financial backers) to propose projects in affluent, previously off-limits neighbourhoods, outside the usual decaying stock and edges of the city.

A new era for NIMBYism and housing growth

Economically, New York stands to benefit from a less constipated pipeline of housing approvals. By some estimates, an increase in housing supply of 50,000 units a year could begin to moderate prices, yielding savings not just for renters but for the broader economy, as wage inflation and homelessness abate. Politically, it is an overdue answer to the generational frustrations that have pushed voters leftward on housing issues, even as incumbent officials clung to the status quo.

Nationally, other cities will take note. San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and even fast-growing Sun Belt metros have wrestled with similar bottlenecks, where local parochialism trumps metropolitan need. Few have so boldly circumvented legislative recalcitrance with direct democracy. Should New York’s override regime portend a sustained housing boom—and not merely a bumpy one-off—the city may burnish its credentials as a global leader in urban reform.

What are the pitfalls? Detractors warn that curtailing member deference neuters local accountability, risking a cavalcade of poorly designed, mismatched developments. But this is less catastrophic than the chronic stagnation it replaces; the option of local negotiation is not foreclosed, merely recalibrated. Paladino’s pivot—opposing, yet facilitating the project—suggests a future where council members compete to shape rather than scupper growth.

We view the experiment with guarded optimism. A well-calibrated override process will neither herald a glut of bland towers nor erase all opposition. Instead, it promises that parochial preferences will no longer hold the city’s future ransom. The Bayside result, paltry though it may seem next to New York’s gargantuan housing deficit, portends a shift of greater consequence.

The acid test will arrive with projects in even prouder, more deep-pocketed communities—where legal challenges and creative obstruction have thus far proved insuperable. Should the appeals board stand firm and council members adapt, New York may finally outgrow its reputation for puny, piecemeal reform and bring its housing supply in line with its ambitions. The initial tremors in Bayside, then, could well foreshadow a more plural and affordable city—so long as the city’s famously recalcitrant politicians remain more cowed by voters than by neighbourhood naysayers. ■