South Bronx Gets City’s First Fast-Tracked Affordable Housing as Voter-Backed ELURP Kicks In

New York’s experiment with speeding up affordable housing approvals signals how cities, given the right tools, can cut red tape without sacrificing public scrutiny.

“Eighty-four new affordable flats, approved in 90 days”—not a phrase that often surfaces in the bureaucratic labyrinth of New York City governance. Yet, on June 7th, the Mamdani administration revealed that an 8-storey, all-electric residential building would soon rise at 351 Powers Avenue in the South Bronx, thanks to a little-used fast-track tool. The measure’s debut punctuates a new chapter in New Yorkers’ long, contentious struggle to house themselves.

This moment is the maiden deployment of the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP), a streamlined mechanism designed to shepherd certain small-scale affordable housing and climate-resilient projects through oversight in a fraction of the usual time. The achievement packs symbolism but also practical utility: expedited review, newly enshrined in the city charter after voters’ endorsement last November, slashes the typical approval process from seven months to just three.

New Yorkers’ endorsement of the measure was hardly equivocal. Citywide, 57% of voters gave their assent, with the Bronx offering the most robust support at 65%. This mirrored the borough’s acute housing needs and perhaps a certain impatience with procedural logjams. Deep in the detail lies a trenchant reform: projects considered benign in environmental impact can now avoid the ponderous dance of hearings and rewrites that has long bedevilled housing development in the five boroughs.

With the vacancy rate teetering at a paltry 1.4%, New York is desperate for fresh accommodation. The new Powers Avenue project, a collaboration between Lemle & Wolff, Help Development, and True Development New York, is precisely the kind of endeavour city officials say was being blocked by the former regime of review-by-delay. It offers more than just homes—there will be theatre space and a job-training centre too, a nod to the holistic vision boosters hope to normalise.

Few expect the new system to flood the market. ELURP only applies to select projects—no handouts for luxury towers that might exacerbate inequality, and no dodges for developers keen to cut corners on environmental standards. But for modest-scale, community-serving properties, the new regime is already denting the inertia familiar to would-be builders. For Mamdani, who was conspicuously lukewarm on the ballot measures when campaigning, the swift action portends an administration seeking practical wins over performative grandstanding.

Beyond expediency, the revision delivers another clever tweak. In the dozen council districts that have historically shirked their fair share of affordable housing, a new pathway allows the City Planning Commission, rather than frequently obstructionist local councils, to make the final call on rezonings. The change, long sought by policy wonks and former mayor Eric Adams’ Charter Revision Commission, threatens to puncture the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) status quo, if only at the margins.

This could have salutary effects for the boroughs beyond Manhattan’s gentrified core, where stringent local opposition often buries even the most modest proposals under mountains of paperwork. Leila Bozorg, the city’s deputy mayor for housing, claims this “new era” will bring urgency and equity to the production of affordable homes, an ambition as necessary as it is overdue.

Bluntly put, the deeper implication is a wager on efficiency over parochial politics. Developers, nonprofits, and activists have long lamented the glacial pace of approvals—a process in which civic engagement was often weaponised to halt, not improve, new construction. That systemic malaise left New York lagging its peers: nearly 80% of the city’s housing projects have, historically, undergone longer reviews than required by law, with costs ballooning and ambitions withering.

A test case for urban reformers

Compare New York’s experiment with fast-tracking to other American metropolises: few have delegated the power to streamline approvals so broadly, and even fewer have enshrined checklists for projects that “lack potential significant adverse environmental impacts,” as the ELURP text puts it. Portland’s attempts to cut regulatory bloat have proven tepid; San Francisco’s process, though recently amended, remains unwieldy bordering on sclerotic.

Globally, some peers take greater liberties—Tokyo and Montreal, for instance, wield more top-down authority to advance public-spirited development. New York’s approach, curiously, still preserves a measure of local input via the City Planning Commission while stripping out the worst excesses of council-level vetoes. Whether this can be emulated elsewhere depends on voter appetite for “streamlining” and the political calculus of whether nimbleness or scrutiny is of higher civic value.

The city’s housing crunch has drawn national notice in an era when affordability woes afflict nearly every major American city. If New York’s abbreviated process can be shown to yield more units—without the scandal or backlash that often dogs top-down authority—its methods could seep outward. Yet the risk remains that such reforms, effective in one context, merely shift the friction to another: lawsuits, rules-lawyering, or backlash from those who still see development as a threat.

As ever, the proof is in the building. ELURP’s fate will rest on whether projects like Powers Avenue move from announcement to ribbon-cutting swiftly, and if the trade-offs—reduced public review time, potentially blunted neighborhood opposition—still yield buildings that are not merely “affordable” in name.

On balance, we reckon New York’s foray into fast-tracked housing is a measured gamble with little to lose. Redacting unfocused delay need not portend shoddy scrutiny, especially when eligibility checks remain threadbare. If the experiment succeeds, some of the city’s most entrenched bottlenecks may at last begin to loosen, delivering not just homes but validation for voters’ trust in nimble governance.

The challenge now is to ensure that momentum survives the city’s notorious political crosswinds—a test as much of will as of process—and that housing gains accrue equitably. The sceptics wait, as ever, in the wings. But in a city where the only thing costlier than real estate is indecision, an expedited path may be as close to a free lunch as New Yorkers can reasonably expect. ■