NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) — One town calls it a “power grab” that “will force Long Island to become the sixth borough of New York City.”
Another warns it will “destroy” life as they know it. A third calls it “radical, unprecedented and a drastic departure” from how localities have governed themselves for decades.
Across the state, but especially around the wealthy suburbs of New York City and Long Island, politicians and residents are sounding the alarm about Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to address a housing crisis.
To some policy experts and supporters, it’s the most politically ambitious program of its type in years, a rare act of courage in Albany, where incrementalism is king. Others see it as the policy equivalent of an extinction-level event and a bizarrely self-defeating move from a governor who risks permanently alienating the suburban voters she’ll need to win reelection in three years.
“People in Nassau and Suffolk are losing their minds,” said Bronxville Village Mayor Mary Marvin, who's been frantically messaging with 30 mayors of other small suburban towns and villages in New York over the past two months about the plan. “They call me up all the time, and by comparison I seem calm.”
The New York Housing Compact is designed to add about 800,000 units over the next decade by requiring New York City and its suburbs to increase housing by 3% over three years. It would rezone neighborhoods near train stations to allow for more homes and apartments to be built in less space, while jurisdictions that fail to meet the targets or reject proposed developments risk having their zoning regulations overruled by the state.
The initiative is a key part of Hochul’s $227 billion budget, which was due April 1 but has been delayed by divisions over bail reform, charter schools and the housing goals.
There’s little dispute that New York needs to address the shortage. While states including California and Florida are also struggling with a lack of affordable housing, New York fares among the worst.
Over the last two decades, the downstate region added 516,000 more jobs than it did homes, according to the New York City Planning Department. In the metropolitan area, home prices have surged 50% in the last seven years alone, and they’ve increased even more upstate in places such as Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester. Rents have also surged and even as home prices have declined from peaks in recent months, higher mortgage rates are making it harder for for first-time buyers to finance purchases.
That’s ultimately hurting the region. New York lost hundreds of thousands of residents in recent years to lower-cost parts of the country, a trend that pre-dates the pandemic and cost the state a seat in the US House of Representatives after the 2020 census. It’s particularly impacted Black residents, fueling a 9% drop in the Black population of New York City between 2000 and 2020.
It’s not that New York doesn’t build homes specifically set aside as affordable. It spends more per capita on affordable housing than any other state, and it has the most rent-regulated housing stock in the country.
It simply doesn’t build close to enough housing of all types.
New York City lags behind most other major metropolitan areas in the US, with lower housing production over the past decade than Austin, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles, even as the city and its suburbs have added tens of thousands of new jobs. And New York’s suburbs, home to some of the most restrictive zoning rules in the country, are also far behind other major suburban centers when it comes to housing production.
Bronxville, a village of just 6,600 residents and 2,500 homes 15 miles north of midtown Manhattan, is a classic study in why Hochul’s plan is generating so much tension.
Established in 1898 as an artists’ colony, the one-square-mile quaint village in Westchester County is filled with Tudor-style mansions and manicured lawns, along with some apartment buildings, none of which are taller than six stories. Renowned for its neogothic and highly ranked public school, the median home price in February was $1.2 million, according to Redfin. That’s only attainable if a would-be buyer can even snare a home with rare listings quickly snapped up.
The compact would require constructing 75 units of housing, while rezoning near the village’s Metro North stop to allow more density would permit building up to 7,000 new housing units, effectively tripling the village’s current size.
Hochul won Bronxville in November’s election, beating Republican Lee Zeldin 54% to 43%. But Mayor Marvin, a Republican, said if they’d known about Hochul’s proposal in November, the results might have been different.
"Quite honestly, if it's so important to her, why didn't she tell us this before the election?” Marvin said of Hochul’s plan. “Because she wouldn't have gotten elected."
Opposition is echoing from the Saw Mill Parkway to the Northern State Parkway, from Yonkers to Rockville Centre, and Armonk to Eastchester. The message is being spread via calls and social media, with Facebook groups such as Long Islanders United Against Overdevelopment and often in apocalyptic terms.
And it doesn’t just come from Republicans.
“Many people are scratching their heads – it’s a housing crisis and we all get it – but this was a very one-size-fits-all aggressive approach that isn’t boding well,” said Assembly Member Amy Paulin, a Democrat who represents Bronxville and other parts of Westchester.
RuthAnne Visnauskas, commissioner of the state’s housing agency, said people are taking Hochul’s plan out of context. Exact details, such as requiring that villages like Bronxville rezone near train stations to allow density of as much as 50 dwelling units per acre, were meant as starting points for negotiations in the legislature, not hard and fast rules that couldn’t change, she said.
Visnauskas was also surprised by the visceral reaction of some lawmakers toward “transit-oriented development,” the part of the proposal that requires allowing for more dense development near train stations. Other US cities have already implemented it, she said, and it’s normal in many parts of Europe.
But she was especially taken aback by some of the more strident opposition to the plan altogether, given the pervasiveness of the state’s affordable housing crisis.
“There are a lot of people who really want to live in New York State, there's a lot of people whose parents and children would like to live here and they are moving to Connecticut and moving to New Jersey or moving to Florida,” Visnauskas said.
“The disconnect between...everywhere I go people say...`There's nowhere for my workforce to live, people are fleeing further and further.’ And yet they don't want to add housing.”
The crux of Hochul’s problem is that while the vast majority of residents understand and may even be sympathetic to the issue — a recent Siena poll showed 90% of New Yorkers think affordable housing is a serious problem in the state — just 35% of voters in the suburbs support her specific plan to require 3% growth in their towns and villages.
In a sign of how politically contentious it’s become in recent weeks leading up to final negotiations of the state budget, both houses of the state Legislature, also led by Democrats, proposed watering down Hochul’s housing proposal. They’re offering $500 million worth of incentive funding to entice municipalities to undertake their own housing initiatives, rather than compelling towns and villages to add more housing.
Negotiations in the State Capitol are ongoing — one of several policy pieces of the state budget that are unresolved — but on the streets of Bronxville at least, Hochul’s plan has some supporters.
Vadim Bulatov, 36, a Bedford resident and owner of a home-goods store, is trying to buy a home but he also believes more residents would be good for business.
"I'm for it because I think it is going to bring more diversity, especially with small towns, it will help small businesses," Bulatov said. "We are very limited with the clientele. The more people are living there the more people are shopping small,” Bulatov said.
"Some people I'm sure will not be all for it, but also you can't please everyone."
This story first appeared on Bloomberg.com.
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