NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- Mayor Zohran Mamdani identified a dozen parts of New York City where affordable housing projects will be eligible for a faster approval process, including Manhattan’s affluent Upper West Side and Upper East Side.
The Mamdani administration, which has set a goal of building 200,000 new affordable homes in the city over the next decade, said Thursday that the districts were chosen because they had lagged in producing affordable housing in recent years.
Bloomberg
The Affordable Housing Fast Track seeks to speed up the approval process for project in those neighborhoods. It takes effect in January and covers areas such as Elmhurst in Queens, Canarsie in Brooklyn and South Shore in Staten Island. It bypasses parts of the normal process, including City Council’s review, with the goal of cutting approval times to three months from seven.
The move is part of the mayor’s larger effort to address the city’s housing shortage by bolstering the supply of homes.
“We are going to build – block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood — at the scale this crisis demands,” Mamdani said in a statement.
The mayor’s office identified the neighborhoods through a citywide analysis of housing development in the last five years, according to the statement. In July 2021, the part of the Upper East Side highlighted by the mayor’s office had about 140,000 housing units and produced 150 affordable units over the next five years, according to the mayor’s analysis.
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