City Council amends de Blasio's rezoning plan, predicts passage

The New York City Council will modify Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rezoning plan to ensure some of the housing it creates will shelter families at lower income levels than originally proposed, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced.

Briefing reporters in the City Hall rotunda on Monday, Mark-Viverito said she was confident that with the changes, the two zoning proposals had enough support to pass. The City Council Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises is expected to vote on it Thursday, followed by the full Council at its next stated meeting.

De Blasio, who has been pushing a rezoning plan as a key part of his ambitious affordable housing goals, appeared to embrace the modified version as he applauded Mark-Viverito and the City Council for their “hard work.”

“They have pushed every day to reach as many New Yorkers as possible and to protect our neighborhoods,” the mayor said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing these vital reforms enacted in the days ahead. New York City is now on the verge of implementing the strongest, most progressive affordable housing policies in the nation. Years from now, we will look back on this as a watershed moment when we turned the tide to keep our city a place for everyone.”

The modifications came after the Council spent months studying the proposals and heard more than 20 hours of testimony on the rezoning plans. Worried residents told lawmakers the income levels targeted by the initial proposal were not low enough to prevent gentrification in some communities.

In response, the Council plans to add a fourth template to the mayor’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing proposal, a land use framework that would pave the way for larger residential developments in future rezonings but require that a portion of the housing created be permanently affordable. The Mandatory Inclusionary Housing measure could be implemented several ways, but the Council pushed for an additional option that would require developers to reserve 20 percent of a building for families earning 40 percent of the area median income. AMI is a federal measure of the metro area income that currently amounts to $60,500 for one person.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration had already created three options for implementing the measure, where the affordable portion of buildings had to house families with incomes averaging out to 60, 80 or 120 percent of AMI. In another change, lawmakers said the third option will no longer target those with incomes averaging out to 120 percent of AMI. Instead, it would target 115 percent of AMI, and require that 5 percent of a building be earmarked for those earning 70 percent of AMI and another 5 percent for those earning 90 percent of AMI.

Additional tiers are also expected to be added to the first template, where a quarter of a building must be leased to those earning an average of 60 percent AMI. Under the change, at least 10 percent of the residence would be reserved for families earning 40 percent of AMI.

Initially, de Blasio officials said including incomes as low as advocates were calling for – often in the 30 percent AMI range or lower – would deter developers. They also said the framework used averages so the zoning code was flexible enough to function in every corner of the city and in various real estate cycles.

Mark-Viverito said the Council came to believe 40 percent of AMI was the lowest income level that could be written into the zoning text, but stressed that subsidies and other tools will be used to bring down rents as neighborhoods are rezoned.

“We felt the 40 percent was as far as we could go at this moment, not making a commitment to endless subsidies citywide that we couldn’t honor in the future,” Mark-Viverito said. “We have commitments that there can be additional subsidies and will be additional subsidies provided in some cases in some neighborhoods that are going through rezonings to be able to get to even deeper affordability.”

Mark-Viverito and at least one colleague pointed to the Real Affordability for All Coalition’s endorsement of the plan over the weekend as evidence some of the most skeptical activists had been appeased. RAFA’s backing came after the administration said it would study ways to incorporate local hiring and training provisions into its affordable housing strategy and to include more housing for lower-income New Yorkers, according to the coalition. In rezoned areas, the group’s larger goal is to have unionized workers build residences and to have half of these buildings be rented at rates that are affordable to the surrounding community. Sources familiar with the agreement said the city is expected to conclude the study this summer.

“There is a full commitment from the administration to work with our coalition,” said Maritza Silva-Farrell, campaign director for RAFA. “It’s not whether we can do it; it’s how we can make it work. … That’s a big step forward for us.”

Still, at least one affordable housing advocacy group said more should be done. The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development praised the Council’s plan, but said it would still leave behind about 30 percent of city households who earn less than 30 percent of AMI. As a solution, the association suggested the second template – which currently requires 30 percent of a building’s units be reserved for those earning incomes averaging out to 80 percent of AMI – be modified so it carves out homes for that lower-income population.

“We’re going to hear a lot over the next few days that well, ‘We should have gone deeper, we should have done this, we should have done that,’” said Councilman Donovan Richards, who chairs the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises. “But when you look at the facts about this program, this is the most rigorous and aggressive program that any city in this country has.”

Besides altering the income levels, the Council said the administration agreed to convene a working group that will develop a “certificate of no harassment” policy intended to mitigate gentrification. Barika Williams, deputy director at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, said such programs generally require landlords to verify that no tenants were harassed before they are allowed to proceed with redevelopment or construction plans.

“It’s key,” Williams said. “The general principle would be that we, as a city, don’t want to be rewarding developers or landlords with building permits to either build new buildings or to completely gut-rehab their buildings when the way they got to that point was harassing out good, stable law-abiding tenants.”

The speaker also announced several tweaks to the Zoning for Quality and Affordability framework, which is intended to usher in more mixed-income developments near subway lines and to promote the construction of affordable developments for seniors. Richards said the minimum apartment size for senior facilities would be 325 square feet, instead of the 275 square feet initially put forward by the administration. He and Councilman David Greenfield, who chairs the Land Use Committee, said the Council was mapping out changes to the transit zones, where the proposal would no longer require affordable housing developments to include parking spaces, as well as outlining areas that will still require special permits for the construction of nursing homes because the communities already have several such facilities.