Shout it from the rooftops: the City Council’s wicked local veto on land use is dead! This week, stridently anti-development Councilmember Vickie Paladino of Queens grudgingly gave her support to a proposed 248-unit housing plan in Bay Terrace, helping the rezoning sail through unanimously in the Council.
In an earlier era, Paladino would have killed this modest eight-story tower by virtue of the local veto (which is politely called “member deference”), through which a single member could say “no” to any project in her own district and the rest of the Council would agree to vote it down, a practice that was the norm for decades.
As Paladino herself put it in a video explaining her vote — in between fear-mongering about the supposed ills of the potentially lower-income tenants who could move into the development — she was swayed by the specter of the new affordable housing appeals board that voters signed off on among the sweep of pro-housing ballot questions that passed in last year’s election.
This board, composed of the mayor, Council speaker and relevant borough president, is doing just what it was intended to do without even having to convene: cutting through the recalcitrance of individual members who can always find some reason to oppose new housing in their backyards.
In Paladino’s case, the rationale is distaste for density and perceived undesirable new tenants. In the case of some of her colleagues, it’s the opposite, with members pushing for affordability beyond what developers are prepared to accept and ending up with nothing instead.
Such was the tragic reality for the stalled development on 145th St. in Harlem, which languished for years after former Councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan refused to get on board, saying flatly that she would prefer the lot sit empty rather than be used for what she considered gentrification (a strange take on some 500 designated affordable homes). Her wish against One45 was the Council’s command.
In either case, it is this inability to see the forest for the trees that has helped put us in this acute housing crisis. No single unceremonious strangling of a potential project has created this issue, but all of them in sum have led us here. No one is arguing that local members should reflexively give the OK on every proposal that comes across their desks, but this moment demands that they at least be, in sum, pro-housing construction.
They can and should negotiate on behalf of their districts’ sometimes competing interests about things like building height and affordability set-asides, but this is a crisis in which everyone has to do their part, and no neighborhood gets to opt out just because its denizens don’t want any new neighbors. This is not the countryside nor suburbia; this is New York City, the greatest city in the world, and one that desperately needs the aggressive pursuit of new homes.
This is the mandate of the voters, too, who listened to the arguments and approved all three housing-related ballot questions amending the City Charter by significant margins. They are fed up with years of their representatives kicking the can down the road as rents continue to rise and their friends and neighbors head to Pennsylvania or farther afield.
We hope that the speedy approval of the first expedited land use process in the Bronx and this acknowledgement by a right-wing councilwoman that the days of one person derailing dozens or hundreds of potential residences are over make clear that we’re in a new era.
