City of No Way: Meet the Urban Planner Rallying New Yorkers Against Eric Adams’ Housing Agenda

On a sunny morning on the last day of May, nearly 100 New Yorkers, mostly from the outer boroughs, gathered at City Hall Park to protest a proposal they feared would annihilate their neighborhoods.

In the midst of the rally, a chant broke out: “Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul!”

“For mayor!” one person added on.

The Paul in question was Paul Graziano, a bespectacled man with his hair looped into a bun at his neck. You’ll often find him standing in front of assembled members of a civic association or community board, like a preacher before a congregation.

He does not spread the good news, but foretells of end times: The out-of-touch bureaucrats want to destroy your neighborhood. They’re coming to tear down your houses and replace them with apartments. Get ready for an “apocalypse,” an “extinction event,” or a “nuclear bomb.”

That grave threat is known as the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity , a proposal from Mayor Eric Adams to change land use rules citywide in order to clear the path for scaled-up housing development. The Adams administration touts the plan as one that will create a “little bit more housing in every neighborhood” by loosening rules restricting what kinds of developments can be built where in a bid to alleviate the city’s housing crisis.

But Graziano, a consultant on urban planning and historic preservation who makes low-fi indie rock music in his spare time, predicts massive increases in development that would overwhelm  sewer systems, schools and police forces while changing neighborhoods beyond recognition.

For the last several months, on almost every weeknight — including on his 53rd birthday — and sometimes on weekends, he’s been sharing that message with community boards, civic associations and Democratic and Republican clubs in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and The Bronx.

“I’m not someone who’s full of bombast, and I don’t go around telling people the sky is falling, but the sky is definitely falling in this case,” he said.

Housing policy leaders who support Adams’ growth agenda charge that Graziano is fear-mongering and sowing misinformation in service of maintaining a status quo that has resulted in a dearth of housing — with a 1.4% rental vacancy rate in a key Census survey last year — and sky-high costs to rent or buy.

But Graziano maintains the City of Yes won’t move the needle on the lack of affordable housing in the city, which, he said, “has to do with decades of legislation and laws that were passed that removed protections for renters, and took away rent stabilization from a million units in the city.”

A chief figure in successful efforts to restrict development in certain Queens neighborhoods in the early 2000s, Graziano takes credit for vanquishing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed statewide housing compact, which would have imposed housing production quotas on localities and met fierce suburban resistance .

Now he’s using a similar playbook to galvanize a racially diverse coalition of residents, mostly homeowners, from the city’s least dense neighborhoods, who together hope to wield the influence to severely weaken if not stop the Adams housing expansion.

“I am not the patron saint of lost causes,” Graziano said. “I don’t get involved in stuff unless I believe that I’ve got a pretty good chance of killing it.”

‘Inaction Is Not an Option’

Amid the housing crisis, a YIMBY (yes in my backyard) sentiment is gaining steam in New York City, with officials and activist groups embracing policies to encourage more residential development. The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal, they say, comprises common sense updates to six-decade-old zoning regulations that have contributed to holding back housing production, which has not kept up with population or job growth.

The Adams proposal would let developers build more as long as the additional housing is affordable; allow two to four stories of apartments atop businesses, like laundromats and grocery stores, on commercial strips; make parking spots optional for residential developments; and let owners of one- and two-family houses turn their attics and garages into apartments (basements, too, pending changes to state law).

“With the city’s housing and affordability crisis, I’m afraid inaction is not an option,” said Dan Garodnick, director of the Department of City Planning and chair of the City Planning Commission, which will vote on the proposal as part of a land use review that also involves community boards, borough presidents and the City Council. “We need to open the door to a little more housing in every neighborhood, and we encourage New Yorkers to take a close look at our proposal to see how we will get there responsibly, without the dramatic changes that communities fear.”

These proposed land use changes — many of which have already been implemented in other cities — are projected to create between 58,000 and 109,000 new units of housing by 2039. That’s short of the half million new units the Adams administration wants to build by 2032.

Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference, was initially struck by how modest the proposal was, but now describes it as one tool, along with tax incentives and capital investments in affordable housing, to address the housing shortage.

“This is not going to, I think, result in a whole bunch of housing right after this passes, but it will open up housing opportunity over time,” Fee said. “Most new housing will be built where you have medium and high density zoning.”

Graziano, who lives on a quiet, tree-lined street in Flushing, Queens, has emerged as a leading oppositional force. He sees himself as waging a war of “scrappy, civic people” against “multi-billion-dollar real estate interests.”

He shares his home, a white colonial, with his wife, their 8-year-old son and a gray cat named Bobby. One of his step sons, freshly graduated from college, recently moved back into the house while he hunts for a job. Next door is his parents’ house, where Graziano grew up. Their front doors face one another, with the sides of the houses angled towards the street.

Nearly 15 years ago, Graziano bought the house — and its contents — at a discount from his neighbor, with whom he was close. He likes his neighborhood — the quintessential type he says he aims to protect — for its green space and its proximity to downtown, the Long Island Railroad and the 7 train, and the Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges.

He says the City of Yes zoning changes would transform this idyllic setting, ruining everything he loves about it.

“Why do you want to blow up stable, remaining middle class neighborhoods in the city?” Graziano said.

He predicts those changes will “set off a mass exodus of people leaving the city.”

Despite the doom and gloom he peddles, Graziano’s disposition tends towards chipper. In conversation, he’s animated and nerdy, slinging urban planning jargon alongside dad jokes and narrative digressions. He may get heated talking about upzoning, but he’s equally fired up listening to the music he described as “Muppet rock meets The Strokes,” by his old band, Snow What . Sitting at his kitchen table, he played air guitar along with the songs.

But lately his music-making has taken a hiatus. Instead, he’s been speaking about the zoning proposal to groups around the boroughs. He views what he does as a form of counterprogramming to the “puppy dogs and ice cream” from City Planning staff, he says. He frames himself as a resource for busy people who don’t have time to dive into thousands of pages of complex zoning text amendments.

His campaign has taken over his life, and he admits he is “kind of a crazy person.”

For the work, he said he’s brought in an average of $2,500 each month — raised by the Queens Civic Congress — not a lot of money, he said but enough to “justify working 140 hours a week to save the city.”

Graziano’s presentations to community boards and civic associations, which he no longer needs to rehearse, include bespoke maps and visuals for the neighborhoods he’s speaking in. In March, before the Ridgewood Property Owners and Civic Association, for instance, he displayed a mock-up showing a pair of two-story homes replaced with a massive, Lego-like block representing a new apartment building.

He also tells groups the city doesn’t need to change its land use rules, as its current zoning regime can accommodate all the new housing needed.

Howard Slatkin, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, categorized Graziano’s claims — that development capacity is plentiful under existing land use rules and that adding more capacity would trigger an apocalypse — as “zoning Flat Earther material.”

He said that Graziano assumes that all development that is allowed under the proposed zoning changes will occur, at maximum capacity, which is typically not the case. He added that Graziano’s mock-up shows the Lego building with impossible configurations and an exaggerated scale.

“As long as I’ve been working in planning, he’s been consulting for groups that want to reduce what housing is allowed to be built. It may be a bit louder today, but the message is similar,” said Slatkin, who worked in the Department of City Planning for over 20 years.

30-Year Mission

Graziano got hooked on urban planning when he visited the Queens Historical Society as part of research he was doing as a college senior at UMass Amherst. He spoke to someone there who invited him to conduct a survey of the remaining historic buildings in the downtown Flushing area, he said.

“I started doing that, and I also started seeing things that I didn’t like when I came home when I was 22,” Graziano said, listing “garbage, increased traffic, houses being torn down.”

He didn’t understand why certain changes were allowed to happen, and he began to learn about zoning and building codes.

Graziano later got a master’s degree in urban affairs from Hunter College. He said he learned very little in the program but gained the credential he needed to be taken seriously.

“I’ve been on the same mission for 30 years, which is to protect my community. It’s really that simple. It all starts from there,” he said. “By extension, it’s not just protecting my community, it’s protecting all communities that want to be protected.”

His resume lists dozens of land use and preservation projects he’s worked on since the 1990s. He’s particularly proud of the rezonings helped facilitate during the Bloomberg administration, including for Bayside, Douglaston, North Flushing and Whitestone. Most of the areas that had zoning changes during that time were downzoned — or had development restricted — or were “contextually” rezoned, which basically froze in amber building types already in existence.

Some former administration officials are rethinking those zoning decisions — which, along with extended historical districts, “slowed the pace of development” in places with high housing demand and “nearly offset the increased capacity in upzoned neighborhoods,” according to a 2020 Citizens Budget Commission report .

North Flushing’s downzoning resulted in a 90% decrease in housing units permitted in the decade after compared to before, according to City Planning . Some aspects of City of Yes would return to the land use rules that were in place before those downzonings.

But Graziano maintains those zoning decisions were correct, reflecting community input and local character, and says the City of Yes would undo that work.

‘Completely Out of Place’

On a recent drive through northeast Queens, Graziano pointed out the “outliers” in the neighborhoods that he said would multiply under the City of Yes proposal: on one block, a Tudor-style building with a deli on the ground floor and two stories of apartments above; on another corner , a four-story pre-war brick apartment building.

“These are the buildings that they want: three- to five-story walk-up apartments, circa 1915. This is exactly what they think is appropriate,” he said.

He gestured toward a low-slung brick commercial building and described how under the City of Yes proposal, this could have up to four stories of apartments on top.

“It would be completely out of place,” he said.

On a few streets , including across from his son’s elementary school in Whitestone, several two- and three-family homes have gone up where ranch-style houses used to be. For Graziano, that’s a warning of what upzoning enables and proof that these neighborhoods are sites of development.

“Every single time a house comes up [for sale], it gets bought and gets replaced with a two-family home. We are doubling the density in this area…house by house,” Graziano said.

Development that looms large for Graziano is barely making a dent in adding housing for New York City overall. Less than 10% of new housing units built since 2010 occurred in the lower-density areas of the city, according to a report from Citizens Housing and Planning Council.

“Some people think we’re full and we shouldn’t have more people, and we shouldn’t change, and that’s how they look at a neighborhood like a Douglaston, or something like that,” said Moses Gates, vice president for housing and neighborhood planning at the Regional Plan Association. “Some people look at it and say, ‘you know, there is a lot of room for growth and there could be more people who could live here.’”

Graziano represents the former: the New Yorkers who fear their suburban lives within the boroughs are endangered.

Maria Becce, a retiree, has lived in her Flushing home for over four decades. Born in Astoria, Becce wanted a garden and backyard and to stay within city limits. Her neighborhood, she said, “was meant to be an oasis in a city where there was much more dense population.”

“New York should be big enough for different lifestyle choices, and we chose to live in a single-family neighborhood for various reasons,” Becce said.

To Graziano, this dichotomy between urban and suburban areas represents the real tale of two cities. He’s working on a bill that would allow neighborhoods like his to secede from New York City, a trap door to escape from what he sees as the top-down, one-size-fits-all, urban regime forced on such areas by City Hall.

‘Don’t Crush the American Dream’

City of Yes for Housing Opportunity enjoys broad support from a swath of anti-poverty and housing nonprofits, developers, labor unions, think tanks and community groups. But its name lends itself to snappy objection, as detractors “say ‘no’ to the City of Yes,” in countless local news headlines and in real life .

Those opponents, mostly middle aged and older, displayed their might at the City Hall Park rally. They carried signs with messages like “Don’t crush the American dream,” and “Density + no infrastructure = slums.”

“No! No! No!” they chanted, like people-pleasers practicing boundaries. “No! No! No!”

Graziano, who organized the event, emceed.

“Who’s here from Queens?” he asked the crowd through a megaphone. They answered in cheers. Graziano verbally toured three other boroughs to responses of shouts.

“I think we’re pretty well represented here, from those who are not from Manhattan. And no shade or disrespect from people who are from Manhattan, but we have different issues,” Graziano said. “We are being disrespected, disrespected by our own elected officials. They don’t want us to exist, and we are not going to take that.”

The crowd chanted, “Vote them out!”

They chanted, “Mayor Adams has to go!”

Graziano himself ran for City Council three times, twice as a Democrat and once for the Green Party . A lawn sign from his most recent failed bid lies on the floor of his dining room, beneath a cat scratcher.

His platforms heavily emphasized his opposition to development in the district and his support for an improved education system. But his politics are hard to pin down: he doesn’t like Adams but declined to say who he plans to support for mayor in the upcoming election or to reveal who he voted for in 2021. He said he’s “not a Trumper.”

He says he only got involved in politics to “protect my community,” and is not interested in trying again. He said people are in politics for “power, money and sex.”

“I got the sex, that’s fine. I don’t need the money,” he said. “I mean, the power, sure, but I have to tell you — and this is what I’ve told a lot of people — if I were in the Council right now, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing.”

City Council Allies

Graziano is a particularly visible and vocal member of a broader movement concerned with quality of life and preserving communities. Community boards and borough presidents are now beginning to cast their advisory votes for the City of Yes. Ultimately, the locals he interacts with inform the vote of the decision-makers that matter in determining the zoning proposal’s fate: members of City Council.

Some have been listening.

Councilmember Joann Ariola (R-Queens) called Graziano’s “vast knowledge of zoning laws and guidelines” a “benefit to the residents of Queens.”

“Although I agree with the information shared, my opinions are only formed by the consensus of my constituents,” she said, clarifying that they are opposed to City of Yes, so she is too.

Another Queens Council member, Democrat Nantasha Williams, takes a far dimmer view of  Graziano, blaming him for the “spreading of misinformation” that she says has “sown fear and confusion.”

“This has made it challenging to engage in a healthy dialogue about the mayor’s City of Yes housing proposal and the broader affordable housing crisis,” she said in a statement. “Our community is already wary of any changes to zoning laws that have been in place since the 1960s, and misinformation only exacerbates these concerns.”

The Department of City Planning recently released an FAQ document in an effort to dispel myths around the proposal. Many of the questions echo Graziano’s assertions.

Will the opponents on the city’s fringes have their voices heard at City Hall? In a portent of things to come, the Council last week approved business-boosting citywide land use changes Adams dubbed City of Yes for Economic Opportunity — but with some significant amendments, after the majority of community boards gave the proposal a thumbs-down. Graziano had given presentations projecting mayhem resulting from those changes would spur.

The Council won’t get to the housing component of City of Yes until the fall, giving Graziano a bit of a break.

“This whole thing is just exhausting,” Graziano said. “Hopefully once June finishes we’re gonna have a month or two before everything gets crazy again in September.”

After the school year ends, Graziano plans to spend a few weeks with his son in a cabin his parents own in Massachusetts. He’ll play guitar and write songs, maybe make headway on an album he’s been intermittently working on since 2020: “The Year We Lost.”

And what if he does lose — and the City of Yes becomes a reality?

“If I’m going to move, it’s going to be to western Mass, which may end up happening if all this stuff goes through,” he said, “because we’re definitely not going to stick around.”

THE CITY is a nonprofit newsroom that serves the people of New York. Sign up for our SCOOP newsletter and get exclusive stories, helpful tips, a guide to low-cost events, and everything you need to know to be a well-informed New Yorker. DONATE to THE CITY

The post City of No Way: Meet the Urban Planner Rallying New Yorkers Against Eric Adams’ Housing Agenda appeared first on THE CITY - NYC News .