On heated housing debate, Adams needs new allies

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams’ friends in the City Council become foes when it comes to his wide-ranging plan to spur housing across the five boroughs.

The plan — which comes up for a vote later this year and completes Adams’ three-part ‘City of Yes’ agenda — has sparked pushback in the parts of the city where voters generally align with Adams’ centrist brand of politics.

Outer-borough neighborhoods lined with one- and two-family homes fiercely oppose the plan to make way for small apartment buildings in suburban areas, eliminate parking requirements and ease the conversion of basements and garages into housing.

And their elected representatives are following suit, putting Adams at odds with his usual allies.

“It is so outrageous that they’re doing this, as you can see I’m livid,” said conservative Democrat Bob Holden. Holden, who lives in a low-slung part of Queens, argues the plan would stress local infrastructure and ruin the suburban character of his district.

“I could have lived in Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn — I chose not to, I chose Middle Village,” he said. “My roots are in this neighborhood and I will fight like hell to defend it.”

Holden and fellow members of the Council’s bipartisan Common Sense Caucus have stood with Adams when he’s faced opposition from progressives on public safety. Earlier this year, members of the caucus were alone in voting against the council’s move to override Adams’ veto of bills to ban solitary confinement in jails and impose new reporting requirements on the NYPD.

And Holden is not alone. Other mayoral allies in the council — Kamillah Hanks, Joe Borelli, David Carr, Joann Ariola, Inna Vernikov and Vickie Paladino — are already wary of his housing plan.

So the mayor will have to lean on progressive members he has so far been at odds with as his proposal moves toward a vote, at a time when his relationship with the legislative body is increasingly fraught.

Most of the city’s 59 community boards — including all but two of the 14 boards in Queens and all three boards in Staten Island — have voted against the plan in nonbinding recommendations over the last two months.

Several neighborhoods with a favorable view — including Williamsburg, Gowanus and Long Island City — are represented by progressive Council members who are alienated from the mayor, like Lincoln Restler, Julie Won and Shahana Hanif. That dynamic gives the progressive caucus a rare leverage with the mayor.

“We need every council district in New York City to be helping to build new housing, especially affordable housing,” Restler said in an interview. “My focus is to keep these modest proposals intact and not compromise or negotiate them away, and enhance requirements for more affordable housing to be constructed as a part of this new policy.”

Adams has a tricky path ahead as his administration works to build support for the plan in the council, all against the backdrop of a reelection fight that will heat up in the coming months.

“He’s been most closely in step with Republicans and extremely conservative Democrats as mayor and they are the most vocal and outspoken opponents of City of Yes,” said one council member who requested anonymity to speak candidly. The person added, “The areas that he’s most depending on in his reelection coalition — southeast Queens and south and central Brooklyn, his anticipated base — those are the areas that are also really pissed about this and loud about this.”

Indeed, in the 2021 Democratic primary, Adams’s support was concentrated among voters outside of Manhattan and the gentrified parts of Brooklyn and Queens, especially areas with concentrations of Black homeowners.

The second installment of the City of Yes, which overhauled zoning rules governing businesses, received similar pushback in suburban parts of the city. No member of the Common Sense Caucus voted in favor of that proposal when the council passed it last month, nor did other mayoral allies.

“They have not built any support in areas where there are the moderate members, and the progressives are the ones they need to rely on,” said another person in the council granted anonymity to speak freely.

Deputy Mayor for Housing Maria Torres-Springer cited the administration’s successes in recent years getting other major land use proposals through the council — including the first two ‘City of Yes’ zoning amendments and controversial projects like a sprawling development in Astoria called Innovation Queens.

The administration is pursuing “an all hands on deck, whole of government approach” to get the plan over the finish line, she said — including Adams making his case in neighborhoods where he has strong ties, like Flatbush, Brownsville and southeast Queens. Adams has been meeting with faith leaders, visiting senior centers and touting the plan during town halls, she said.

“ We're changing those racist '60s housing rules that basically told you you couldn't live anywhere in this city. We're saying no to that,” Adams said at a town hall in Brownsville in January. “City of Yes, because we no longer want to constantly have people tell us no, when we want to live somewhere in the city.”

Torres-Springer, referencing the city’s housing shortage that has driven up costs, said, “I really believe … that our partners at the City Council will not walk away from what we believe is a historic opportunity to really start addressing the root of those challenges.”

The administration plans to ramp up messaging in the coming weeks on how the ‘City of Yes’ can help address racial inequities rooted in zoning.

City Hall officials emphasize the housing plan would not spur dramatic changes in any single neighborhood, instead allowing modest growth everywhere — including areas with little to no development in recent decades.

Dan Garodnick, Adams’ top planning official, regularly says every neighborhood must help address the housing shortage, illustrated by a 1.4 percent rental vacancy rate — the lowest in more than 50 years.

“With a district that is second to last in affordable housing production, and almost half of the renters being rent burdened, what would you recommend that we do here for the residents of your district who are struggling?” Garodnick asked Paladino at a recent City Planning Commission hearing.

“Your facts are wrong,” Paladino, who represents parts of northeast Queens, responded.

“We’ll let the world fact-check you,” Garodnick said. (The New York Housing Conference compiled a list of housing production by Council district and found Paladino’s district produced just 51 affordable housing units between 2014 and 2023.)

Adams’ plan has been buoyed by growing political support for housing growth from advocacy groups and some politicians, including Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine.

But only 19 of the city’s 59 community boards released favorable recommendations on the plan — non-binding responses that nevertheless affect reactions from politicians up for reelection.

By comparison, just six community boards voted in favor of a similar citywide zoning amendment approved under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016, known as Zoning for Quality and Affordability .

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson also released favorable recommendations on Adams’ housing plan.

And Reynoso, who is aligned with the progressive movement looking to unseat Adams next year, called the proposed changes “remarkably modest.”

“My advice to DCP is simple: Do not back down; do not scale back; do not shy away. If you’re going to do anything, do more,” he said in a statement. “Nothing is more important than ensuring every New Yorker and every family has a place to call home for generations to come — not politics, not parking, not even the character of a neighborhood.”

But controversial aspects of the plan — like eliminating parking mandates — have prompted concerns even from council members who are broadly supportive of the administration’s goals.

Council Member Rafael Salamanca, chair of the land use committee, called the proposed parking changes “a major concern.”

“Communities like mine, even though they’re transit-rich, it’s a concern because my constituents drive, with all the issues with the MTA, with violence happening in the trains,” he said in an interview.

His South Bronx district produced the most affordable housing out of all the Council districts between 2014 and 2023 — 7,182 units, according to the housing conference list, and he agreed that other parts of the city must do their fair share.

Asked whether her district has as much of a responsibility to address the city’s housing shortage as others, Paladino said, “absolutely not.”

“He has no right to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do to our district,” Paladino said of the exchange with Garodnick. “You cannot come in and butcher up a district without concern for the people who live there.”