Mayor Eric Adams announced new proposals to address the housing crisis and set a “moonshot” goal of meeting the need for 500,000 new homes over the next decade. His proposals focus on streamlining the building and land use processes and expanding housing production citywide through neighborhood planning.
His proposals to speed up development processes can be found in the report of BLAST – Building and Land Use Approval Streamlining Task Force. New initiatives include reducing the time and cost of CEQR (City Environmental Review Process) review, exempting small housing projects from Environmental Assessment Statements, speeding up pre-certification before the land use review process, and expanding DOB NOW (the online platform to submit jobs to DOB) to create a centralized city “one-stop-shop” construction portal.
The mayor also proposed several zoning initiatives to add housing, including rezoning around four new Metro-North train stations in the Bronx, which the administration estimates can add 6,000 new homes, 1,500 of which would be affordable, and a plan to add housing, commercial and industrial spaces to Atlantic Avenue and neighboring blocks in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
