New York Mayor Bill de Blasio finally managed to win the battle of New York's vast affordable-housing program enshrined in city law for two years. The victory means New York City's residential neighborhoods will feature denser and more effective development and rewrite the city's decades-old zoning to enable more residential development.
New York Magazine reported that the overhaul in zoning represents a triumph for Mayor Blasio and proves his administration's ability to transform progressive desires into policy, and policy to reality. The program's success is also the success of developers as they can now forge ahead on a sea of city subsidies, tranquilized by more generous regulations. The goal, after all, is to assist New York build more and so that more residents in New York can have an affordable place to live.
The political victory for first-term Mayor Blasio was passed on Tuesday by the City Council and is expected to fundamentally change the way housing is developed in the US' largest city. According to ABC News, the program's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing component presents developers with choices for construction in rezoned neighborhoods.
"Anytime there is a rezoning of a neighborhood or of a single building site, affordable housing will be required as part of whatever new is built," Democrat de Blasio said. In a recent survey conducted by Brach College, the mayor's approval rate increased from Septembers' 44% to 58%, reports the Housing Wire.
Almost all of the city's 59 community boards were against the rezoning proposal, which Mayor de Blasio had made a lynchpin of his call to build or preserve 200,000 units of below-market-rate housing by 2025. The mayor's administration hired an outside political group to provide assistance in coordination to its plan and won the support of some big real estate players and labor unions.
May de Blasio and his administration now aim to make the housing program, as well as the new coalition formed to push for it, key components of his re-election campaign in 2017.
