Ballot Measures, Measured

You Should Tell People to Vote Yes on All Six. Especially if You Are Zohran Mamdani.

Good report, great cover page.

Halfway through last Wednesday’s Mayoral Debate, moderator Errol Louis asked Mamdani a straightforward question. Where did he stand on the Charter Revision Commission’s ballot measures (Nos. Two, Three, and Four) to spur affordable housing development? Here was his answer:

“I’m appreciative that those measures will be on the ballot, and that New Yorkers will be able to cast their votes for them. I know that we desperately need to build more housing in this city and I also know that the jobs we create in the building of that housing should be good jobs as well.” [at this point he was loudly booed by both Sliwa and Cuomo, and seemingly also the audience, then prompted by Louis to give a real answer, and concluded] “I have not yet taken a position on those ballot amendments.”

Just as a matter of pure performance, this was an unbelievably lame bit of speech from one of our era’s most gifted political speakers. Flanked by two candidates who had no trouble coming up with definitive yes-or-no positions on those measures (Cuomo supported, Sliwa opposed), the fresh-faced outsider found himself looking and sounding more like a duplicitous, smooth-talking career politician than the former three-term Governor or the fixture of the city’s Republican Party for the last fifty years. It gave Cuomo, who at this stage in his career positively oozes slime and duplicity from every hackneyed phrase that comes out of his mouth, an opportunity to joyfully mock Mamdani, accuse him of being “all-talk,” and be, in that moment, completely correct about it.

Performance is one thing. All great performers have bad moments, and Mamdani will survive having one so late in the campaign, in a debate that aired at the same time as the Knicks’ first game of the season (a gutsy underdog win over Donovan Mitchell and the suspiciously soft and unclutch elite media darling Cleveland Cavaliers). The substance of the non-response is far more troubling. Those three ballot measures are no-brainer, slam-dunk, absolutely essential steps that the city must take if we want to do anything about the affordability crisis that Mamdani cares so much about. They are also tiny, baby-steps, woefully inadequate on their own, but symbolic of the direction that we need to go in.

II.

Imagine if Prospect Park had been having chronic brush fires for decades, and if the entire borough of Brooklyn had exactly five firefighters, and that all of them were stationed in Brighton Beach, and that every time they were called to put out a brush fire in Prospect Park, they were required by law to make the five-mile journey by bicycle. These ballot measures are the equivalent of purchasing the Brighton Beach fire station a single motorcycle, and giving them permission to use it on weekends only. Woefully, pathetically inadequate, but it’s SOMETHING! Now imagine a mayoral candidate in a televised debate, equivocating on his support for a ballot measure to buy that motorcycle, pledging that he cares deeply about the brush fires and wants something to be done, but that he doesn’t want to irritate Midwood and Flatbush residents who dislike motorcycle noise.

The brush fires are the city’s housing crisis. New York City and the surrounding region is short about half a million units of housing. We added about 35,000 last year, which was by far the most in a decade. There are currently about 300,000 affordable housing units (that are subsidized in some way or another by the city), and we need to replace about 50,000 of them and build at least 100,000 more (Zohran is shooting for 200,000). The shortage has caused rents to skyrocket, leaving more than half of renters burdened, or spending more than 30% of their monthly income on rent. It has caused a massive domestic outmigration (the number of people who moved out minus the number who moved in, not counting new immigrants) of more than 150,000, mostly working class Black and Latino New Yorkers. And in every month of this year, well over 100,000 people have slept in New York’s shelter system. Our city’s leaders have known about this for a while. “We should probably try to build some more affordable housing” has been standard fare on the campaign website for every candidate running for any public office in the city for the past ten years. And some of them have tried! They’ve failed, because it’s virtually impossible.

Every inch of New York City is zoned, and the zoning tells you what you can and can’t build in each lot on each street. Every once in a while, a lot opens up that can be developed “as of right,” because the development falls under the specifications of the zones. But the zoning is incredibly restrictive. If you live in a pre-war building of more than ten stories, there’s a good chance that it would not be legal to build that building today under your neighborhood’s zoning rules. If you want to build something substantial, you have to get the lot rezoned. That means going through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP.

ULURP freaking sucks. There are six stages. The City Planning Commission decides whether to certify the application, which starts the process. Then the local Community Board, Borough President, City Planning Commission, City Council, and finally the Mayor’s office all get “review periods,” which occur sequentially. The City Planning Commission, City Council, and the Mayor all can kill the project. Technically the Community Board and the Borough President cannot, but the City Planning Commission usually defers to them if they recommend rejecting a project. Each period is supposed to take a specific amount of time, such that the whole process takes seven months. But each review point is so treacherous and unpredictable that projects usually spend two years or more conducting environmental reviews and community outreach to prepare for each ULURP stage, which adds significant cost, and crucially, is two years or more where people are not able to live in that housing. And this does not count the many, many potential projects that decide the process is too daunting and expensive, and give up entirely.

Here’s how this works in practice. In 2015, a nonprofit senior supportive housing provider announced their intention to build an eleven-story building with 200 units of 100% deeply affordable housing for seniors on 108th between Amsterdam and Columbus. The lot had three city-owned parking garages, and had been discussed as a site for affordable housing development for decades, without any progress up to that point. This is the kind of housing everyone nominally wants: a reasonably sized building, in a dense neighborhood with plenty of tall buildings, developed by a nonprofit, providing affordable housing to a needy group. It’s hard to argue with any of that.

But not too hard for the local community groups. The parking garages were prized neighborhood resources that the community depended on. A volunteer ambulance organization used the garage, did the city have a plan for where they could keep their equipment? The construction noise would disrupt a middle school across the street. The building would cast a shadow on a nearby playground and turf recreational field. These are concerns that could be applied to any development anywhere in New York City. Their logical conclusion is that it should be illegal to build an eleven story building on the Upper West Side. This is why we have a housing crisis.

It took two years for the nonprofit to assuage these concerns enough to even begin ULURP. They submitted their application in the fall of 2017, won approval in the spring of 2018, and cut the ribbon on the building in the fall of 2022. Mark Levine, who was the local City Council Member during the ULURP process and then the Borough President during the construction, called this project “the toughest land use fight” he’d ever experienced. But that’s in retrospect. In 2016, he told the West Side Rag that he was “not yet ready to support” the project. Because of the City Council’s policy of deferring to the local Council Member on all ULURP votes, Levine essentially had a personal veto. Until he was “ready” to support it, the project was dead.

III.

Ballot Measure Four dilutes this City Council veto. If it passes, the City Council would still have the power to reject a plan, but the project would then have the opportunity to appeal that decision to a newly created Affordable Housing Appeals Board, with the Mayor, the Borough President, and the City Council Speaker. If two of the three approve, the project could pass ULURP despite opposition from the local City Council Member.

Ballot Measures Two and Three make other tiny, incremental improvements. Two would create a fast track for affordable housing projects that are publicly financed, or in one of the twelve community districts that have built the least affordable housing over the past decade (including the Upper West Side and the Upper Eas Side). Three would create a similar fast track, the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP!) for certain types of relatively small developments.

You’ll notice that local neighbors will, if all of these measures pass, still have ample opportunity to raise concerns about lost parking garages and shaded playgrounds, and will have their elected officials, at many different levels of government, empowered to fight for their interests and kill the projects they don’t like. But the local City Council Member will no longer be an all-powerful chokepoint, and hopefully, the process will run a little faster and smoother.

It is understandable, if a little pathetic, that City Council Members do not like this idea, and would like to hold on to this bit of power. In a vacuum, Mamdani may not want to pick a fight with them, especially when these measures are likely to pass anyway. He’s done a few things this week to avoid picking fights and broaden his tent as much as possible for the start of his term, including things that I specifically asked him not to do.

And look, he says all the right things. The housing section of his website shouts out the West 108th affordable housing development specifically as a model for the kind of development he wants to support citywide. More broadly, he’s obsessed with making housing more affordable, it’s the main goal of his campaign, and it’s the right goal. Over the course of that campaign, he made many gestures towards his understanding that process reforms like this are the only path towards achieving that goal. Last night, he committed to closing Elizabeth Street Garden for a different senior affordable housing nonprofit development. And he’s an enthusiastic champion of many of the wider Abundance-adjacent issues like bus lanes, street safety, and congestion pricing. He rides the subway everywhere and he Citi Bikes!

But none of that will mean anything if he’s not willing to actually fight local community groups when they complain about a development in their backyard. You should vote yes on all three of these ballot measures. And when Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor this January, you should urge him to, when he has the opportunity, do what it takes to make it ever so slightly easier to build housing. We need a better way to put out those Prospect Park brush fires.

Bonus Round: The Other Three Measures!

Not all NYC Ballot Measures are so weighty and politically contentious. Usually, they’re pretty dry and boring. Just two years ago New Yorkers were given the opportunity to support or reject a motion to “exclude indebtedness for the construction or reconstruction of sewage facilities contracted prior to 2034.” Even assuming that I can parse what the heck that means, am I supposed to have an opinion on the optimal debt levels that the state should take on for sewage facility construction projects? Sewage facilities seem important and worthy of being constructed, and some amount of government debt to pay for them seems reasonable. Too much debt is probably bad. I’d love to leave it there and let some nerd I elected to do this sort of thing as a full-time job make the final call. But we need a ballot measure to amend the State Constitution, so I had to develop an opinion on this. I’m pretty sure I voted yes. It passed. I hope they’re building some really excellent sewage facilities out there.

This year, the remaining measures are pretty fun. Number One allows a ski resort to develop trails on land in the Adirondack forest preserve. The specific plot of land is apparently mentioned in the State Constitution, so this is the only way this can be done, which I find hilarious. Because this sounds pretty bad! Why are we getting rid of preserved wilderness and building luxury recreational facilities? It starts to look a little better once you learn that a) the ski trails already exist quasi-illegally, so this would just bring the offending facility into compliance, not create new trails and b) in return the Adirondack forest preserve would receive 2,500 acres of forest land elsewhere and c) the Adirondack Council seems to like this trade, calling it the “best case scenario.”

Number Five allows the city to take five paper maps housed in the Borough Presidents offices, and combine them into one digital map. Apparently, poring over physical copies of these maps is a not-insignificant nuisance for all city development and infrastructure projects, and the Charter Revision Commission believes that a digital map would enable significant time savings. This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder how bad the rest of the system is. Are we going to learn on a future Ballot Measure that the city government issues all of its intra-office memos by typewriter, and that we need to amend the State Constitution to allow them to use email?

Number Six is the real banger: moving future city elections to be on-cycle with presidential elections, starting in 2032. On one hand, this is kind of a bummer for me because it would mean less voting. And if you haven’t been able to tell yet, I love voting. I’d vote every day if I could. You get a sticker and a free pen with a squishy nub that works on a touch screen. Like fifteen different volunteers station themselves and wave you on solemnly to make sure you don’t get lost walking down a hallway with arrow signs on the floor. At least at my polling place, you get to fill out bubbles like it’s a standardized test (I also love standardized tests) and then you get to feed your ballot into the special machine. And you can have airpods in the entire time if you want! You don’t even have to pause your podcast or anything. There’s also the whole “participating in democracy,” “having a say in actions of the most powerful government in the history of the world” angle if you’re into that sort of thing. But that’s just one piece of it for me. Voting’s just such a vibe.

Clearly not everyone feels this way. Some people don’t do it ever. Others do it sometimes but skip it other times. Only 54% of registered New Yorkers voted in last year’s presidential election. Only 30% of registered NYC Democrats voted in the Primary in June. The remaining 70% boggle the mind of a certified triple prime (I voted in all three of the last three city primary elections) like myself. How are there so many people who don’t realize how fun it is to vote? But there are more of them than there are of me, and that’s the kind of thing that tends to matter when it comes to voting. It would probably be a good thing if city elections got closer to that 54% turnout level, even if it would mean a busier news cycle, with proportionally less attention on the local elections, and most importantly, fewer voting opportunities for me.