Hochul and Adams State and City Of Yes housing plans focus on basements, suburb towers and office buildings

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 NY Daily News

Suburbs would have to step up their development game under Gov. Hochul’s plan to build 800,000 new units of housing across the state in the coming years.

To confront the state’s housing crisis, Hochul proposed in her State of the State address Tuesday a plan dubbed the “New York Housing Compact,” which will require every town, city and village in the state to set a target number of new homes to create over a three-year period.

 The governor specifically called out suburban communities surrounding New York City for limiting building in recent decades and said in her address that the state is ready to step in.

“Local governments can meet these targets any way they want,” she said. “They can shape building capacity. They can redevelop old malls or buildings, office parks, incentivize new housing production or just update the zoning rules to reduce the barriers.”

However, she added, if communities “have not made good-faith efforts to grow when proposed housing projects are languishing for no legitimate reason, the state will implement a fast-track approval process.”

That “fast-track” course would allow housing proposals that are denied locally to go to a “state housing approval board” or the courts.

The downstate area, including Westchester, Putnam and both Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, would be required to grow their housing stocks by 3% every three years.

Upstate towns would have to meet a target of 1% growth every three years. Hochul noted that New York in recent years has trailed other states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, when it comes building housing.

The governor also wants to see more multi-residence projects near MTA subway and train stations. The plan requires municipalities with MTA rail stations to rezone areas within half a mile of a station to allow for at least 25 homes per acre.

The proposal includes $250 million for infrastructure to accommodate the increased density including sewers, schools and road work. It also calls for an expedited environmental review process for rezonings.

“Today, we say no more delay. No more waiting for someone else to fix this problem. Housing is a human right,” Hochul said. “Ensuring enough housing is built is how we protect that right.”

Suburban legislators were largely quiet about Hochul’s proposals on Tuesday.

History shows they might be a heavy political lift — suburban politicians have traditionally complained about state laws that would require them to allow more housing.

Griping by suburban politicians forced Hochul to drop two such ideas from the state budget in 2022, including a plan to encourage housing near train stations similar to her current proposal. The other would have required towns to allow apartments to be built within single-family homes.

In the city, Hochul is seeking a new version of the lapsed property tax abatement plan known as 421-a, which would incentivize the building of affordable housing units. A revamped version of the program failed to make it into the budget last year.

Real estate groups and organizations like Homeowners for An Affordable New York, a landlord-backed group, applauded the governor’s proposals.

“The Governor outlined an ambitious agenda for addressing longstanding inequities in the housing market,” spokesman Andrew Mangini said in a statement. “Housing developers and property owners, both big and small, look forward to engaging in conversations with state lawmakers to ensure fair and equitable solutions to practical issues in housing and real estate.”

Tenant advocates and progressive lawmakers, meanwhile, panned the plan. They said it falls far short of what is needed to address the housing and affordability crisis already facing many New Yorkers.

 NY Daily News

Mayor Adams and top city planning officials released new details around their push to convert underused office space into apartments in the city’s bustling business districts, including a plan that would allow for the rezoning of millions of square feet of space in office buildings.

The blueprint, which Adams and city planners put out through a City Planning Department study, would in part require zoning changes to permit conversions in buildings built prior to 1991.

Currently, such office-to-residential conversions are only allowed in Financial District buildings built in 1977 or before, and buildings in other city

Swaggering Mayor Adams orders big banks to come back to the office

  

NY Daily News 

Mayor Adams wants the Big Apple’s financial powerhouses to get back to business — period.

The newly minted mayor took aim at major investment firms in the city on Monday for ordering their employees to work from home for the time being as COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations continue to swell in New York.

Adams, who was sworn in Saturday, said the resumption of remote work policies at big banks like JPMorgan Chase ripples through the economy and hurts low-wage workers.

“We must get open, and let me tell you why: That accountant from a bank that sits in an office — it’s not only him, it feeds our financial ecosystem. He goes to the cleaners and get his suits clean, he goes out to the restaurants, he brings in a business traveler, which is 70% of our hotel occupancy,” he said in an appearance on Bloomberg TV.

“You can’t run New York City from home. We must have everyone participate in our financial ecosystem to allow the low-skill, unskilled and people who are doing hourly employees to actually be part of our eco-system. They can’t remotely do their job.”

Adams’ adamant push for office work came on the heels of Goldman Sachs becoming the latest major financial firm to tell its city-based employees to work from home for the first couple of weeks of January to try to blunt the recent surge in COVID-19 cases driven by the extremely contagious omicron variant.

JPMorgan Chase, CitiBank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley have already instituted similar policies.

The remote work precautions come as New York continues to see its COVID-19 curve trend in the wrong direction.

According to data from the state Health Department, 23.17% of all tests conducted across New York in the 24-hour period ending Monday morning came back positive, with 29,246 infections recorded in the city alone. Hospitalizations are ticking up at an alarming rate as well, and 103 New Yorkers died from COVID-19 statewide in the same reporting window, the highest daily death toll in months, the data showed.

Despite the pandemic resurgence, Adams said the city can’t return to business shutdowns, arguing that widespread availability of coronavirus vaccines should allow New Yorkers to “live with COVID.”

“I need my companies back open and operating,” he said. “You can’t run a city like New York on 30% occupancy in buildings. We need to get back to business and open our city.”

On the topic of vaccines, Adams said he’s considering mandating booster shots — which have proven highly effective in protecting people against severe COVID-19 symptoms — for the municipal workforce. He said he’ll have an announcement on the matter “around April.”