Adams unveils plan to create 500K new homes by 2032

New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday unveiled a new, three-part strategy to tackle the city’s affordable housing crisis. Dubbed “Get Stuff Built,” the plan aims to address the housing crisis by accelerating the creation of new housing, setting a “moonshot” goal of creating 500,000 new homes over the next decade.

The plan was produced by the city’s Building and Land Use Approval Streamlining Task Force (BLAST), which gathered in June and created 111 actions that the city should take in order to create more housing.

The first part of Adams’ plan involves the streamlining of three city governmental processes that have staggered the creation of new housing. The plan will enact policy changes on the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR), land use approvals, and the city’s building permitting process that will reduce the time of these processes by 50 percent.

The pre-certification process for land use applications will be sped up and made more transparent, making a procedure that can typically take two years or longer substantially shorter by eliminating certain requirements.

The second step of the plan is to “Build Everywhere,” a city effort to increase its investment in business districts and job hubs across the five boroughs.

Part of this step includes the city’s effort to create thousands of housing units close to four new MetroNorth stations that are set to open in the East Bronx by 2027, supporting the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan in Central Brooklyn that will create thousands of affordable homes, and diligently searching for other opportunities across the city to create new housing.

The final step of the plan is to “Build Together,” that is, utilizing connections with city, state, and federal allies to push the creation of housing forward at a quicker pace. This part of the plan includes calls for changes like legalizing existing basement apartments, converting unused office buildings into housing, eliminating exclusionary zoning practices, and more.

“If New York is to remain the city we love, we must have places for the people we love. We need more housing, and we need it as fast as we can build it,” Adams said. “The system has been broken for so long that we have come to view it as our reality. Our city declared a housing emergency five decades ago, yet, we have failed to address it with the same urgency we would any other crisis.”

“That ends now. We can, and we must, do better. We need to add hundreds of thousands of units to address the problem, and that is exactly what we are going to do. Today we are saying yes to more housing and yes to getting stuff built. We are going to build faster, we are going to build everywhere, and we are going to build together.”

Adams will also call upon federal partners to obtain financial support and policy changes. Gov. Kathy Hochul has already voiced her support for the plan.

“New York has become the place where workers and businesses want to be, but limited housing supply and a lack of affordability are costing far too many New Yorkers their ‘New York Dream,'” Hochul stated.

“With our state staring down a housing crisis, we will need every community, every town, and every city to do its part to make housing accessible and affordable for all. My administration is ready to meet the housing crisis head-on in partnership with Mayor Adams and other local and state officials, and I look forward to sharing our proposals to unlock New York’s housing potential in my State of the State address.”

The “Get Stuff Built” plan is an effort by the Adams administration to fulfill the commitments it made in June’s “Housing Our Neighbors” blueprint. The blueprint outlined a strong, equitable comeback for the city after the pandemic and actions to address the city’s housing and homelessness crisis.

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