July 7, 2025

Good evening, Chair Buery, Vice Chair Greenberger, Secretary Bozorg, and members of the Charter Revision Commission. I am Ahmed Tigani, Acting Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). I am joined by my colleague Michael Sandler, Associate Commissioner for Neighborhood Strategies. We’re thankful for the opportunity to testify on how this Commission’s proposed revisions to the City Charter will accelerate our agency’s work to create and preserve affordable housing for New Yorkers and help address our long-standing fair housing challenges.

We commend this Commission’s reports, which document the limitations and challenges of the charter’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) in balancing meaningful community involvement with the emergency confronting the current state of housing access in our City. HPD greatly values, and places tremendous resources into, community engagement when we advance new projects through various discretionary approval processes. Yet, it’s hard to ignore that ULURP has regularly become a speed bump—if not a roadblock—to lowering housing prices for everyone and expanding New Yorkers’ choices to move to where is best for them. At a time when we need to build in every neighborhood to respond to the ongoing housing emergency, ULURP adds cost and time, ultimately limiting HPD’s ability to build deeply affordable housing.

The proposed solutions thoughtfully restore the intent of the 1989 charter to integrate local perspectives into a citywide decision-making framework while providing new tools to address the urgency of historically low vacancy rates. If approved by voters in the fall:

• Bureaucratic redundancy for subsidized affordable housing will be slashed. State and local laws and procedures—including environmental review, building safety standards, agency review, underwriting standards, and public reporting—will continue to provide accountability and transparency in the development process, especially when taxpayer dollars are used. For public sites conformant with zoning, the proposed Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP) would not only reduce the development timeline by three months, but, by eliminating “pre-certification,” also free up bandwidth at Department of City Planning (DCP) and on the City Planning Commission (CPC)’s calendar for more complex land use issues.
• This means HPD will be able to get shovels in the ground faster and use subsidy more efficiently, allowing us to build more units at deeper affordability levels. Rather than spending time on process, we can focus on neighborhood engagement, including envisioning alongside communities and elected officials how best to serve neighborhoods with public land.
• At the same time, local voices through Community Board review will still continue to be a central part of the review process. Projects that raise novel land use issues and warrant the time and cost of a holistic review will continue to leverage the strength of the existing full ULURP. However, given the immense burdens of limited choice and higher prices that New Yorkers currently bear every day, we no longer have the luxury of allowing a small group of voices to delay and stop housing. As others have testified before this Commission, today’s charter sometimes puts City Council Members in the challenging position of deciding between what is right for the city as a whole and responding to anti-housing voices in their district. At the same time, HPD remains a trusted partner with neighbors and elected officials who have a genuine desire to strengthen their communities. Where zoning is outdated, a comprehensive planning effort that incorporates anticipated climate impacts, infrastructure constraints, and gaps in public amenities will still place elected officials front-and-center in guiding future growth.

To illustrate the impact, we would like to share three recent affordable housing projects:

1. 1093-1095 Jerome Avenue in Highbridge shows how ULURP disadvantages affordable housing compared to market-rate housing. Unanimously supported by community members and elected officials at all levels, this recently approved project replaces two structurally unsound buildings with a newly-constructed 100% affordable building serving low-income individuals and families, including a set-aside for older adults. Yet even for projects like this one that meet zoning requirements, our financing guidelines, and our neighborhood planning goals, ULURP is required for public land disposition while an identical project on private land would require no discretionary review. For this project, HPD spent over a year in “pre-certification" and 7 months in ULURP itself working with DCP and the developer to prepare and review ULURP-specific documents, even though the ultimate approvals voted on by the City Council was a single page project summary. Under the proposed ELURP, projects that conform with zoning would skip “pre-certification” and continue to undergo community review, but would then go straight to the City Council.
2. 97-04 Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica shows how the process even for minor changes zoning puts projects at risk. This transit-oriented housing project, replacing a single-story health center, is delivering senior housing above a new facility operated by the Community Healthcare Network and is supported with Resolution A funding from then-Council Member and, later, Speaker Adrienne Adams. The project, however, needed ULURP to rezone the site to be a part of the immediately-adjacent zoning district. In the years between when the project was first conceived and when it received approvals, hard costs and interest rates rose. While collaborative problem-solving addressed the financing gap, many similar projects end up stalled or canceled because of the length of ULURP. The urgency of the current crisis warrants a faster alternative process for quickly creating new publicly-financed affordable housing that integrates into the existing neighborhood. In the future, projects like this one could instead leverage the Fast Track Zoning Action at the BSA, which would be available only for entities formed as Housing Development Fund Corporations and organized specifically to develop low-income housing.
3. Finally, The Beacon East Harlem shows how full ULURP will continue to be used and how it shines. Rooted in the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan and approved by the City Council this past March, this 100% affordable housing mixed-use development on public land benefited from ULURP as it exists today, as well as from the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan and Request For Proposal (RFP) processes. Through it, Manhattan Community Board 11 and Deputy Speaker Diana Ayala ensured continued delivery of critical services by nonprofits housed in the Multi-Service Center by strengthening the relocation plan. For projects like it with multiple and complex land use actions—in this case, a zoning map change and zoning text change to map Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), disposition of City property, and a change to the City Map to resolve historical property line issues and to create a new pedestrian pathway into New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)'s Wagner Houses campus—ULURP’s comprehensive approach provided transparency and a predictable structure that helped facilitate interagency collaboration.

In addition to accelerating the types of projects already in our pipeline, these proposed amendments also create more viable pathways for projects currently precluded by ULURP. For too long, Black and Brown New Yorkers, immigrants, people with disabilities, low-to-moderate income families, and other marginalized communities have been closed out of certain neighborhoods across the city. As part of Where We Live NYC, our report on and commitments towards fairer housing, we found that New York City has become increasingly diverse yet still segregated by, for example, race and ethnicity by most measures and that these measures ultimately correlate with unequal life outcomes. While the factors that keep our city segregated have changed, rising housing costs and the obstacles to building more housing in many neighborhoods have continued to limit housing choice for New Yorkers.

As we shared during our testimony in March, housing discrimination and lack of choice remain ongoing challenges exacerbated by our city’s severe housing shortage. To meet our fair housing goals, where we build is just as important as how much we build; and we need to build in every neighborhood to ensure that New Yorkers can choose to live in the neighborhood that best meets their needs. The Commission’s Affordable Housing Fast Track proposal to build on the Speaker’s Fair Housing Framework will be critical to reversing historical inequities that have closed off certain neighborhoods. This framework, which was passed unanimously by City Council in 2023, establishes a long-term citywide housing needs assessment as well as Community District-level growth targets across income levels. By expediting affordable housing in districts that are doing the least to solve our housing crisis, enabling modest increases in multifamily housing, and incorporating the fair housing plan and these 12 geographies into the City’s Ten-Year Capital Strategy, New Yorkers will have a greater ability to choose between two viable and desirable options: moving to where it makes the most sense for them or staying in a neighborhood that receives equitable investment.

Recognizing the scale and complexity of our housing crisis and fair housing challenges, these charter tools are a critical part of an “all of the above” approach that builds on the momentum of City of Yes and the set of state legislative pro-housing approvals gained in 2023 and 2024. Over the next few months as we finalize this year’s update to Where We Live NYC and put forth bold new actions that build on our prior commitments, we will be proactively analyzing how our procedures and policies would adapt in response to these new charter tools. Should these changes be approved by voters in the fall, HPD will be ready to hit the ground running to accelerate affordable housing production and expand housing choice. HPD urges this Commission to put all proposed housing amendments onto the ballot and give voters the power to advance our agency’s mission and create a more affordable, inclusive, and stronger New York City of tomorrow.