Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is making steady progress in its quest to rezone four neighborhoods by the end of 2025, an effort that could produce some 40,000 new homes and burnish Adams’ legacy if he leaves office after this year.
The largest of these neighborhood plans, in Long Island City, kicked off its roughly seven-month public review on Monday. That plan will allow for about 14,700 apartments, according to the administration, by permitting more high-rise apartment buildings on largely industrial sites along the Queens waterfront and further inland near the Queensboro Bridge and Court Square.
Before getting that plan passed, the administration hopes the City Council will sign off on rezonings in Midtown South; Jamaica, Queens; and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, all of which appear to have relatively smooth paths to approval thanks to the support of local elected officials who have the power to sink each proposal. They would come on top of a 7,000-unit rezoning along new Metro-North stations in the Bronx that was approved last August, and the big City of Yes package passed in December that promises 82,000 homes over 15 years.
The six initiatives are being closely watched by housing advocates and real estate developers alike, and could bring Adams closer to meeting his moonshot goal of building 500,000 new homes by 2032 in hopes of easing the city’s crushing affordability crisis.
Adams’ success in “upzoning” neighborhoods was far from assured, given his own unpopularity and the uproar that surrounded his predecessor Bill de Blasio’s attempts to rezone neighborhoods such as Inwood and East New York. But Adams has benefited from a shifting tide on housing development, especially among progressives, and also differed from de Blasio by mostly avoiding rezonings in low-income communities of color where opposition to gentrification is more pronounced. Adams’ rezonings have also benefited from warm relationships between City Council leaders and City Hall housing officials, such as City Planning Director Dan Garodnick.
“We’ve been very deliberate about the way that we have engaged with communities and with council members,” Garodnick told reporters last week. “We try to amplify their priorities and to deliver a win for them and for the city. I believe that it’s yielding real results.”
Here’s where things stand with each of the four pending neighborhood rezonings:
Long Island City
The 14,700 projected units created by the Long Island City Neighborhood Plan would make it the largest neighborhood rezoning in the city’s history — surpassing the 8,500 homes projected to emerge from the Gowanus rezoning approved at the end of the de Blasio administration. Its roughly seven-month review began on Monday, teeing it up for approval toward the end of the year.
Although the Western Queens neighborhood has boomed since a 2001 rezoning that boosted density on 34 blocks, the new effort focuses on sites that were left untouched by those changes. Garodnick has also emphasized that unlike the 2001 plan, which did not mandate any affordable units, the new effort will create some 4,300 below-market-rate homes thanks to the city’s mandatory inclusionary housing rules.
The plan also calls for eliminating or narrowing a few dead-end streets near the waterfront, which could allow the city to create new parkland and, eventually, a half-mile public walkway stretching from Gantry State Plaza to the south up to Queensbridge Park. (Those sites include city-owned parcels where Amazon once wanted to build its ill-fated Queens headquarters; the city plans to solicit ideas for how to redevelop those sites.)
And although some industrial sites would make way for housing under the plan, the rezoning would mostly preserve the large “industrial business zone” south of the Queensboro Bridge. The rezoning actually proposes boosting that area’s capacity by switching it to a higher-density zoning scheme that allows for bigger manufacturing and commercial buildings — something the administration says could create thousands of new jobs.
The local councilwoman, Julie Won, worked with the Adams administration to shape the plan and gather residents’ input over the course of 18 months. She said Monday that she will push the Adams administration to add affordable housing units, negotiate with Con Edison and the New York Power Authority to cede some waterfront space for a future park and create new public open space at city-owned sites under the Queensboro Bridge, among other priorities.
Real estate developers have taken note of the pending plan. In a March filing for a 42-story mixed-use building on the Long Island City waterfront, an attorney for the unnamed developer wrote that their client is “holding off on developing the remainder” of the site until the outcome of the rezoning is known.
Jamaica
The sprawling Jamaica Neighborhood Plan would allow for some 12,000 new housing units across more than 300 blocks in the Southeast Queens neighborhood. It began its review in late March, setting it up for approval in the fall.
The plan would permit high-rise housing near the neighborhood’s busy train station and along Jamaica, Archer and Liberty avenues and slightly smaller buildings on thoroughfares such as Guy R. Brewer, Sutphin and Merrick boulevards. Although much of that area is already zoned for low-rise housing, the plan would also bring brand-new residential development to the blocks just south of Jamaica station, where only commercial buildings are currently allowed.
Like the Long Island City plan, it would also boost the capacity of manufacturing sites that sit on both sides of the Long Island Rail Road tracks that cut through the neighborhood.
Councilwoman Nantasha Williams represents most of the area and has indicated support for the rezoning, thanks in part to the Adams administration’s promise to pair it with $300 million in sewer upgrades.
Midtown South
Adams’ only Manhattan rezoning would affect 42 blocks between 23rd and 41st streets, bounded by Fifth and Eighth avenues. It would create some 9,700 homes — up from a previous estimate of 4,000 — thanks to a change in state law that lifted a cap on residential density and the passage of City of Yes, in which the city gave itself the tools to actually use those new extra-bulky districts.
Unlike the other proposals, the Midtown South Mixed-Use plan would rely in large part on converting existing office and industrial buildings into housing. The result could be a new live-work neighborhood taking shape in sections of Flatiron and the Garment District that have until now been mostly closed off to housing.
Local Councilmen Keith Powers and Erik Bottcher both support the rezoning, which began its review in January and should be wrapped up this summer. It got a conditional thumbs-up from the neighborhood’s Community Board 5 this month, and is now in the hands of Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who has generally supported new development.
Atlantic Avenue
The first rezoning likely to pass in 2025 is the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use plan, which kicked off its review in October and is due for a City Council vote by mid-May.
The proposal would create about 4,600 homes by boosting density on 21 blocks surrounding the Brooklyn thoroughfare, which cuts through Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The blocks currently permit light manufacturing and are home mostly to warehouses and car-repair shops; the new zoning would allow buildings as tall as 14 or 15 stories.
Efforts to reimagine Atlantic Avenue began in 2013, when a neighborhood community board began studying ways to shift the corridor away from its industrial past and toward a housing-centered future. Although then-Mayor de Blasio’s administration resisted the effort, Adams has embraced it — as have the local council members, Crystal Hudson and Chi Ossé.
City Hall has promised to improve safety along the traffic-heavy avenue by installing planters and bike corrals, although the administration disappointed lawmakers by insisting that those upgrades would take a decade to complete.
