Mayor Eric Adams’ administration asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit seeking to overturn the landmark City of Yes housing plan, arguing that annulling the zoning changes months after they took effect would sow chaos in the city’s housing market.
The city’s formal response was filed Wednesday in Staten Island Supreme Court, two months after a group of conservative lawmakers and neighborhood groups filed suit against the reforms. The lawsuit is focused on the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan approved in December, but plaintiffs hope their suit will also annul two previous plans approved under the “City of Yes” banner, which loosened zoning rules affecting climate-friendly construction and business growth.
The lawsuit alleges that the Adams administration failed to perform full environmental reviews and improperly broke the packages into three parts without considering their collective impact. But attorneys for the city say those claims ignore the hundreds of pages of environmental reviews that were prepared for each plan, and that the plaintiffs rely on “absurdly exaggerated overestimates of development” to claim that the housing plan would strain local infrastructure.
“They do not believe the city needs or would benefit from more housing — at least not in their backyard,” the city’s response reads. “They paint an apocalyptic portrait of the amount of housing supposedly enabled by Housing Opportunity and the related effects.”
More practically, the city argues that gutting the housing plan now would be a logistical nightmare, since many of the changes took effect immediately and have already spawned new projects. The plan is expected to permit some 82,000 homes over 15 years by allowing backyard and basement dwellings, bigger apartment buildings in dense areas, and small multifamily buildings near transit and above shops in the outer boroughs.
Developers have filed some 3,000 construction applications since City of Yes for Housing Opportunity was approved — an untold number of which rely on the zoning changes, according to a statement by a Buildings Department official included in the city’s response. So annulling the plan now would “cause havoc for the city and all building permit applicants,” city lawyers wrote — adding that, if necessary, the judge should issue a injunction that would simply pause implementation.
In a 68-page memo backed up by lengthy affirmations by officials who worked on City of Yes, the Adams administration tries to dismantle many of the arguments made by the plaintiffs — who claimed, for example, that the Housing Opportunity plan would create up to 1,581 new homes in the small Rockaway Peninsula community of Belle Harbor. The true maximum is 1,072 units, the city writes, since the plaintiffs wrongly assumed every homeowner would choose to build so-called accessory dwelling units and miscalculated how many properties would be eligible.
As for the plaintiffs’ claim that all three City of Yes plans were improperly “segmented” into three parts to avoid a more comprehensive study of their impact, the city responded that the similar titles reflected a simple “branding decision.”
“The goal was to signal to the public that the City of Yes initiatives were each designed to benefit and improve the city,” wrote City Planning official John Mangin in his own court filing.
The city’s arguments generally align with the views of the three land-use attorneys reached by Crain’s shortly after the lawsuit was filed in March, who said the plaintiffs would struggle to prove that the city did not study the proposals enough. Still, one of the lawyers speculated that the lawsuit could have a chilling effect by discouraging developers from pursuing projects that would be upended if the reforms are overturned.
Adding to the uncertainty, the plaintiffs filed suit in Staten Island, where elected judges are subject to pressure from the borough’s conservative political leaders. The City of Yes suit has been assigned to Lizette Colon, a judge with ties to the Brooklyn Democratic Party.
The lawsuit’s numerous plaintiffs include the seven members of the City Council’s conservative Common Sense Caucus. They have help from two professional city planners who have been critical of City of Yes: George Janes, who works as a hired expert for community boards, and Paul Graziano, who called the reforms “a calamity for our city” in a City Hall rally this spring.
