By Gus Saltonstall
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, along with the Department of City Planning Director Sideya Sherman, announced earlier this month that the Upper West Side would be one of 12 community districts in New York City where the affordable housing construction process would be fast-tracked.
The 12 community districts were selected based on the neighborhoods where the least amount of new affordable housing has been built in the past five years, which included the Upper West Side.
Fast-tracking new affordable housing means that beginning on January 1, 2027, a streamlined 90-day public review process will be implemented on the Upper West Side and in the 11 other community districts, as opposed to the previous seven-month Uniform Land Use Review Procedure known as ULURP.
The 12 fast-tracked districts represent around one-fifth of New York City’s 59 community districts but produced just 724 of 63,870 new affordable homes over the past five years, according to the city. In other words, 1.1 percent of the total.
The Upper West Side constructed 152 affordable units in the last five years, according to city data.
“New York’s housing crisis is not going to be solved by asking the same neighborhoods to do all the building,” Mamdani said in a news release. “Every New Yorker deserves a home they can afford, and every neighborhood must be part of delivering it.”
This modification to the affordable housing creation process comes after voters approved a ballot measure from the Adams Administration in November of 2025 to address uneven affordable housing creation in the five boroughs.
This new fast-tracked process will shorten the review timeline of projects and take the final decision away from the New York City Council and put it in the hands of the mayor-appointed City Planning Commission.
At least one prominent Upper West Side figure is strongly against this change to the affordable housing process:
Councilmember Gale Brewer.
“Community Board 7, the Upper West Side, is on that list—not because UWS residents don’t want affordable housing, but because developers here prefer to build as-of-right, market-rate developments without (what they view as) the time-consuming hassle of Community Board or City Planning or City Council approvals. They can make more money, faster, without that process,” Brewer wrote in a recent newsletter.
Brewer called the charter language that City Planning is implementing “purely quantitative” and noted that it only counted new housing built from scratch, as opposed to existing buildings converted or rehabbed into affordable units.
“Well guess what? There’s not that much vacant land on the Upper West Side, and thus our affordable housing metric, under these new rules, is in the basement,” Brewer wrote.
She continued, “City Planning’s designation oversimplifies and neglects the realities of affordable housing that does exist in our neighborhood: our many sites for temporary supportive housing, SROs on the market, formerly illegal hotels converted to safer housing, many NYCHA units, and hundreds of 421a subsidized units.”
There will be a City Council meeting on October 21 that includes the subject of the Fast-Track change to affordable housing where Brewer plans to raise her concerns.
“The effort to circumvent local leadership—in exchange for expediting the process by a meager 4 months—is the anti-democratic cherry on the sundae,” Brewer said of the affordable housing process change.
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The phrase “affordable housing” has become something of a joke, since it is rarely “affordable” to those who actually need it. I gave up believing in “afforable housing” when I saw an “affordable housing” lottery that allowed people with six-figure incomes to enter the lottery.
The reason no developers want to – or ever will – build TRULY AFFORDBLE housing (no matter what is said otherwise) is because the costs of permits, construction, etc. are so high that it would be impossible to build (or renovate) a building to create TRULY affordable apartments, and still make a profit. In fact, doing so would almost certainly lead to a loss that would be ongoing.
This is the (sad) Catch-22 of “affordable” housing – and there doesn’t seeem to be any way around it.
Huzzah!! I was skeptical at first but this is yet another Mandani W, he keeps churning them out!
Gale obviously can’t be trusted to allow for obvious new housing developments, see exhibit A and her ridiculous decades long obstruction of the redevelopment of West-Park Presbyterian