Dear Mayoral Charter Revision Commission:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Moses Gates, and I am Vice President of Housing and Community Planning at Regional Plan Association, a 103-year-old nonprofit civic association focused on research, planning and advocacy in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area. We are also members of the Thriving Communities Coalition, a citywide alliance of community, faith, housing, land use and environmental organizations dedicated to ending land use injustice in New York City.

RPA would like to express its appreciation and support of all four of the land-use questions that the Charter Revision Commission has proposed. We believe that the passage of these will lead to a significant ability to scale up housing production to the level we need, especially in neighborhoods around jobs and transit, and in neighborhoods which have not contributed their fair share of affordable housing to the city. RPA has long championed many of the concepts that underpin these questions and is excited that the commission has chosen to go in the direction it has.

We need more housing, we need more affordable housing, and the siting of both needs to be done in a much more equitable manner. Communities have a vital role to play in local planning in terms of where and how to site affordable housing and contribute to housing growth overall. But for too long, this ​“where” and ​“how” has instead been ​“if,” leading to our current situation. The commission’s proposed ballot questions strike the correct balance of streamlining process and decision-making to encourage badly needed housing while still involving and encouraging community input. And in addition to housing, amending the process needed to adapt to climate change is an overdue and much-needed change to our land-use processes. The effects of climate change are fast-moving, and the government needs to be fast-moving as well in order to address these effects.

While no comprehensive planning proposal is being proposed by these questions, they do take a citywide planning approach to our land-use process, especially the question designed to address the inequities of affordable housing growth between communities. Combined with the specific process reforms for individual project approval, these proposals would move New York City toward a more rational, comprehensive and equitable planning process.

We believe these reforms, if passed, will stand as the most impactful solutions put forward in this generation to address both our housing and environmental crises. At a time where solutions to address affordability and environmental resilience are needed like never before New York City needed bold and creative leadership from this commission. It got it.

Moses Gates