Testimony in Support of the Citywide CEQR Type II Rule – City Administrative Procedure Act - Proposed rulemaking to add certain housing to the Commission’s list of actions exempt from environmental review

My name is Maulin Mehta, and I am New York Director at Regional Plan Association (RPA). Thank you Chair Garodnick and all the members of the commission for the opportunity to testify today in support of the proposed rule changes to add certain housing projects to the Commission’s list of actions exempt from environmental review. These changes will help speed up development timelines, reduce costs, and get sustainable quality housing built faster.

The intent of our City Environmental Quality Review process is to serve as a critical tool to evaluate and disclose impacts and mitigation measures necessary to protect the environment and quality of life for New Yorkers when discretionary actions are approved. At the same time, after conducting a thorough historical lookback of over 1,000 environmental reviews over the last decade and the impact of similar housing projects, the City has found that we are delaying projects and increasing their costs with no clear benefit for New Yorkers.

Middle density housing is critical to addressing our housing challenges, but we are not producing enough of it. In RPA’s analysis, during the twelve years prior to the Great Recession it accounted for only 15% of our region’s housing permits with New York City building two thirds of the units - almost 75,000 units. In the years since, this type of housing only accounts for 5% of the total number of permits, with New York City dropping to just 15,000 units.

As the Citizens Budget Commission noted in their 2022 report, low and medium density projects are less able to absorb the costs associated with lengthy review processes. They found that the two year average review would increase low density project costs by 15% and medium density project costs by 11%. These increases are made even worse depending on the financing of a project. CBC also found that our approvals timeline is two to three times longer than other cities with similar environmental reviews, such as Los Angeles, Boston and Oakland.

These rule changes will enable a number of benefits for New Yorkers.

This change will help address our housing crisis. As estimated, if these changes had been in place a decade ago, over 12,000 more units of housing would have been built. We are in a dire housing crisis, and our City is lagging behind other major cities in per capita housing production. We need to help streamline our review process where we can in order to facilitate more housing production at scale.

This change will help us address our climate crisis. The projects will have to be green and avoid using fossil fuels for heat and hot water. They will have to be located away from hazardous or polluting sites or areas that are impacted by flooding. And they face tighter restrictions to avoid impacts on adjacent public spaces or natural resources.

This change could also help us create equity in the housing and property management market. Due to the need for additional financing capacity to maintain a site throughout the existing review process, we see many of the most well-resourced companies engaging in development. By streamlining review for low and medium-density projects, we may be able to see smaller development firms and property managers engage more in our communities.

We should also be clear about what this change does not do. This proposal does not undermine existing zoning, nor does it take away from meaningful public review. Communities will continue to have opportunities to work with developers in delivering projects that address their needs.

However, CEQR was developed as an evaluation and disclosure tool, and in its current form, it is not a planning tool that helps us work towards comprehensive citywide objectives. We need to streamline review so that we can do more to align our land-use process with our goals for the City and its people. Our housing crisis demands practical steps to help create the hundreds of thousands of units we need. These rule changes won’t solve all our housing needs, but they take us closer to a more equitable and predictable framework. Let’s pass these rule changes and help make our land-use process more effective.