New York City’s racial equity reports (RERs) are the product of the landmark Local Law 78, which took effect in June 2022. This law mandates an RER on housing and opportunity to go along with certain land use actions, as well as the creation of the Equitable Development Data Explorer (EDDE), which is meant to inform these RERs.

This report seeks to examine the quality and influence of New York’s RERs so far through three contrasting case studies. The first focuses on a large, city-sponsored neighborhood rezoning. The second focuses on a cluster of three smaller, developer-sponsored rezonings. The third focuses on a Historic District designation; while this action would require an RER if done today, this district was designated in 2018, four years before the law took effect. This third case study allows us to examine how race and racial equity discussions were approached before the legislation was enacted and in the context of proposed preservation rather than proposed growth.

Key Findings

Our findings can be read as an early assessment of the law’s implementation and how land use planning and development in New York is responding. The main takeaways are:

RERs are professionally done, but their quality varies. New York’s RERs have an easy-to-follow template and easy access to the data sources necessary to complete them. This makes threshold requirements easy to meet, which all RERs we examined did. Still, there is some variation in quality between those we examined, with the RER for the large, city-sponsored neighborhood rezoning being of higher quality than the those for smaller, private applications.
RERs are not often referenced explicitly in media and public testimony. This is despite the fact that the topics they are meant to address—displacement, affordability, and equity—are frequently discussed in both media and public testimony. It should be noted, however, that there is a possibility that the data RERs provided have made their way into these conversations.
A central contribution of the RER legislation is requiring a formal, substantive statement around the impact of land use actions on racial equity. The inability for initiators of a land use action to elide potentially difficult conversations around race, racialized displacement, and racial equity—even if these conversations remain unreferenced or unresolved—is arguably the most valuable contribution RERs have made so far. Although RERs cannot be conclusively shown to have impacted the ultimate outcome of any of our cases, they have supplied information and perspective about each that would otherwise not have been available.

Finally, the report addresses two broader questions about the overarching purpose and construct of RERs: 1) What are the merits of the current strictly descriptive model as opposed to a more predictive model that would seek to specifically quantify or score a given land use change’s effect on racial equity?; and 2) how do New York’s RERs measure up to Brookings’ proposed rubric for conducting and judging racial equity impact assessment in land use decisionmaking?