Mayor Eric Adams wants to remake New York into the “City of Yes.”
The mayor made his pitch in a speech to the Association for a Better New York last week, laying out a litany of government-inflicted roadblocks holding back growth where we need it most. It’s time, he argued, for government to get out of the way, to stop saying no and to start saying yes to more housing, more jobs and more innovation.
It was apple pie for the civic and business leaders gathered. But behind the bureaucracy-busting message was something a lot more revolutionary — and a whole lot more challenging to pull off.
Because Adams didn’t just direct his own administration to get to “Yes” more often. He’s challenging New Yorkers themselves to say “Yes,” too.
Talking about the need to build more housing and open more businesses, he urged New Yorkers to say, “Yes in my backyard, yes on my block, yes in my borough.” That’s a very tall order.
But if we can get New York City government and New Yorkers alike to embrace that vision — the City of Yes — we can work towards solving some of the biggest challenges around affordability and equity facing our city.
We can build our way out of a housing crisis fueled by a scarcity of all types of homes, especially affordable apartments and homeownership opportunities. We can supercharge our response to a climate crisis that threatens to deepen inequality. We can lower a stubborn unemployment rate that is double the national average.
These are genuine crises. We must act, fixing outdated rules, creatively solving problems and collectively overcoming the inertia and obstruction that’s taken over our public discourse. How?
On the government side, Adams is targeting a slew of outdated rules sorely in need of reform. Zoning rules that would bar a small bakery from expanding to the storefront next door, blocking new jobs in the process. Fire regulations that stymie new rooftop solar panels, preventing us from fighting climate change. Unnecessary parking requirements that prevent a homeowner from adding an otherwise legal apartment inside the house, costing a family a home in the midst of a housing crisis.
We’ll need zoning and policy changes — some of them contentious — to clear the way.
And that’s where we come in as New Yorkers and where we have to change our own collective mindset. Solutions depend on communities, government and builders working in good faith with one other to improve our city and provide more opportunity.
Fear of change is natural. After all, nobody relishes the notion of a construction site on his or her block. But when “No” becomes a default for us as individuals and communities, we make systemic problems that much worse.
Just last week, the city lost out on 900 new apartments on an underused section of 145th Street in Harlem, half of them badly needed affordable housing, because of fierce opposition to development. Commonsense rezonings to add more affordable homes in SoHo and Gowanus last year faced outsized protest.
That’s all become strikingly normal — but it isn’t working.
ABNY was founded during the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis. We had big problems then, too, and collective inertia had gotten in the way of solving them. ABNY represents a vast coalition of civic and business groups, from major education institutions like the City University of New York to major employers like our hospital systems and financial-service firms.
And as we expand our network to even more sectors and stakeholders that mirror the diversity of the city, we’re ready to be a partner in the vision the mayor just mapped out — identifying arcane rules and practices that government can fix and rallying our fellow New Yorkers around equitable growth that solves our biggest challenges.
“Yes” can have nuance. It can come with conditions. It can be the result of communities tenaciously fighting for their own interests and vision. But as New Yorkers, we have to commit to getting to “Yes” and not starting from “No” when it comes to housing, jobs and growth.
We know there’s a path to work together. In 2020, ABNY helped mobilize a massive coalition of community organizations, civic leaders and ordinary New Yorkers that got skeptics to say “Yes” to the Census, securing the biggest and most accurate count in the city’s history — and unlocking billions of dollars more in federal funding.
We want to help make New York a City of Yes that can build its way to a more equitable, inclusive and affordable future for all New Yorkers.
Steven Rubenstein is the chair of the Association for a Better New York. Melva M. Miller is its CEO.