One Minute to Make New York Better
This week, we're asking you to act to support more homes and more affordability.
Hi All,
Housing scarcity is hurting all of us. Too few homes drive rents higher and higher: the median one-bedroom in NYC costs $4,500, out of reach even for high earners; families with young kids are leaving the city; evictions at the bottom of the income ladder lead to folks living on the street.
This week, we can all take a simple action to fight for more—more homes, more affordability, more security. The action? We can each make a one-minute call to our city council member asking them to pass the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity.
The plan, to allow a little more housing in every neighborhood, is coming before the City Council next week. The provisions are modest but meaningful: allowing small apartment buildings near transit, facilitating more office to residential conversions, ending expensive requirements that parking be added every time a home is built, and more. Together, they would create about 110,000 new homes in the city over the next 10-15 years.
We’ve had the same restrictive residential zoning code since 1961, and it’s long past time to update it for the world we live in today—offering more affordability for everyone while also boosting jobs and economic growth.
Unfortunately, a tiny minority of New Yorkers is fighting tooth and nail to stop this modest progress. The group is indeed small—a recent poll found that New Yorkers approve the plan by a 50-point margin—but they are loud. We must be louder.
We rarely email just to ask you to take action, but now is one of those times. Too often, the change New York needs unfolds on a project-by-project, neighborhood-by-neighbor basis; in this case, one call, and one vote, can be transformative.
Please call your city council member’s office this week and tell the staff member who answers that you are a constituent who wants City of Yes for Housing Opportunity to pass in as strong a form as possible. Then, if you can, sign up to testify at the public hearing next Tuesday, 10/22 (you can do so via Zoom!).
We can provide additional resources or talking points if you need them, but a one-minute call will be more than enough to put your support on record, and to move the Council closer to breaking us out of the scarcity that has held us in a stranglehold for far too long.
Ryder