New York City is turning to its own properties — including libraries, parking lots and garages — in a desperate search for space to build new homes.
Mayor Eric Adams is set to sign an executive order on Wednesday that would direct every city agency, from the Parks Department to the police, to see whether new homes could be built on any property it owns. The properties might include places like garages where the Department of Sanitation stores trucks or underused parking lots.
The mayor’s office said that it had no plans to eliminate any libraries or park space to make way for housing.
The city has sporadically scoured its inventory for open land and underused buildings in the past, according to the mayor’s office. They pointed to a new 14-story building in Inwood in Manhattan that includes 174 affordable homes built atop a public library. But the executive order, which creates a task force with representatives from different city agencies, is intended to be a more forceful and urgent directive.
“If there’s any land within the city’s control that has even the remotest potential to develop affordable housing, our administration will take action,” Mr. Adams said in an announcement accompanying the order.
In New York City, where land is scarce and pricey, developing government-owned sites is often cheaper than private ones, and should allow landlords to price apartments at more affordable levels. But new projects may still face major hurdles. Parking garages may need to be rezoned to become housing, for example, a process that includes a lengthy public review period. Converting older office buildings can be prohibitively expensive.
Building on city-owned land won’t be sufficient to alleviate the extreme housing shortage in New York. Various estimates suggest that after decades of lagging construction, New York City area is in need of hundreds of thousands of homes, a shortage that has sent rents higher as people compete over the limited number of apartments on the market.
But the mayor’s order is one piece of a broader effort in the city to make way for more housing. The Adams administration is trying to loosen restrictions on development citywide through a change to zoning rules. A separate rezoning that could yield almost 7,000 homes in the Bronx was approved by the City Council last week.
Mr. Adams’s order follows similar efforts from New York State, the Biden administration and others — all part of a search to place homes anywhere there is open or underused space.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the first move in a push to build on state-owned land: a mixed-use development on a vacant, 13-acre state-owned site near a Long Island airport. The Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, has also begun a search for parking lots, vacant university buildings and other sites where new homes might be built.
City officials said they expect to have a list of possible sites by early next year. They said while the city does not have a lot of unused space, the needs of agencies change over time — for example, two parking garages might be consolidated into one.
The officials said they will not yet require that affordable housing be built on every site: Each will be vetted case-by-case based on the strength of the market, environmental constraints and other factors. In some cases, some sites might be used for developments that do not include housing.
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