A new political action committee in New York City aims to spend $3 million in support of ballot measures that could make it easier to build housing as the city faces its worst shortage in decades.
The committee, led by Amit Singh Bagga, a Democratic strategist and former city and state official, has filed paperwork with the Campaign Finance Board under the name Yes on Affordable Housing. The committee has already secured $1 million of the $3 million in commitments from donors, he said, and plans to spend the money on a handful of campaign staff members, mailers and advertisements on television, radio and streaming services.
It’s the latest example of how the fight over the measures is intensifying, alongside a mayor’s race also largely dominated by issues of affordability.
The measures, written by a special panel created by Mayor Eric Adams, aim to diminish the power that individual members of City Council have to reject housing in their districts.
The City Council, which opposes the measures, recently asked the Board of Elections to take the extraordinary step of keeping the measures off the November ballot, arguing that the wording was not clear enough. The board is expected to vote on Tuesday.
Mr. Bagga, the campaign manager, said he was confident that the measures would stay on the ballot, even if supporters had to file a lawsuit to challenge the elections board.
“Our current system has turbocharged a small-minded, ‘all for me and none for thee’ approach that I think has asphyxiated New York’s ability to do big things,” he said. “From my perspective, these ballot measures would equip us with some of the most basic tools we need to fix this broken housing system.”
The panel that wrote the measures, known as a Charter Revision Commission, is supposed to be independent. Mr. Adams had asked its 13 members to tackle the city’s housing shortage, one of the main drivers of the rising cost of living. The rental vacancy rate, according to the most recent city measure, is just 1.4 percent.
After months of public hearings and deliberation, the panel proposed four measures related to housing. Three would significantly rewrite the rules of development and are the most contentious.
One measure would create a “fast track” by giving the City Planning Commission, instead of the City Council, the authority to approve or reject affordable housing projects in the 12 community districts that have allowed the least housing to be built. A majority of the planning commission’s members are appointed by the mayor.
Another measure would make it easier to build “modest” developments, such as those that would be up to 30 percent bigger than the current rules allow. These changes would also need approval from the planning commission, and not the Council.
A third would create an appeals board that could overrule a decision by the Council to reject or modify an affordable housing development. The board would need agreement between two of its three members: the mayor, the Council speaker and the president of the borough where the development was proposed.
The City Council has said the measures amount to a power grab by Mr. Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent. Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, said last week that the measures “attempt to mislead voters by hiding their real impact of eliminating the public’s power over land use decisions that allow new development.”
But the measures have also been endorsed by some of the mayor’s opponents. A spokesman for former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is running for mayor as an independent, has called them “no-brainers.” Brad Lander, the city comptroller and an ally of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, has testified in support of the measures.
Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a pro-housing nonprofit, said that if voters passed the measures, there could be ramifications in other cities across the country that are dealing with similar affordability problems.
“This is the first time a major American city is going to put meaningful systemic changes to the politics of housing growth on the ballot,” she said.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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