City Council’s Utopian Vision for Development Doomed to Fail

At first, I couldn’t tell if Shekar Krishnan was being disingenuous or just naive.

The City Council member penned an opinion piece this week about development that sounds wonderful — if you don’t know how the industry and politics actually work.

He outlines a utopian world in which communities decide what gets built and how much it costs, while ensuring there’s enough housing for everyone.

“When we build new housing, we must make sure it’s affordable,” he writes. Even if he’s just telling people what they want to hear, this creates an expectation that is impossible to meet and actually makes things worse.

“New York Can Build More Housing Without Shutting Community Out,” Krishnan’s headline declares. In arguing his case, he reignites smoldering embers of the anti-development backlash that spread insidiously across neighborhoods during the city’s comeback.

The Queens Democrat and civil rights lawyer spent years fighting gentrification and displacement on the front lines, but might have missed the forest for the trees. The big picture is that falling crime and surging employment spurred more demand for housing than developers were allowed to build.

Yet Krishnan explains the affordability crisis this way:

“From Mayor Bloomberg’s massive luxury rezonings, like the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront, to Mayor de Blasio’s controversial neighborhood rezonings, time and again we’ve failed to provide affordable housing and instead accelerated neighborhood displacement—and we’ve still not built enough.”

An example of the right way, he writes, is a 13-story tower at 78-01 Queens Boulevard made possible by a rezoning that he negotiated with Apex Development’s Andrew Esposito.

But that project follows the de Blasio model that Krishnan calls a failure: Mandatory Inclusionary Housing on rezoned land. Esposito used MIH Option 1, which has a floor of 25 percent affordability at 60 percent of the area median income.

Krishnan used his de facto veto power, aka “member deference,” to negotiate for a slightly lower AMI of 55 percent, a 15,000-square-foot community center and a pool with nonprofit-run swimming lessons and lifeguard training.

To his credit, he approved it despite locals’ arguments that it would trigger gentrification and displacement. Krishnan told Gothamist that doing nothing in the face of a housing crisis was “not an option,” which is correct. Yet now he blames rezonings for accelerating displacement and failing to provide affordability?

Let’s cut through the spin: Krishnan wants to retain veto power for the local Council member over rezonings.

But his own example shows how dangerous that is. Council member Bob Holden, a Democrat in a neighboring district, voted against the 13-story Apex project, calling it “completely out of character” for Elmhurst.

In districts with such Council members, projects like Apex’s have been impossible because of the “community input” that Krishnan says should be at the center of land-use decisions.

One man who did something about that, by promoting City Charter revisions, was John Mangin. A local hero of the housing abundance movement, Mangin is Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s choice to chair the Board of Standards and Appeals.

His nomination triggered Krishnan’s op-ed, which claims the BSA chair “wields immense power to shape and implement housing policy across the city.”

Oh, please. The BSA is important, but its chair does not wield “immense power” to shape housing policy.

Can you guess who has wielded immense power since 1989? The City Council. Not coincidentally, the housing crisis took shape over the three decades that followed. Krishnan’s chamber owns it.

Yet he writes, “Pitting housing development against community-centered, holistic planning is a false conflict. When we shift power away from communities and into the hands of city planners and developers, we lose needed perspective.”

Sorry, but communities had their shot. They proved they won’t allow enough housing. Krishnan’s own community board voted 30-2 against Apex’s “high-rise,” citing the same old excuses of gentrification and displacement. Reality check: The project is displacing a former TD Bank parking lot.

Mangin is not creating a “false conflict.” Nor does he oppose community input. He simply understands that if “community-centered planning” allows NIMBY neighborhoods to block development or make it more expensive, the result is higher rents and displacement.

The City Charter revisions that Mangin helped to create would not have changed the outcome on Apex’s project, but would make such projects possible in Holden’s district — a fact Krishnan ignores.

Let’s go back to his fluffy but also counterproductive line, “When we build new housing, we must make sure it’s affordable.”

Who is “we”? Politicians don’t build housing. Developers do, if lenders and investors are willing to finance it.
“We must make sure it’s affordable” is like saying “We must make sure 1+1=3.” The Council cannot make projects pencil out. It must allow projects that pencil out to be built.
How does he define affordable? All housing is affordable to someone.

In a classic straw-man argument, Krishnan writes: “I understand the impulse behind calls to reduce community engagement, and I agree that New York’s land-use process can be unnecessarily bureaucratic. Still, there is a profound difference between eliminating bureaucracy and eliminating democracy.”

No one is eliminating democracy.

The Charter revisions approved last year by voters shifted some land-use decisions from NIMBY Council members to BSA members appointed by the democratically elected mayor. For projects that go through the Council, they created a rezoning appeals board with three democratically elected officials. This has already prevented Krishnan’s Queens colleague Vickie Paladino from blocking affordable housing.

Krishnan says local input improves projects because communities know their unique needs, while central planning resulted in Robert Moses bulldozing neighborhoods. “We need to safeguard a community process,” he writes, “while preventing NIMBYists or those who want to veto development from manipulating that process.”

How would Krishnan do that? He doesn’t say.

Instead, he imagines a perfect world — “a coherent vision for New York that preserves meaningful community power and strong protections against displacement, while enabling us to build the housing, infrastructure, and climate resilience our future demands.”

Sounds great, but it’s rife with contradictions. A coherent vision for a city is not achieved by letting each community decide what may be built there. Guaranteeing tenants can remain in their rentals forever makes it difficult to build for current and future tenants.

Tradeoffs are inevitable. When Krishnan tells New Yorkers that perfection can be achieved, he helps ensure that nothing will be.