I spent years inside government working on housing and land use policy, and one of the most important lessons I learned was that the most common way an affordable housing project dies in New York is also the quietest. It’s not voted down in some dramatic hearing; it sits in review, withers, and ends unceremoniously.
It suffers a death by a thousand cuts — extra time waiting and paperwork over here, different committees and boards and required votes chipping away at the project over there, all of them costing time and money that get spent on process instead of actually housing people.
The result is less housing, lower affordability, and the families who might have lived there never hear a word about it. This has been on my mind as I watch the City Council attempt to derail extremely qualified John Mangin to chair the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA). This debate over his nomination is both a test for a Council that describes itself as pro-housing and a preview of future housing fights.
We are in a huge housing crunch, and affordability is a huge issue. The rental vacancy rate sits at 1.4%, the lowest since 1968. Behind those stats are real issues that real people face: there are not enough homes, and too few people can rent them. For the future of our city, this is the most important issue we face.
Last November, voters got tired of waiting on their politicians and approved changes to the City Charter, creating a fast track for housing. The margins were not close and the message was obvious: build housing, lower costs, make New York City affordable.
This is where the Mangin nomination comes in. The fast track runs through the BSA, an obscure board most people will never encounter. Under the new rules, it can grant zoning relief to publicly-financed 100% affordable developments on private land in neighborhoods that already allow housing, and the underlying zoning stays put.
Enter John Mangin.
Mayor Mamdan nominated Mangin in June, and anyone who has worked on housing in this city knows the record and understands both why he was nominated and why he is qualified. He designed City of Yes for Housing Opportunity at the Department of City Planning, the most sweeping zoning reform since 1961, helped build Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and countless neighborhood plans, and served as policy director of the Charter Revision Commission that drafted the reforms voters just approved. Before any of that, he spent years fighting exclusionary zoning in New Jersey.
Some Council members have seized on a 2014 law review article in which he argued that wealthy neighborhoods with outsized political power ought to take on their share of new housing. Most New Yorkers would probably call this common sense.
That article masks what this disagreement is actually about. The real fight is over the agency he would lead and the tools the voters just handed it. The fast track applies only to projects that are entirely affordable, built by nonprofits and mission-driven developers, with affordability that in practice is permanent.
Scrutiny is fair, and a nominee with Mangin’s experience can handle a hard hearing; he should get one. What he should not get is a pocket veto of a decision New Yorkers already made, during City of Yes and again at the ballot box last fall, when both times they chose to build.
Housing delayed is housing denied, the Council should confirm John Mangin and let him get to work.
Gray is the executive director of Open New York. She previously served as a senior policy advisor in City Hall, where she oversaw land use and housing policy.