New York’s housing crisis is well documented, its symptoms, root cause, and remedies diagnosed over and over again. We’ve all known for years what’s slowing construction down, driving costs up, and pushing projects into years of delay before a single shovel hits the ground. The harder question has always been how to fix it — and now, for the first time in a long time, a real answer is within reach.
In 2022, the Building and Land Use Approval Streamlining Taskforce was mandated to find out where the city’s development process was broken and figure out how to repair it. More than two dozen agencies and 50 stakeholder groups spent months doing exactly that, producing 111 specific recommendations to cut red tape across environmental review, land-use approvals, and building permitting.
Near the top of the list was a finding that should have surprised no one: projects small enough to have no meaningful environmental impact were still being subjected to full environmental reviews that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and stretched on for years.
The 2022 BLAST report noted that a three-month construction delay on a 100-unit building costs roughly $1.4 million — equivalent to the city subsidy for 11 units of affordable housing. A typical two-year land use approval process adds an estimated $67,000 per unit in costs for a high-rise development. Those costs don’t disappear. They are passed on to tenants as higher rents and to all New Yorkers as fewer affordable units.
The taskforce recommendations addressed what the city could control. What they couldn’t touch was the State Environmental Quality Review Act — the upstream source of much of the delay and cost that flows down into the city’s own processes. That’s the piece that’s been missing.
Gov. Hochul’s “Let Them Build” agenda fills that gap. The core proposal is targeted: exempt housing projects that have consistently shown no significant environmental impact from undergoing full SEQRA review. Let’s be clear, there will still be oversight and local control; what changes is the removal of a review process that years of data show produces no meaningful environmental benefit, only delay and cost.
This isn’t a theoretical argument. At RiseBoro Community Partnership, the work is building affordable housing across New York City — in neighborhoods with acute need and finite resources, where every dollar of unnecessary cost and every month of unnecessary delay has real consequences.
A two-year environmental review for a building that poses no meaningful environmental risk isn’t protecting anyone — it’s obstruction. That obstruction shows up in rents. It shows up in projects that don’t pencil out. It shows up in families who’ve lived somewhere their whole lives and can no longer afford to stay.
The Senate has included SEQRA reform in its budget proposal. Gov. Hochul has made it a centerpiece of her housing agenda. The city’s borough presidents have called for it. The Assembly has yet to include it in its proposal.
The final budget is the opportunity to close that gap — and budget season doesn’t last forever. SEQRA reform that doesn’t make it into the enacted budget waits another year, while the housing crisis doesn’t. The Legislature has the data. It has the testimony. It has the political cover of broad support from local governments across the state. What’s needed now is the will to act.
La Rocca is chief operating officer of RiseBoro Community Partnership. She previously served as chief efficiency officer for the City of New York and commissioner of the New York City Department of Buildings.