Reforming New York City’s Land-Use Process Weighing Democratic Accountability vs. Getting Things Done

In my 38-year career as a city planner in New York City, I often sensed the bemused shade of the master builder, Robert Moses, commenting ironically on the futility of promoting growth in the face of antidevelopment activists and elected officials. Moses, of course, was famous as “the man who got things done.”[1] In his time, Moses could use the leverage afforded by the many funding streams that he controlled to effectuate backroom deals with politicians, leaving his political opponents feeling steamrolled. It was also—less credited by Moses’s biographer, Robert Caro—an era in which the mayor had enormous leverage under the city charter to achieve approval of land-use initiatives, including not only the highways and urban renewal plans that Moses spearheaded but also major zoning changes, such as the comprehensive revision of the city’s zoning resolution that became effective in 1961.

The fallout from what Moses and successive mayors did with their land-use powers led to a political backlash that lasts to this day. I worked, beginning in 1980, in a different world—made in reaction to Moses’s career—in which opponents of development projects have many powerful blocking tools at their disposal. No one has anything remotely comparable to the power that Moses, as well as the mayors he worked under, wielded. Current procedural arrangements are simultaneously profoundly more democratic than the days when “things got done” and arguably unable to address the city’s needs.

In the spring of 2025, a group of New Yorkers, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams to an NYC Charter Revision Commission (CRC), are once again revisiting the question that has bedeviled its most important predecessor commissions: Who should have power over the use and development of the city’s land? The land-use power not only determines the extent and pace of physical change but also political power and patronage. By changing the balance of power among the mayor, city council, borough presidents, public advocate, and community boards, CRC can substantially change the city’s future trajectory.

The current CRC was formed in December 2024.[2] While CRC can propose changes to any provision of the city charter, the mayor asked it “to focus on how the charter can combat the city’s generational housing crisis.” That has led inevitably to the question of whether the land-use process—the way in which decisions are made and the relative power of the participants—is a cause of the housing crisis and whether changes in the process can be part of the solution.

In Moses’s day (among his many other posts, he was a member of the City Planning Commission from 1941 to 1959),[3] the land-use process was much faster than today and favorable to backroom dealing. In the early years of NYC’s governance, land-use powers were concentrated in the board of estimate.[4] The city’s first zoning resolution, enacted in 1916, evolved little in the first two decades of its existence. The city’s first “reform” charter was approved in 1936 and took effect on January 1, 1938.[5] This charter created the City Planning Commission (CPC), comprising seven members, one of whom was the chief engineer of the board of estimate and the other six appointed by the mayor.

According to the 1936 Charter Revision Commission’s report,“It is ... proposed to create a responsible, independent [city planning] commission concerned with the welfare of the whole city, to advise and report upon all questions affecting the growth of the city, including the expenditure of capital funds, changes in zoning and changes in the city map.”[6] The two essential objectives—that the planning commission would have a citywide perspective; and that it would be insulated from the grubby patronage politics of the borough political machines—have persisted, albeit imperfectly achieved, to the present.

The 1936 charter still sought democratic accountability for the planning commission by giving the board of estimate, which comprised elected officials, final approval. That reintroduced politics into a process ostensibly insulated from politics. If the borough presidents supported one another and got support from the comptroller or the city council president, they could defeat a mayoral initiative approved by the planning commission. The mayor had to maintain enough support on the board to ensure that that did not happen. Thus, the revenue streams controlled by Moses were helpful to successive mayors in dispensing favors to cooperative politicians.

Importantly, the new CPC, charged with defining the citywide interest, determined that the 1916 zoning permitted too much growth and needed to be more restrictive. In its early decades, the commission undertook a series of restrictive zoning changes, culminating in the 1961 comprehensive amendment.[7] Those changes were politically popular and likely helped smooth the way for some of Moses’s projects.

The planning commission was required to hold a public hearing before voting on an application for a zoning or city map change. The board of estimate had 30 days to vote on zoning applications. That created a process that could be compressed into less than two months. The 1961 charter, which became effective on January 1, 1963, provided that all seven members of CPC would be mayoral appointees and extended the board of estimate’s review time to 60 days.[8] However, when the parties wanted fast action, they could still get it. One of the most notorious actions that the City Planning Commission and board of estimate approved was the special permit for a new Madison Square Garden, which facilitated the demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station, designed by McKim, Mead & White. The application was filed on December 6, 1962, approved by CPC on January 16, 1963, and approved by the board of estimate on January 24, 1963.[9] That gave the opposition little time to get organized.

The political backlash in the 1960s against Moses’s highways and urban renewal plans and the destruction of Penn Station ultimately led to major reforms. The Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) dates to the 1975 charter revision.[10] The main innovation of ULURP is a clock limiting the time that an application may be under review. In the 1975 charter, the community boards, which until then had existed informally, were codified in the charter, establishing the formal land-use review period as six months. Including community boards, combined with the concurrent institution of environmental review requirements,[11] greatly slowed down land-use review and created much more opportunity for opposition to organize and be heard. In the 1975 city charter, the board of estimate was the final decision-maker for ULURP actions, and the city council was not involved.[12] The three citywide elected officials (the mayor, comptroller, and city council president) each had two votes, and the five borough presidents had one vote each.

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Board of Estimate v. Morris, invalidated the voting structure of the board, on one person–one vote grounds, due to the disparity in size between the smallest borough, Staten Island, and the largest, Brooklyn. A charter revision commission had already been convened and decided to propose a revised government structure in which the board played no part.[13] Importantly, the city council became the final land-use decision-maker. This shifted power away from the mayor. At the board of estimate, the mayor controlled two votes and only needed four of the remaining nine to achieve approval of land-use initiatives. If the borough presidents supported one another in opposition, the mayor could still succeed with the support of the two other citywide officials. Now, the mayor must maintain at least 26 of the 51 council members as allies. If the council members support one another in opposition to proposals affecting members’ districts, they can vote down a mayoral initiative. This practice is called “member deference,” or, in acknowledgment of its Chicago origins, “aldermanic privilege.”[14]

NYC’s current land-use process remains known by the acronym ULURP, although it is not actually uniform.[15] There are two main components to the process: first, a list of actions subject to ULURP; and second, the procedures for the review of those actions. For a change in the zoning map, for example, the review period is about seven months. Notoriously for applicants, however, the clock starts only when the application is complete. The “pre-ULURP” period, in which the application is under preparation, has no set time frame and can take a year or longer. In the pre-ULURP period, there are interactions between applicants and the Department of City Planning (NYC DCP), elected officials, community boards, and community groups. These interactions may reshape an application, as the applicant seeks political viability. In addition, most applications are required to undergo an environmental review pursuant to state law and state and city rules.[16]

NYC’s current land-use process was a remarkable achievement by the 1989 CRC. The board of estimate’s decision-making had been opaque, with backroom deals routinely resulting in votes taking place after midnight, when the public had gone home. The city council operates during normal business hours and is far more accountable to voters. Nonetheless, the era following the 1989 charter has coincided with a marked failure to resolve a long-running housing-supply crisis in the nation’s biggest city. To what extent is this due to the structural flaws of the charter? One view—that the charter is not the problem—was taken in CRC testimony by Ben Weinberg, director of public policy at Citizens Union. Speaking in opposition to changes to the structure of land-use review in the charter, he stated:

As a general matter, Citizens Union believes that the problem of New York City housing is not a problem of the New York City Charter, but rather of the lack of a more comprehensive vision and of coordination between the Executive and Legislative branches. Our housing shortage is not the result of flaws in the structure of government, but how these branches of government operated and the politics that drove, and still drive, their decisions....

In sum, the Executive and Legislative Branches must work together on more general zoning provisions and more comprehensive planning, under the current structure of government. This approach would prioritize the needs of the City as a whole over the politics of a single neighborhood or a specific development site. And it would provide New Yorkers with more certainty as to the future of housing in their community and the built environment around them.[17]

An alternative view, which I share, is that structural defects in the charter do matter. Criticism of the land-use process directed to the 2025 CRC by housing advocates focuses on two points: the process is too long; and the practice of member deference, facilitated by the 1989 charter’s shift of final authority to the city council, means that parochial concerns dominate, to the detriment of the objective, first established in 1936, that the City Planning Commission be an effective advocate for citywide priorities.

Length of the Process

The structural reforms that lengthened the land-use review process are costly to applicants and require that they sustain political support over a prolonged period in which the elected decision-makers may change. All the while, opponents can organize and identify pressure points that can be activated to defeat a land-use change. It is the opposite of the abbreviated process that helped Mayor Robert F. Wagner secure effective approval of Penn Station’s demolition.

The biggest factor in lengthening the city’s land-use process is environmental review. Here CRC can do little that is meaningful, as environmental review is governed by state law. NYC has already taken advantage of what authority it has to create a “Green Fast Track” process for qualifying housing applications.[18] Responsibility for further changes rests with the New York State Legislature, which could encourage new housing construction by expanding the list of actions exempt from environmental review, known as the “Type II” list. Currently, one-, two-, and three-family homes are exempt from environmental review.[19] That facilitates suburban sprawl while subjecting proposed apartment buildings in transit-served cities to lengthy environmental scrutiny.

A bill introduced in the current legislative session would offer additional relief. In NYC, S3492, the “Sustainable Affordable Housing and Sprawl Prevention Act,”[20] would exempt from environmental review “affordable” housing developments meeting environmental sustainability standards, with up to 999 units. More modest thresholds would apply elsewhere in the state. The definition of “affordable” is left to future rulemaking by the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal; but if enacted and administered flexibly, the proposed legislation could exempt from environmental review a large share of the residential development proposals that go through ULURP currently.

Commentary before CRC focuses on the ULURP process itself. Some of these proposals shorten the ULURP time clock. Other proposals remove categories of land-use actions from ULURP entirely. Some of the latter proposals limit review to the city council only (for actions that raise potential budgetary but not land-use concerns) or assign actions requiring technical expertise, but not raising potential land-use impacts, to appropriate city agencies. These proposals would lower costs for public and private applicants.

In my own February 2025 testimony to CRC,[21] I proposed several changes to shorten or eliminate ULURP reviews:

• The process should be shortened by 30 days by combining the review periods for the community board, borough board, and borough president in a single 60-day time frame.
• Dispositions of city-owned land with no zoning change should be removed from ULURP (the city council would continue to review the business terms of the sale).
• Minor changes in the legal grades of streets would be removed from ULURP, and handled through an administrative process.

The Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) made proposals for ULURP reform in a March 2025 report.[22] These include:

• “Exempt from ULURP the disposition of City-owned land for as-of-right development that will consist predominantly of affordable housing.” This is a less sweeping version of my own proposal, in which a subset of applications for property disposition would be exempt, provided no zoning change is proposed.
• “For public housing campus improvements conducted through a resident partnership process, require only CPC approval for land use actions.” Under this proposal, projects on an NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) campus, endorsed in a resident vote, would be reviewed only by CPC. The implicit assumption is that if NYCHA project residents support a proposal, CPC approval would be noncontroversial, and the city council would not need to affirm the approval.

CHPC would also make all land-use actions subject to council call-up. That would allow the council to forgo review of noncontroversial applications.

Sean Campion of the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), in March 2025 testimony to CRC,[23] proposed to combine the community board and borough president ULURP reviews in a single 60-day review under the borough president. This would represent a major downgrading of community boards’ role in ULURP. The community boards, however flawed and unrepresentative they may be, serve as a voice for the neighborhood. The boards came into existence because of concerns about how well borough presidents could represent community concerns. Thus, such downgrading might be seen as making the process less democratic.

Member Deference

Potentially more controversial proposals cut the city council out of the review of certain applications entirely or significantly diminish the council’s power. Such proposals assume that, if given more power, the mayor—via DCP and CPC majority, or, in some cases, the borough presidents—would be more likely to support new housing and other pro-growth initiatives. Thus, CRC, by voter referendum approving a new charter, could set the stage for changes in city policy that would be difficult to enact through the council. The council’s opposition to pro-growth policy changes is rooted in member deference, and individual council members’ opposition responds to organized antidevelopment constituents within the member’s district. The citywide electorate, in contrast, might be supportive of facilitating those policy changes. The referendum would give such changes democratic legitimacy. However, since many such proposals would likely be vigorously opposed by the council, protecting its members’ prerogatives, CRC needs to move cautiously.

I proposed in my CRC testimony creating a new position within DCP, the zoning administrator, who would have the power to review and approve minor zoning waivers. I suggested that the amended charter should specify that one of these waivers is to allow, on any lot zoned for housing, new buildings with up to six units, not more than 35 feet in height. CPC would, by rule,[24] establish the criteria that the zoning administrator would use to consider applications for small multifamily buildings. In addition, CPC could, also by rule, specify additional minor waivers under the administrator’s purview.

Allowing small multifamily buildings, subject to findings, on any residential lot sets minimum standards for permitted residential occupancy and mirrors reforms in other American cities.[25] The land-use changes spurred by this proposed charter change could represent a significant increase in built density in large areas of the city where new residential buildings are now limited to one or two units. Such buildings, with lightweight construction and no requirement for an elevator, represent naturally occurring affordable housing, needing no public subsidy.[26]

Figure 1 shows one such six-unit building, constructed in 1931 at 104-15 116th St. in South Richmond Hill, Queens. The building stands on a street zoned today for one- and two-family homes.[27] The city council has been protective of such areas, most recently scaling back NYC DCP’s proposed “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity” zoning amendments.[28] The retention of off-street parking requirements for new housing is particularly problematic. The proposed zoning administrator could consider waiving required parking for small multifamily buildings, among other waivers, making new housing more feasible.

CHPC also proposes a minor waiver procedure—but in its case, the borough president would be responsible, rather than a zoning administrator in DCP. The list of minor waivers would be developed by CPC and the council, which would likely preclude waivers that result in more new housing. The council would likely want to retain such waivers to enable members to prevent new construction in areas with local opposition. Under CHPC’s plan, these minor waivers could be “called up” by CPC if it were unhappy with the borough president’s decision.

In addition, CHPC proposes allowing CPC, by supermajority, to override the land-use votes of the city council. CPC has 13 members, seven appointed by the mayor,[29] one by the public advocate, and one each by the five borough presidents. CHPC would replace the public advocate’s appointee with one by the city council speaker, to make this change more palatable. While the number of votes needed for the supermajority is not specified—likely nine or ten—at least some borough president appointees would need to vote for the override.

Borough president appointees on CPC usually do not vote against the borough president’s position on an application. Since borough presidents have a shared interest in mutual deference, this change would be most likely to have effect where the local council member who objects to a proposal and has swayed the council is not a political ally of the borough president. In such cases, the borough president may not object to an override.

CBC’s recommendations are, in some cases, like CHPC’s. CBC would allow applicants to appeal city council disapprovals to a panel consisting of the 13 members of CPC and the city council speaker. If 10 of the 14 members of the panel agree, the council’s decision would be overridden. Like CHPC’s proposal, this is also likely to be most effective where an objecting council member is not allied politically with the borough president.

CBC would also remove the council’s jurisdiction over ULURP actions other than zoning map and text amendments and changes to the city map. The actions that would be taken from the council’s purview include zoning special permits, revocable consents, franchises, major concessions, and site selections for capital projects. Since some of these application types can be politically controversial—and have budgetary consequences—the council is likely to object strongly to this change.

CRC has been presented with a menu of thoughtful options to shorten the land-use process and to limit the circumstances in which member deference operates at the city council to thwart pro-growth zoning proposals. While no proposal is free of controversy, changes that preserve much of the council’s power are more likely to be palatable to the charter review panel’s members. Proposals that restrict the council’s power—if approved by CRC, subject to a fall referendum—would represent a major rearrangement of the relative standing of the players in local governance.

Where CRC members stand depends on how they view the relative merits of the two sides of the argument. On one side, defenders of the current arrangements argue that the 1989 charter process, though often leading to frustrating outcomes, reflects the difficult bargaining inherent in democracy. Rather than changing the process, the parties involved should bargain more effectively. Others might argue, as I would, that curtailing council members’ power to derail proposals affecting their districts is justified, given the housing-supply crisis that has persisted in NYC for decades.

Please see Endnotes in PDF

Photo by Walter Leporati/Getty Images