Marte’s Wary of Key Parts of City of Yes Plan Pushed by Adams, Stirs Debate

City Council member Christopher Marte says Mayor Adam’s City of Yes for more housing is a definite maybe.

Marte, who represents lower Manhattan in the council, has been mobilizing Community Boards to interrogate the Mayor’s plan and convened a town hall for Monday, July 1, to alert constituents to his concerns.

City of Yes for Housing is the largest rewriting of city zoning rules in more than a generation. Mayor Adams says the changes are needed to spur more construction and alleviate the city’s severe shortage of housing. The apartment vacancy rate last year was only 1.4 percent and the prices of apartment rentals have soared in recent months.

But Marte says the plan would be a boon to developers and undercut the power of both council members and community boards to negotiate with developers for benefits like parks, schools and affordable housing.

Marte says that “because Community Boards are pretty much the first stop when people have this discussion” he and his staff “have been proactively going to” the three community boards in his district –Manhattan CBs one, two and three—to share his concerns.

That in turn has alarmed some Community Board members, who allege that Marte is turning inside-out the proper process for zoning changes–often shorthanded as ULURP, for Uniform Land Use Review.

“During my five years as a community board member, leadership has made it abundantly clear that elected officials are not supposed to give opinions to us, but rather if they attend community board meetings they should be there to listen to us as representatives of the community,” said a member of Community Board three, Michelle Kuppersmith.

“This is especially true for a ULURP which has a clearly dictated hierarchy of input, with the community board being the first to weigh in, and the council member being the last voice in the process. During my tenure on the board no other elected official has attempted to influence us in this manner, which is why Marte’s pattern of behavior is quite alarming and threatens the independence of community boards.”

Kuppersmith stressed that she was speaking personally, not on behalf of the community board or either of her outside, but relevant roles. She runs a government transparency not-for-profit and also chairs Open New York, an increasingly influential organization that champions the need for more and easier development to alleviate the housing crisis.

Marte dismissed Kuppersmith’s concern. “That opinion is really far-fetched,” he said. “Community boards always ask our opinions. Council members should be proactive because this is really dense information and it’s a lot of information. Think about the average community board member. They are volunteers they don’t have weeks on end to go through a thousand three hundred pages.

“Of course, there is going to be community board members who don’t want this transparency. Don’t want this information because they already have their minds set on supporting big developers. That’s their prerogative. We want to make sure that every single person on the community board, when they do vote, has some understanding of this application.”

Marte said that the Mayor’s pitch – that his plan would produce a little more housing in every neighborhood – was incomplete.

“This is weakening the power of council members,” he said. “this is taking away that power in certain aspects to fight for what our community deserves. So, I think the only winners here are developers in the current plan. They are going to have more opportunities to develop and get more profit. That’s why it is really important that we stay focused and really go into the weeds in this. We have to make sure we aren’t just giving away our powers for nothing.”

A major concern is generating not just more housing but more affordable housing, he said. He noted that more housing had been created in lower Manhattan’s community board one in recent years than in any other community district.

“However, out of all of those tens of thousands of units that came online, zero were affordable because we don’t have a mandate of affordability when it comes to conversion.”

Instead of giving developers an option to include affordable units, Marte said, “We believe we should have mandated affordability whenever we give any additional floor to area ratio to developers.”

In a newsletter to constituents announcing his town hall, Marte juxtaposed the mayor’s citywide rezoning plan with the one he has been working on in his own district:

“Land use policy has always been the bedrock of our office as Lower Manhattan is almost always under construction, and hundreds of thousands of residents are at the risk of displacement. Our community-based rezoning plan, the Chinatown Working Group Plan, would help create new affordable housing while preserving immigrant communities on the Lower East Side and Chinatown. Instead of prioritizing this plan, the Mayor is plowing ahead with his own - and it’s not a shock that it doesn’t put the needs of working people first. Join our town hall on Monday, July 1 at 6:30pm on zoom to learn more about the City of Yes.”

Marte said his goal was not simply to get Community Boards to vote against the plan, which would be an advisory vote in any case.

“If they’re going to say no, say why.” This, he said, will strengthen his hand in negotiations with the city for changes in the plan. “This is going to impact our city for a really long time....They don’t want to change too much of their plan. But my job is to convince them.”

The debate is clearly just getting started.

“Promoting alternative plans is part of healthy debate,” Kuppersmith replied to Marte. “But doing so by influencing community boards directly is inappropriate. This behavior threatens the independence of the boards and sets a troubling precedent of council members meddling in the early stages of review process.”

Kuppersmith suggested that Marte’s use of the power of his office and government staff raised “a dangerous specter of conflict of interest.”