State Senate Joins Hochul in Trying to Speed Up New Housing

Building new housing

Hochul has long warned that New York suffers from a housing shortage, which she has blamed on restrictive laws that block or sharply limit building in many communities across the state.

This year, she and the Senate are seeking to tackle the issue by changing the state’s environmental review law — the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQRA — which can add months or years to the time it takes to build new housing. Both of their budget proposals include measures that would allow many building projects to skip environmental review or go through a fast-tracked version of the process. The measure is also a top priority for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who appeared with Hochul at a rally in Brooklyn last month in support of the change.

The Assembly, which has rejected multiple proposals to boost housing in recent years, left SEQRA reform out of its budget proposal.

At a hearing in January, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, who chairs the chamber’s environmental conservation committee, expressed reluctance to change the environmental review process.

“The development community is very excited about eliminating reviews for what they say is affordable housing, which of course they could have been building all along,” she said at the time. She blamed the state’s housing crisis on “years of real estate speculation.”

There are some key differences between the governor’s and Senate’s proposals. The Senate wants to concentrate the exemptions to environmental review in urban areas, allow larger buildings to qualify, and require projects to conform to “minimum environmental and infrastructure standards” in order to skip environmental review. (The governor’s proposal would allow more, though not all, new buildings to skip environmental review but would still require them to follow existing environmental protection laws.)

The Senate also said it is committed to “fair treatment and good wages” for construction workers, a nod to the wage floor guarantees sought by the state’s building trades unions, though the legislation lacks specific measures on this score.

Maintaining affordable homes

The Senate followed Hochul’s lead on another major housing policy: a revamp of a tax break that helps affordable housing owners pay for upgrades to their buildings. The program, known as J-51, allows property owners to deduct the cost of construction work from their property taxes.

Both the Senate’s and governor’s proposals would allow owners to seek a property tax reduction equal to the full cost of improvements, as opposed to the current limit of 70 percent, making the program more attractive to owners. The Senate’s proposal would also change eligibility criteria to ensure that buildings in which nearly all apartments are rent-stabilized can qualify for the tax break.

The Assembly didn’t include this change in its budget proposal.

Rosenthal noted that the Assembly has supported similar measures in the past, but that the Democratic conference hasn’t discussed this year’s proposal yet.

Both the Senate and Assembly proposed hundreds of millions in new funding for New York City’s public and government-assisted housing. NYCHA, the city’s public housing authority, is facing an estimated $80 billion backlog in necessary repairs. Hochul’s proposal didn’t include new funding for this purpose.