NY’s Hochul Wants Red Tape Gone for Housing Affordability Boost

Gov. Kathy Hochul is pitching slashing red tape to cut housing developers a break as home prices rise.

Hochul (D) wants to streamline the environmental review process that all major developments must undergo in New York as a way to address complaints about affordability. She criticized the state law mandating the reviews as stymieing housing infrastructure during a Monday event with developers and local municipal officials.

“My belief is that if you build more, you have more supply naturally, it will suppress prices from going up,” Hochul said. “Sometimes they stabilize, and in some communities they actually go down. And that is what our objective is here.”

The effort dovetails with a wider shift among Democratic leaders to call for major overhauls of regulatory barriers and championing increased development, especially in larger cities.

But those pushes in some cases, are pitting leaders against environmentalists who say the changes would benefit corporate interests. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) frustrated green groups last year when he allowed advanced manufacturing facilities, such as semiconductor plants and industrial biotechnology facilities, to qualify for an exemption under that state’s retweaked environmental review process.

Hochul said she was narrowly focused this year on changing the law to benefit housing construction, but indicated she might consider allowing manufacturing sites to qualify in the future. Her changes would amend the review process to exempt housing that doesn’t have “significant adverse impacts” on the environment, and projects would need to comply with local zoning laws.

Hochul has cited research showing that environmental review can inflate development costs by $82,000 per unit in New York City, an expensive undertaking for multi-unit buildings. Large projects can also be stuck in limbo for years due to the extensive requirements under New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act, a 1975 law that has been relatively untouched for decades.

She is also seeking to use the streamlined environmental review process to deploy clean energy projects.

The proposal has won over some state legislators, who must approve a state budget due April 1. Local officials and economic development advocates cheered the move, citing growing strain for home buyers across the state.

A two-person household earning 120% of the average median income can’t afford a median-priced home in six upstate counties, including five in New York’s Hudson Valley, according to Chris Brown with the Columbia Economic Development Corporation.

“We are doing our best to create the situations and sort of start the groundwork for development to occur,” Brown said. “But very often we run into many of the same issues.”