After months of maneuvering, the City of Yes housing plan is at the stage of last-mile negotiations between City Hall and the City Council. What emerges from this process should look substantively like what came in. It seems that Council members are largely honing in on details and how to best support housing construction as opposed to the root need to modify our outdated zoning and regulatory rules to promote more housing. Nonetheless, too much tweaking defeats the purpose; the notion of a little more housing in every neighborhood is more than a slogan, it’s a guiding principle. Part of the reason that we’ve ended up in this mess is because everyone always wants their own tailor-made concessions — my neighborhood should have these carve-outs, because well it’s about my neighborhood’s character, and we can’t all just toe the same line, and so on. There is no doubt that the various neighborhoods of the city are different and have different needs and different qualities, and that’s part of what makes the city such a vibrant collection of all cultures and interests. Yet these neighborhoods are also not isolated, geographically or politically. An issue like lack of housing will eventually come to affect everyone, and that means everyone has to do their part. More suburban areas don’t get a pass and they don’t get to offload their own responsibilities out onto already-denser parts of the city. Despite some of the public fear-mongering, none of this means anyone’s putting a billionaire’s row-style high-rise in the middle of Elmhurst or Gravesend or anywhere but where those supertall buildings are already standard. As we’ve often pointed out, the City of Yes housing package is largely about allowing construction of the sort that had once already been standard in NYC, acknowledging that needs are shared and we should be cumulatively moving away from overt reliance on things like parking in a city that is so transit-rich. Council members are pushing, as they often do, for deeper affordability requirements for new housing, such as in the units that would be created in the plan’s affordability allowance designed to allow developments to be up to 20% larger than would otherwise be permitted as long as the additional stock is all affordable. This is a perfectly reasonable demand in general, but the members should keep in mind that the whole impetus of this reform is that additional housing stock will force prices down on the weight of availability alone, and going too heavy on affordability requirements has the effect of discouraging development in the first place. While the Council’s City for All plan has variously been called an alternative or competitor or some other such moniker, we see it mainly as an expansion and complement. The funding question indeed is very important and the idea that zoning shifts alone will suddenly springboard us into a future of plentiful housing and diving costs is a fanciful one, and certainly not what City Hall was contending with the plan. If the Council wants to supplement these efforts with funding and some additional policy planks, by all means, go ahead. But what’s most important here is keeping the shifts that will actually allow more housing construction to occur and occur everywhere.