Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released his administration’s SPEED (Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development) report, a raft of policy recommendations aimed at delivering new affordable housing units more quickly.
The report is the result of the mayor’s fifth executive order, signed on his first day in office on January 1. Both the report and the executive order highlight the city’s vacancy rate of 1.4 percent to emphasize the need for more affordable housing—units subject to price restrictions and subsidies that often keep rents below market rates.
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The SPEED report offers New Yorkers two key takeaways: first, that the Mamdani administration is moving to cut red tape that impedes housing construction; and second, that improvement will take time.
How exactly do mayors slice red tape? They hire the right people to do it. Mayor Mamdani appointed Leila Bozorg as Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning and Julia Kerson as Deputy Mayor for Operations. They co-chaired the SPEED Task Force and used their extensive operational experience in government to produce the SPEED report.
The report’s major initiatives include reducing the zoning pre-certification period for eligible projects from 24 months to six, principally through streamlined environmental review; creating centralized teams to guide projects through complicated multiagency review; accelerating the compliance process for permits and building inspections required for construction and move-in; shortening the operational timeline of the city housing lottery; and establishing a faster pathway for homeless individuals to enter affordable housing. More changes may follow.
While some of these are quick fixes, many will require diligent effort over months and years to be realized. In some cases, the city must wait for Albany to amend state law, as with the expected reforms to the State Environmental Quality Review Act that SPEED relies on. In others, extra staff will be needed to clear administrative backlogs.
If a new mayor working to quicken housing production sounds familiar, that’s because the SPEED report in some ways echoes the Get Stuff Built report, issued by Eric Adams’s administration at the end of 2022, his first year in office. Get Stuff Built was the product of the Building and Land Use Approval Streamlining Taskforce (BLAST) under Adams’s Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, who went on to oversee Mamdani’s transition team. It identified many fixes resembling those in SPEED, including reducing housing projects’ environmental review time. BLAST delivered results, such as the Green Fast Track, which accelerated small- and medium-size residential buildings through environmental review. SPEED will likely produce similar kinds of operational outcomes.
Yet New York has become so constrained by housing regulation that, despite the Adams administration’s notable efforts, a mountain of work remains. Mamdani is pursuing new fixes, but he’s also expanding on many of his predecessor’s initiatives. For example, Adams-era City of Yes zoning changes facilitated more office-to-residential conversions; SPEED recommends hiring more people for the city’s Asbestos Technical Review Unit to accelerate the permitting and review of these conversions. SPEED is part of a years-long effort in New York City’s government to permit operational efficiency, often with many of the same actors across administrations like Deputy Mayor Bozorg, who held several positions in the Adams administration.
Questions remain about the mayor’s larger plans to expedite and encourage the production of market-rate housing, which is the workhorse of housing development in New York City; it produces the largest volume of new housing, and its rents permit many projects with affordable units to pencil. SPEED is specifically focused on subsidized (affordable) housing. Some of its changes will benefit housing development generally, but broader efforts like rezonings and adjusting the state’s 485-x wage requirements would lead to more market-rate construction. Mamdani has yet to address meaningfully other key issues like the city’s large portfolio of financially distressed, unsubsidized, rent-regulated buildings. His advocacy for a rent freeze seems to work against those buildings’ financial stability, and his support for new city laws like COPA is at odds with SPEED’s demonstrably pro-housing reforms.