On December 18, 2023, Tim Foley, the CEO of the Building and Realty Institute (BRI) and a member of Welcome Home Westchester’s Steering Committee, testified on the urgent need for more housing in Westchester and throughout NY State to the Assembly Standing Committees on Housing and Cities.
Watch his testimony:
Full transcript of testimony:
Good afternoon. I’m speaking in a dual role today. First, as CEO for the Building and Realty Institute of Westchester and Putnam, a real estate trade association that has represented homebuilders, developers, remodelers, and those who own or operate multifamily in the region since 1946. I am also speaking on behalf of the Welcome Home Westchester campaign, a multi-stakeholder campaign that includes pro-business organizations like the Westchester County Association and Nonprofit Westchester, academics and think tanks that have extensively examined the housing question, organizations dedicated to fighting against homelessness and supporting families in need, faith leaders and community advocates to drive a new conversation around housing in the county.
I would like to thank Chair Rosenthal, Chair Braunstein and the members of the committee for their continued focus on housing across the state, particularly in the Greater New York City area.
We are fortunate in Westchester County in that many of our local leaders have been sounding the alarm about the dire state of housing for the past five years. In 2019, the Westchester County Planning Department released a comprehensive Housing Needs Assessment, and its findings were both eye-opening and a call to action.
Thanks to that Housing Needs Assessment, we learned that the communities of Westchester needed to build 11,703 new units of housing just to meet present-day needs in 2019, let alone future growth. We learned that 30-to-45-year-olds, the key demographic that has always been the renewing lifeblood of any community, are being priced out of Westchester. In fact, it is the one demographic now shrinking the fastest as affordable housing and starter home options become increasingly out of reach. We also learned that our fastest-growing demographic was now our 85-year-old and above seniors, with many looking to downsize but finding they either must remain in place or leave the community they love. Despite Westchester’s reputation as a commuter community, we learned that there are nearly as many people commuting into Westchester for work as there are commuting from Westchester into New York City. Tragically, we also know that more than 2,000 children find themselves homeless in Westchester County on any given night, according to the Department of Education.
A housing gap of tens of thousands of units doesn’t happen by accident. Over the previous decades, our fragmented municipality-by-municipality land use system created barriers to housing, created delays in approvals, and allowed leaders to pass the buck to others when it came to housing affordability. Consider where this system has led us: from 2010-2018, Westchester produced just 9 homes per 1,000 residents, far fewer than comparable suburban areas around Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. It has simply been too easy for too long to avoid building the housing we need.
As alarming as our housing shortage is, there are plenty of signs of progress. The cities of New Rochelle, White Plains, Peekskill, and Yonkers have embraced revitalizing the areas around their train stations and their downtowns with a surge in multifamily construction. Nearly all of these projects require a percentage of units be affordable for those making 80% of the area median income or below. New Rochelle has been appropriately touted for accomplishing this through substantial land use reforms – designating a downtown overlay zone where housing production is desirable, creating a form-based code and conducting a generic environmental impact statement, all with the promise that when applications meeting its criteria are brought forward, they can be approved within a mere 90 days – a far cry from the 2 to 4 years it would take local land use boards to conduct a SEQRA review and various other approvals in many neighboring Westchester towns.
But it’s not just in the cities. Neighboring Port Chester has adopted some New Rochelle-style reforms, and the closed-for-decades United Hospital site is now being transformed into housing. The Village of Pleasantville has moved forward with three transit-oriented development projects near its train station that will increase its housing stock by 8%. The Village of Harrison just had its ribbon cutting for a transit-oriented development that fits wonderfully in its downtown, steps from the Metro North station. And the Village of Pelham is in the process of its own transit-oriented development rezoning and master plan. Again, most of these TODs will have a portion of units dedicated as affordable housing.
Other communities have looked at the debate in Albany over housing these past two years and have found themselves motivated to look at options like accessory dwelling units, thinking it would be better to establish rules of the road that they’re comfortable with and hope to be grandfathered into any future state legislation than to risk a more expansive bill becoming law. In the past two years, three communities passed ADU ordinances, others expanded their existing ordinances, and more are in the process of being adopted. Of course, the first Westchester communities to allow for the construction of the accessory dwelling units did so in the 1980s and the 1990s, so this is more rediscovering a model of housing that we ought to be comfortable with, rather than promoting something wholly new.
The way I like to put it is we have about a dozen communities moving forward to address their own economics and our communal housing shortages. They’re not all using the same model or doing the same thing, but they are making progress. That’s good news.
The bad news is there are four dozen municipalities in Westchester County. There’s a lot of work to be done and, we feel, an important role for the state in creating the incentives and yes, mandates when warranted to make sure all communities who have contributed to this shortage contribute to its solution. Not every community needs to do the same thing, but we believe the state has an interest in ensuring that no community has the option to do nothing.
Based on the conversations we continue to have with residents and leaders within these communities, we wish to share with you a series of recommendations on how to put these principles into legislative action.
UTILIZE FUNDING FOR INFRASTRUCTURE AS THE MOST IMPORTANT CARROT: The reality is that any meaningful reform to address our shortage must first and foremost involve providing funding to municipalities to support the level of new housing supply we need. This is the central idea behind the Governor’s Executive Order for Pro-Housing Communities and ought to be the starting point when discussing incentives to produce meaningful pro-housing change at the local level.
All of us are familiar with neighborhood objections to proposed housing applications which quite often use concerns over roads, parking, sewer, water, and school capacity as cudgels to beat back the possibility of even context-appropriate smart growth. Some, but not all, of these concerns are valid. For example, reports by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress have shown that most school districts have been losing enrollment over time. Our own research has shown that the housing developments that have moved forward have tended to yield a positive tax benefit for school districts greater than the cost of educating any new students. But sewer infrastructure is a concern, both north of I-287, where the issues around septic use near the watershed, and south of I-287, where some of the infrastructure has been in place for a century, can be challenging.
Sufficient funding for infrastructure improvement grants tied to measurable progress in addressing the statewide housing shortage is a fundamental building block for progress, and a must in next year’s state budget. We also recommend additional financial support for municipalities who can demonstrate that they are moving in the right direction on housing, including:
- Grants to update a municipality’s comprehensive plan.
- Incentive funding to cover costs of a Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) for communities that have created a housing growth overlay zone or other rezoning to support increased multifamily.
- Adding an annual bonus on Aid and Incentives for Municipalities (AIM) funding tied specifically to achieving pro-housing actions or bringing new housing online.
- Creating additional points or AIM bonuses for achieving key pro-housing milestones, like completing a comprehensive plan update, or achieving a threshold of new units open for sale/rental in a calendar year, particularly if they include a substantial percentage of units that are affordable for 80% AMI or below, and even more for units that are affordable for 50% AMI or below.
REQUIRE COMMUNITIES TO CREATE A LOCAL HOUSING PLAN: Although the debate over housing in the New York City suburbs was often contentious last year, there was one area for which there was a more comfortable consensus. Many of our own municipal officials and the County Executive have spoken favorably over potentially requiring that every community undergo a process to create a local housing action plan. We believe that most municipalities were comfortable with the experience with the 2020 Executive Order requiring each local government in New York State to adopt a police reform plan that balanced maintaining public safety with the goal of building mutual trust and respect between police and the communities they serve. There seemed to be similar comfort using that as a model to require local housing plans.
This policy comports well with the Welcome Home Westchester campaign’s longstanding principle that since every community has contributed to the housing shortage we now seek to address, every community ought now to determine how they can be part of the solution.
The supposed virtue of local control is that those closest to the community have the best sense of the community’s needs and special conditions and can plan accordingly. In practice, only a handful of Westchester communities have wrestled with the housing needs in their community and the region with thoughtful planning. Many communities have comprehensive plans that are decades out of date or barely mention housing. Generic Environmental Impact Studies are rare. Most housing applications are still considered as one-offs, evaluated in isolation, rather than as part of a local plan to address the severe needs for housing while also factoring in infrastructure needs, available lands, the possibility of redevelopment of underutilized buildings, and the specific needs of the community in terms of income levels, housing costs, and at-risk communities. Similarly, although the need for housing is across-the-board, each community need not use the same tools and strategies. There is a place for supportive housing, “starter home” zones, accessory dwelling units, substantial rehabilitation, “missing middle” housing and so much else, and some options may work better than others, in some localities.
At a minimum, each community ought to be required to produce a local housing plan to meet the moment, reflecting the needs of the community and local factors established through a preponderance of evidence, rather than the particular concerns of a small number of individuals at a single public hearing. Requiring such plans should include financial support through State grants and other funding sources.
Existing bills that partially take this approach:
A.2017 (Thiele) requires local governments to prepare and adopt an affordable housing plan with public input and update it every five years. (Though we also note that the current version of the bill includes the phrase “character of community,” which is vague and also has an unfortunate history of being used to justify prohibitions and limitations on housing that would be unjustifiable based on a preponderance of the evidence alone.)
STRONGLY INCENTIVIZE COMPREHENSIVE PLANS WHICH INCLUDE A ROBUST HOUSING ELEMENT: Ideally, the local housing plan would be accompanied by an updated comprehensive plan, for a holistic look at the community. This is a large endeavor, however, and many municipalities lack funding, bandwidth, or expertise to run the whole process leading to a comprehensive plan update. The state should take a leading role with incentives so that more municipalities can employ any of the following options:
1. Funding for adopting a comprehensive plan component that furthers one or more housing types that meet local market, social, and environmental needs.
2. Amended SEQRA regulations declaring that locally needed/high valued housing types receive presumptively negative declarations.
3. Create a class of sustainable development projects that are eligible for administrative review and approval and waiver of land use regulations.
4. Provide infrastructure funding to support sustainable development projects.
5. Enhance set asides of LIHTC and other affordable housing funding.
6. Incentivize housing development through increased eligibility for real property tax abatement, more AIM funding, school funding, and bonus consideration for other relevant state funds.
PROVIDE CERTAINTY OF TIMELINE FOR THE SEQRA PROCESS FOR HIGH-VALUE HOUSING PROJECTS: A surprisingly common refrain from housing stakeholders throughout our region is the need to streamline the State Environmental Quality Review Act (“SEQRA”). The law’s noble underpinnings are designed to protect the environment by avoiding hasty decision-making. However, SEQRA has become weaponized by overuse and has morphed into a procedural quicksand of delay. SEQRA should be reformed to create a fast-track consideration for certain classes of development – e.g., housing with a certain level of affordability, housing with certain policy benefits like passive house construction or other climate mitigation features, or housing in a particular valuable zone for redevelopment as part of a Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant. If the state and the municipality have already recognized the value of a particular high-impact project, applications fitting that criteria ought to have a more predictable and reasonable timeframe for review.
Existing bills that partially take this approach:
A.4933A (Kelles) / S.925A (May) — provides that housing and infill projects where the applicants have been certified by an expert that they do not violate state environmental laws, meet an affordability threshold, and where the application receives certification for sustainable construction techniques, should either have a limited SEQRA review or be deemed exempt from SEQRA.
A.3111 (Kelles) / S.0668 (May) provides that qualifying projects with a substantial percentage of low- and moderate-income housing shall receive an up-or-down decision within 40 days of the end of a public hearing on the project and enumerates a concrete list of factors that would justify a no vote. We note that Assemblymember Burdick is already a co-sponsor.
PURSUE TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENTS WITH LOCAL FACTORS TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT: Although the Governors’ specific proposal on transit-oriented development (“TOD”) became something of a piñata during the 2023 legislative session, the concept does need to be pursued as one of the most high-value ways of increasing housing stock. Increasing housing capacity near public transit hubs and commercial corridors is low hanging fruit. However, there are approaches that would yield better results and less opposition to the blunt circle-drawing as-of-right zones envisioned within last year’s Housing Compact.
For example:
Massachusetts Transit-Oriented Development law (Sec. 3A of MGL 40A) requires the 170 MBTA communities to submit a plan for an as-of-right TOD density zone within half a mile of transit stations, but allows the local community to pick the zone so long as it is “of reasonable size” rather than hold the entire radius of land to a prescribed density.
New Jersey’s Transit Village Initiative represents another approach. This incentive-only, multi-agency Smart Growth partnership creates incentives for municipalities who meet certain Transit Village Criteria and complete a Transit Village Application. Those so designated receive technical assistance and priority consideration for grant funding by the state agencies that make up the Transit Village Task Force.
CREATE AN ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM: An effective set of solutions will include both carrots and sticks. Housing incentives are necessary and valuable. Many of our towns and villages need financial and technical assistance. Incentives alone do not always work. There are examples of communities in Westchester who will forego federal or state incentive funding. For the sake of equity among municipalities and to combat historical patterns of housing exclusion and housing discrimination, some enforcement mechanism will be necessary.
Examples include:
A.3111 (Kelles) / S.0668 (May) — creates a state zoning board of appeals to consider applications for low or moderate-income housing development that may have been wrongly rejected at the local level.
The New Jersey Mt. Laurel Doctrine which sets a “Fair Share” percentage goal of housing that must be affordable in each town, and allows for enforcement if towns fail to comply with their fair share obligations, including builder’s remedy lawsuits and other compliance challenges in court. It does not privilege one type of meeting the housing goal over another but does allow for judicial enforcement if a town falls short.
Chapter 40B in Massachusetts (a.k.a. “the Builder’s Remedy”), which similarly sets a fixed percentage of housing units that must be affordable for each municipality. If the municipality is under that goal, and if it has rejected an application for housing, the applicant can appeal that decision to a State Zoning Board of Appeals. If it is empirically determined that the municipality is under its goal, the rejection can be overruled. This policy has been in place since the 1960s. Only a dozen to a couple of dozen cases are brought statewide each year.
Welcome Home Westchester appreciates your continued focus on addressing the housing crisis. We believe that it would be a great disservice to our communities, workers, and businesses to endure yet another legislative session without comprehensive statewide housing reform – particularly where neighboring states are moving forward. We urge you to take action.