NYC Council Speaker’s Disengenuous Housing Reform Claims

23 July 2025

Real estate’s love-hate relationship with Adrienne Adams is on the rocks again.

It’s no mystery why she came out against pro-housing reforms on the ballot this November, even though she has been a pro-housing City Council speaker: Her job is to defend the power of her chamber and its members.

She is also upset that Mayor Eric Adams, by convening the commission that proposed the reforms, blocked the Council from putting its own ideas on the ballot.

Speaker Adams cannot admit to these reasons, so she gave others — none of which ring true.

She claimed that the measures proposed by the City Charter Revision Commission would “undermine” Council members’ ability to negotiate for “affordable housing, homeownership opportunities, good-paying union jobs, and neighborhood investments.”

But under the reforms, only rezonings in the 12 districts (out of 59) that have approved the least housing could bypass Council review. Council members in those districts are not negotiating for housing anyway — they are rejecting it. That’s how they made the Dirty Dozen list!

How can reforms “undermine” members who are already at the bottom? They have made no deals for affordable housing, union jobs or community benefits. There is nothing to undermine.

What about Council members who are not in the Dirty Dozen? As the speaker’s statement said, some do force developers to improve projects’ affordability, use union labor and donate to pet causes such as “anti-displacement” slush funds.

Under the charter revisions, these members could still do so. Developers would still have every reason to come to terms.

The only change would be that if they don’t reach an agreement — which generally only happens when the local member is being completely unreasonable — an appeals panel could overturn the Council’s rejection.

The developer would still need two votes out of three from the panel, which would include the mayor, borough president and Council speaker.

“Undermine” is a strong word. The appeals panel represents, at most, a slight attenuation of the stranglehold that the local Council member has on projects.

It would likely come into play only when a member takes an extreme position, like when Kristin Richardson Jordan demanded below-market rent for 100 percent of units at Bruce Teitelbaum’s One45 project in Harlem. She set the project back three years, until it was approved by Jordan’s successor.

The speaker threw other strands of spaghetti at the wall to see if any would stick. As if to say there’s no problem to fix, she noted that Council approvals since 2022 have allowed for 120,000 new homes. She failed to mention four things:

The next Council might not be pro-housing. Adams and other members are about to be pushed out of office by term limits, so she cannot guarantee anything after this year. The charter revisions will lock in reforms.
Despite approving City of Yes and other rezonings, the Council still rejects new housing in deference to members in NIMBY districts. For the same reason, the City of Yes and four Bronx rezonings were watered down by parking mandates. The charter revisions will hold these districts to account.
Although 120,000 sounds like a lot of homes, it’s a 15-year projection — 8,000 per year. The city needs to build 50,000 homes a year to quell the housing crisis, at least twice its current pace.
Small projects that need rezonings never get past the drawing board, because the process is too risky and expensive to justify going through it. The charter revisions fix that.

For good measure, the speaker said the proposals “advance a self-serving narrative in support of expanded mayoral power, even as his administration hypocritically overturned housing at the Elizabeth Street Garden that was approved years ago by the Council.”

The mayor’s Elizabeth Street Garden reversal was a fiasco, but it was a trade for three other housing projects that Council member Chris Marte could have vetoed. The charter revisions would create a path around obstinate members like him. Had they been in place, all four projects could have happened.