New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, an expedited process designed to speed the delivery of affordable housing on city-owned land.
Under this new initiative, the city’s Department of Housing and Preservation Development (HPD) will pre-qualify affordable housing builders and shorten the pre-development Request for Proposals (RFP) process by eight months for certain projects, half the time it would usually take to complete.
HPD is releasing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for affordable housing developers who will pre-qualify for the Neighborhood Builders program, with a focus on nonprofit organizations and minority- and women-owned businesses. Once development teams have been qualified, the faster Neighborhood Builders process will be used at sites across the city, with the goal of delivering 300 new affordable homes, including around 100 affordable homeownership opportunities. The RFQ deadline is May 8 and HPD anticipated the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track will advance the development of as many as 1,000 new homes over the next two years.
“Our city is facing a historic housing crisis – the last thing we need to do is tie ourselves in red tape,” said Mamdani in a statement. “The Neighborhood Builders Fast Track will speed up housing development and make it faster to build on city-owned land. This administration is willing to move at the speed of need to make this a city New Yorkers can continue to call home.”
is this for illegals aliens? if illegals were taken out of city would you need more housing?
On the face of it, this does sound like a worthwhile project. Fingers crossed that it comes to fruition and that there isn’t widespread graft and payola to sully something that sounds like it could help those in need of affordable housing.
The rules of New York will never change. You have to pay union wages, even if you hire nonunion workers, and the fees and permits and everything involved. It’s not going to create affordable housing, unless it’s totally subsidized housing paid for by taxpayers.
300 homes? Whoopee! That will really make a dent in the availability problem.