REMARKS
Borough President Reynoso on housing supply and affordability in Williamsburg
2:30:03
·
62 sec
Borough President Reynoso discusses the relationship between housing supply and affordability in Williamsburg. He points out that while Williamsburg saw a significant increase in housing units, rents still increased dramatically.
- Reynoso explains that Williamsburg's 2005 rezoning coincided with widespread downzoning in other parts of the city
- He argues that this resulted in a redistribution of housing development rather than an overall increase
- Reynoso emphasizes that the current proposal aims to unlock development potential across the city, undoing some of the restrictions put in place by previous administrations
Antonio Reynoso
2:30:03
The other thing is that Williamsburg's rezoning in 2005 came alongside the largest down zoning in the history of the city of New York everywhere else.
2:30:14
So mostly politically affluent neighborhoods, got downzoning, got landmark, got a reduction in height versus places like Williamsburg that had an increase.
2:30:25
So all you ended up doing was moving units from one place to another, but there was no overall increase in housing development at a pace that would be meaningful representative of the growth of the city of New York.
2:30:38
What we're trying to do here is unlock a lot of that.
2:30:40
Undo the the the hurt that was put worked by the Bloomberg administration's down zoning in a lot of neighborhoods.
2:30:47
So I just think that's my point that I'm trying to make here is, as a council member in Williamsburg, what I feel there is significant, but the work in Riverside, in the Bronx, or in Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn, affect what's happening in Williamsburg.
2:31:01
So the rents didn't go down, even though we did our part because other places didn't do theirs.
