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REMARKS
Commissioner Leila Bozorg on improving the land use process to create more housing
0:10:47
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3 min
Commissioner Leila Bozorg expresses her gratitude to the commission's leadership and staff.
She is proud of the proposed changes to the city's land use process (ULURP), which are designed to create more housing in more neighborhoods.
Bozorg explains that the proposals maintain the strengths of ULURP, including the role of community boards, while creating a more balanced, efficient, and fair process for affordable and modest-sized housing projects.
Leila Bozorg
0:10:47
you.
0:10:49
I want to echo the gratitude, already mentioned for executive director Alex Schierenbeck and the entire staff, commission staff.
0:10:57
All of your research, analysis, and general commitment to these issues is really gonna improve our city over time, and thank you for that.
0:11:04
I also too wanna thank chair Bury and the rest of the commissioners.
0:11:07
It has been an absolute honor to grapple with these issues with you, and consider ways that our charter can be improved for our fellow New Yorkers.
0:11:16
And most importantly, I wanna thank the hundreds of people who took time to join any of the 10 hearings and the thousands more who provided written testimony.
0:11:23
Your perspectives have been critical to designing proposals that target the specific challenges and barriers to progress we face.
0:11:31
I'll say I'm personally incredibly proud of the proposals being put forward today by this Commission.
0:11:37
Throughout the past eight months of hearings and written testimony, we heard very clearly, along with many of the issues Chairburi summarized, about the ways that the city's land use process, which is prescribed by our charter, is working and the ways that it can be improved, presuming our goals are to build more housing in more neighborhoods.
0:11:56
We've heard very loud and clear that ULURP has certain strengths, and we heard loud and clear that we need communities to still have power to shape and strengthen land use proposals with their local perspectives, expertise and experiences.
0:12:10
As such, the proposals maintain the strengths of ULURP with its careful consideration by multiple public bodies, and the proposals also preserve the role that community boards play in shaping projects through local feedback.
0:12:22
ULURP will still serve as the primary vehicle for significant land use changes across our city.
0:12:28
But these proposals will bring this decades old process into today's real world, one where millions of New Yorkers and their families face an affordability crisis that threatens their ability to stay here at all.
0:12:40
These proposals acknowledge the uneven shape and patterns of our current housing landscape and acknowledge that we cannot continue to allow the housing needs of all New Yorkers to be hostage to any specific person's or group's or neighborhood's parochial interests.
0:12:56
So these housing and land use proposals we are voting on today are carefully designed to enable more balanced, more efficient, and more fair consideration for the kinds of housing New Yorkers say they need and want most: regulated affordable housing and modest sized projects.
0:13:11
This all, of course, still requires that we have strong housing leadership at every level of government, as we have today with our current mayor, our current speaker, many of our elected officials.
0:13:23
And we must all stay committed, whether in the public or private sector, to continue interrogating all the systems, processes and practices that live outside our city's charter and play a role in hampering housing creation across our neighborhoods and region.
0:13:37
But as far as this commission's work is concerned, I'm really proud that we found consensus for these powerful ideas, which have the potential to usher in a more equitable and abundant housing future, and I really look forward to seeing whether voters might agree through their ballots.
0:13:50
Thank you.