Governor Hochul Holds Roundtable With Local Leaders to Highlight Let Them Build Agenda as Statewide Support Continues to Grow

Helping Our Communities Build Housing

When Governor Hochul took office, she vowed to tackle the housing crisis and bring down costs by building the housing that New Yorkers desperately need so that more hard working households and families can afford a place to call home. However, too much critically-needed housing development is forced to navigate a web of red tape created by state mandates that can add unnecessary costs and years of needless delays, despite such housing development consistently being found to have no significant adverse environmental impacts. Studies have shown thatState-mandated environmental review can slow down housing projects by an average of two years, and add hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional costs , at a time when New Yorkers can least afford to wait for the housing they need to continue to live and thrive in New York.

To speed up the development of housing to create a more affordable and sustainable New York, Governor Hochul has proposed to amend the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) to exempt certain types of housing that have no significant adverse impacts on the environment from SEQRA review. Housing exempted from SEQRA will still be required to comply with crucial State regulatory and permit requirements governing water use, air quality, and protection of natural resources. The proposal does not supersede local zoning and other state and local permitting requirements, and exempted housing also must be located outside of flood risk areas in order to qualify.

Years of experience in both New York City and across the state, involving more than a thousand projects, has shown that virtually none of such projects ultimately were found to have significant environmental impacts, but nevertheless were still subject to lengthy and duplicative reviews. Governor Hochul’s reforms will cut red tape to accelerate the delivery of much needed housing and reduce the cost of building in ways that are consistent with sustainable and environmentally-protective development, driving down the cost of housing and rents across the state while protecting our natural resources.