Image Credit: Parking Reform Network/NYC Department of City Planning
Introduction
Even as funding for the MTA’s 2025-29 Capital Plan becomes available, the New York City region is short half a million homes to meet demand. The MTA can finally renovate and upgrade critical systems to keep them from falling into disrepair from decades of disinvestment, yet housing costs are skyrocketing and putting shorter commutes out of reach for many MTA riders. These are not two separate phenomena. Denser, transit-oriented housing creates more demand for transit, which provides resources to the MTA’s hard-fought efforts in building better service.
Enacting policies that restore the virtuous cycle of housing growth and transit improvement is the only way for New York City to build an affordable and livable future – particularly as the region is expected to lose more than 80,000 units of housing due to climate change by 2040
New York City needs to build more housing immediately, but residents need adequate mobility. The density necessary to realistically combat the housing crisis requires public transit to function. With nearly all open space exhausted and water increasingly encroaching into the built environment, there are few places left for New York City to grow.
To fight the housing crisis, the Mayor organized a Charter Revision Commission that is exploring changes to the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure – or ‘ULURP’ – process. ULURP governs land use changes that are needed to change New York’s zoning – including to add to New York City’s housing stock – from rezoning entire neighborhoods to a property owner looking to convert their single-family home into a duplex. In late April, the Charter Revision Commission released a preliminary report outlining the objectives and framework for the recommendations that may be put on the ballot in November’s general election. The report identified myriad issues with ULURP that contribute to New York City’s housing crisis but included little discussion about how to utilize transit to meet the city’s dire housing needs.
This whitepaper serves as a transit addendum to the Charter Revision Commission’s preliminary report to offer more tools to make housing more affordable and New York more livable. For the commission to solve the structural problems facing New York City’s housing crisis, members should consider the following transit-oriented recommendations:
- Create a transit-oriented comprehensive citywide plan
- Expand Zoning for Accessibility
- Eliminate mandatory parking minimums citywide
The Transit-Housing Connection
Housing in New York City is extremely expensive. Median rents in New York City reached a record high of $3,973 as of May 2025 with Manhattan’s median rent climbing to over $5,368 in February 2025. With job growth continually outpacing housing production, housing costs show no indication of slowing down. Between 2011 and 2023, New York City added 895,000 jobs but just 353,000 housing units.
From the inception of the subway in 1904 until the mid-20th century, the idea of building housing around transit in New York City was a standard, if not obvious, practice. The zoning resolution in 1961 brought New York City’s zoned capacity from 55 to 12 million people by suburbanizing the city’s residential zoning. By 2016, onerous restrictions on height, floor area ratio, and commercial space made 40% of the buildings in Manhattan, the most transit-rich island in the world, illegal to build. Today, New Yorkers want to live within convenient commute times of their jobs, grocery stores, doctors, and schools, and developers want to build housing in high-demand, transit-accessible areas. Unfortunately, this is illegal in many parts of the city where our zoning is closer to that of Houston, Texas, than Houston Street.
Wealthier areas fail to provide adequate housing stock, so communities of color have suffered disproportionally. Though commute times have risen for all MTA riders, Black riders spend 25% more time going to and from work than their white counterparts. While neighborhoods remain frozen in amber by restrictive zoning, their residents are not: nearly one-in-ten – or 200,000 – Black New Yorkers left the city in the last two decades.
Housing that isn’t well connected to mass transit often encourages private automobile ownership, which is four times more expensive than riding the MTA. Auto infrastructure consumes already limited space; highways displace residents (a quarter of a million and counting), worsening air quality, and furthering the climate crisis in the process. New York City, already one of the most congested cities on Earth, simply lacks the land to build low-density, auto-centric housing at the scale needed to address the housing crisis. The density required to address the affordability, climate, and housing crises requires affordable, equitable, and accessible public transit to function.
Beyond the recommendations below, some opportunities will be created, such as the retrofitting of a freight rail line between Brooklyn and Queens for passenger service to create the Interborough Express. The light-rail line will include 19 stops and connect 17 subway lines, over 50 bus routes and the Long Island Rail Road. It also creates the potential for 70,000 to 100,000 new homes to be built within a half mile of stops, depending on land-use changes by the city.
Recommendations
With the Charter Revision Commission underway, these recommendations can help New York build a future where housing and transit are both affordable and abundant.
- Create a Transit-Oriented Comprehensive Citywide Plan
Creating a comprehensive plan that addresses our dire need for more housing while considering needed improvements to infrastructure in a holistic and strategic way is critical to solving our housing crisis and cementing a stable future for mass transit riders and infrastructure.
New York City currently has no citywide planning process to address New Yorkers’ concerns, problems, and long-term interests. Instead, these needs are ‘managed’ piecemeal as the city sporadically unlocks new housing development through individual spot rezonings that vary greatly based on mayoral administration. ULURP today provides the same level of scrutiny both for massive rezonings and individual adjustments, such as converting a single-family lot to accommodate a duplex. A comprehensive plan could provide for density increases benchmarked by infrastructure development that includes improved transit and explores potential new routes and empowers homeowners to make decisions about their property without going through the same public review process as a multi-billion-dollar developer. This would help coordinate city agencies and emphasize public projects that address core structural problems the city faces.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso’s Office recently released a comprehensive plan for the borough, one of the only examples of comprehensive planning in New York City in recent decades. This plan charts a path to thoughtfully tackle major problems facing the borough, including housing, while acknowledging that housing, transit, health, and other issues fundamentally intersect. This should serve as a model for the rest of the city to follow. A citywide comprehensive plan mapping out a future-oriented vision to realistically fight the housing crisis and help balance overarching interests with community needs would help to cut red tape and reform our outdated zoning process.
Comprehensive planning unlocks the synergistic capabilities of our city and state government agencies and authorities, allowing for more cooperation and faster, stronger action. For example, the ridership projections for the Utica Avenue extension included in the MTA’s recent 20-Year Needs Assessment utilized current housing capacity, dampening the project’s likely return on investment. Ultimately, it was not included in the 2025-29 Capital Plan because planners are forced to assume housing production will remain stagnant without intervention. Had there been a comprehensive plan that detailed the growth expectations of the neighborhoods potentially served by the expansion, the project would likely have scored more highly.
While the agency has a rather limited portfolio of developable parcels of land within New York City, the MTA is working in partnership to create some transit-oriented developments near stations, like the Monitor Point development in Greenpoint (684 apartments), and transit-oriented developments in Harlem, off the terminus for the planned 2nd Ave subway extension (900 apartments).
Transit expansion projects currently in progress, like the Interborough Express, 2nd Avenue Subway Extension Phase II, Penn Station Access, and center-running bus lanes on Flatbush Ave would benefit enormously from a comprehensive plan encouraging the coordination between our transit and housing planning agencies in long-term planning. For example, a PCAC analysis showed that City of Yes would increase daily transit ridership by up to 97,000, bringing in $304 million annually over 15 years in subway and bus operating funds. Facilitating the cooperation between different government agencies in long-term planning would be a boon for this city’s infrastructure and policy decisions.
The decades-old existing ULURP process does not give leaders the tools to address our housing crisis. It’s time to build upon it with a comprehensive plan that allows for higher density, more affordability, and abundant housing near transit. Updating the ULURP process through curbing member deference, reforming community outreach, and rationalizing the environmental review process are necessary steps to ensure a comprehensive plan comes to fruition. This will support current and future transit infrastructure projects and transit riders.
2. Expand Zoning for Accessibility
The Zoning for Accessibility text amendment passed by the City Council in 2021 has encouraged denser development and created newly accessible subway stations at no cost to taxpayers. However, it can go further to fund more accessibility upgrades at more stations and stops, all while allowing more MTA riders to live near the transit they depend on.
Zoning for Accessibility has two core components: the first requires developers of projects within 50 feet of a station’s footprint to provide an easement to the MTA during the construction of new elevators or other accessibility projects. This applies to nearly every subway, LIRR, Metro-North, PATH stations, and some Staten Island Rail stations across the city.
The second component of Zoning for Accessibility applies only to developments within parts of Midtown, the Financial District, Downtown Brooklyn, and Long Island City – 79 stations total, just over 15% of all the subway and rail stations in New York City. Provided that a development falls within 1500 feet or 500 feet of a station, depending on the zoning of the neighborhood, they may receive a density bonus in exchange for constructing one or more elevators to enhance or create an accessible station. Developments outside this small zone are left out irrespective of potential benefits to the community.
Every neighborhood should be able to benefit from increased density and accessible transit. Not only should every subway and rail station in NYC be eligible for Zoning for Accessibility, but every development, with community approval or cooperation, should have the option to build denser if they want to support accessibility projects financially. PCAC recommends multiple amendments to the Zoning for Accessibility text that should be put to voters:
- Expand the area of the Zoning for Accessibility text. All developments within a quarter-mile of a subway or rail station should be eligible for Zoning for Accessibility across the city, increased to a half mile for existing high-density neighborhoods. Residents within this area are more likely to use transit as their primary mode of transportation. Major neighborhood rezoning projects should also automatically qualify for new developments to be considered a “bonus” ZFA zone for the stations closest to the rezoning. For example, the Gowanus rezoning in Brooklyn has dozens of new buildings, and new residents will certainly use the nearby Union St. R and Carroll St. F/G trains that fall outside of the ZFA zone.
- Create a “potluck” style of funding for accessibility and other station upgrade projects from nearby developments. Smaller “missing middle” developments within a certain distance from any transit station in need of an upgrade should be able to contribute a smaller amount to the project’s funding and, in return, receive a smaller yet proportional return in zoning incentives. This money would go into a locked-box fund that could only be spent to build that accessibility project. Construction should begin once the pot is full, either from multiple smaller developments or a single larger development. If the nearest station is already fully accessible, this system could be used for other station upgrade projects, including improving lighting, public art, wayfinding, and more.
- Extend Zoning for Accessibility’s easement and transit bonus provisions to apply to bus stops. Currently, Zoning for Accessibility only applies to subway and rail stations, but the bus network also needs upgrades at hundreds of stops around the city. Developers within a quarter mile of a bus stop should have a mechanism through Zoning for Accessibility to fund bus stop improvements like benches, shelters, level boarding platforms, and lighting in exchange for a density boost within a quarter mile of the development.
These changes would mean that a greater number of developments could fund new accessibility and station improvement projects, increasing both housing density and station accessibility at the same time. Expanding Zoning for Accessibility is an amazing opportunity to support efforts in alleviating the housing crisis while quickly increasing accessibility and use of NYC’s transit system.
3. Eliminate mandatory parking minimums citywide
Mandatory parking minimums legally require new housing construction to include off-street parking, so new projects must use large percentages of their precious space to build storage for personal vehicles. In a transit-rich and land-constricted city like New York, desperately needed housing is often replaced with infrastructure that only encourages driving, pushing rents higher to offset the high cost of constructing underground or onsite parking.
City of Yes only eliminated parking minimums in the densest neighborhoods such as Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, reduced them in neighborhoods within the Outer Transit Zone, and did not affect neighborhoods beyond the greater transit zone. The City Council’s compromise on City of Yes to retain parking minimums in much of the city slashed an estimated 20,000 units of housing from the plan.
New York City should follow the lead of more auto-centric cities like Minneapolis and Austin and eliminate parking minimums citywide, even in neighborhoods not currently served by the subway. PCAC has previously recommended encouraging future transit use by eliminating parking minimums; doing so is a down payment on a more symbiotic relationship between housing and transit infrastructure.
Parking minimums reduce the amount of housing, increase its cost, and make transit options less likely to draw new riders. New York City, the most transit-rich city in the Western Hemisphere but with an acute housing shortage, needs to eliminate parking minimums to combat the housing crisis and support and expand the MTA system.
Conclusion
There’s a critical shortage of housing in our region. More than 60 years into New York City’s self-declared housing emergency, we remain more than half a million homes below current demand.
Good access to transit, more so than a home’s location, is the most important factor in the mobility of its inhabitants. New York City needs to utilize smart housing growth around transit to bolster our transit system. On the opposite side of that same coin, New York City needs effective mass transit to support the density needed to defeat the housing crisis.
New Yorkers deserve the opportunity to act decisively where their leaders have failed for decades and resolve our housing crisis. PCAC encourages members of the Charter Revision Commission to advance the recommendations laid out in this report as ballot measures in November’s general election.