A conservative city lawmaker-led group filed a lawsuit on Tuesday night seeking to block Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes plan — a seismic overhaul of city zoning regulations aimed at building more housing across the five boroughs.
In the suit, filed on Staten Island in Richmond County Supreme Court, the plaintiffs allege that the Adams administration and the City Council violated city and state environmental review laws by passing the City of Yes late last year. If successful, they say the lawsuit would also overturn two other City of Yes zoning plans passed by the administration over the past year—one aimed at cutting carbon emissions and another designed to boost business growth.
A coalition of mostly Republican city and state lawmakers, civic groups, housing associations, and individuals brought the action. The city, mayor, City Council, Department of City Planning, and City Planning Commission are all named as defendants in the suit.
One plaintiff, City Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola (R-Queens), during a Wednesday morning City Hall news conference, said their lawsuit “makes it clear that not only did the city lie to all of us, but it also broke the law in the process.”
“What you are seeing here today is a citywide grassroots organization that is fighting back,” she said. “A movement of local residents here in our city fighting back and who refuse to have their neighborhoods destroyed. They will not have their rights trampled.”
Ariola, along with the other lawmakers in the group, has railed against the plan since it was introduced. They argue it would fundamentally alter the outer borough neighborhoods they represent by opening them up to developers seeking to build more housing.
In response to the suit, mayoral spokesperson Zachary Nosanchuk said, “When it comes to housing, there will always be those who say, ‘Not in my backyard,’ but we stand by the city’s thorough and transparent review process and will address any lawsuit when it is received.”
While declining to comment on the substance of the lawsuit, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams defended City of Yes as one fix to the city’s historic housing shortage.
“We can never be the council that says ‘no’ to people who need a place to live. I stand on that,” the speaker said. “Our city is in need of housing, obviously. It’s at the top of everybody’s list. New Yorkers need housing for our city to be affordable.”
The mayor signed City of Yes into law in December after the 51-member City Council passed it by a 31-to-20 vote. The plan is estimated to yield 82,000 new units of housing distributed across the five boroughs over the next 15 years.
However, the plaintiffs argue that both the administration and the council failed to take a “hard look” at the negative impacts of the zoning overhaul, thus running afoul of both the State Environmental Quality Review Act and city Environmental Regulations.
They also charge that the city was not forthright about how much the changes would strain neighborhoods’ infrastructure and resources by allegedly not factoring the environmental impacts of the other two City of Yes plans into the housing overhaul.
“The fact that they looked at it independently, intentionally to minimize the environmental impacts, I don’t believe will be sustained in court,” said Jack Lester, the group’s attorney. “It’s a classic case of what they call unlawful segmentation.”
Another plaintiff, conservative Democratic Council Member Robert Holden claimed that the Department of City Planning ignored infrastructure issues in his low-slung southwestern Queens district in passing the plan. Those issues include chronic flooding and an overtaxed electrical grid, he said.
Holden added that building more housing in the neighborhoods he represents would alter the character that brought people there in the first place.
“We’re going to fight like hell to protect our neighborhoods,” Holden said. “We have the right to feel the sun in our backyards because we chose that when we bought our home. We said we want to have sun; we don’t want to have skyscrapers.”
