City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced Friday that New York City will create a new Advisory Group on Housing Affordability, targeting nearly 3,000 vacant lots that current construction codes effectively make impossible to build on.
The lots run roughly 17 to 25 feet wide. Too narrow for standard development rules. Menin told architects gathered at the American Institute of Architects New York’s 2026 Honors and Awards Luncheon on April 24 that revising those rules could unlock up to 35,000 new housing units across the five boroughs, and that the City Council plans to push development on these sites up to eight stories tall.
That’s a significant number in a city where the housing shortage has pushed rents to levels that are forcing longtime residents off the subway lines they’ve ridden for decades.
The advisory group will pull together housing affordability advocates, engineers, architects, finance experts, and urban planners to identify which regulations are worth keeping and which ones are just getting in the way. Three co-chairs will lead it: Barika Williams, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development; Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York; and James H. Simmons III, CEO and founder of Asland Capital Partners.
Williams said the effort has to center on people who are already being pushed out. “For ANHD and our members, preserving and expanding access to deeply affordable housing must be at the center of any housing strategy,” she said in a statement. Her organization, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, focuses on ending displacement and fighting for equitable development across the city’s neighborhoods.
LaBarbera was direct about what the group can do for workers. “By taking a hard look at outdated rules and unlocking the potential of small lots across the five boroughs, we have a historic opportunity to create tens of thousands of new homes while putting thousands of New Yorkers to work in good-paying, union jobs,” he told the luncheon audience.
That dual argument, more housing and more union construction work, is the kind of political combination that tends to actually move in Albany and at City Hall.
Menin described these small lots as a Goldilocks zone for development. They’re big enough to add meaningful housing supply but small enough that construction costs and timelines stay lower than the massive mixed-use towers that dominate the headlines and take a decade to permit. She framed the push as a way to fight blight while rebuilding communities that have been watching vacant land sit idle for years.
“We’re talking about revitalizing our neighborhoods and rebuilding our communities that are facing blight and abandonment,” Menin said at the luncheon. “We’re also talking about adding tax dollars to our revenue stream and creating new economic opportunities. And finally, we’re talking about affordability and we’re talking about improving quality of life, not just for our children, but for our children’s children.”
She didn’t name specific codes or regulations the City Council is targeting for elimination or revision. That’s the advisory group’s job.
Critics will want details fast.
New York’s construction code has layers that have accumulated across administrations going back generations, and the devil in any reform is which rules get cut and which ones protect residents and workers. LaBarbera acknowledged that tension directly, saying the group will need to make smart reform choices that maintain the safety and integrity of construction codes while enabling a streamlined process that actually produces housing quickly.
For riders on the B63 in Brooklyn or the S40 on Staten Island, the connection to transit is real. Every new housing unit built near existing bus or subway infrastructure is a unit that doesn’t require a car, doesn’t add to the crush on the bridges and tunnels, and doesn’t push another family further from their job. Small-lot development built into existing neighborhoods, rather than in isolated megaprojects, tends to sit near the transit that’s already running. That’s the pitch, anyway.
AM New York’s full coverage of the announcement puts the potential unit count at 35,000 across the nearly 3,000 lots the City Council initially identified, a figure Menin’s office hasn’t formally walked back. The advisory group doesn’t yet have a timeline for delivering its recommendations to the full Council, and Menin didn’t commit to one at Friday’s luncheon. The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development and the Building and Construction Trades Council will both have seats at the table as those recommendations take shape, meaning the tension between affordability depth and construction volume will get aired from the start rather than after the fact.