Mamdani puts 12 districts on Affordable Housing Fast Track, including 5 in Queens

The Affordable Housing Fast Track, approved by New York City voters in a City Charter amendment in November 2025, aims to streamline the city’s review process and accelerate the construction of affordable housing in the 12 community districts that have historically produced the lowest amounts of affordable housing.

The city has now announced the 12 districts with the lowest production of affordable housing, including Community Districts 4, 5, 10, 11 and 13 in Queens.

The districts include areas such as Elmhurst, Corona, Ridgewood, Maspeth, Middle Village, South Ozone Park, Howard Beach, Auburndale, Bayside, Douglaston, Queens Village, Bellerose and Rosedale.

The 12 districts represent roughly one-fifth of New York City’s 59 community districts but produced just 883 of 63,870 new affordable homes over the past five years, equaling 1.1% of the citywide total.

Meanwhile, the four lowest-producing districts, including Queens CD10 and 13, produced fewer than 10 affordable homes over the five-year period.

On the other hand, the highest-producing district – Brooklyn CD5 – produced more affordable housing units than all 12 Fast Track district combined in the cycle, producing over 5,700 affordable units in the five-year period.

As a result of City Charter amendments approved by voters last year, eligible rezoning proposals that create affordable housing in the 12 designated districts will use a streamlined 90-day public review process beginning in January 2027. The streamlined process will cut roughly four months from the traditional Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), which takes seven months and includes review from impacted community boards, borough presidents, the City Planning Commission and the City Council.

The Affordable Housing Fast Track retains review from community boards and borough presidents – but holds them concurrently. It also retains review from the City Planning Commission but bypasses the City Council completely. The fast track does not change environmental review requirements or landmark protections.

Mamdani said the streamlined process will help ensure that every neighborhood in the city plays a role in addressing the housing crisis, ensuring that certain neighborhoods are not tasked with shouldering the bulk of affordable housing production.

“New York’s housing crisis is not going to be solved by asking the same neighborhoods to do all the building,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Every New Yorker deserves a home they can afford, and every neighborhood must be part of delivering it. The Affordable Housing Fast Track gives us a new tool to cut through red tape and make sure our housing growth is shared more fairly across all five boroughs.”

Leila Borzog, deputy mayor for Housing and Planning, said New Yorkers had delivered a “mandate for affordability” at the polls last November, describing the fast track as an “important step” in addressing the housing crisis in the city.

“Soon, it will be easier to build affordable housing in the districts that have added the least — an important step in our work to deliver the housing options in every neighborhood that New Yorkers deserve,” Borzog said.

Sideya Sherman, director of the Department of City Planning, said housing production has been “deeply uneven” across the five boroughs for too long, leaving New Yorkers with fewer choices about where they can live.

“The Affordable Housing Fast Track gives us a new tool to help change this by making it easier to advance permanently affordable housing in communities that have produced the least,” Sherman said in a statement.

Some Queens elected officials did not welcome the announcement, however.

Council Member Phil Wong, who represents parts of Queens CD 4 and 5, accused the Department of City Planning of only reaching out to his office for input on Wednesday afternoon, one day before the agency made the announcement.

In a post on social media, he also questioned whether New Yorkers fully understood the impact of the Affordable Housing Fast Track.

“New Yorkers voted for these Charter changes last year, whether everyone understood all the consequences or not,” Wong said in a post on social media. “One consequence is taking more land use authority away from local communities and the Council.”

Council Member Joann Ariola, who represents part of Queens CD10, also objected to the measure, stating that affordable housing production should not come at the expense of community voices.

“We all want more affordable communities where generations can continue to grow and thrive together, but cutting the Council out of land use decisions takes away our ability to advocate for our constituents and ensure that new projects actually fit with the unique demands of each neighborhood,” Ariola said in a statement. “Getting a project approved faster matters little if those projects are only going to fail the people who will live there, and that’s exactly what I fear.”

Before the vote last year, then-Council Speaker Adrienne Adams claimed that the charter revisions would cede the Council’s role in ULURP to City Hall, depriving the local community of a voice in the process, given the influence that a council member can have on a development in their district.

The Council also argued that the term “fast track” was misleading because the Council’s 65-day review period represents only a tiny fraction of the overall process for most developments. Council officials argued that it typically takes around 700 days before deevelopments even enter ULURP due to long and arduous agency reviews, such as environmental reviews.

The Adams Administration, which proposed the charter revision, countered that the measure could root out some of the hyper-local politics that can hinder development in certain parts of the city.