From the October issue: When the City Council passed sweeping changes to the city’s zoning code in March, it was heralded as a major victory for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan. “The scope and magnitude of these proposals cannot be understated,” Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker, told Politico at the time. “They will fundamentally change how our city approaches affordable and senior housing production.”
But just a few months later, Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, which is both the most dramatic of those changes and the linchpin of the mayor’s ambitious goal to build 80,000 units of affordable housing in the next 10 years, has encountered major stumbling blocks, calling into question its efficacy as an engine of change. [more]