Hooray! Voters bless a rollback of the City Council’s power to block affordable housing

One bright spot in Tuesday’s election was the passage of four ballot proposals to speed the creation of affordable housing — mainly by stripping the City Council of its power to block it.

It’s a well-deserved slap to the council, which is infamous for putting parochial concerns and special interests ahead of what’s good for the city as a whole.

This final gift from Mayor Eric Adams will help greatly in creating more lower-cost housing in the city, at a time when it’s desperately needed: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani should thank him publicly and profusely.

Proposal 2, which passed 58% to 42%, will fast-track the greenlighting of lower-rent housing that receives public financing or is meant for communities that see relatively little of it.

It does this by scrapping council review and shaving months off the review time.

Voters backed Proposal 3 by a similar 57%-to-43% margin; it streamlines and simplifies the process for changing zoning rules for small areas and small-scale housing — slicing months off the seven-month slog under the Uniform Land Use Review Process, cutting out the council and leaving final say up to community boards, borough presidents and the City Planning Commission.

Proposal 4, which won 58% to 42%, takes direct aim at the council, particularly its pernicious practice of deferring to Not-In-My-Back-Yard members who block affordable housing.

From now on, a board made up the mayor, City Council speaker and the relevant borough president will be able to reverse City Council decisions on these projects.

Proposal 5 will bring the City Map into the 21st century by requiring it to be online, instead of having 8,000 paper maps managed by local “topographical bureaus” in each borough, as now.

That, too, will help speed up approvals and give developers and the public better access to vital information needed for projects. No wonder a whopping 73% of voters backed this proposal.

New York’s housing market has suffered for decades, thanks to city and state laws that discourage the construction and upkeep of new units — most notably, rent regulation.

Mamdani’s rent freezes, which will benefit even rich tenants, will do nothing to boost the housing supply — the one thing that can keep housing costs in check and make more apartments available. Instead, they’ll lead to less livable housing.

Which is why the passage of these proposals, which strip the City Council of its ability to thwart affordable-housing production, couldn’t have come at a better time.