The City Council is exploring a building code change to New York’s construction code that could have real consequences for the scrappy, underused parcels that dot Long Island City and Hunters Point: the narrow infill lots that have sat vacant or in low-intensity use for years because they’re simply too small to build on under current rules.
Council Speaker Julie Menin unveiled the push in April in front of the American Institute of Architects, framing it as a way to create housing without going through the lengthy zoning process. No legislation has been introduced yet, but Community Board 2’s Land Use and Housing Committee discussed it at its May meeting.
Disclosure:
The publisher of the Hunters Point Ledger is a member of Queens Community Board 2. We don’t speak on behalf of Community Board 2 or any other members.
What’s the problem with small lots?
New York’s construction code makes it very difficult to build multifamily housing on lots narrower than about 27 feet. The issue isn’t zoning; it’s the building code itself, which sets requirements for things like emergency exit staircases, hallway widths, and trash rooms that eat up so much of a small floor plate that a project simply can’t pencil out financially.
The result: lots of small lots stay empty or are used for parking, storage, or one-story commercial space, even in neighborhoods with extreme housing demand.
What is the City Council proposing?
The Council hasn’t introduced legislation yet, but the direction of the reform is clear. Specifically:
Single-stair egress up to eight stories. Current code generally requires two separate staircases in residential buildings above six stories. The proposal would allow buildings up to eight stories tall to use a single staircase, provided the floor plate is no larger than 4,000 square feet. NYC allows single-stair buildings up to six stories since 1968. This proposal would extend that allowance two floors higher.
Other code tweaks. Eliminating requirements like a dedicated trash room on each floor could reduce the square footage lost to non-residential uses, making more of a small building’s space available for actual apartments.
A preliminary Council analysis found that roughly 2,850 small lots across the five boroughs (between 15 and 27 feet wide) are vacant or in non-residential use and could be candidates for development under reformed rules. The Council estimates the changes could unlock up to 35,000 new apartments citywide.
“Stairs take up a lot of space. Each one of them is 200 square feet, and if you need two of them on a small lot, it just starts to eat up a lot of space on the floor plate, and it makes apartments harder to lay out.”
Is single-stair construction safe?
This is the question that comes up whenever single-stair reform is discussed. The short answer: yes, with appropriate limits in place.
NYC has allowed single-stair buildings up to six stories for decades, as have Seattle and Honolulu. The key safety provisions are short distances from any apartment door to the staircase, limits on the number of units per floor, and modern fire suppression systems. Buildings with large floor plates and long corridors, the kind that require two stairs, actually present their own fire safety challenges, such as dead-end hallways and longer evacuation times.
What does this mean for LIC and HPS?
Whether any specific lot would actually see housing built on it depends on ownership, financing, and market conditions, not just the building code. But removing the code barrier is a necessary first step.
To get a sense of the local landscape, the Ledger queried the city’s property database for every tax lot in CB2 with street frontage between 15 and 27 feet (the range the reform targets). Long Island City has plenty of the kind of lots this proposal targets: narrow parcels that came out of the neighborhood’s industrial past and haven’t been redeveloped. Most of these nearly 7,000 lots are either one- or two-family homes, or multifamily walkups.
The lots most likely to see redevelopment are the 222 that are vacant land or surface parking, many in higher-density zones (R6, R6A, R6B, R7X) where 8-story single-stair buildings would be permitted under the proposed reform.
“These kinds of code reforms often shape housing outcomes just as much as zoning itself. This is pretty different from the large LIC mega-projects. These are scattered, smaller sites, and so it sort of shifts part of the housing conversation away from large rezonings and toward whether existing zoning is actually buildable.”
Prameet Kumar, Committee chair
The Council is in early discussions with the Mamdani administration and has formed an advisory group of construction, design, and community development experts to help shape the reforms. CB2’s Land Use Committee will continue to track the effort as it develops.
The building code didn’t create LIC’s vacant lots, but it has helped keep them that way. If the Council’s reform passes, that excuse goes away.
Read more
- The Single-Stair Solution: A Path to More Affordable, Diverse, and Sustainable Housing
- One Step Forward
Randy Plemel
Publisher
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The founder and publisher of the Hunters Point Ledger, a newsletter covering Hunters Point South and Long Island City. He serves on Queens Community Board 2, and all views are his own.
