Voters Sped Up the Approval Process for Some Housing Projects

New York voters approved two charter changes in 2025 that speed up how affordable housing projects move through city review.

Back in November 2025 New York City voters approved a set of charter amendments that changed how certain land use applications move through city government. Two of those changes, the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure and the Affordable Housing Appeals Board, are already shaping projects working their way through the system. Here is how each one works.

ELURP: a shorter track for smaller projects

The Expedited Land Use Review Procedure, known as ELURP, gives certain smaller projects an alternate path that can finish in about three months instead of seven months on average. It applies to modest housing and infrastructure proposals, including rezonings on sites already mapped R6 or higher where the change would add no more than 30% to the maximum residential floor area. These are moderate- and higher-density Residence Districts which are slightly altered.

ELURP just speeds things up, since time is money and the theory is that these alterations are both slight and in the public’s interest:

• Community boards and the borough president still get their 60-day advisory review, but under ELURP those two reviews run at the same time rather than back to back.
• The City Planning Commission has 30 days to hold a hearing and vote to approve, approve with modifications or disapprove.
• For a smaller set of actions that state law requires the City Council to weigh in on, such as certain text amendments or property dispositions, the Council takes the Commission’s place and has 30 to 45 days to act depending on filing date.

In most ELURP cases, though, the City Planning Commission’s vote is the final word and the Council is not part of the process.

The city’s first ELURP application, a plan to build 84 affordable apartments on a vacant lot in the Bronx, reached the City Council for final disposition approval in May 2026. “With new tools like ELURP, we can deliver more affordable housing, more quickly across New York City.  I’m thrilled to see this project receive approval just three months after entering ELURP, and grateful for Council Member Elsie Encarnacion and the City Council’s support,” said Leila Bozorg, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning.

AHAB: a check on Council rejections

The Affordable Housing Appeals Board addresses a different piece of the process: what happens when the City Council votes down or modifies a ULURP application that would create affordable housing, such as a project subject to Mandatory Inclusionary Housing. Before this amendment, the mayor could veto a Council rejection outright. The charter change replaced that veto power with a three-member board made up of the mayor, the City Council speaker and the borough president of the borough where the project sits. If two of the three agree, the board can reverse the Council’s disapproval or restore a proposal to the form the City Planning Commission originally approved, undoing any Council modifications.

The board’s scope is narrow. It applies only to single-borough projects, not citywide zoning text changes or proposals that span more than one borough. Meetings must be public with at least five days’ notice, and the board has to take final action within 15 days of a review request.

Why it matters here

Both mechanisms sit inside the same ULURP framework that governs rezonings, dispositions and other land use actions in Hunters Point South and Long Island City, including projects reviewed by Queens Community Board 2. Whether a specific application in the district qualifies for ELURP, or whether a Council vote here could ever trigger an AHAB review, depends on the details of that application: its zoning designation, its density increase and whether it falls under Mandatory Inclusionary Housing. Those determinations get made case by case as applications are filed, not automatically.