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“New York City currently operates without a comprehensive plan to guide its growth and development—making it an outlier among major American cities, which routinely use such frameworks to balance citywide needs with local ones.”
The Coalition for the Homeless estimates that up to 350,000 people in New York City did not have a place to call home as of March 2026, easily the most tragic aspect of our city’s affordability crisis and plenty of reason to support the Mamdani administration’s prioritization of housing affordability.
The city’s Fair Housing Framework, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Where We Live 2025, are excellent starting points. But people need more than a roof over their head—they need jobs, open space, transit, education, services, commerce, protection from climate change. In short, people need neighborhoods that are thoughtfully and intentionally organized around the goal of allowing people a chance to thrive in place.
New York City currently operates without a comprehensive plan to guide its growth and development—making it an outlier among major American cities, which routinely use such frameworks to balance citywide needs with local ones. Instead, the city plans reactively and on a piecemeal basis: a rezoning here, a development deal there, sector-by-sector initiatives that never cohere into a shared vision. Communities are consulted, then ignored. Developers set the agenda. Faith in government erodes when no one takes accountability for broken promises and communities are left with no recourse.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has signaled his intention to change this, and urban planners and community advocates concerned about equity in our city are taking note. His commitment to comprehensive planning—and his stated goal of addressing the legacy of racially discriminatory zoning while proactively planning for the health and needs of the city—is exactly the kind of leadership New York City needs.
With equity advocate and community planner Sideya Sherman now directing the Department of City Planning, this administration has both the mandate and the talent to do what decades of predecessors would not.
But a comprehensive plan, by itself, is not enough. The critical question is: whose voices will shape it?
New York City’s charter already contains the seed of an answer. Section 197-a allows community boards to create formal neighborhood plans that city agencies are required to consider in land use decisions. In principle, these plans could form the backbone of a genuinely bottom-up planning framework. In practice, community boards are chronically underfunded and staffed by volunteers without technical expertise, and 197-a plans are routinely set aside when they conflict with developer interests.
There are also myriad grassroots plans, developed by non-profit organizations and neighborhood associations, that differ from city rezoning and development plans because they are comprehensive and rooted in neighborhood needs. Sunset Park’s Green Resilient Industrial District (GRID) Plan, led by UPROSE, and the Bronx-wide Coalition’s Bronx-wide Plan are cases in point, and they should be considered in the city’s long-term planning goals and strategies. Borough President Antonio Reynoso’s 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn stands out as an example of how to get comprehensive planning done.
We know what success looks like when community planning is actually supported and respected. In the South Bronx in the early 1990s, a group of residents and businesses from Melrose Commons challenged an urban renewal plan for their neighborhood that had been developed by the city.
Not only had they not been consulted in the planning process, but the plan, if certified, would have replaced a 30-block portion of the South Bronx with massive new development that was largely unaffordable and out of character, and would result in widespread displacement of homes and businesses.
The group united to form Comité Nos Quedamos (We Stay/Nos Quedamos Committee) and began to hold meetings to inform and organize other residents and businesses.
With support from former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, they managed to stop certification of the plan, worked with the city and their own consultants, and produced an alternative vision rooted in their actual needs.
The alternative urban renewal plan, adopted in 1994, has produced more than 3,000 units of stable affordable housing and over a million square feet of commercial space, with minimal displacement. WE STAY/Nos Quedamos, Inc., the community development corporation that grew out of the process, continues to promote permanently affordable housing and sustainable development in Melrose Commons to this day.
The Melrose Commons Urban Renewal Plan, driven by local residents and businesses, working in partnership with city agencies and with the support of elected officials, gave community planning genuine power.
Mayor Mamdani can make this approach structural and citywide. We urge him and the City Council to take three concrete steps to do so.
First, establish a comprehensive planning framework that connects neighborhood plans to citywide goals—so that communities planning for their own futures are contributing to, not competing with, a shared vision for the city.
Second, resource community boards and communities to actually do this work. That means planning expertise on staff, technical support from the Department of City Planning, and accessible processes that don’t systematically disadvantage low-income communities or those with language barriers.
Third, commit to implementation. A community plan that is approved and then ignored is worse than no plan at all—it confirms the cynicism it was meant to overcome. Planning and budgetary decisions, rezonings, and development approvals should be required to demonstrate alignment with adopted community plans.
New Yorkers have shown that when given real resources and real power, they can plan for their neighborhoods with sophistication, creativity, and, key to the Mamdani agenda, equity. Most comprehensive grassroots neighborhood planning has come out of New York City’s least-served areas—diverse communities where there are concentrations of poverty, demonstrating again and again that equity and repair are the guiding forces. The obstacle has never been community capacity. It has been the political will to take neighborhood planning seriously.
This administration has demonstrated a belief in equity. Here is a concrete way to embody it—not in a single project or a press release, but in the architecture of how this city makes decisions about its future, firmly guided in the belief that every New Yorker has a right to the city, and a right to a voice in shaping the city.
Jocelyne Chait and Eve Baron, PhD, are member of the Collective for Community, Culture and Environment.