The New York City Department of City Planning has released its list of the 12 neighborhoods where rezoning requests for affordable housing will be placed on a fast track for approval.

The DCP's list, published almost a year after New Yorkers voted to help speed up affordable housing production, will cut the time developers spend waiting for rezoning approvals for affordable housing projects down to 90 days. The measure is expected to accelerate housing production in neighborhoods that have long eschewed new development once the rule takes effect Jan. 1.

The list comprises 12 community boards in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, which collectively account for just 1.1% of the city’s affordable housing production over the past five years, according to DCP.

“New York’s housing crisis is not going to be solved by asking the same neighborhoods to do all the building,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement. “The Affordable Housing Fast Track gives us a new tool to cut through red tape and make sure our housing growth is shared more fairly across all five boroughs.”

The community districts selected by DCP for the affordable housing fast track are:

• Brooklyn CD 10: Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights 

• Brooklyn CD 12: Borough Park, Kensington

• Brooklyn CD 18: Canarsie, Flatlands

• Manhattan CD 7: Upper West Side 

• Manhattan CD 8: Upper East Side, Roosevelt Island 

• Queens CD 4: Corona, Elmhurst 

• Queens CD 5: Ridgewood, Maspeth, Middle Village 

• Queens CD 10: South Ozone Park, Howard Beach 

• Queens CD 11: Auburndale, Bayside, Douglaston 

• Queens CD 13: Queens Village, Bellerose, Rosedale 

• Staten Island CD 2: Mid-Island 

• Staten Island CD 3: South Shore 

DCP developed the list after voters approved a ballot measure last November that streamlined approval processes for affordable housing proposals. The two-pronged policy aims to distribute housing development more evenly throughout the city by identifying areas that have produced little affordable housing in recent years and to speed up the process by trimming the time that rezoning applications take.

The process also targets a political mechanism known as member deference. The city council members have long effectively let a district's elected representative dictate whether or not a rezoning is approved.

The city has created more than 65,000 affordable housing units over the past five years, but just 724 have come from those districts, according to City Planning. By contrast, 51% of new affordable housing produced during that period came from 12 districts in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

“We can't concentrate affordable housing in just a handful of neighborhoods,” DCP Director Sideya Sherman said in a call with reporters Wednesday. “The affordable housing fast track really is a way for the city and for New Yorkers to urgently get the affordable housing that they need in more parts of our city.”

The city will review and recalculate the 12 districts where the fast track will apply every five years. 

Proposed developments providing permanent affordable housing will now go through the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure, Sherman said. The 90-day period — split between 60 days for community input and for borough presidents to review proposals and 30 days for City Planning Commission review — will replace the seven-month wait that developers normally face.

If the proposals are denied, developers can turn to an appeals board made up of the mayor, the council speaker and the borough president.

Eligible projects will have to produce levels of housing that align with Mandatory Inclusionary Housing standards or better. 

Under MIH guidelines, projects with more than 10 units must set aside between 20% and 30% of residential floor area in new developments, enlargements, and conversions to residential uses as permanent affordable housing. The area median income eligible for affordable units can range from 60% to 115% under the program.

The DCP won't mandate a specific number of units that each community district needs to produce, Sherman said. Instead, ELURP will speed up the public review process for certain housing and resiliency projects, plus city-owned land disposition actions.

“Determining what is the appropriate amount of housing growth is certainly something that we will identify and work with communities as we explore opportunities in those neighborhoods,” Sherman said. 

The city has already used ELURP three times, Sherman said, including rezoning an undeveloped city-owned site in Mott Haven to allow for an 84-unit apartment building. 

Though welcomed by developers, ELURP ruffled feathers on the council when the ballot measure was proposed. Then-City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams called the measure “misguided.”

Members whose districts now fall within the confines of DCP’s map have continued to advocate against the measure. Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer told City Limits in July that Manhattan should be taken “off the list” and said in a hearing this month that the “fast track pisses me off.”