Lawsuit Filed Against City of Yes

The City Council’s Common Sense Caucus, along more than 100 other elected officials, citywide civic and community organizations and individuals, have filed a lawsuit to overturn the controversial “City of Yes” zoning.

The Article 78 lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court in Richmond County late Tuesday, details how the city violated basic procedures required under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) and the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) in adopting the comprehensive overhaul of the city’s Zoning Resolution.

“Respondents violated their environmental obligations in at least three critical ways: first, by failing to take a ‘hard look’ at significant areas of environmental concern without providing a rational basis or reasoned elaboration for this failure; second, by segmenting City of Yes (‘Rezoning’) into three distinct stages as if each stage were independent, this violation of law served to avoid assessing the cumulative impacts of each phase of the Rezoning; and finally, Respondents overhauled New York City Zoning without proposing any mitigation or any rational explanation for failing to propose reasonable alternatives that offered mitigation,” the lawsuit alleges.

“The City of Yes was never really about solving an economic or housing ‘crisis’ – it was about clearing the decks for big development in our communities, then trying to deceive the public into believing it would have no negative environmental consequences or impact on our quality of life,” said Minority Leader Joann Ariola. “The lawsuit we filed today makes it clear that not only did the city lie to us all, it broke the law in the process. It is the culmination of a diverse, citywide grassroots movement of residents who refuse to have their neighborhoods destroyed or their rights trampled.”

The ambitious City of Yes plan was divided into three phases: Zoning for Carbon Neutrality, passed in the New York City Council in December 2023; Zoning for Economic Opportunity passed in June 2024; and Zoning for Housing Opportunity, passed in December 2024. City of Yes was widely unpopular and faced substantial public opposition. The Housing Opportunity plan, for example, was opposed by 38 of the city’s 59 community board and nearly half of the New York City Council Members.

Each phase of the proposal was accompanied by an obligatory environmental analysis, or Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), by the New York City Planning Commission, which concluded that substantial new commercial and residential development and density, including tens of thousands of housing units, would have “no significant” negative impact on communities across the city – despite the fact that many of these communities already lack basic water, sewage and utility infrastructure, have little to no access to public transportation, overcrowded schools, traffic, pollution and frequent and destructive flooding.

Besides the findings of “no significant impact” being absurd on their face, the segmented, separated review process for each phase “unlawfully, arbitrarily and capriciously reduced the cumulative environmental consequences of City of Yes such that proper mitigation or alternatives could not be proposed.”

“The Rezoning represented a wholesale departure from longstanding public policy that respects open space, air and light, stress on infrastructure and the neighborhood character of vast areas of New York City’s low-density communities,” the lawsuit concludes. “To have undertaken this Rezoning contrary to the requirements of basic environmental law must result in a nullification of Respondents’ unlawful behavior.”