How environmental review is strangling New York's future
Making housing cheaper and building better transit is being stymied by New York’s environmental review laws.
You may have heard that in August, New York’s City Council approved a plan for 7,500 new apartments in the Bronx, near several upcoming Metro-North stations.
What you probably haven’t heard is that enacting this upzoning required the Department of City Planning to spend almost two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars navigating New York’s environmental review process. They meticulously studied the project's potential impact on everything imaginable: wildlife, schools, traffic, shadows, archeological remains, neighborhood character, and even how the project will change the number of books per person are in the local libraries.
The extensive scrutiny of the Bronx upzoning is required by New York's environmental review laws, which have become a major obstacle for our city’s abundance agenda. These laws add significant delays and costs to essential projects to house more New Yorkers and improve our transit systems — all while delivering questionable benefits to the environment.
Understanding New York’s environmental review process is essential for anyone who hopes to make this city a better place to live. In this post, I’ll cover how:
New York requires most changes to the physical world to be closely studied for their impact on air pollution, noise, public health, libraries, schools, shadows, traffic congestion, subway ridership, and a litany of other topics.
It is very expensive and time-consuming to estimate and review the impacts of potential projects to the level of detail required by New York’s environmental review laws.
Making housing cheaper and improving our transportation system is seriously hampered by environmental review’s costs and delays. Even projects that are obviously good for the “environment”, like building subway lines or eco-friendly apartment buildings get stuck with these big costs.
Reform of environmental review is possible and there have been modest successes at streamlining. However, it’s a really complex topic that requires technical expertise and political courage.
What is environmental review?
Environmental review is a process that New York’s state and local government agencies must follow when they take an action that might impact the environment.1
Under New York‘s State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), government actions that require environmental review are:
Government-led projects that might impact the environment, like constructing a school or a highway, implementing congestion pricing, or amending citywide land use rules.
Government decisions to approve a private sector project which might impact the environment, such as a private landowner requesting to change the rules that apply to their property so that they can construct a taller building.
So, what does environmental review entail? In essence, environmental review requires that the government agency:
Estimate the impact of their proposed action on the environment. The agency (or their consultants) make detailed predictions following an 831-page manual, and consult with members of the public who might be impacted. For privately-initiated actions, the person or business proposing the action has to cover the costs of the review.
Declare that their proposed action is the best path forward, after considering all the relevant environmental, economic, and social factors.2
Note that environmental review doesn’t forbid the government from taking actions that harm the environment — it just requires that agencies carefully study the impacts and attest that they believe their action is overall the best path forwards.
These environmental impact studies are incredibly detailed and wide-reaching — often extending to hundreds of pages of analysis. This meticulousness stems from the way that SEQRA is enforced and New York’s very broad definition of the environment:
“Environment means the physical conditions that will be affected by a proposed action, including land, air, water, minerals, flora, fauna, noise, resources of agricultural, archeological, historic or aesthetic significance, existing patterns of population concentration, distribution or growth, existing community or neighborhood character, and human health.” – NYCRR § 617.2(l)
This definition means that almost anything about the physical world or the way humans exist within it is within the scope of environmental review. This includes obvious things, like plants, animals, air, and water. But this definition also covers much less environmental topics, like subway station crowding, the number of books in the public library, and preservation of historic buildings. The law requires that government agencies study how all of these topics might be impacted by their actions.
The other factor that incentivizes agencies to be exceptionally thorough with their environmental reviews is SEQRA’s private enforcement mechanism. Anyone who believes they’ve been harmed due to a government agency improperly following the environmental review process can sue in court. If they convince a judge that the government agency insufficiently studied the likely impact on the environment, then the court can freeze the project, and require the environmental review to be restarted.3 That could cause huge delays to a project, so agencies have a strong incentive to be exceptionally thorough with their reviews, to reduce the chance of a legal challenge in the future.
Case studies: Recent NYC environmental reviews
Let’s look at several recent environmental reviews in New York to give you a sense of what they cover.
Example 1: Bronx Metro-North Rezoning
Proposed action: Upzone areas of the East Bronx near several soon-to-be-built Metro-North train stations. The area is currently mostly commercial/industrial, but the upzoning will allow the construction of around 7,500 apartments with direct train connections to Penn Station and Midtown Manhattan.
Action proposed by: NYC Department of City Planning, on behalf of the City Planning Commission
Findings of environmental review: Overall, very little negative environmental impact. Increasing building heights will cast longer shadows. Beyond core environmental impacts, it’s estimated that the new residents will include 3,575 public school students. These new students will be able to be accommodated within the capacity of existing schools, except that one elementary school will reach 104% of its capacity. The review also found there would be some impact on transportation, with more riders on the subway, buses, and more car drivers.4
Length of environmental review: 900 pages. The review took 18 months from the first public filing in December 2022 to reach its conclusion in June 2024 (and presumably they started preparing the documents many months before their first public filings).
Example 2: Manhattan Congestion Pricing
Proposed action: Levy a toll on vehicles that drive into the area of Manhattan below 59th Street, in implementation of the state’s Traffic Mobility Act of 2019.
Action proposed by: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Departments of Transportation at the city, state, and federal levels.
Findings of environmental review: Turns out that having fewer cars on the roads is good for air quality, noise pollution, and makes traffic move faster. Who could have guessed?!? There’ll be a small increase in traffic on highways elsewhere in the region, as some vehicles which previously would have passed through Manhattan will divert to avoid the toll.
Length of environmental review: 868 pages (plus 3,139 pages of appendices). The review took 22 months from the first public filing in August 2021 until the Finding of No Significant Impact in June 2023.
Read more about congestion pricing and its recent pause:
Example 3: Gas Station to Restaurant Rezoning in Queens
Proposed action: Rezone a privately-owned property in Flushing, Queens (map), to allow the owner to build a restaurant with a drive-through. The land has been vacant since 2015, and before then it was a gas station.
Action proposed by: Bacele Realty Corp, the owner of the property. Because this was a privately-initiated rezoning, the owner of the land is fully responsible for the costs of the environmental consultants who prepared the report.
Findings of environmental review: No significant impact on the environment. It turns out that running a restaurant is less harmful to the environment than operating a gas station. Who could have guessed?!?
Length of environmental review: 116 pages. The review took 10 months from the first public filing in February 2023 until the review’s conclusion. Presumably the property owner started working on their paperwork at least several months before their first filing – in fact I’ve found correspondence about this project as early as June 2021.
The history of environmental review
New York’s onerous environmental review requirements trace their origins to the rampant pollution of the 1960s and 70s.
New York’s air and rivers were very, very dirty. Factories belched toxins into the sky. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1966 a dense smog encased New York City and killed 168 people. Towns and factories intentionally discharged untreated sewage, garbage, and industrial waste into New York’s rivers. The situation was genuinely terrible.
It’s against this background that Washington passed the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, which introduced environmental review requirements for federal government actions. New York followed suit in 1975 with SEQRA. Both of these laws sought to reduce pollution by ensuring that government agencies consider the environmental impacts of their decisions.
In practice, however, other laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act did far more to improve the health of our natural environment than environmental review procedures. These laws actually forbid the actions that are most damaging to the environment — unlike NEPA and SEQRA, which just force agencies to “carefully study” the impacts of their actions.
When you consider how polluted the environment was in the 1970s, it’s easy to see why the legislators who wrote NEPA and SEQRA thought that adding expenses and delays to development was acceptable in order to reduce further pollution. However, with the passage of time, the full costs and dubious benefits of these laws have become clear.
What we gain and lose from environmental review
There’s no doubt that environmental reviews produce detailed data to help us understand the impact of actions. We know, for instance, that New York’s congestion pricing system will increase traffic speeds in Manhattan by 16% at rush hour, reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles in Manhattan by 8%, and eliminate 750 traffic-related injuries per year.5
But in performing these analyses, we incur huge costs and delays. For private residential projects, environmental review increases project costs by between 11% and 16%, and typically delays construction by around two years.6 Project sponsors must pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to environmental consultants, continue paying property tax, and bear the opportunity cost of the years of delay. Similarly, Government-led projects suffer years of delay and incur large in-house and consultant expenses on projects to build infrastructure and housing.7
It’s especially painful that these reviews appear to rarely yield clearly better outcomes for core environmental concerns — and in fact, by slowing down transit projects and construction of dense, low-pollution housing these laws may often be harming the environment by perpetuating the status quo.
What’s worse is that for government-led projects, these environmental reviews have limited benefit because the projects being studied are already committed government policy, and the law explicitly allows for agencies to approve actions so long as they, on balance, best advance policy overall objectives.
For example, the environmental analysis of congestion pricing was completed four years after the New York State legislature passed its law requiring congestion pricing to be implemented. On housing, the various upzonings initiated by the Department of City Planning are already the explicit policy of the Adams administration.
Helping lawmakers do better cost-benefit analysis of policies before politicians commit to them could be really helpful. But merely going through the motions of environmental review after elected officials have committed to a policy is expensive make-work that delays the enactment of the will of the people. And those delays erode public trust in the government's ability to deliver.
Read more about cost-benefit analysis in An Abundance Agenda for New York.
Reforming our environmental review process
Just because legislators 50 years ago thought that environmental review might avoid harm to the environment doesn’t mean we have to be stuck with these processes forever. The Citizens Budget Commission has an excellent recent report that analyzes and proposes reforms to reduce the burden of New York’s environmental review processes, including:
Reducing which projects require environmental review, including exempting land use changes
Focusing only on core environmental concerns during review — not ancillary topics like schools, transportation, and neighborhood character
Consolidating environmental review with other public engagement, such as community board and borough president hearings
Setting goals for how long environmental reviews should take and holding agencies accountable for delays
We should enact the CBC’s recommendations. Their report contains specific details of how the executive and legislative branches of our city and state governments can act to streamline the environmental review process.
Fortunately, we’ve already seen several attempts at streamlining the environmental review system — but much more action is needed:
Earlier in 2024, the city enacted a “Green Fast Track” system to lessen the environmental review burden for certain all-electric residential developments which have been shown in the past to very rarely have harmful environmental impact. This is good, but only applies to a subset of individual residential projects.
There’s a bill pending in the state legislature to streamline the environmental review process for dense housing in urban areas. This bill has been crawling through the legislative process since January 2023, and it’s unclear whether it has any hope of passing in the next session.
But much more work needs to be done.
Zooming out to the abundance agenda
New York's environmental review process, while well-intentioned, has become a significant roadblock to achieving the abundance agenda.
Reducing the cost of living, building more homes, and improving transportation will be severely hampered if we subject every project to an expensive and slow environmental review. I’d love to see community boards, YIMBY groups, and city council members proposing upzonings all over New York, but the costs of environmental reviews make it difficult for anyone other than the Department of City Planning or parties with a direct financial stake in a project to take action.
This makes reforming environmental review a high-leverage topic for the abundance movement to focus on. If we can streamline environmental review, like the CBC proposes, then all sorts of important projects can happen cheaper and quicker. Even just shortening an environmental review by a few months can save millions of dollars in financing costs for a high-rise apartment building, for example.
Reforming environmental review — and other similar constraints on New York’s development — requires electing and supporting pragmatic pro-abundance elected officials. It requires giving legislators the expert support to draft and implement reforms for these immensely complex topics.
And it requires building a powerful abundance movement full of people — like yourself, perhaps — who believe that a better New York is possible, and that it’s worth putting in the effort to make that vision a reality.
I’m excited about New York’s congestion pricing, Sidewalk Chorus
Improving New York City’s Land Use Decision-Making Process, page 26, Citizens Budget Commission
It’s hard to precisely quantify the cost of environmental review for government-initiated projects because major departments, like the Department of City Planning, have contracts with environmental consultants to handle all of the department's environmental review needs in a multi-year period. My analysis of procurement data suggests that DCP is currently spending around $2 million per year on environmental consultants, plus an unknown (large!) amount of internal staff time.
Great post!
California reforming CEQA this year gives me hope something could happen here in NY.