Queens Council Set to Override Adams Vetoes on Affordable Housing, Ridgewood Locals Weigh In

Queens’s latest tussle over affordable housing bodes for a city still undecided on whom, exactly, “affordability” should serve.

For all the sprawling debates about affordable housing in New York City, deliberations often descend into the peculiar: just how many bedrooms must “affordable” flats have before they stop serving developers and start benefitting families? Such was the scene at Christ the King High School in Middle Village, Queens, on a frostbitten night in mid-January. Queens Community Board 5 assembled, part social club, part parliament, part forum for impassioned if thinly attended local democracy.

At the centre was Daniel Heredia, the Zoning and Land Use Review Committee chair, who briefed neighbors on the impending City Council vote to override three of Mayor Eric Adams’s recent vetoes. The first, the Community Opportunity Purchase Act (COPA), grants non-profits a crucial first crack at buying multi-family buildings before they vanish into developers’ portfolios—a bid to slow speculative turnover. The other two bills, both concerning affordable housing, sparked more heated reaction. One mandates a quota of studios and one-bedrooms but snubs family-sized units. The other, more contentious still, reserves half of new “affordable” units for those earning above $100,000—a wage that, in much of Queens, seems paltry only by the city’s own contorted standards.

The Adams vetoes, critics argue, were insufficient; supporters retort that the bills, as written, do little to help actual neighborhood dwellers. Community Board 5’s meeting was no exception: public skepticism ran high, a sentiment echoed by Heredia’s lament that, “so many developments that are being built are not affordable for the communities that they’re being built in.” It is a refrain all too familiar in a city where the median income remains dwarfed by its median rents.

The pending override places the issue squarely before the City Council, including local member Phil Wong. If passed, COPA would provide not-for-profits a pre-emptive option—sometimes merely 90 days—to secure buildings, potentially buffering outer-borough neighbourhoods against buyouts and displacement. Its supporters contend that such policies are essential to maintain a modicum of socio-economic diversity. Sceptics see only additional hurdles for commerce and an insufficient brake on relentless price inflation.

The two housing bills are arguably more polarising. The stipulation for more studios and one-beds could, in theory, relieve pressure on young singles and small households, a growing slice of Queens’s tenant base. Yet, by omitting larger, family-size apartments, the law implicitly prioritises transient populations or childless professionals—demographics often prized by developers for their mobility and deeper pockets. The bill reserving half of “affordable” units for households earning north of $100,000 recasts affordability itself as a relative, not absolute, measure—a sop, perhaps, to “middle-income” New Yorkers estranged from both luxury skyscrapers and old rent-controlled holdouts.

If pushed through, these bills would shape not just who lives in Ridgewood, Middle Village, and beyond, but who might conceivably stay. At the very least, they portend even more exacting local debates before any shovel breaks ground. Elsewhere in the evening, routine announcements continued: a bicycle club plotting a brisk pedal to the Manhattan High Line; Ridgewood Library’s book sale (bargain hunters and purgers equally welcome). Even civic events, it seems, orbit the larger gravitational question of who the city is for.

The sprawling battles over affordability are not unique to Queens—or indeed, to New York. Cities nationwide, from San Francisco to Boston, are wrestling with how best to preserve urban diversity while managing intensifying demand. Yet, the scale of New York’s housing challenge remains formidable. According to the Furman Center, the city added just 200,000 net new homes in the past decade, while its population grew by over 600,000. Small wonder lines for subsidised housing now stretch into the tens of thousands.

Who decides what’s “affordable”?

The debate over qualifying income bands may appear arcane, but it exposes a deeper philosophical rift. Median household income in Queens hovers around $75,000, well shy of the six-figure threshold defined as “middle income” in recent legislation. For some, re-targeting affordable housing at higher earners protects the “missing middle”—households too prosperous for public housing, but nowhere near affluent enough for new development rents. Others see a ruse, shifting public subsidy away from the genuinely needy toward the barely-squeezed.

This dance between equity and expediency is hardly new. The city’s housing policy has long careened between twin poles: social mission v. fiscal realism, supply v. community cohesion. Mayors, from De Blasio to the incumbent Adams, have tried and largely failed to conjure enough deeply affordable homes. Indeed, analysts fret that even the most energetic rezoning—unless radically scaled up—can only chip away at gargantuan backlogs.

The role of community boards, largely advisory by law, is both critical and symbolic. They are sounding boards for local anxieties and prototypes for wider civic engagement. Low in turnout (winter chill or not), but rich in opinion, they channel grassroot disquiet up into the city’s legislative arteries. That last week’s meeting urged residents to contact their council member before the veto override underscores the lingering potency of local input—however wan the odds of altering a council poised to checkmate a lame-duck mayor.

It is worth noting, too, the rich web of community activity woven around these debates. Grassroots organisations—from Friends of the Ridgewood Library to Ridgewood Rides—chart a parallel, quieter course to community retention and cohesion. By facilitating access to books, social services, or bicycle advocacy (supported by Council Member Jennifer Gutierrez’s office), such initiatives do what city legislation often cannot: foster belonging without recourse to legal code or real estate calculus.

The upshot? New York’s ambition to remain accessible to its middle and working classes will be won or lost not in ribbon-cutting ceremonies or press releases, but in obscure hearings and after-hours meetings much like this one. If there is hope, it lies in the city’s stubborn pluralism—its capacity to keep debating who belongs, even as market forces conspire to narrow the field. Yet, absent bold alignment between policy and demography, the “affordable” moniker risks losing all meaning, a paper shield against centrifugal economics.

Whether or not the City Council’s override prevails, this latest Queens skirmish reiterates a perennial civic question: can municipal government, hemmed in by politics and custom, arrest the price spiral more effectively than the market? For now, the answer, like the city itself, remains up for grabs. ■