Two numbers on the table today — the MTA's on-time count and the apartment count City of Yes was supposed to deliver. Funny how both look great until you ask who's actually counting. If you're just joining us: City of Yes is the citywide zoning reform New York passed to loosen the rules on housing types and modest added capacity, neighborhood by neighborhood, during a brutal shortage — rental vacancy sitting at 1.41 percent. The hard part now goes beyond the zoning text: can legal permission survive financing, approvals, and implementation long enough to actually become apartments? This is New York City Politics and Urbanism Daily. The Comptroller put a number on the subway, and the City of Yes pitch finally meets the permit queue. Stick around — one of these stories has a receipt now. We'll keep tracking City of Yes housing implementation — follow the show so the next update finds you. This one's from New York State Office of the State Comptroller:
During the course of this analysis, MTA reported to the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) that it has revised its methodology for classifying delays in late 2023 to assign more delays to specific incidents. This change led to a rise in the number of incidents with 50 or more delays associated with them, known as major incidents.
Here it is — Report 10-2026 from the Comptroller. Independent auditor, not the MTA press shop. And the number I've been waving at all week finally has a document behind it: 82.2 percent in 2024. DiNapoli's office, yeah. And notice what's actually new: the delay causes have shifted since 2019. The MTA's Subway Action Plan story doesn't line up with this report. Right, because SAP got OTP to 81.1 in 2019 — that was a named program fixing 2019 problems. Aging signals, planned maintenance, medical incidents? That's the 2025 problem. The money was aimed at the wrong decade. And there's a methodology asterisk people will skate past — the MTA reclassified how it counts delays in late 2023, assigning more to specific incidents. So the incident numbers jump partly because they're counting differently now. City of Yes passed over a year ago now, and everyone called it a landmark — but zoning is just permission, right? So what actually changes on the ground, and what's still just ink on paper? Yeah, that's the gap. The Council passed City of Yes in December 2024, and it did change the rules: it eliminated minimum parking mandates for new construction in parts of the city, legalized accessory dwelling units — think backyard cottages and garage apartments — expanded which office buildings can convert to residential, and created new higher-density zoning districts that can be mapped across the boroughs. One year in, there are real signs of movement. Developers are advancing plans for larger buildings, air rights deals are picking up, and some homeowners are moving ahead on ADUs. But zoning permission still has to turn into construction, and that's a much messier chain. Per a piece in Governing, local governments ultimately determine whether a reform unlocks housing or quietly stalls, because the blockers are usually economics, financing, and process — not just the letter of the zoning code. The ADU story shows it pretty cleanly: one Queens homeowner who stood next to the former mayor at City of Yes rallies found herself essentially unable to build the backyard unit she'd been promised was now legal, because the non-zoning barriers — construction costs, financing gaps, and city program support — hadn't caught up. So if permitting and financing are the real chokepoints, is anyone actually trying to fix those, or is City Hall just moving on to the next announcement? There is movement on the pipeline side. Mayor Mamdani's SPEED reforms, released in May 2026, target environmental review, permitting, and the housing lottery process, and the city says they could cut development timelines by as much as two years. Around the same time, Governor Hochul signed SEQRA reforms — the most significant changes to New York's environmental review law since 1975 — also projected to shave up to two years off project timelines. Now the test is whether those timeline cuts make financing feasible for the missing-middle projects — duplexes, small apartment buildings — that City of Yes rezoned for but that remain hard to build at scale. Got a tip, a correction, or a story idea about New York City politics or urban life? Send it our way at nydailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We’re always listening.
We’ve put links to every story from today’s episode in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can follow it there and read more for yourself.
That’s New York City Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.