Hiding in plain sight: the desegregating impact of applying the “fast track” affordable housing approval process to the 12 communities districts that have had the lowest production.
Oct. 1, 2026 — New York City’s Department of City Planning has released the list of the 12 community districts that have had the lowest rates of affordable housing production. These are the community districts where, for the next five years, affordable housing proposals that need zoning changes or other formal land use approvals will be “fast tracked” pursuant to an amendment to the City Charter that voters approved in Nov. 2025.
Fast tracking will compress the review process and, critically, vest final approval in the City Planning Commission, not the City Council. So “member deference,” a custom long-identified in New York City and other municipalities as stymieing affordable housing development, will not be available in these circumstances.
Below is a table of the demographics of the 12 community districts selected pursuant to the Charter-mandated process. The data actually reflect “community district tabulation areas” (CDTAs), which are approximations of the geography of community districts.
Nine of 12 of the lowest producing districts (highlighted in red or yellow) have non-Hispanic Black populations less than a third of the citywide Black population (per the 2020-2024 American Community Survey, the source for all the data here, the citywide non-Hispanic Black population is 20.4 percent). Seven of those nine (highlighted in red) have non-Hispanic Black populations less than a quarter of the citywide non-Hispanic Black population.
In view of the fact that participants in New York City’s housing-lottery process are heavily Black and Hispanic, it seems indisputable that the designations for the fast track will have some desegregating impact. (The magnitude of that impact, of course, depends on the extent to which the new process unlocks for-profit and not-for-profit developer activity.)
Despite this, the statement issued on Oct. 1 by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrupulously avoided any mention of fair housing, let alone desegregation. I reached out to the Mayor’s office to ask: (1) whether he expects the fast track to have a desegregating impact; and (2) whether that would be a positive development for the city. No response has been forthcoming.
I had also reached out to the Department of City Planning with the same questions. Subsequent to publication, on Oct. 5, a spokesperson emailed a response to me. City Planning, in contrast to the Oct. 1 statement out of the Mayor’s office, was unequivocal in making the link between the fast track and the city’s segregated housing patterns: “The Affordable Housing Fast Track will help address longstanding patterns of segregation and advance fair housing,” the spokesperson wrote, noting that “the 12 Fast Track districts are collectively 14% Black and 18% Hispanic,” compared with “the 12 districts that have produced the most affordable housing in recent years [collectively being] 31% Black and 46% Hispanic.”
And for whether a desegregating impact would be a positive development for the city, City Planning’s response was still framed in the language of the need for “fairer, more equitable housing growth across neighborhoods.” I think that is in the nature of a “yes,” but I have followed up.
| Single-race, non-Hispanic | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | Black | Asian | ||
| BK 10 | 51.7% | 2.4% | 22.9% | 19.3% |
| BK 12 | 60.1% | 3.1% | 18.6% | 13.1% |
| BK 18 | 20.4% | 57.3% | 5.9% | 8.7% |
| M 7 | 62.3% | 6.4% | 10.9% | 14.8% |
| M 8 | 72.8% | 3.2% | 10.2% | 9.3% |
| Q 4 | 5.3% | 5.8% | 34.5% | 52.4% |
| Q 5 | 46.3% | 2.0% | 10.1% | 38.3% |
| Q 10 | 19.9% | 12.5% | 23.2% | 26.1% |
| Q 11 | 34.9% | 2.2% | 45.1% | 14.1% |
| Q 13 | 8.7% | 51.6% | 18.9% | 13.6% |
| SI 2 | 59.4% | 3.1% | 20.4% | 13.6% |
| SI 3 | 76.1% | 0.7% | 8.3% | 12.3% |
| Note 1: In the column for the percentage of Black, non-Hispanic residents in a CDTA, red highlighting indicates a percentage is less than a quarter of the citywide percentage of non-Hispanic Blacks; yellow highlighting indicates a CDTA less than a third of the citywide percentage. | ||||
| Note 2: The Department of City Planning flags any estimate where the “coefficient of variation” (sampling error relative to the size of the estimate) is greater than or equal to 20 percent as “not statistically reliable enough for most applications.” The only cell in this table to which the flag applies is the one for non-Hispanic Blacks in SI 3. | ||||
| Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024 five-year estimates, as tabulated by the NYC Department of City Planning for Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTAs), available through the Population FactFinder of the NYC Department of City Planning at https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov. | ||||
Updated Oct. 2, 2026 to include the paragraph on Mayor Mamdani’s statement, and on Oct. 6 to include the response from the Department of City Planning’s spokesperson.