
Mayor Eric Adams announcing the citywide composting program. The smart composting bins and brown bins are also pictured. Image Credit: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.
The program expands on a Queens pilot program that diverted 12.7 million pounds of compostable material from landfills. On February 1, 2023, Mayor Eric Adams and Department of Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch* revealed a new roadmap for the creation and implementation of a citywide composting program. The program will be the nation’s largest and will roll out over the next 20 months. (read more…)

Mayor Eric Adams. Photo Credit: facebook.com/NYCMayor
On January 30, 2023, Mayor Eric Adams and NYC Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit T. Aggarwala announced a temporary amnesty program for overdue water bills. The program will forgive the interest if a customer pays a portion or a whole outstanding water bill. Nearly 200,000 customers owe a total $1.2 billion in water bill charges to the Department of Environmental Protection. The money from water bill payments goes toward the maintenance, repairs and upgrades for the city’s water system, which supplies over a billion gallons of water and treats 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater daily. (read more…)

Image Credit: Mayor’s Office.
On January 9, 2023, Mayor Eric Adams announced a set of recommendations from the Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force for changes to state laws and city zoning requirements to make it easier for the conversion of underused office space to housing. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed how many companies operate, transitioning to work-from-home or hybrid structures that require less office space, while the city experiences an ongoing affordable housing crisis. (read more…)

Mayor Adams holds a copy of “Get Stuff Built,” the administration’s proposal for streamlining parts of the land use process and Buildings requirement. Image Credit: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.
On December 8, 2022, Mayor Eric Adams unveiled New York City’s latest land use roadmap, Get Stuff Built, a complement to his City of Yes zoning proposals announced earlier this year. Get Stuff Built represents a collaborative effort among more than two dozen agencies serving on the Building and Land use Approval Streamlining Taskforce (BLAST), which held 18 working group sessions and four roundtable discussions with more than 50 external stakeholders. Designed to address housing affordability, support small businesses, and facilitate capital projects, Get Stuff Built lays out 111 initiatives to streamline development in the City in three categories identified for reform: environmental review, land use processes, and building permitting. (read more…)

Mayor Eric Adams. Photo Credit: facebook.com/NYCMayor
Storm events like 2021’s Hurricane Ida highlight the importance of implementing stormwater mitigation measures in flooding-prone areas. On January 9, 2023, Mayor Eric Adams announced the expansion of the Cloudburst Program, a program to construct clustered stormwater management projects in flood-prone communities. The program will expand to Corona and Kissena Park in Queens, Parkchester in the Bronx, and East New York, Brooklyn. Through the program, work has already started in South Jamaica and St. Albans in Queens and in East Harlem in Manhattan. (read more…)