Brooklyn Community Board 6

What Is the City Charter?

The City Charter is New York City's governing document — consider it the city's constitution. It defines the structure of city government: the powers of the Mayor, City Council, Borough Presidents, and Community Boards; how the city budget is set; how land use decisions are made; and the rules that govern how the city operates day to day.

The charter is not static. A Charter Revision Commission (CRC) can be convened to review it and propose amendments, which then go to voters as ballot questions. Over more than a century, these changes have fundamentally reshaped the city — from creating the five boroughs themselves, to establishing community boards, to expanding or limiting the power of elected officials. The charter is how NYC decides who has power and how it gets used.

🗺 How New York City Came to Be: Consolidation as the Original Charter Revision

Before 1898, there was no "New York City" as we know it. Manhattan was a city unto itself. Brooklyn was a separate city — and the third or fourth most populous in the entire country. Queens was a patchwork of towns. Staten Island was a collection of independent municipalities. The Bronx had already been partially annexed from Westchester County in stages beginning in 1874.

The man most credited with pushing consolidation forward was Andrew H. Green, who as far back as 1868 wrote that the solution to the region's fragmented and inefficient planning was to bring New York City, Kings County, parts of Westchester, Queens, and Richmond "under one common municipal government." His proposal sat largely ignored for years, buried in a report to the Central Park Commission. But the idea never died.

By the 1890s, the business community was pushing hard. The Chamber of Commerce and real estate interests argued that a unified government would bring economic efficiency, a better-managed harbor, debt relief for Brooklyn (which was nearly bankrupt with a failing water supply), and the kind of civic infrastructure needed to compete with Chicago and other fast-growing cities. Consolidation, they said, was New York's "manifest destiny."

A non-binding referendum was held in 1894. The results told a complicated story. Staten Islanders voted roughly 4-to-1 in favor — they wanted access to big-city resources. Manhattan was heavily pro-consolidation. But Brooklyn was a different matter entirely. The vote there was 64,744 in favor and 64,467 opposed — a margin of just 277 votes out of more than 129,000 cast. Brooklyn's leading newspaper, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, ran an anti-consolidation campaign featuring editorials, cartoons, and even a song contest. The winning song was titled "Up with the Flag of Brooklyn."

The anti-consolidation arguments in Brooklyn will sound familiar: consolidation would raise taxes, import Tammany Hall corruption, overrun Brooklyn with slums, and ruin its school system. Sound familiar? The structure of that argument — the idea that outsiders and newcomers would degrade an existing community — has recurred in civic fights ever since, including fights I have dealt with directly in CB6.

After the referendum, Republican state party boss Thomas C. Platt decided consolidation served his political interests and pushed a bill through the legislature. Both the mayors of New York and Brooklyn vetoed it. The legislature overrode the vetoes, the Assembly passing the bill with only two votes to spare. Governor Morton signed it into law on May 11, 1896. On January 1, 1898, Greater New York came into existence — and the first charter was written under pressure, in haste, and was acknowledged even at the time to be deeply flawed.

I've jokingly referred to the consolidation as the "mistake of '98" — and I'm not alone in that framing. But the real lesson is this: the vote that created the city we live in today was decided by 267 votes in Brooklyn. Charter changes have lasting consequences, and they happen whether or not people pay attention.

It's also worth noting what didn't get consolidated. Yonkers, which had already invested heavily in its own infrastructure — streets, sewers, a water supply — resisted annexation and incorporated as an independent city. As historian Richardson Dilworth has argued, infrastructural development enabled Yonkers's autonomy: communities that could supply their own services had less reason to join New York, while those that couldn't had more. The places that became the outer boroughs often did so precisely because they needed what New York City could provide.

🏗 The 2025 Charter Changes: Evolved Governance for the Housing Crisis

In November 2025, NYC voters approved a set of charter amendments creating faster land use review pathways for affordable housing. These passed over fierce opposition from the City Council — which spent public funds on mailers, digital ads, and an opposition website arguing the measures were "misleading" and would "take away your power." The Board of Elections rejected the Council's attempt to remove the questions from the ballot entirely.

The central issue was member deference: the informal practice by which each City Council member can effectively veto any development in their district. Under ULURP, a seven-month review process, the Council has final say — and by long-standing tradition, the full Council follows the local member's lead. If a member says no, the project dies. Some council districts have produced virtually zero affordable housing. Developers have described checking the district's council member before even pursuing a project, knowing that a hostile member means a dead application. The result is a system where geography and politics — not need or merit — determine where housing gets built.

The 2025 amendments created three new pathways that bypass or shorten this process: an expedited track for affordable housing on public land with City Council review but no full ULURP (ELURP-CC); a BSA fast-track for HPD-supported projects on residentially zoned land; and a shorter CPC-ending process for modest density increases (ELURP-CPC). A fourth track, the Affordable Housing Fast Track, takes effect in 2027 targeting the 12 community districts with the lowest affordable housing production rates. Community boards still get their advisory window in all of these. The full ULURP still exists. What changed is that a single council member can no longer kill a project that meets the threshold for these tracks before it even gets a real hearing.

I completed an election district-level analysis of the results. Every single ED in CB6 approved the pro-housing measures. Questions 1 and 6 failed citywide. Questions 2, 3, and 4 — the housing measures — passed with over 56% of the vote. The entities that claimed to speak for entire neighborhoods in CB6 didn't even win their own blocks. Voters were discerning, not disengaged. See my full ED-level analysis ↗

This is directly in line with what CB6 has consistently identified as its number one priority. The district unanimously supports more housing — especially affordable housing. Every ED result confirmed it. The charter changes that passed in 2025 are the governance tools that make acting on that priority possible.

The anti-consolidation arguments of 1894 Brooklyn and the anti-housing arguments of 2025 city council districts share the same structure: that newcomers and outside decisions will degrade existing communities. The ballot results in both cases showed those arguments don't represent the broader public. They represent whoever is organized enough to dominate the meeting room — which, as the 2025 election made clear, is not the same thing as a neighborhood.

Why It Matters for CB6

The charter directly shapes what community boards can and cannot do — and what can be built in our neighborhoods. Two reforms I've continued to push for:

Comprehensive Planning. We need a citywide process to replace the current piecemeal, project-by-project approach. Decisions about housing, infrastructure, and land use still happen in silos. The new expedited tracks help, but they don't substitute for a plan.

An Independent Community Board Office. CBs need the professional staffing and capacity to effectively use these new processes — to analyze applications, track trends, and represent their districts at the level the charter now demands. In CB6, we've lost approximately 1,500 housing units since 2010 due to consolidation in landmark districts, including 388 since COVID began — the most of any community district citywide. That kind of research shouldn't require a CB to do it alone.

CB6 & Landmarks Reform

Our preservation framework can unintentionally exacerbate the housing crisis — particularly through the unchecked consolidation of apartments in landmarked districts. Reforming the Landmarks Preservation Commission to acknowledge and address these outcomes is critical if we want preservation policies that complement, rather than undermine, our housing and equity goals.

CB6 Land Use Coordinator Rebecca Kobert has been researching this trend in depth. The data is clear: the neighborhoods we preserve must also be neighborhoods people can afford to live in.

Your Voice in the Process

Whether you agree or disagree with any of these ideas, your voice belongs in this conversation. The charter has shaped New York City for over a century. Charter changes have lasting, wide-reaching impact — and they happen whether or not people pay attention. The question is whether New Yorkers show up to shape them.

Reach out: Mike@bkcb6.org