The words and the rules you run into dealing with the City, from zoning and building permits to heat season, trash setout and liquor licenses, explained once in plain language and sorted by policy area and by the agency in charge.
The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure is the public review the City Charter requires before a rezoning, a special permit, the sale or purchase of City property and other major land use decisions can take effect. It runs on a fixed clock, and the community board goes first. Tap each step, or drag the slider to see where a project is on any given day.
Pick what someone is asking the City to do.
Timeline and lists: NYC Department of City Planning, Uniform Land Use Review Procedure ↗
On paper, the City Council's vote on a ULURP application is a vote of all 51 members. In practice, the whole Council votes the way the member whose district the project is in wants it to. That practice is called member deference, and it is not in the City Charter at all.
Member deference is a matter of custom. The Charter gives each of the 51 members one equal vote on every application that reaches the Council and says nothing about how they decide, so members can trade those votes. Each member gets control over their own district by agreeing not to vote against a colleague's position in theirs. That agreement is where a single member's leverage comes from.
Because projects in a hostile member's district rarely get filed at all, the biggest cost is the housing nobody proposes. It shows up in where the city has built: from 2014 to 2024, 12 community districts added as much housing as the other 47 combined.
A lot of new homes in one part of the city does not meet the need in the districts that build none. People look for homes near their jobs, schools and families. When a few districts do most of the building, every other district keeps its demand without adding the supply.
Department of City Planning Housing Database. Homes lost to alterations include apartments combined into larger ones. Gowanus figures are new buildings completed in the Special Gowanus Mixed Use District. 2026 is through the latest release. See The True Sum of Housing Built and Middle Housing Still Missing.
The 2025 Charter Revision Commission sent five amendments to the ballot on November 4, 2025. Tap each for what it does and how the city voted.
In BKCB6, despite everything people heard during the campaign, the housing measures passed overwhelmingly: 66.2% Yes on Question 2, 65.4% on Question 3 and 62.5% on Question 4. Questions 1 and 6 failed. Voters clearly used discretion.
After millions were poured into campaigns both supporting and opposing the pro-housing ballot measures, voters approved them decisively. These measures removed a councilmember’s ability to veto housing in their district, a power that has been used repeatedly to block housing. The evidence is overwhelming that building housing at the right scale makes a city more affordable, and New Yorkers demonstrated they understand this. Had the ballot measures been defeated, I would have been disappointed, but I would have had to acknowledge that voters do not want to build housing faster. That is not what happened. Voters chose affordability through housing.
And before the assumption creeps in that voters checked “yes” across the board, it is worth noting that there were six ballot questions, and they were not treated equally. Questions 1 and 6 failed. Questions 2, 3, and 4, the housing measures, passed overwhelmingly. Voters were discerning, not disengaged.
The goal is clear: make the city more affordable. Mamdani has committed to building 200,000 affordable housing units. You cannot achieve that with neighborhood vetoes, which is precisely why voters removed them.
Mike Racioppo, District Manager, Brooklyn Community Board 6, and a commissioner on the Charter Revision Commission. From “Why Mamdani’s New ‘Office of Mass Engagement’ Matters,” City Limits, Jan. 16, 2026 ↗
Results: NYC Board of Elections certified citywide recaps (Dec. 2, 2025). Details: 2025 Charter Revision Commission Final Report; Mayor's Office, Oct. 1, 2026; Gothamist, Jan. 27, 2026.
Where each active application is on the clock, what CB6 did with it, and the zoning it asks for. Tap a zoning district to decode it.
Every land use application in BKCB6 since the 1970s, with how each one ended, is on ULURPs Over Time.
Every lot in the city has a zoning district, like R6B on a Park Slope side street or M1-4/R7A in Gowanus. Type one, or tap a district mapped in BKCB6, to see what each part means and how much it allows under the 2025 rules, including the extra room for qualifying affordable housing created by City of Yes in 2024.
Propose a rezoning on a lot and see how much more it would allow, which review it would go through, how long that takes and who has the final say. Then switch the community district to see how the same proposal would be handled somewhere else.
Start with the map: tap a community district to see what it has built and lost, how a rezoning there would be reviewed, and to load it into the simulator. The 12 districts outlined in red built the least affordable housing and get the new Affordable Housing Fast Track.
2014 to 2024. Housing Database figures from the Department of City Planning; HPD figures are homes in HPD-financed new construction. Fast Track districts from the Mayor's Office, October 1, 2026.
A simplified illustration using the 2025 Zoning Handbook's maximum floor area ratios and the 2025 Charter amendments. Housing figures use each district's standard residential maximum; whether an application qualifies for a shorter review is decided by the Department of City Planning.
Floor area ratio is the total floor area a building may have, divided by the size of its lot. Pick a district and a lot, then change how much of the lot the building covers to see how the same floor area becomes a shorter, wider building or a taller, narrower one.
An illustration only. Real buildings must also meet height, setback, yard and other rules, so the number of stories shown is a rough guide, not a permitted building. Figures: NYC Zoning Handbook, 2025 edition, pp. 109 to 112 ↗
What the law requires of building owners and of tenants, taken from HPD's ABCs of Housing ↗ (tenant and owner editions) and State Homes and Community Renewal fact sheets. Pick who you are and what's going on. Every rule links to its page in the source and to its full entry in the glossary below.
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Enter the date, the time and the temperature outside.
Pick the condition HPD cited and the date of the notice.
Enter the date the current lease ends.
Sources: HPD, ABCs of Housing; NYS HCR, Fact Sheet #36, FS-36 (03/2026) and Fact Sheet #38, FS-38 (06/2025). Summaries of the law, not legal advice.
Every agency has its own vocabulary and its own rulebook, and most of it is spread across manuals, PDFs and web pages nobody reads end to end. We pulled the glossaries and guides the City publishes into one place, rewrote each entry in plain language, and tagged every one with its policy area, the agencies involved and a link back to where it came from.
Type a word, an acronym or a situation ("heat", "sidewalk shed", "setout", "variance"), or narrow by area and agency below.
Each entry links to the page it came from. These are the documents and pages this guide draws on:
Zoning codes themselves (R6A, C2-4, M1-4/R7A) are decoded in the Zoning Code Decoder on the CB6 Glossary.