Digital City Map on NYC Ballot
October 15th Rally For Affordable Housing (Photo courtesy of Yes On Affordable Housing)
New York City voters will decide this November whether to update the city’s 70-year-old map system and streamline housing development. A digitized map is a ballot measure this year, Proposition 5, and Amit Singh Bagga, campaign director for Yes on Affordable Housing, spoke to WFUV News about its connection to the other housing propositions on the ballot.
“Proposition Five is pretty straightforward,” Bagga said. “It is a proposition to essentially bring New York City from 1955 to 2025. We currently have 8,000 paper maps that are the official maps of the city that live in the offices of all of the borough presidents.”
He said the proposal would turn those paper maps into one official digitized city map, which would help to cut down on the time and expense required for zoning and environmental review.
Bagga noted that this aligns with his campaign’s efforts to pass the other housing proposals – 2, 3, and 4 — on the ballot in addition to proposition 5.
“We have a deficit, a current deficit, which does not even account for future growth, of one million homes,” Bagga said. “We’re never going to be able to tackle this problem unless we can build housing much faster, less expensively, and more affordably.”
Bagga previously served as Deputy Secretary of Intergovernmental Affairs to Governor Kathy Hochul and helped lead New York City’s 2020 Census campaign. A native of the Bronx and resident of Queens, he has advised campaigns for Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani.
Support for the Yes on Affordable Housing campaign comes from housing advocates, some unions, and officials like New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Some City Council members, including Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, have opposed parts of the plan, arguing it limits local control.
Unlike propositions 2, 3, and 4, Bagga said he’s not heard of any resistance to proposal 5 from anywhere.
“Any initiative that might potentially have a check on a body’s power is going to face some opposition from that body,” Bagga said.
[Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 4. Listen to 90.7 FM, streaming at WFUV.org, that evening as FUV News will have updates on election results.]
