New York City’s latest housing push, centered on a 99-unit threshold that unlocks lucrative tax breaks, is reshaping what gets built and where. As projects stack up just under that line, the pattern is starting to collide with the mayor’s promise to deliver both more homes and more equitable growth.
I see a growing tension between a numbers-driven boom in mid-sized developments and the political expectations that came with City Hall’s housing agenda, especially in neighborhoods already wary of change. The way this 99-unit wave plays out could determine whether the mayor is credited with easing the housing crunch or blamed for fueling a new round of backlash.
The 99‑unit sweet spot and New York’s tax-break math
Developers in New York have long calibrated building size to the tax code, and the current landscape has turned 99 units into a kind of magic number. The city’s main property-tax incentive for rental construction, structured around thresholds that kick in at 100 apartments and above, has encouraged builders to stop just short of that line to keep projects simpler and cheaper while still large enough to be profitable. In practice, that means a surge of mid-rise buildings that maximize land value without triggering stricter affordability or labor requirements that apply to bigger complexes, a pattern documented in filings for recent multifamily projects that cluster at 80 to 99 units in fast-growing corridors such as parts of Brooklyn and Queens housing-incentive data.
The 99-unit ceiling is not just a quirk of developer preference, it is a rational response to how New York structures exemptions and abatements. Under the current regime, projects that stay below the 100-unit mark can often avoid deeper income-targeting rules or longer affordability commitments while still qualifying for as-of-right benefits tied to new construction, according to recent analyses of the city’s tax expenditure programs and state-authorized replacements for the expired 421-a program state incentive framework. That design has effectively created a sweet spot where the financial upside of building is high, the regulatory burden is relatively low, and the political accountability for delivering truly affordable units is diffuse, since each individual project is modest enough to fly under the radar of citywide debate.
How mid-sized projects complicate the mayor’s housing targets
Mayor Eric Adams has staked his administration on a promise to add hundreds of thousands of homes, framing new construction as the only way to blunt rising rents and persistent homelessness. On paper, a boom in 99-unit buildings helps him move toward those production goals, because each project adds dozens of apartments without the protracted fights that often accompany megadevelopments. City housing reports show that recent rezonings and as-of-right projects have produced a growing share of units in the 50 to 99 range, which collectively account for a significant portion of the new supply counted in the administration’s progress updates production statistics. From a raw-numbers perspective, that pattern looks like a win…