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Streets and City Land

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Government Efficiency August 2026

Question 3 Reaches 4,103 Vacant Lots and Every Bike Lane Project

Ballot Question 3 does two things that look unrelated: it strips consultation steps that delay street safety projects, and it moves small City-owned lots into a faster disposal process. Both are about the same thing, which is how long it takes the City to change something it already owns. The land half is the one you can measure, and it is smaller than it sounds.

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Three quarters of the City's vacant lots are small enough for the new expedited review, but they are 5% of the land

City-owned tax lots classified as vacant land, grouped by lot size, with total acreage. Question 3 moves lots under 10,000 square feet into the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure.

  • Under 10,000 sq ft (newly expedited)
  • Larger lots (unchanged)
Source: NYC Open Data, Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO), May 2026 Note: Lots where PLUTO records city ownership and a vacant land use. Not every vacant City lot is surplus; some are held for a future public purpose.

Why the street safety half matters. Local law defines a “major transportation project” to include any project that adds or removes a bike lane of any length, plus roadway changes running more than four blocks. Every one of those triggers notifications and inter-agency consultations before work can start. Question 3 keeps the consultations but confines them to agency heads, lets DOT begin work justified by crash data before finishing notifications, and stops a missed procedural step from voiding a finished project. The stakes are not abstract: 229 people were killed in reported collisions on City streets in 2025, the lowest count since 2014 and still 229 people.

Why the land half matters, and its limit. 4,103 of the City's 5,442 vacant lots fall under the 10,000 square foot threshold, so three quarters of them become eligible for a review that takes 90 days instead of seven months. But those lots hold 262 acres between them, against 4,646 acres in the larger lots the question does not touch. This is a change that reaches a great many small parcels and very little of the actual land.

Vacant lots: tax lots in PLUTO where owner type is city ownership and land use is vacant land, bucketed by recorded lot area. PLUTO reflects Department of Finance records and lags actual dispositions. The 10,000 square foot line is the threshold in the proposed Charter amendment, which also requires that a project have no potential significant adverse environmental impact to use the expedited procedure.

Sources: NYC Open Data, PLUTO; COGE Adopted Final Report (July 23, 2026); COGE Preliminary Report (June 2026).