A majority of New Yorkers voted to pass ballot measures that change the land use process for affordable housing. But Republican districts and neighborhoods that built less housing are still resistant to the changes.

The map above shows how neighborhoods voted on Proposal 2, which creates a “fast track” approval option for affordable housing projects. Blue indicates areas where a majority voted in favor, and pink voted against the measure. (Patrick Spauster/City Limits)

A total YIMBY victory?

Two weeks ago, New Yorkers passed three housing ballot measures that change how affordable housing projects get permitted, with each receiving more than 56 percent of the vote across the five boroughs.

It was a win for the so-called “Yes in My Backyard” movement, which encourages the production of more housing to control rising costs.

But not every part of the city gave the ballot measures the thumbs up. 

Voters in City Council districts that built more affordable housing over the past five years approved the measures with a two-thirds margin. Those that built less were 13 points behind, with 53 percent voting to advance them. Voters also disapproved the measures in five out of six districts represented by Republicans.

Those districts that built less were precisely the target of some of the reforms, which supporters say will ensure all neighborhoods chip in to building housing amid a citywide shortage.

The ballot measures move some of the City Council’s land use authority to boards with members appointed by the mayor. Proposal 2 creates an affordable housing fast track, 3 streamlines building for “modest” development projects, and Proposal 4 creates a board of the mayor, borough president, and Council speaker that can override the Council when it blocks or reduces affordable housing in development projects.

While the changes passed by finer margins than initial polling suggested, supporters touted the vote as a victory for affordable housing in an election that had the highest turnout in a mayoral year since 1969.

“There is a healthy pro-housing consensus in this city. Over a million people voted for an affordable housing fast track, and in every borough and in places where the political system has not been delivering affordable housing in a generation,” said Alec Shirrenbeck, executive director of the Charter Revision Commission, which was convened by Mayor Eric Adams and crafted the measures.

According to the New York Housing Conference, just 10 City Council districts built 53 percent of all the city’s affordable housing over the past decade. Four out of 51 districts produced under 100 total units, according to their tracker.

While changing the power dynamics around housing appealed to YIMBYs and their coalition, the City Council and some tenants’ rights groups saw the ballot measures as a power grab.

“The deceptive language of Mayor Adams’ proposals hid what they changed in order to secure approval from voters, which is fundamentally anti-democratic,” said City Council Spokesperson Benjamin Fang in a statement to City Limits.

The ballot measures passed by wide margins in some City Council districts where members were strongly opposed, like Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ district, where nearly three in four voters on average voted for ballot measures 2 through 4.

The City Council maintains that the proposals were worded deceptively. “Portraying them simply as advancing housing faster rather than honestly as shifting power from a democratic land use process to more mayoral power, helps explain why they were approved and where they earned support,” Spokesperson Fang said in a statement.

The proposals underperformed compared to other recent ballot measures, passing with the narrowest margin in 15 years, according to the Council’s analysis. No measure passed with less than two thirds of the vote in that time, the Council says.

City lawmakers are now pushing for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature on a bill in Albany that would roll back some of the changes passed by New York voters (though Hochul expressed support for the ballot measures before Election Day).

Opponents say they support new housing, but that the measures cut local voices from the process and reduce the leverage that councilmembers have to secure benefits in their districts during project negotiations.

New tools for a new mayor

Amid rising housing costs across the country, cities have been looking for ways to build more, which some experts say will ease rent increases. But local communities often oppose new development—creating a political conundrum for policymakers.

Opposition to projects like the Just Home affordable housing complex in the Bronx, where the local community and councilmembers protested, can stop or slow new construction for years.

“The loudest community voices are a small minority of any area. And those voices get amplified in certain public meetings and certain press, but they do not represent the majority of residents in any neighborhood,” said Andrew Fine, policy director at the YIMBY group Open New York.

But in a sign of changing political dynamics around housing, Republican Councilmember Kristy Marmorato, who won her seat in 2023 in part due to her opposition to Just Home, lost to Democrat Shirley Aldebol earlier this month. The district was also the only Republican-represented district to vote for the ballot measures, which won 52 percent of the vote there.

Signs opposing the Just Home project in The Bronx neighborhood where it was planned. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

In New Jersey, the state’s northern suburbs have built 50 percent more homes per resident than New York City, thanks to a landmark legal decision called Mount Laurel, which requires localities to zone to facilitate housing.

Now, with a fast track to production in the 12 community districts that have built the least affordable housing, New York City will have its own mechanism to build in neighborhoods that are lagging behind.

“This happens all the time, where a larger form of government makes decisions that are best for the greater good, and that can understand the externalities that a smaller form of government cannot,” said Fine.

He also pointed to recent tenant protections, including 2019 state rent laws and good cause eviction, that he says open the door to new housing while assuaging fears about displacement.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani voted for the housing ballot measures on Election Day, after weeks of speculation over his stance.

“I also understand that there are councilmembers in opposition to these measures, and their opposition is driven by commitment to their communities and a deep concern about investment in those communities and I share the commitment to that investment,” Mamdani said after voting. “I look forward to working with them and delivering.”

Supporters said that the changes to the land use process are modest fixes—and the government will still be in conversation with local districts about their needs when it comes to new development. 

“You need to do deep community work, that you need to work with all the elected officials. You have to try to find consensus wherever consensus can be found. Nothing about these changes suspends the rules of politics,” said Shierenbeck.

The ballot measures will give Mamdani more tools to reach his ambitious housing goals, which includes building 200,000 affordable apartments in the next decade, Shierenbeck added.

He pointed to the “fast track” provision, which means publicly financed affordable housing projects—like the long-debated Elizabeth Street Garden senior building in SoHo—will be voted on by the Board of Standards going forward instead of the City Council, where opposition from local councilmembers can sometimes derail projects.

In development, time is money. Shierenbeck thinks the new zoning actions will help Mamdani stretch the city’s capital dollars to finance affordable housing, even as he tries to ask the state for more.

“These reforms are not everything, but coupled with other changes and a kind of a multi-year commitment to housing, that we can really see material benefits for working in middle class New Yorkers,” said Shierenbeck.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Patrick@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post How Your NYC Neighborhood Voted On The Housing Ballot Measures appeared first on City Limits.

By CHRIS MEGERIAN and THOMAS BEAUMONT, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump doesn’t like someone, he knows how to show it. In just the last few days, he’s described Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a traitor, mocked Rep. Thomas Massie’s second marriage after his first wife died and demanded that comedian Seth Meyers get fired from his late-night television show.

But he had nothing bad to say about two people roiling his party: white nationalist Nick Fuentes and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. The former Fox News host recently hosted Fuentes for a friendly interview, where he declined to challenge his guest’s bigoted beliefs or a remark about problems with “organized Jewry in America.”

FILE – Nick Fuentes, far right activist, holds a rally at the Lansing Capitol, in Lansing, Mich., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2020. (Nicole Hester/Mlive.com/Ann Arbor News via AP, File)

Asked about the controversy that has been rippling through Republican circles for weeks, Trump did not criticize Fuentes and praised Carlson for having “said good things about me over the years.”

The president’s answer echoes his longstanding reluctance to disavow — and sometimes, his willingness to embrace — right-wing figures who have inched their way from the political fringe to the Republican mainstream.

“We are disappointed in President Trump,” said Morton Klein, president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, adding that he should “rethink and retract” his comments.

The threat of antisemitism, which has percolated across the political spectrum, will likely be a recurring political issue in the coming year, as Democrats and Republicans battle for control of Congress in the midterms. Although Trump has targeted left-wing campus activism as a hive of anti-Jewish sentiment, Fuentes’ influence is a test of whether conservatives are willing to accommodate bigots as part of their political coalition.

A top conservative group faces antisemitism controversy

The turmoil has already engulfed the Heritage Foundation, a leading think tank whose president Kevin Roberts initially refused to distance himself from Carlson. A member of Heritage’s board of trustees, Robert George, announced his resignation Monday, which followed a recent decision by an antisemitism task force to sever its ties with the organization.

Although Roberts has apologized, George said “we reached an impasse” because he didn’t fully retract his original support for Carlson.

FILE – Tucker Carlson, left, talks after President Donald Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk in the Rose Garden of the White House, Oct. 14, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

“I pray that Heritage’s research and advocacy will be guided by the conviction that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, is ‘created equal’ and ‘endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights,’” George wrote on Facebook, quoting the Declaration of Independence.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore, an evangelical conservative activist and film producer, joined Heritage’s antisemitism task force in June but stepped away when Roberts refused to resign.

“If we aren’t solid on condemning antisemitism, shame on us,” she said Monday.

Cardoza-Moore praised Trump’s record on supporting Israel but said he fell short on Sunday while talking about Carlson and Fuentes.

“We can all agree — and I wish — that he would have gone further,” she said.

It’s unclear what kind of pressure Trump will face despite his previous dalliance with Fuentes, who had dinner with the past-and-future president at his Mar-a-Lago club in between his two terms.

“I don’t think President Trump during his first or second term could be acting more strongly to prevent antisemitism,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He noted Trump’s first-term relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and, more recently, the president’s handling of the war in Gaza.

Trump’s comments could prolong a Republican rift

This is not the first time Trump has shied away from criticizing fringe elements on the right. During his first campaign for president, Trump initially declined to disavow support from white nationalist David Duke, saying, “I just don’t know anything about him.”

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He claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” during racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. While running for reelection, he told the extremist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

Trump’s unwillingness to condemn either Fuentes or Carlson has the potential to prolong a rift within the Republican Party. On Sunday, as he prepared to fly back to Washington from a weekend in Florida, Trump praised Carlson and said “you can’t tell him who to interview.”

“If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” Trump said. “People have to decide.”

Fuentes liked what he heard, posting “Thank you Mr. President!” on social media.

Trump’s remarks run counter to a wave of objections that have flowed from key Republicans. The issue will be the focus of a planned gathering of pro-Israel conservative leaders on Tuesday in Washington called “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right.”

The event features U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Klein, of the Zionist Organization of America.

Perkins said the event has been discussed for some time. “But with recent comments by folks like Tucker, there was an urgency to go ahead and hold the conference,” he said.

The recent annual summit of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas was similarly focused on condemning antisemitism within the party, a shift from the original plans to celebrate the ceasefire in Gaza and the return of Hamas-held hostages.

Brooks said at the time, “We are at this point in what I consider sort of the early stages of an undeclared civil war within the Republican Party, as it relates to Israel, and antisemitism and the Jewish community.”

“And it’s really going to be our challenge going forward to combat that before it has a chance to grow and metastasize in the Republican Party,” Brooks said.

During one part of the conference, college students waved red signs that read, “Tucker is not MAGA.”

Trump addressed the summit by prerecorded video, using his time to promote his administration’s support for Israel. He did not mention the controversy that had dominated the conference.

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Adriana Gomez Licon in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. contributed to this report.

Every year, the entire staff of National Geographic — writers, explorers, photographers — get together to decide the best places to visit in the year to come.

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It’s like the world’s most qualified travel company is giving you advice for free. Getting there, now that will cost you – although for 2026’s picks, some destinations for U.S. residents are easier to reach than you might think.

“Our annual Best of the World feature will inspire you to explore Spain’s Basque Country beyond a total solar eclipse, hike a coast-to-coast trail in South Korea, plan a road trip on America’s iconic Route 66, or celebrate 800 years of maritime history in England,” write the magazine’s staff.

Domestically, places that made the list include Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (impressive arts and culture); Maui, Hawaii (recovering after the 2023 wildfires) and the Badlands of North Dakota (the soon-to-open Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library). In no particular order, here are some other destinations on the magazine’s list of 25.

National Geographic’s best places in the world to travel to in 2026

1 The Dolomites, Milan, Italy

2 Vancouver, Canada

3 Beijing, China

4 Rabat, Morocco

5 Hull, Yorkshire, England

The city of Tulsa, Okla., has preserved its historic Meadow Gold neon sign to shine bright over Route 66 (now 11th Street). (Photo by Scott Varley, Daily Breeze/SCNG)

6 Manila, Philippines

7 Akagera National Park, Rwanda

8 Oulu, Finland

9 Route 66, Oklahoma

10 Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico

Source: nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/best-of-the-world-2026

When the new Ken Burns documentary series “The American Revolution” premiered on PBS on Sunday, it marked the end of a filmmaking journey that began almost a decade ago.

“Ken always says these films take 10 years,” says Sarah Botstein, who co-directed the series with David Schmidt and Burns. “From the second he goes, ‘We’re going to make “The American Revolution”‘ to when it broadcasts is 10 years.”

That’s two years longer than the actual length of the American Revolution, but the Founding Fathers and the Continental Army were making history in real time, while Burns and his Florentine Films team were reading and researching nearly 250 years later.

“I’ve worked on a few of these big epic series,” says Botstein, who joined Burns’ filmmaking world in 1997. “Our process stays the same with any topic.

“The specific things that have to do with the 18th century and the American Revolution are different from jazz music or World War II or Vietnam,” she says of past docu-series from Burns and his collaborators. “But we start by immersing ourselves in the topic.

“We read a lot. We meet a lot of people. We meet scholars. We’re fundraising. Geoff Ward [who writes screenplays for Burns’ series] starts to familiarize himself with the topic. He’s reading and writing and thinking about the story he’s telling.

“We just jump into the deep end of the pool and try to figure out who’s alive that’s given this a lot of thought or has some direct relationship to the history,” Botstein says.

A few years in, the team starts interviewing the historians and scholars they’ve settled on.

“I’ve been likening it like going to Jane Kamensky’s senior seminar on the American Revolution,” Botstein says of interviewing the history professor and current president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and his home, Monticello.

“Or Vince Brown’s senior seminar on the American Revolution,” she adds, referring to the Harvard professor of African and African-American Studies. “We basically just go to school with the American Revolution.”

The interviews aren’t freeform, notes Schmidt, who joined Botstein on a recent video interview.

“We go with a list of questions, but we’re not trying to connect Point A to Point B,” he says. “‘Could you please lead us?’ We talk about the American Revolution. We’ll see what can make it into the film later.”

“The American Revolution” began broadcasting on PBS stations in two-hour episodes over six consecutive nights Sunday, Nov. 16, and will continue through Friday, Nov. 21, with the first of numerous rebroadcasts as a marathon on Saturday, Nov. 22, and Sunday, Nov. 23.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Schmidt and Botstein discussed what they learned in their deep dive into the American Revolution, how concepts such as democracy and liberty shifted during and after the revolution, what the series might mean to viewers today, and more.

Q: Most of us remember a few highlights about the American Revolution: Paul Revere’s ride, Lexington and Concord, Washington crossing the Delaware. What did you learn in the deep dive you took?

David Schmidt: There are two things that definitely were unlocked in my brain that I think are incredibly important. One is that while the American Revolution did win American independence, did unite the states, did create the republic that we operate under, those weren’t the goal at the start of the war.

At the time of Lexington and Concord, the goal was to liberate Boston, have a redress of all these grievances, and restore the way we operated within the British Empire to the way it used to work back when we were all happy. Independence, union, and republic were outcomes of the revolution. They were necessary in order to win the revolution.

The other, which should be so obvious, is something that Maya Jasanoff, [a historian specializing in the British Empire], says in the film: “The United States came out of violence.” That should be self-evident when we’re talking about a war. But I don’t think it is.

Sarah Botstein: I think how long the revolution took. And, obviously, nobody knows how history is going to go. We’ve all been talking about this. Ken will say, “George Washington didn’t know he’s going to be George Washington.” The founders couldn’t decide if they were going to declare independence or get the aid of a foreign power and try to throw off the Crown.

Nobody knows how things are going to happen. We feel that today. There are large pieces of the story that I think are left out, as your question suggests, of the four or five things we collectively think we know about the revolution.

It’s also the underdog story of all time. It’s so surprising and unlikely that we’re going to win. It sort of comes down to us [through time] as this great thing that we did – rather than this totally unlikely, surprising thing that we did.

Q: Talk about democracy, and how it became this revered result of the revolution when the series shows its origins as  almost unplanned.

Schmidt: Democracy is something that we as Americans have struggled to define for 250 or more years. Some of the historians in the film make the point that some of the big-name founding fathers were actually afraid of democracy. They thought it similar to anarchy. If you give power to the individual, every individual, what do you have left?

I think that democracy, such as it came out of the American Revolution, was, as the writer Bill Hogeland says in the film, an unintended consequence of the revolution. What that is, I believe, is that in order to win this war, the leaders of the patriot coalition had to offer more rights and freedoms than had existed before the revolution. And you see that play out in the Bill of Rights.

Democracy, one man, one vote, actually isn’t something that happens at the end of the revolution. It just kind of increases through the ages of the revolution and continues through the course of American history.

Q: The series also makes clear that the liberty and freedom the founders fought for in the revolution didn’t apply to everyone. Black Americans, Native Americans, women are not fully vested.

Botstein: The Declaration of Independence says “all,” right? So if you say “all,” even if you don’t mean it, eventually people are going to hear that and be inspired to push, as Maggie Blackhawk [a law professor and legal historian at New York University] says, the levers of power.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how to edit the scene on the Declaration of Independence. How to square all the complexities and ironies and complicated things about who wrote it, when it was written, and what it meant then to what it means now. It took us a long time to figure out how to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, how to point out its ironies and its failings and to see it as inspirational.

Schmidt: What might surprise people is how quickly people at the margins pick up the ideas of the Declaration and begin using them for themselves. There’s Lemuel Hayes [a prominent Black minister and Revolutionary War soldier] by the end of the year writing that liberty is everybody’s. I think it will surprise people that people at the time recognized the inconsistency in some of the arguments patriots were making.

Certainly, Abigail Adams was saying that. Phyllis Wheatley [the first Black American to publish a book of poetry] was saying that. It’s not just a presentist interpretation looking back on the past. It’s letting the people of the time themselves talk about that.

Q: Both of you worked on Ken’s series on Vietnam, which might be the most visually documented war in history. Here, there were no photographs, video or film. How did you adapt?

Botstein: I think we got better at it as we went. It’s pretty daunting, and I certainly was like what the (heck) are we going to do? We’re making a film before photographs and newsreels.

So first, we have to bring in all the stuff that’s been done over 250 years in terms of paintings and interpretations. Then, think about this as a story of land, right? It’s a vast continent. We moved north to south during the war. It was fought in every season. The weather plays a major role.

We’re a fairly organized, neurotic group of people. So we think, “OK, we’ve got five or six years. We’ve got to be winter here, summer here [for video shots of the locations where key events occurred]. We got better as went. I think in terms of how we worked with the reenactments and re-enactors.

We would obviously go to Lexington and Concord. They’re going to have a major reenactment. We’re going to go shoot it with a bazillion cameras. But we’re also going to have to get to know a few of those re-enactors and do smaller shoots.

Everything was very impressionistic. We shot through glass, we shot at a distance, we always had a smoke machine with us.

And we were fairly reliant on the extreme integrity of the living history museums, places like Colonial Williamsburg, Sturbridge Village [in Massachusetts], the Longhouse at Ganondagan in upstate New York. Those people were extremely generous to us.

Schmidt: An 18th-century war was so different from a 21st-century war. You can’t really imagine the human effort it takes to make the war effort work without seeing the people and movement in some way. That’s why we needed the re-enactors. You need to see them walking, going through mud.

Thousands of people, not just soldiers; there are women and children and other civilians following the army. There’s animals. It’s a moving village. You also want to see what it took to build the munitions, hammering away at a rifle as it’s being made. You want to see people’s hands make the uniforms. This is really a handmade war effort.

Q: People watching this series can learn a lot about the American Revolution. What lessons can it provide people today?

Botstein: Annette Gordon-Reed has a great bite at the very end of the film where she says she believes that the founders wanted us to be an engaged, active group of citizens. Education is at the heart of the founding principles of the United States. Citizenship is right behind it. You’re going from being a subject [of the Crown] to a citizen in the American Revolution.

And over the last 250 years, we’ve made good on who’s a citizen, who has a right to vote, who is an active member of this now-working republic-democracy. So I think citizenship is at the heart of the movie, as is patriotism.

I think being patriotic doesn’t mean that you just stand around mindlessly waving a flag. It means you are an active member of your community. You know who’s on your local school board. You care about your local senate race. You don’t pick up your head every four years and scream about the president.

They were worried about executive overreach. They were worried about a too powerful executive branch. The more I learned, the more I thought this Congress was what they worried about. They wanted Congress to be the voice of the people and to check the president.

We need to actually know what the founders actually thought about. My takeaway is a really interesting version of patriotism and citizenship that I did not understand 10 years ago, and I hope that comes through in the show.

Schmidt: One thing I get out of this story is that the times they lived through were incredibly uncertain. And in that uncertainty, there’s a lot of scary things. There can be terror in that, but there’s also a lot of possibility. People came together and did the work and got something done.

I think that’s a universal lesson that at times of uncertainty – and I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial take, that this is a time of uncertainty – there’s possibility in that uncertainty.

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