In a year full of abundance discourse, New Rochelle Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert is living the abundance agenda.
The skyline of her Westchester County city, just 20 miles north of Manhattan, is barely recognizable from a decade ago. New apartment and condo towers have shot up, the city’s population is booming, and rents and home prices haven’t risen nearly as fast as in other cities in the region and across the US.
The city plans to fulfill its goal of adding 11,000 units in about 32 buildings in several years, growing the city’s housing stock by 37%, according to the Wall Street Journal. The mayor told Business Insider the city is about two-thirds of the way to its goal.
And the efforts are showing signs of success. Median rents in New Rochelle rose by just 7% between 2017 and 2023, according to a Pew analysis of Apartment List data. That’s compared to a 31% median rent increase nationwide.
Over the last decade, the city has supercharged housing construction by overhauling zoning laws, streamlining environmental review, and offering new tax breaks to developers. The city has focused on revitalizing its downtown by building homes on underutilized commercial and parking lots near rail and bus stations.
“We weren’t tearing down homes. We weren’t tearing down existing apartment buildings,” Ramos-Herbert said in an interview this fall with Business Insider. “We were just leveraging underutilized sites and catalyzing them through the development.”
The new homes don’t just impact New Rochelle’s 85,000 residents. They have implications for the entire region, which is suffering from one of the most severe housing shortages in the country. New York City relies on its suburbs to house a big portion of its workers and absorb a steady stream of people leaving the five boroughs.
While the Big Apple builds less housing per capita than most other major cities in the US, many of its suburbs have an even more dismal record. Between 2010 and 2021, the New York suburbs approved just 13 new homes for every 1,000 residents — about half the rate of the Big Apple.
There’s been some opposition to all the new construction in New Rochelle among locals. There are concerns about traffic, lack of parking, and noise from construction sites. But her constituents also worry that the shiny towers are being filled with transplants, rather than New Rochelle locals in need of affordable housing.
The mayor said that gentrification concerns are overblown. She noted that 22% of the residents in the new housing are from New Rochelle, and 21% are from surrounding towns in Westchester County. That’s compared to 33% who’ve come from New York City. The new units have given locals a smaller home to downsize to, or a way to shorten their commute by living within walking distance of an Amtrak and Metro-North rail station, she said.
“These are not strangers. These are our friends. These are your kids’ friends,” she said. “These are your parents.”
The city has been hailed as a model for communities that need to boost housing production amid severe affordability challenges. New Rochelle isn’t alone in the region — Jersey City has also built housing at a rapid clip in recent years, becoming another model for YIMBYs to point to.
Ramos-Herbert’s advice to other cities and communities: start by building transit-oriented development on underutilized commercial plots.
She also touted the critical income the new housing and residents bring in for the city through property taxes and sales tax, allowing it to invest in infrastructure and programs that benefit everyone. She pointed to the $100 million renovation of the city’s train station and the transformation of a highway that divides a historically Black neighborhood into a linear park and local road.
“You can only tax so much,” she said. “We have to kind of create, ensure, proactive creation of alternative revenue streams to support us.”
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