Voters approve digitized New York City map amid affordable housing push

New York City voters last week comfortably approved an amendment to the city charter that would for the first time require the city to consolidate and digitize its city map, in an effort supporters said would help boost its housing supply.

More than 70% of voters agreed to amend the City Charter to require that the borough map office be consolidated and to create a centralized digital city map at the Department of City Planning. Right now, the city map exists as around 8,000 individual paper maps that are administered separately by each borough, resulting in differences in terminology, symbols and even height measurements.

The vote was part of a broader effort to amend the City Charter, which outgoing Mayor Eric Adams kicked off in Dec. 2024 with the creation of the current New York City Charter Revision Commission. In their final report, commissioners said having a more unified approach will help get development projects built more quickly, especially as “startlingly anachronistic methods can impose significant costs in time and money on infrastructure, housing, and other projects (both public and private) that require confirmation of, or changes to, the City Map.”

“Confirmation of jurisdiction for an infrastructure project in a waterfront area, where coastlines have changed over time and property records can be spotty, can require a physical trip to consult fragile canvas maps from over 100 years ago,” the report says. “A street demapping for an [New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development]-sponsored affordable housing project can add close to a year of additional time, even for projects that are already going through [public review].”

Maintaining the city map has been the role of the city’s Borough presidents through their respective Topographical Offices since 1901. But the commission’s report noted that any map changes face a “long queue” at those offices due to the work involved and a lack of staff, meaning there are likely only three or four changes made a year. And the city’s planning department has taken on most land use functions formerly held by Borough Presidents since 1963.

“Routine alterations can take years to get to the starting line,” the report says. “The queue is also unpredictable, since priorities of the Mayor, Borough President, or other officials may bump private applicants to the end of the line. The length and complexity of this process has rendered City Map changes perhaps the most feared [review] actions among private applicants.”

Digitizing the map would also help “modernize a small but important corner of City government that creates significant headaches for urgent infrastructure, housing, and other projects,” the commission report said. That part of things would require each of the 8,000 or so paper city maps to be collected and scanned, but the whole effort will not be easy.

“Consolidating the borough maps into a unified City Map is not a task that can be accomplished in an instant,” the report says. “DCP staff estimate it will take approximately 18 months to translate the borough maps into a unified language and scan pre-1938 maps — that is, maps from before DCP’s creation — that exist only in paper form in borough Topographical Bureaus.”

While the proposal appeared very popular among New York City voters, it had its detractors. City Councilmember Robert Holden said in a statement the digital map “sounds helpful, but this measure is vague on cost, privacy, and who gets to change it.”

Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella, meanwhile, warned that centralizing the city map would “make it harder for residents and businesses to get quick, accurate help.”

And he said the borough presidents’ offices have “vital” functions that would be lost under this proposal, including maintaining the maps, assigning and verifying addresses, providing mapping data for surveyors, public and agency access to the maps and reviewing alterations. He called it a “power grab” that would undermine “our voice when it comes to land use.”

“It sounds like a small update, but it could mean big changes for how the city runs,” Fossella wrote in a Facebook post before Election Day. “[If] passed, this proposal would strip away every borough’s voice in city governance — leaving land use issues in the hands of a faceless city agency with no relation or understanding of each borough’s specific needs and geography.”

In response to those allegations, the charter commission said it will rely on the borough offices’ expertise even when the map is centralized. And it said those offices will not be required to close, but instead would offer them “additional flexibility” by removing the requirement that they have a mapping bureau staffed by a professional engineer.

Under the commission’s proposal, the city map would be consolidated by Jan. 1, 2028, then set a deadline of Jan. 1, 2029, for a digital map to enter the city’s review process. If it passes muster, the digital city map would then be the source for planning reviews and approvals, rather than paper maps.