A new proposal to ease New York City’s housing crisis would make way for nearly 10,000 apartments in parts of Midtown Manhattan that do not currently allow new residential construction, a shift officials hope will reinvigorate an area that has come to represent economic challenge.

The plan, which city officials introduced at a Planning Commission meeting on Tuesday, seeks to change the zoning for 42 blocks of the neighborhood. That would allow for some 9,700 additional homes, including 2,900 designed to be affordable for moderate- or lower-income New Yorkers.

“It’s unfathomable that in an area this central, with a housing crisis this dire, that if you wanted to build housing here, our own rules would simply not allow it,” said Dan Garodnick, the head of the Planning Department.

The plan must be approved by the City Council, which is expected to vote on it this year. It is likely to pass because it has the support of the two Manhattan councilmen, Keith Powers and Erik Bottcher, who represent the area, which has struggled to recover from the depths of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Bottcher said “it doesn’t make sense that we have slots of Midtown Manhattan that don’t support housing at all.”

But he said that as discussions around the plan continue over the next few months, it will be important to find a balance between new construction, the conversion of office buildings to apartments and the needs of existing businesses in the area, like the fashion industry.

The Midtown plan is yet another attempt by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams to deal with a housing shortage that is at its worst point in half a century. That scarcity has helped drive up the cost of living substantially, making the city an emblem of America’s deepening affordability crisis.

The issue is already becoming a major focus in the mayor’s race, as Mr. Adams’s challengers seek to outdo one another with promises to make the city more affordable.

And lawmakers have increasingly focused on lifting restrictions on development in recent years. Late last year, the city approved a wide-ranging plan — called City of Yes — to encourage more development all across the city. The plan in Midtown might benefit from some of those changes, Mr. Garodnick said, including one provision that makes it easier to convert struggling office buildings to housing.

Mr. Adams, who has called for 100,000 new homes in Manhattan over the next decade, said in a statement on Tuesday that the Midtown proposal was an example of how the city is “building the neighborhoods of tomorrow with vibrant 24/7 space, affordable housing, and inclusive, dynamic public realm opportunities.”

The proposal would also benefit from changes the State Legislature passed last year that allow the development of taller residential high-rises in Manhattan.

The four areas affected by the plan include swaths between 35th and 40th Streets south of Bryant Park; between 34th and 41st Streets west of Broadway; and two chunks between 23rd and 31st Streets on either side of Sixth Avenue. There are already a variety of buildings in these zones, including several high-rises that were built before zoning restrictions were put in place in the mid-20th century.

At the meeting on Tuesday, city officials said the areas are particularly good places to put more housing because they are close to more than a dozen subway lines. The area is also “job rich,” Mr. Garodnick said, with more than 7,000 businesses and 135,000 jobs.

The Midtown plan is also designed to boost retail in the neighborhood, where vacancies in commercial buildings and less foot traffic have contributed to a feeling of gloom.

“There is a high level of agreement that the status quo is not working in Midtown South,” Mr. Garodnick said. “The neighborhood needs a boost.”

Still, with its potential to reshape a prominent part of the city, the plan most likely will be opposed by those who are skeptical about new development.

“Who is it going to benefit?” said John Mudd, the president of the Midtown South Community Council. “It’s not going to end the homeless issue, it’s not going to end the cost burden issue, it’s not going to bring back people that are artists.”

Even the addition of nearly 10,000 homes will hardly make a dent in New York City’s housing shortage, which is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of units. And, as opponents of new developments often argue, it could put more pressure on the city’s infrastructure, including the transit system.

Mr. Mudd said the Midtown rezoning was just one in a series of projects that benefit private developers and ignore the needs of everyday New Yorkers. He pointed to other nearby examples, including the development of market-rate housing on a public housing site and new buildings around Penn Station.

“There’s a lot to deal with,” he said.

By including Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, in his extraordinary pardons for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, President Trump granted clemency on Monday to a man whom prosecutors have described as a savvy, street-fighting extremist who helped his compatriots in “Trump’s army” initiate an assault on the Capitol.

Mr. Tarrio, 42, was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other felonies for his role in the Capitol attack. His was the longest sentence handed down against any of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with Jan. 6.

A representative for Mr. Tarrio said he had been released from a federal prison in Louisiana and was expected to return to Miami, his hometown, on Tuesday afternoon.

Even before Jan. 6, Mr. Tarrio was among the best-known far-right figures in the country, having been involved in violent protests going back to the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. Rarely seen without his sunglasses and baseball cap, he took control of the Proud Boys the next year after the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, stepped aside.

But Mr. Tarrio is arguably better known for the part he played in supporting Mr. Trump during the 2020 election — and in the chaotic months after he lost the race. The Proud Boys were thrust into the heart of that campaign two months before Election Day when Mr. Trump, at one of the presidential debates, called out the group by name, telling its members to “stand back and stand by.”

Mr. Tarrio responded immediately on social media, “Standing by, sir.”

In December of that year, Mr. Tarrio responded to a message that Mr. Trump himself posted on social media, summoning his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 for what he said would be a “wild” protest. The day after, Mr. Tarrio established a crew of “hand-selected members” for the rally, court papers said, known within the Proud Boys as the Ministry of Self-Defense.

During the trial of Mr. Tarrio and four other Proud Boys, federal prosecutors described how the group under his control was “thirsting for violence and organizing for action” after Mr. Trump lost the election and ultimately fought at the Capitol “to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it.”

Mr. Tarrio was not in Washington on Jan. 6. He had been kicked out of the city days earlier by a local judge presiding over separate criminal charges brought against him for vandalizing a Black church after an earlier pro-Trump rally. But prosecutors say that he and other members of his group frenetically exchanged text messages while the mob, with the Proud Boys in the lead, overran the Capitol.

Ultimately, video clips of the attack showed that the Proud Boys were instrumental in encouraging other rioters to confront the police or in confronting officers themselves. Members of the group took part in several breaches of police lines and were at the forefront of violence almost the entire day.

When he was sentenced in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Tarrio sought to portray himself as humbled by the events of Jan. 6, apologizing for his role in the riot and calling it a “national embarrassment.”

“I am not a political zealot,” he said.

A few months before he went on trial, he met secretly with federal prosecutors who, by his own account, offered him leniency if he could corroborate their theory that he had been in touch with Mr. Trump in the run-up to Jan. 6 through at least three intermediaries.

Mr. Tarrio said he told the prosecutors they were wrong — a position that, regardless of its veracity, would have surely pleased Mr. Trump when it was made public.

It remains unclear what Mr. Tarrio’s release might mean for the future of the Proud Boys. He is a polarizing figure in the group, beloved by some members and despised and distrusted by others, including many from Miami, his hometown.

Moreover, the organization dismantled its national leadership and largely retreated from high-profile demonstrations after Jan. 6, which led to the arrest and prosecution of dozens of its members. While some chapters of the Proud Boys used violent language on their online accounts during the 2024 campaign, the group was barely present on the street or at rallies in support of Mr. Trump.

So what do you do if you find a 1,000-pound moose stuck in a partly frozen lake in the center of a six-million-acre wilderness?

When rescuers arrived at Lake Abanakee in Northern New York, only the head of the moose was above the water. It had fallen through about 40 minutes earlier, and was spotted by an unidentified bystander in the vast forests of the Adirondacks.

The moose, a male that had shed its antlers, had walked about 200 feet onto the lake in Indian Lake, about 100 miles northwest of Albany, before falling into the frigid waters late on Thursday morning, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The rescuers saw that the moose was unable to get out of the water. An airboat, a flat-bottomed watercraft with a propeller, was on its way to help.

“I guess there’s no training manual for getting moose out of the ice,” Lt. Robert Higgins, a state environmental conservation officer, said with a chuckle later in an interview posted on the agency’s website.

He narrated the rescue like it was all in a day’s work, as if anyone would quickly dress in cold-water gear and venture onto a frozen lake with sleds and heavy chain saws, as the team had done.

“We knew that time wasn’t on our side,” Evan Nahor, a forest ranger, said in the interview. “It was, ‘Do what we can with what we have.’”

The airboat had not yet arrived, so the rescuers walked onto the ice, using a spud bar, which is a long, metal tool with a chisel on one end, to find the most solid path to the moose.

“Every minute counts,” Lieutenant Higgins said of the rescue.

They weren’t worried, they said, about needing to be saved themselves if they fell through. Their dry suits would keep them warm and afloat and their safety ropes would be used to pull each other out.

Kneeling on sleds — to spread out their weight across the ice — they began using a chain saw to remove sections of ice and pushing them away to open a channel to the shore.

The video shows the crew attacking the ice surrounding the moose as it calmly treaded water — maybe a little too calmly.

“We tried poking it with a couple of different things, but it didn’t seem afraid of them,” said another forest ranger, Matt Savarie. “So, finally, we pushed the jet sleds that we had up close to it. And for whatever reason, it was scared of those. So once we got behind it, we were able to direct it.”

The bull moose, which can weigh around 1,000 pounds, paddled briskly through the narrow channel and made it to shore. By then it had been in the water for about two hours.

“It was really tired,” Lieutenant Higgins said. “It was shivering. It just didn’t have much energy left. We didn’t know if it was going to be able to stand up or not.”

It took about 15 minutes for the moose to find its footing and strength. “It tried a few times and eventually it stood up,” Lieutenant Higgins said.

Then it shook off the ice and took an easy stride on a different path, into the forest.