Half a century ago, city planners. warn that New York has the potential to grow into a “monster city” with 55 million people. To avoid this fate, the city passed a major overhaul of its zoning rule in 1961, limiting the size of buildings and the number of people that could live in them.
Now, a prolonged housing shortage, fueled in part by those old restrictions, is causing an affordability crisis.
It may feel counter-intuitive that the largest city in America is experiencing a housing shortage. Cranes and construction crews seem to be constantly on the move, stacking new residential buildings, condominiums, and tall skyscrapers.
But the problems reflect a national phenomenon and fueled by the popularity of New York City itself. More people want to live here than the city can afford, increasing the price of available housing.
New York metropolitan area need more than 340,000 additional homes in 2019, according to a May analysis by Up For Growth, a Washington policy and research group. City yes grant fewer building permits per resident for most of the past decade compared with Boston, Austin and San Francisco, according to a study from the Citizens Budget Committee, a nonprofit research group. And the new housing is not keeping pace with new job growth.
At the same time, the number of rental houses in under $1,500 is shrinkingand average rents for new Manhattan apartments that were rented in June reached an amazing $4,000real estate firm Douglas Elliman reports.
There are many barriers to increasing housing supply to meet demand, including:
● Planning restrictions limit the size of buildings and make them accessible to all adjacent areas, except to prevent new development;
● Construction costs, and especially the cost of subsidizing and supporting affordable housing;
● State and local politicians are unlikely to agree on meaningful solutions.
Not everyone agrees that easier building more homes is a panacea. Some housing advocates say government officials should also prioritize rent control and public housing to make living here more affordable.
However, most would agree that without some kind of intervention, the situation could worsen as the city tries to recover from the pandemic, exacerbating homelessness, making it harder for businesses to retain workers and forcing poorer residents.
“I’m usually quite an optimist,” said Vicki L. Been, former deputy mayor for housing and economic development under former mayor, Bill de Blasio, who advocated easier housing construction. . “I would describe myself as very concerned.”
Cynthia Reel, 66, is one of thousands of renters worried about the rising cost of living. In March, she moved from the Upper West Side to a cheaper apartment a few blocks north of the George Washington Bridge. But at $2,000 a month, even that feels hard to manage, especially if she gets a rent increase when her lease renews next year.
If the increase is “absurd,” she could move to New Jersey, she said, “even though I don’t want to do that.”
An invisible web of binding
The heart of the matter is zoning.
Jason Barr, a professor of economics at Rutgers University-Newark, who has written about the history of zoning.
Over the years, the rules have caused the anxiety they can create lack of housing.
The city is grappling with crime and financial hardship, with its population lost in the 1970s, falling from about 7.9 million in 1970 to about 7.1 million in 1980. But it recovered and reached 7.3 million in 1990 and over 8 million in 2000.
When Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mr conduct a major reshaping of the city, to help it recover and boost its economy and population. And while the plan paves the way for higher-density development and opening more of the city’s waterfront to residential use, some of his efforts have put limits on new housing.
Between 2003 and 2007, the Bloomberg administration redistributed nearly one-fifth of the city, according to a 2010 study by New York University’s Furman College Center for Urban and Real Estate Policy. But nearly 90% of the plots analyzed in the study had reduced capacity or only a modest increase.
At the same time, New Yorkers who didn’t want their neighborhood to change more and more were finding ways to slow down projects.
The development of zoning rules has allowed neighboring individuals and groups to file lawsuits against projects they do not like. Today, developers generally won’t recommend a project if they feel they will encounter significant resistance, said Kirk Goodrich, president of Monadnock Development.
Even if they propose a project, the road can be thorny: A recent project in Harlem could house more than 900 new homes was recently withdrawn after objections from local council members. Council members opposed two other projects – one Astoria in Queens and another one in Throgs Neck in the Bronx – there will be more than 3,000 housing units, of which about 800 units will be rented below market rates.
An effort to redistribute parts of the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, approved in 2021 and including a Monadnock project, has taken place. more than a decade, partly because of political infighting. “The time spent in these battles,” said Goodrich, “didn’t allow us to provide housing at scale in a timeframe that has allowed us to reduce the shortfall.”
According to a study by the Citizens Budget Committee, construction costs are also high and increase every year. Interest rates, rising to fight inflation, threaten to create growth even more expensive.
Even without inflation, unique provisions in New York City’s building code, plumbing code, and electrical code would increase development costs, according to the study.
Solution to prevent political quagmire
State and local officials have so far been unable to agree on meaningful solutions.
State lawmakers this year considered and failed to pass at least four different measures to boost housing supply in and around the city: will make it easier to build apartment buildings around public transport and that would allow cities to legalize dead basement and garage homes after opposition from legislators representing the New York City suburbs.
A bill would also remove state limits on residential construction sizes died in the legislature.
And legislators to controversial tax cuts helped finance the development of large new apartment buildings, known as 421-a, that expire without needing to be replaced or rehabilitated.
Cities and states have also failed to retool The tax system is fundamentally uneven that places more burden on larger apartment buildings than on smaller properties.
Mayor Eric Adams has promised to make it easier to build in New York City, for example, by removing or relaxing some of the requirements that new buildings provide parking for residents and streamlining building codes.
But the changes, expected to go into effect as early as 2024, could face stiff political opposition.
“More people than ever have been impacted by the housing crisis during the pandemic,” said Jessica Katz, the city’s housing director. “We hope that we can build an alliance around that.”
Yvonne Stennett, executive director of the Community League of the Heights, a community development group in Washington Heights, says the city should promote more projects like an affordable housing development project of 174 units in Inwood in which her team is involved, is possible after neighborhood rezoning and public and private grants.
Building and maintaining affordable homes requires a large amount of public investment to subsidize below-market rents. While Mr. Adams has committed to spending $22 billion over 10 years on affordable housing – a historically high figure – his administration has no specific housing reservation production goals and Housing advocates fear the investment may don’t go far enough.
For some, the housing supply issue has been exaggerated.
Samuel Stein, senior policy analyst at Community Service Society, a nonprofit group fighting poverty, said other factors, such as investors seeking higher returns on housing, also led to affordability issues.
He said lawmakers should prioritize measures that could limit exorbitant rent increases, like “good cause eviction” bill that also failed the State Legislature and channeled public investments into projects that benefited the lowest income New Yorkers.
An uncertain future
As solutions remain stalled, affordability issues are forcing New Yorkers to make tough decisions about where to live that could change the very nature of the city.
Many New Yorkers wonder if middle- and low-income people can continue to find homes here. Ms Stennett said many longtime residents of her neighborhood, long a largely working-class area, were “pushed out” as the wealthier moved in.
“This city is getting too rich – who can afford some of this?” Mrs. Stennett said. “How is a newlywed couple supposed to do that? How is a incoming freshman supposed to do it? How can a family receiving public assistance be expected to receive government support? “
Taylor Sicko, 25, used to move from the apartment in Brooklyn, where she lived with a roommate, to Midtown Manhattan, until she lost her job during the pandemic and could no longer afford the $1,300 monthly rent. Ms. Sicko took an online quiz about where to live and decided to book a late 2020 flight to Denver, a city she had never visited.
Nearly two years later, Ms. Sicko, still lives there, with a new car and apartment of her own and has no plans to leave anytime soon. And she won’t have to: Her new job is a completely remote role with a legitimate tech company based in New York.
“I find myself very rarely miss New York,” Ms. Sicko said.
Matthew Haag contribution report.
