NYC has affordable housing. Manhattan increasingly doesn't, but so what? We have plenty of transit options from the other boros to Manhattan.
NYC's biggest current problem isn't affordable housing, it is that transit capital projects are grotesquely expensive because of a combination of: diffusion of political responsibility, a broken bidding process, and very strong construction unions. What we have is great, but without the ability to undertake new projects, including rehabilitation, without spending much more time and money than any other city in the world, it will eventually be a big problem.
NYC's main issue is that transit transfers between services are painful. Transfers between PATH, LIRR, NYC Ferry, MTA & the Air-Train can add a lot of unnecessary precious minutes. The MTA's newly minted OMNY payment system does not work on any of these either. The NYC transit system is expansive, but people stick to a select few locations because the transfers are so painful. Fixing this would be the easiest & cheapest solution to release some pressure from the housing market.
Then there is NYC's generosity which follows (Blue city?) America's quintessential 'spend a lot, but never address the problem' approach. Between 50k-100k illegal migrants are being housed in NYC hotels right now ! Really ? The world's most expensive real-estate is the best place for housing illegal-migrants in country with the world's most hospitable area ? About 100k people are in homeless shelters in similarly prime real-estate.
Same issue with rent control. In NYC, Roughly 1,006,000 rent-stabilized homes make up about 28 percent of the overall housing stock and 44 percent of all rentals. That's insane! Rent stabilized/controlled apartments face inevitable dilapidation while heavily limiting new housing supply in a city. Rent control is one of the best-studied : 'methods that do not work'. (In NYC rent stabilization is more common, but effectively follows the same patterns as rent control) Afaik, this does not include 500,000 housing projects residents, a lot of whom live in prime residential space in NYC.
Social welfare & housing assistance are all well & good. But, no one should be entitled to a zip-code. NY's expansive rail network means that you can live 30 miles out of town, and still be within 30 minutes of your workplace. Let the location of housing assistance get decided by the free market. You can have your rent controlled apartment or NYCHA assistance. But, you aren't entitled to live walking distance from the WTC just because you're poor or have been renting since 1970.
I agree that sustainable urbanism & dignified living should be central parts of 1st world city policy. But, blue cities in the US seem to be hellbent on looking at issues from the worst possible lens. Their solutions always answer the question : "What is the best way for us to maximize spend, minimize guilt and somehow lead to everyone being worse of ?". I had long thought that this pathology was limited to west coast cities, but the infection appears to have spread to the North East as well.
Not sure what your point is. If it turns out you have built lots and lots of the highest-density housing and there's nothing affordable in sight even after that, then guess what - you're basically in Manhattan. There are far worse problems to have when it comes to urban development!
As others have mentioned, increasing units without increasing infrastructure will only make things worse. NYC is great because of its transportation, subways for intra-city and rail for the suburbs. Even then, NYC isn't perfect. The middle class can't afford to live safety in NYC. It is polarized for the rich-poor. Living in Manhattan is price-prohibitive, $2500+ for a decent one bedroom. The bronx is mostly poor with a high crime-rate. Queens/Brooklyn are polarized too. The middle class need to commute from the suburbs (NJ, upstate NY, long island/CT), with commutes of 1 hour+ each way. Fortunately the rail system can mostly handle it, but it is still a lot of time out of the day.
Manhattan is hardly affordable. Development alone is hardly an answer for affordability. Most development projects in the US are designed to increase growth and demand, not to decrease price. Increased growth and demand actively work against affordability, so if your development is contributing to increased demand as much as it is to supply, it's not helping.
It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.
New York City's walkability and public transit are easily one of its greatest, most important, and most valuable features. It's a shame that there's been such a revolt against local taxation over the last 30-40 years. Our big cities are the lifeblood of our modern technological economy. And yet we are under-investing in them drastically. But it's absolutely an affordable problem, we have the money we just balk at talking on the responsibilities properly, we want to pretend that if we temporize and half-ass our way there the problems (not just transit but housing and opioids and so forth) will just take care of themselves or spontaneously disappear. That is an immature and unrealistic stance. We need to govern ourselves, we need to take care of and maintain our own cities and our own people. If we continue to fail to do so it won't just be public transit in one city in a death spiral, it'll be the whole entire country headed the way of a failed state. And it'll happen a lot sooner and a lot faster than you might expect.
New York definitely has an affordable housing issue but a vast over supply of luxury housing (a lot still going up to) that I'd imagine a good portion of these hires would be taking up.
I'm all for rent-stabilization going away, if two things happen:
1) We remove building restrictions around the city that keep new taller apartment buildings from going up. Yes, almost all of NYC is developed land, but many parts of Brooklyn, for example, are full of one and two story buildings that aren't using the space effectively.
2) We upgrade the mass transit systems to handle the increased population. The subway system is already strained to the breaking point, and the buses can't help enough without getting personal cars off the road to free up traffic.
The population of the city has dropped by around half a million since the pandemic and the rise of remote work. There are plenty of empty apartments, many of which are being warehoused by landlords because they don't want to rent out at stabilized rates. And erecting more luxury housing, which is mostly what gets built these days, isn't going to make city more affordable for the middle class. Perhaps vastly expanding public housing would, but the city housing authority is already almost $80 billion behind in deferred maintenance for its current housing stock. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/nyregion/nyc-housing-auth...)
The author has one thing right though. Transforming NYC into a place where nobody would want to live is a good way to make it more affordable.
I live in NYC. The problem is that there’s literally 0 housing. That’s it.
Literally so many people want to move here, but you look on all of streeteasy on a given day and there’s like 500 apartments. In a city of millions.
Sure you can pay more and get something. But it used to be that you traded a lot of quality of life (in unit washer dryer, dishwasher, ac, no walkups, cars, space, etc) for a lower price and the social aspects of living in a city. People don’t believe it, but cities used to be cheap. Now you literally pay more for less in all respects especially during Covid. As the prices have been spiraling up, you also get demographic shifts of only rich people or literally homeless shitting on the streets so you lose the cultural elements of having a diverse income unless you go deep into Brooklyn.
I’m not arguing that NYC is not fun still. It’s still great. But without housing for a semi normal price (I can’t even get a place with a dishwasher for less than 2.5k in most areas), and a lot of it, the trade off for living in nyc is making less and less sense.
Do you live here? Because there are lots of empty lots and there are tons of under-developed areas. I don't know why you believe "Manhattan is extremely construction-friendly"; it's certainly not 'construction-friendly' enough so that there are numerous affordable housing options. Some crazy number of housing units are under either rent control or rent stabilization. The housing dynamic here is insane.
True, but people also forget that new infrastructure, when well timed, can accelerate growth and expand the base. New York should know that more than any place. How do we know when to invest in infrastructure? I'd say that the affordable housing and transportation crises we're facing in US cities is the economy screaming at us to build.
NYC's biggest current problem isn't affordable housing, it is that transit capital projects are grotesquely expensive because of a combination of: diffusion of political responsibility, a broken bidding process, and very strong construction unions. What we have is great, but without the ability to undertake new projects, including rehabilitation, without spending much more time and money than any other city in the world, it will eventually be a big problem.
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