There are several ways that this could be improved, it seems to me. Currently you bear the weight of having to make up everything: you cite no other writer on any aspect of the problem of city planning and housing construction in New York City. Given that an immense amount is written on the subject, which is intensively studied by many disciplines and engages, not surprisingly, quite a few capable and well-informed New Yorkers, you should not find it hard to locate writing you can learn from.

You can save space by removing technical details in the zoning system. Your objective is to show that moving from single-family homes to high-density high-rise apartment blocks creates housing. Perhaps not reading anything written about cities since Jane Jacobs would make it easier to say nothing about the social consequences.

Another route to improvement would be to think about politics, rather than dismissing it, like air resistance, from the simplified physics problem. New York City is a somewhat complicated political environment, which is why writing about even a small sliver of it (Peter Stuyvesant Village, or Forest Hills, let's say) will require more than a little political history to become intelligible. Robert Caro on Robert Moses still seems to me like the required starting place, though the New York City of The Power Broker is as old as I am now.