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Law in Contemporary Society
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Is Prohibitively Expensive Housing In New York City Inevitable?-- By KieranSingh2001 - 16 Apr 2024The ProblemAs someone who has never faced housing scarcity, it's hard to put my finger on why it ignites a passion in me more intense than nearly any other political issue. Perhaps it comes from seeing my neighbors, in my well-to-do neighborhood of Minneapolis, my hometown, preach high ideals of racial and economic justice in one breath, then lobby for zoning policies that keep their neighborhoods rich and white in the next. Yet, housing costs and scarcity are at their most severe here in NYC, and living here has crystallized my impulse to use my legal career to fight for everyone's right to housing. But for every tenant I can represent as a lawyer, there are a hundred other people with no representation in subpar, or prohibitively expensive, living conditions. Thus, the question remains: is it possible, on a macro level, to make housing affordable for everyone in New York? Even the oft-derided "transplants?"The Current NYC Housing LandscapeIn 2023, the median rent in Manhattan reached $4,200. In Brooklyn, it was $3,500. Thus, on average, it costs fifty thousand dollars a year just for housing in Manhattan. Moreover, the population of Manhattan has declined significantly in the last one hundred years, and it's not for lack of people's desire to live here.Zoning LawsIn New York, the amount that can be built is a function of the size of the property itself. The ratio between the total floor area of a building and the area of the plot of land is limited. Without getting into too many technical details, the ratio determines the height and volume of a development on a plot of land and varies based on neighborhood. Areas like Morningside allow residential high-rises while areas like Bushwick allow less density, and neighborhoods like prospect park south are sometimes restricted only to single- or two-family dwellingsRent Stabilization and Affordable HousingCurrently, around a million units in NYC are rent stabilized, meaning that landlords can only increase rent by a certain percentage each year, and that the landlord cannot refuse to renew the tenant's lease, among other protections. While theoretically abundant, affordable and stabilized units are hard to find. On sites like StreetEasy? , only 200 stabilized apartments are listed in the entire city. Stabilized and affordable apartments can also be obtained through lotteries, but that leaves something as significant as the right to shelter to chance.The Path to Housing AbundanceRezoningA 2018 Minneapolis rezoning plan allowed for the building of duplexes and triplexes on land that was previously zoned for single-family homes and eliminated parking minimums. The number of units in Minneapolis since the rezoning (from 2017-2022) increased by 14%, while the number of units in Minnesota at large only increased by 4%. Homelessness increased by 14% in the state, while decreasing by 12% in the city. Rents increased by 1% in Minneapolis, and 14% in the state. While still an increase in rent, 1% over 5 years far underpaced the rate of inflation. While NYC bears little similarity to Minneapolis, the same principle could apply here. Rezoning lower-density areas as "R10," a zone that allows for tall apartment towers and higher floor-area-ratios, will allow the construction of far more units per plot of land.Tracing Historical and Political Opposition to DevelopmentNew York has an infamous history with broad-scale city planning changes. Robert Moses, an immensely powerful bureaucrat, enacted citywide urban renewal, road, and public housing programs, often displacing poor people and minorities in the process. Opponents of this sort of rezoning draw apt comparisons to past "urban renewal" displacements. According to Village Preservation, an architectural and cultural preservation organization operating for more than 4 decades, A SoHo rezoning plan approved in 2021 did not live up to promises due to the replacement of rent-regulated buildings with market-rate buildings. It may be easy to dismiss this sort of argument from a statistical perspective, but losing a rent-stabilized apartment is a massive loss to each individual affected. Moreover, Village Preservation has pointed out that areas with the least amount of construction (and the most landmarking) have had the lowest increase in rents, whereas the areas with the most new construction have had the highest increase in rents. The Minneapolis data may be more on point, because there may be causal problems with assuming that places are more expensive because of development rather than the reverse. Regardless of the veracity of VP's analysis, however, the anti-rezoning viewpoint is politically salient and may cause trouble for any proposed rezoning plan.Rent StabilizationOpponents of upzoning, including prominent urban critic Roberta Gratz, often invoke the possibility of developers buying buildings with rent-regulated units, replacing them with shiny new apartment towers that offer only market-rate housing. However, the status quo of restricted supply is unsustainable, and upzoning can occur counter to, or without, displacement. First, if swathes of the city were rezoned for R10, wealthier people and transplants may move into new market-rate units, and with a greater supply of market-rate units, it would lower the competition for units overall. Second, the city can allow affordable developments even higher than what the R10 limit allows, greatly expanding the number of affordable units allowable per plot. The 421-a tax exemption could be expanded to incentivize higher percentages of affordable housing, for longer, further expanding the availability of affordable units. For people in existing units, current regulation requires that those forced to move after a demolition get moving assistance and stipends. With a much higher number of affordable units available, the city could extend assistance after demolition, guaranteeing a similarly-priced unit in the same general neighborhood. Finally, this abundance of affordable and stabilized housing units could allow residents to find rent-stabilized units more easily. These ideas may have a hard time getting past the legislature or city council, and there may be economic ramifications that I am currently oblivious to, but the current system is unsustainable. New York is the greatest city in the world, and its membership shouldn't be artificially restricted.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. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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