Build big, build now: More affordable housing
New York City’s affordable housing shortage was an acute crisis before coronavirus struck. Now, vacancies are rising, rents are falling — and the crisis has, in another sense, only grown.
COVID has cost hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers their jobs and income, even as shrinking city tax revenues are straining the budget of funds needed to help subsidize housing.
A city that, knock wood, will soon attract thousands of newcomers needs bold, smart strategies to produce an ample supply of affordable apartments, so the ranks of the homeless can decisively shrink and New York can be a place where working- and middle-class families can thrive.
As the city’s Housing Preservation and Development agency quietly suggested last week in a 238-page report many months in the making, there are ways to get more bang from our limited housing subsidy bucks beyond the de Blasio administration’s relatively necessary but insufficient policy of rezoning poorer neighborhoods and subsidizing thousands of units.
The administration is rightly pursuing rezoning in SoHo and Gowanus, and should look at ways to enable the same in other wealthier neighborhoods. The higher market-rate rents developers can charge there would allow city subsidy dollars to stretch further.
Simultaneously, Albany should lift the current law capping density in affordable housing, a 1961 relic that’s preventing already dense neighborhoods from building new homes.
The city could add an estimated 100,000 housing units without new costly construction, simply by changing zoning rules to allow single-family homes to have second dwellings on the premises, or allowing conversion of basements, attics and garages into separate housing.
Meanwhile, wage an all-out assault on the cost of construction, to enable new units to be produced at a lower price point.
Building will bring jobs today and housing tomorrow. Onward and upward.
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