The Housing CrunchWhy New York City has something for everyone, except somewhere to live.
How Do We Fix This?
There is no one, clear solution to New York City's housing crisis. Instead, the right path forward will most likely involve putting together bits and pieces of many competing ideas. Living in a big, diverse place like New York necessarily means weighing and balancing many different needs and experiences. We heard about some of them from readers over the past couple of weeks of the Housing Crunch series. We heard about how nurses, hospitality workers and public employees are being stretched thin and priced out of housing marketed as "affordable." The "best solution for most people with an income below $125,000," as one reader put it, "is to move out." We heard from landlords and investors who felt that "overregulation" and politics are the main problems. One owner of an older apartment building that includes a rent-stabilized unit said it was not "financially viable" anymore and that the building will be torn down after it is sold. The debate over solutions is so contentious in part because different people are solving for different end goals. The various stakeholders do not have the same idea of what New York City should look like in five, 10 or 25 years. Will the population be growing or shrinking? How many low-earning artists will be able to afford to live in the city? What about financial executives, tech workers or people who work in elder care? How should scarce public resources be distributed? We asked a few people from different backgrounds to suggest a few ways they think the city should move forward. Alicia GlenFormer deputy mayor of New York City From 2014 to 2019, when Alicia Glen was a deputy mayor under Mayor Bill de Blasio, she helped significantly expand the city's investment in affordable housing. Now she is the managing principal at the real estate firm MSquared. She said the city needs to focus on the "small and practical" things, like regularly pursuing big neighborhood rezonings to make way for more density and negotiating better prices with landowners and contractors for affordable housing development. She said the city should spend more on subsidizing mixed-income housing developments and not just developments that target only low-income people. In addition, the city should take a big swing to finance big developments, she said. "The city should be doing a big housing production fund that will provide lower-cost capital to produce housing and they should focus less on affordability," she said. She added, "If you were going to build 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 a year, on top of existing production, you could make a credible argument that just building a lot of housing that's unregulated would be beneficial to the marketplace and even beneficial to the most vulnerable tenants."
Tisha ShresthaYouTube vlogger and renter on the Upper West Side Tisha Shrestha, who works in health care in New Jersey and lives on the Upper West Side, may not be one of the most vulnerable. But the hunt for her apartment, which she documented in a series on YouTube, reflected many difficulties New Yorkers encounter. This February, Shrestha moved into a $2,650 one-bedroom apartment, above her price range because she couldn't find anything more affordable where she would still have a reasonable commute. "It's very competitive, extremely competitive," she said. "It's brutal. I was jokingly mentioning to my friend it's somewhat like a full-time job." To improve things for renters, she said, there should be total transparency over how much must be paid upfront, which can be thousands of dollars — security deposit, broker fee, application fee, pet fee, move-in and move-out fees. Investigating each of these things takes time, which renters often don't have much of before an apartment gets snapped up. Shrestha also said that apartment listings should clearly link to the website of the city's housing department or other places where renters can look up past conditions, including complaints or housing code violations. "If the information is not upfront, it's hard to find," she said. Maggie BrunnPresident of A&E Real Estate When A&E Real Estate was founded in 2011, it had only one 49-unit building in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn in its portfolio. Today, it is a well-known New York City landlord, owning and operating some 15,000 units across the city. Maggie Brunn, its president, wants the city to rethink the rent stabilization program, which covers roughly one million apartments, or about half of all New York City apartments. She says it has become very tough to raise enough money from banks and investors to keep the apartments in good shape, largely because of caps on rent increases that the state passed in 2019. "When an apartment has been lived in for 20 or 30 years, those limits don't even come close to the actual costs of rewiring, plumbing and the basic improvements you'd need to rent an apartment that a family would be proud to call home," she said. "That means more and more of those desperately needed low-rent apartments are sitting vacant." Under one program, landlords who make improvements to individual units in big apartment buildings can recoup up to $30,000 of that investment through monthly rent increases that equal 1/180th of the improvement cost. For a $30,000 improvement, for example, the rent increase would be $166.67. That's not enough, Brunn said. A separate city program offers tax abatements to building owners who rent to some people over 62 or people with disabilities at lower costs. A similar program could be targeted at owners of rent-stabilized apartments who need to make renovations to bring units back online, Brunn said. "If we can't find a way to protect the existing housing stock for working families, we will continue to lose ground in the housing crisis," she said. Kirk GoodrichPresident of Monadnock Development Kirk Goodrich has spent 30 years working in affordable housing development, community development and real estate finance. Now the president of Monadnock Development, he said there are too many regulations that make development slow and expensive. He cited Local Law 44 of 2012, which requires developments to report to the city information on wages and rent, among other details. "We want to make sure people are getting paid the proper wages, no question," he said. "But we have a whole group of people dedicated to" meeting the requirements of the law. Goodrich said that the city should focus as much on the plight of working families as it does on helping the poorest residents. For example, 15 percent of the units in a new city-subsidized affordable housing development are typically set aside for people who are formerly homeless, compared with 5 percent for municipal employees. "Why can't they be equal?" he said. Goodrich added, "We've come to define affordable housing as principally being about helping the poorest and most vulnerable as opposed to seeing it as a vehicle to help working families affordably live where they grew up and where they work." Samuel SteinSenior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York The Community Service Society of New York is a nonprofit that works in the interest of low-income New Yorkers. Samuel Stein, a senior policy analyst for the organization, wants to help the people who bear the brunt of the housing crisis. For many of those people, the housing market will not create the solution on its own, he said. "We need a much stronger public hand in housing," he said. He said the state should create a public benefit corporation known as a social housing development authority that can borrow money, buy land, develop homes and override local zoning rules. It could develop mixed-income developments, instead of those only for lower-income people. Those properties would then be managed by the authority, a nonprofit or the tenants themselves. He said the government also needs to improve code enforcement, as homes for the poorest, including public housing and privately owned homes, slip further into disrepair. Makaelah Walters contributed research.
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Borough Bio: Staten IslandStaten Island, New York City's smallest borough by population, has more than 463,000 residents, or around 5 percent of the total city population. Almost 60 percent of those people identify as white, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, almost twice as many as in the city as a whole. The homeownership rate there is almost 70 percent, also roughly twice the rate of the city as a whole, according to an analysis by the New York University Furman Center. The borough has about 184,800 homes. The median home value is about $637,100. Staten Island is also relatively low-density, with a population of between 10,000 and 18,000 per square mile, compared with, for example, 220,000 on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, according to the analysis. Many politicians on Staten Island have resisted proposals to allow more housing development, including a citywide development push by the Adams administration. "Our communities and neighborhoods are, quite frankly, different from many parts of New York City," Vito Fossella, the borough president, said this summer in opposition to the mayor's plan. "And we prefer to maintain the existing character."
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N.Y. Today: 5 ways to fix the housing crisis
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