In the 1970’s, John Lennon and Yoko Ono rented the top floor of a modest multi-family brownstone at 105 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They liked the relative anonymity of living in the area and the community of five other families with which they shared the building.
Next door at 107 Bank, composer John Cage and his partner, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, shared their building with another family.
Today, those two buildings have been combined and transformed into a single mega-mansion townhouse — sold for over 70 million dollars—one of the most expensive residential deals in Lower Manhattan.
This is not an isolated case. Over the past two decades, New York City has lost at least 9,300 housing units to similar conversions. At a time when the city’s vacancy rate is just 1.4%, we cannot afford to lose homes that already exist.
When multi-family buildings are converted into single-family residences, the impact extends beyond the loss of units. Fewer residents mean fewer customers for local businesses, less activity on our streets, and a gradual erosion of the neighborhood fabric that makes New York City special.
With a historically low vacancy rate, New York City needs more housing, not less. That is why we introduced the Teardown Tax Act.
Our bill imposes a $50,000 surcharge for every residential unit removed and not replaced from the housing supply during multi-family-to-single-family residential conversions. The revenue generated would be directed to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s Historic Preservation Grant Program, helping maintain and restore the buildings that anchor our neighborhoods. In this way, when housing units are lost, there is direct reinvestment in the affected communities.
This proposal is not about stopping development. It is about aligning incentives so that development supports, rather than diminishes, our housing stock. And we know this approach can work. Chicago implemented a similar teardown tax in 2021 and has since seen meaningful reductions in demolitions of middle-class multi-family homes. One neighborhood saw a 90% reduction in demolitions, while another experienced a 40% decrease. If Chicago can do it, so can New York.
The Teardown Tax Act is one piece of a broader housing strategy. Building new housing is essential, but so is protecting and preserving the housing we already have.
We should be asking a simple question: are our policies encouraging the creation and preservation of homes, or allowing them to disappear?
New York cannot solve its housing shortage by reducing its housing supply. This legislation is a straightforward step toward ensuring that our housing policies reflect that reality.