New York will have to build across all income bands and all neighborhoods to reach a place where we have a stable, healthy housing market. That’s the warning from the city housing report issued last week calling for 700,000 new homes being needed over the next decade.
We often talk about solutions to our housing crisis in terms of tossing water on the raging fire; the question, basically, is how much we need to build simply to get out of our dire emergency.
But, of course, it makes far more sense to think about how to go beyond surviving and towards thriving, which would mean among other things that people who live with relatives or roommates but want their own places can actually do so and that people can keep easily moving to NYC without having to be in steep competition not only with each other but with the present population, whose middle class has been increasingly driven out.
While this preliminary Fair Housing Growth Strategy report, the first one ever done under a 2023 law, pegs the number of new units needed to merely bring the current abysmally low 1.4% vacancy rate to a more viable level at 290,000, it suggests another 240,000 to accommodate population growth and 170,000 on top of that to take some of the pressure off a market that has been overheated for decades.
We look forward to seeing more of its specific methodology in both the coming hearings and the report’s final iteration, due out in October, as it remains rather sparse in this initial version.
Nonetheless, whether that 700,000 figure is the exact “right” number in the long run is sort of irrelevant. None of us can predict exactly how population flows will have shaped up in a decade, but what we do know is that the U.S. population is growing, that it is becoming more urban, and that there is no particular reason to think our housing needs will resolve themselves without heavy construction and conversion.
If ever there was a time to shoot for lofty goals, that time is now, particularly as the city government finds itself empowered with an array of new tools to compel and entice greater housing development. Despite its many foibles, one thing the Adams administration undoubtedly did right was push through the City of Yes slate of housing measures, which understood that the approach to building must be streamlined; those gains were bolstered by city voters approving last year’s housing-related ballot proposals, which give Mayor Mamdani a much clearer runway to help build with the gusto that’s needed.
One thing the new report once again makes clear is that expanding our housing stock is a joint responsibility of the entire city, not just the historically densely settled parts. Contrary to the fear-mongering of some local busybodies, increases in development are always envisioned proportionally to existing density, meaning no one is suggesting that a sleepy suburban neighborhood suddenly host a Hudson Yards-style collection of high-rises. If neighborhoods really want to avoid displacement, the best way is to do their part.
What must happen is that even these lower density neighborhoods start adding housing stock at rates roughly proportional to what every other neighborhood is shouldering. The idea that any neighborhood can insulate itself from the effects of demand that far outstrips supply is folly.