City of Yes: A Final Assessment

New York City has been experiencing a housing emergency since Tony Manero was strutting down the sidewalks of Bay Ridge in 1977’s “Saturday Night Fever.” This emergency consists of a mismatch between the price of existing housing and the means of local residents. This mismatch is disproportionally found at the bottom of the market, where it impacts lower income households. In response, the City has attempted a variety of policy initiatives. In recent years, many of them have tried to address the problem by stimulating the production of housing. The logic behind this supply-side policy approach rests on three propositions:

• That lack of affordable housing stems from a lack of housing supply;
• That an increase in housing supply will make housing for affordable to those in need; and
• That the relaxation of land use regulation provides an effective means to stimulate the new construction. 

The results of these past initiatives have not been encouraging and offer little evidence that you can build your way out of the affordability crisis with new market-rate construction. The Adams Administration, however, has doubled down on this strategy with its ambitious, citywide zoning text amendment City of Yes for Housing Opportunity. Over the past months, we have documented why this proposal is not only unlikely to address the lack of housing affordability, but also why it could exacerbate the problem. Today, as the City Council concludes its review of the plan, we provide an overview of this work. 

Early this year, Executive Director Andrew Berman delivered a lecture that examines whether evidence supports the argument that increases in housing supply leads to lower housing prices. It doesn’t — not at a neighborhood, borough, regional, or state level. It seems in fact to have the opposite effect; and he shows this to be the case even in the presence of an affordable housing requirement under the City’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. You can watch that lecture here. 

We then published a report that examines whether a housing shortage is truly the root cause of housing unaffordability. The evidence casts doubt on this explanation. The report shows that our housing stock has increased even as the city’s population has declined; and it demonstrates that some of the neighborhoods identified by the City as needing to produce more housing “to contribute their fair share” already are, in fact, among the densest neighborhoods in the world. Finally, the paper calls into question the capacity of new construction to alleviate housing prices, pointing out that new housing is disproportionately aimed at the luxury market and that it leads to the elimination of older, more affordable units. See the report here. 

We followed that up with a second report that looks at the relation between race demographics and new housing construction. Prominent voices in government and civic life have insisted that increasing our supply of market-rate housing in all neighborhoods will increase their inclusiveness. The evidence, in fact, shows the opposite. Neighborhoods throughout the city show a correlation between increases in new housing units, increases in the percentage share of White residents, and decreases in the percentage share of Black and Hispanic residents. See the report here.

Proponents of City of Yes and similar supply-side housing interventions point to Vancouver as an example that demonstrates the advisability of this approach. So we hosted a talk by Patrick Condon, a Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture, to discuss his book Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis. This work looks closely at the case of Vancouver and shows that, far from increasing housing affordability, the city’s flood of new housing construction has actually coincided with skyrocketing housing prices. Watch the video here. 

The City has tried to bolster their rationale for City of Yes by arguing that all housing scholars and advocacy groups believe that increasing the supply of market rate housing is a key ingredient in tackling the affordability crisis. This, in short, is a lie. We produced a blog series that offers an overview of many grounds for disagreement among scholars when it comes to the relationship between zoning regulation, housing supply, and housing affordability. Part one looks at the difference between an affordability crisis, for which there is ample evidence, and a general housing shortage, for which there is, at best, mixed evidence. Part two and three offer an overview of studies that dispute the relation between the relaxation of zoning controls, increases in housing supply, and increases in affordability. Part four deals with the impact of upzonings on housing affordability and demographics, discussing studies that establish a connection between these zoning changes and gentrification. See the series here.

Looking ahead, we will be holding a panel to consider yet more spurious evidence advanced by the City in support of City of Yes — the claim that the cities of Minneapolis and Austin demonstrate the effectiveness of increasing housing supply to tackle the problem of affordability. Joining us will be housing scholars from Austin and Minneapolis as well as a planning scholar with expertise in the New York City development. Register here!

The City Council’s vote on the City of Yes plan will happen very soon. Write to your council member now before it’s too late — you can do so here.