The release of our analysis debunking the city and state’s claims underlying their plans for bigger and denser market-rate housing developments certainly attracted lots of attention and interest. We’ve received calls from not only across the city, but the country — from housing activists and neighborhood leaders who know they’re being railroaded into accepting huge gifts to developers and increasingly oversized construction under the premise that it will bring down housing prices for all. Our analysis undermines the claim that more unaffordable housing will make housing more affordable for everyone, and that neighborhoods like ours — among the most densely populated in the world — aren’t doing enough to provide housing.

We do have an affordable housing shortage. But the way to address it is not to allow developers to build more and bigger unaffordable housing — they’ll continue to do plenty of that under existing rules. You can now read and access our analysis in report form.

This is not the first time the city’s made wildly inaccurate claims about how zoning and development will pan out in terms of housing and affordability. We published a report analyzing several of the city’s rezonings over the last dozen or so years and how they played out as compared to the city’s projections. The results were shocking but unsurprising, and illuminating:

This is all more than an academic exercise. Mayor Adams’ “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity” proposal would allow larger and denser luxury condo developments across our neighborhoods, all under the pretense that doing so would somehow help fix our affordability challenges. 

TO HELP: