The Adams Administration’s proposed City of Yes of Housing Opportunity is the latest attempt by the City to tackle the affordable housing crisis by relaxing zoning controls. The hope is that, if you allow even bigger development, everyone will be able to sit back and watch the market work its magic, producing market rate construction […]
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 […]
This is the fourth installment in our Q & A series on what should be called City of Yes for Developer Opportunities, a massive rezoning that ostensibly addresses the city’s affordable housing crisis, but actually doesn’t. The proposal’s underlying assumption is that this crisis afflicts everyone, from the inconvenienced plutocrat who has to reach too […]
Many of the questions we keep encountering about the ambitious city-wide upzoning proposal called City of Yes for Housing Opportunity stem from a basic misunderstanding. Most people take “City of Yes” to be plain English, when, in fact, it’s government-speak for “City of No political will to meaningfully address the need for affordable housing.” In […]
The City of Yes zoning text amendment proposal continues its reckless march through the public review process, improbably announcing “next stop: housing affordability,” but really inspiring zero confidence about where the hell it’s taking us. Part 1 of this series refuted the claim that we are confronting a generalized housing crisis and answered questions about […]
The persistence of ideas offers no guarantees of their soundness. Take, for instance, the recurring belief that the answer to the housing question lies in less regulation. Deregulated housing markets have had a long and colorful history, but not one typically associated with an abundance of sound affordable housing for the working poor. On the […]
The ‘holiday’ of Festivus was developed as an alternative to the commercialization of the Christmas season and is celebrated annually on December 23rd. First celebrated in the mid-1960s by author and editor Daniel O’Keefe (father of Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe), it was popularized on Seinfeld’s December 18, 1997 episode “The Strike,” in which Kramer refuses to work […]
A seemingly intractable housing affordability crisis has placed a dichotomous choice at the heart of housing policy debates: to build or not to build. An increasingly loud and politically influential coalition, YIMBYism (“Yes in my Backyard”) adheres to this framing, and supports all new residential construction as a primary tool for mitigating housing costs. In […]
or YIMBY Movement: A Flat Earth Society for the 21st Century Earlier this month, I wrote an op-ed citing two recent analyses — one about new housing construction by neighborhood in New York City, the other about affordable housing prices by neighborhood — which showed that the YIMBY (‘Yes In My Backyard’) theory that simply […]
