Mission Creep at Village Preservation:
The City of No

Definition: The gradual expansion of an
intervention, project or mission beyond its
original scope, focus or goals spawned by initial success

By Alec Pruchnicki

Village Preservation (VP) (previously known as The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) has had some spectacular initial successes since its founding in 1980. The protection of large parts of Greenwich Village and the Meatpacking District by the establishment of historic districts has often defeated a ravenous real estate industry. This has been consistent with its mission to “…document, celebrate, and preserve the special architectural and cultural heritage of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and Noho.”

But in recent years VP has taken positions, some good and some bad, and made demands on a variety of issues that are beyond its original mission, scope, or expertise. There have been many press releases and detailed discussions of important issues, but I’ll just highlight a few.

VP has pointed out, correctly, that often building new housing or getting zoning upgrades results in higher housing costs not lower ones. Of course it does. That is how gentrification works whether it is a building, neighborhood or whole city. Developers try and find run down areas that have the potential to become hot real estate markets, buy up cheap property, get zoning upgrades when possible and build like crazy. If the area does become hot, they sell/rent the new housing at a premium rate and make outrageous profits. The average prices must go up. Even when there is 75/25 mixed housing, there will still be three times as much market rate apartments as affordable or low-income ones. The math makes it inevitable that the average price goes up. It is straight forward mathematics when they guess right.

But average prices do not matter if you manage to put aside some affordable or low-income housing in the same areas as the gentrified construction. It is the mix of housing that can satisfy both gentrification and housing preservation needs at the same time. How do you do this?

Recently, there was a brief drop in rental prices in NYC. During Covid people were leaving the city and there were empty apartments. There were articles in the papers describing this and I knew several people who got leases with lower prices. Although landlords have been accused of warehousing empty apartments and although exact numbers are never available, during Covid just the opposite happened. Landlords hate empty apartments and if there are enough of them prices drop. How does this help us?

The City of Yes (CoY) proposal would encourage housing throughout the city and not just in downtown Manhattan. VP, with its history and base in Manhattan, doesn’t seem to know what is happening out in the boroughs. All over the city there are small time landlords who are not Rudins, Tischs, or Trumps and they need all the help they can get to build. There are also many people in two- or three-family private homes who would like to expand their homes for their own use or maybe add another apartment and give them the resources they will need to live on when they retire on a fixed income. In other words, the CoY is designed to encourage massive expansion throughout the city, maybe massive enough to produce excess apartments and lead to the drops in rent we saw during Covid.

VP has picked apart the various aspects of CoY in detail to show they won’t work, but hasn’t produced any viable alternative to this massive and risky proposal. This is because VP has zero experience in building and, most importantly, financing new housing. The reason developers get 75 to 100 percent of what they want and housing advocates get less is that developers usually come with 100 percent of the financing. If housing advocates had the money, we would get what we want and the public needs, and developers would have to take what is left over. VP has no realistic idea how to do this.

VP has also shown that CoY has many loopholes that developers can exploit and should be closed. But be careful. Let’s find out why those loopholes are there in the first place before closing them. Is it because developers are intransigent and the city hasn’t the strength to override them? Is it because the loopholes are not as easy as portrayed? Whatever the reason is we, including VP, should learn why they are there to begin with. Unfortunately, VP may not have the expertise to outsmart the real estate industry which has been doing this type of work forever, although people think it does. It is clear that present incentives to build affordable housing in NYC are failing and maybe it’s time to do something different, even if it appears risky. At least it’s time to do something different if we are really serious about solving our housing crises.

There is also a moral aspect to this fight. Greenwich Village is the most famous residential neighborhood on the face of the Earth. Our history of political movements and activism, music, art, literature and even tourism have, in combination, made us unique. Our ridiculously expensive housing costs have made us one of the richest, and inevitably one of the whitest, neighborhoods in the city. Who are we to lecture, using VP as our mouthpiece, to the rest of the city on housing issues when we have it so good and other neighborhoods are struggling? We do preservation outstandingly well, as our mission statement demands, but housing outstandingly poorly for many New Yorkers. Let’s stick to what we do best, at least for now.