City’s Proposed “Fair Housing Growth Strategy” Plan Would Add a Sixth Borough Worth of New Housing, But No New Land
By Andrew Berman
155 WEST 11TH STREET: The city’s plan would require adding about 80 more of these to the neighborhood. Image courtesy of Village Preservation.
The city has released its draft Fair Housing Growth Strategy report, a blueprint for new housing development in NYC over the next ten years. It calls for dramatic changes across the city, in every corner.
It proposes NYC increase its number of housing units by 700,000, or 20%, over ten years. That’s about triple the rate NYC has been building in recent years, which have been some of the most intense years of residential building in decades.
That proposed increase would be the equivalent of adding Philadelphia to NYC in a decade ─ but without adding any new land. It’s also the equivalent of adding a sixth borough, but no extra space.
As an illustration, Queens, the city’s largest borough, has 896,333 housing units. The Bronx has 547,030 units, and Staten Island has 183,692 units, for a combined total of 730,722 units — about what is proposed to be added.
Each community board in the city would be expected to build a roughly proportional share of those new units to meet that goal. That’s the equivalent of each community board adding a Hudson Yards (“the largest private real estate development in United States history”) or a Long Island City (“the fastest growing urban neighborhood in America”) in that time. Those developments took place on largely industrial or underutilized land which lent itself to large scale new development. But community boards like ours, for the most part, don’t have such areas ─ so meeting those goals would require large scale demolition of existing buildings and neighborhoods.
To meet these goals, in just the next five years,* Community Board 2, Manhattan (Greenwich Village, SoHo, NoHo, Hudson Square) would need to add the equivalent of 200 more of 5-11 West 13th Street. That’s the 538-foot tall tower under construction west of Fifth Avenue which will be far and away the tallest ever built in Greenwich Village. Alternatively, 80 more of the 17-story 155 West 11th Street would be required to meet those targets. Presumably, roughly the same would be needed for the five years after that.
The housing the city and each community board would be expected to produce would be 75% market rate — which in our neighborhood means super-luxury housing ─ unaffordable to all but the richest of the rich. Twenty-five percent of the new housing the plan envisions is called “affordable.” But 70% of that “affordable” housing, or 17.5% of the total new housing, can require income levels that would make it unaffordable to at least almost half of all New Yorkers ─ and income levels unaffordable to a more than half of all NYC renters. Just 7.5% of the housing would be required to be affordable to New Yorkers at lower incomes.
The plan is based on the belief that there is an overall housing shortage in NYC, as opposed to a shortage of affordable housing, which continues to rapidly disappear. The premise is that large additions of new housing, no matter how expensive, will make prices more affordable for everyone, especially those most in need.
But the reality is that NYC actually has more housing now than it’s ever had, and more housing per person than it’s ever had. Many economists, planners, and housing experts dispute the contention that simply increasing housing supply will bring down costs, especially for those most in need.
If the proposed plan is adopted, moving forward it will be used to guide whether any rezoning proposal from developers or the city should be approved. Each community board will be called upon to pass rezonings to meet the housing goals these plans have set. Oftentimes those rezonings also include big giveaways to developers for luxury office, retail, and other commercial development (like the recent SoHo/NoHo rezoning), as well as the housing development they promise but frequently fail to deliver.
Prior such rezonings in our neighborhoods have missed the mark ─ by huge margins ─ at producing the housing and affordable housing they were supposed to generate. For example, rezonings in nearby Hudson Square and at St. John’s Terminal failed to produce much of the housing ─ and especially the affordable housing ─ they promised. Similar results from rezonings can be found throughout the city. But under the proposed planning framework, more such rezonings would be expected to be approved, based upon similar faulty methods of prediction of outcomes, to satisfy the goals set by the plan.
To learn more and send messages to the mayor and other city officials about the draft plan, go to www.villagepreservation.org/housing-plan.
*The plan’s specific community board-by-community board housing targets only cover the next five years, as opposed to the specific citywide target, which covers ten years.
