NIMBYs are killing our city’s future

New York has lived through many periods when the future of our city seemed in serious jeopardy. There was the Great Depression of 1929; the city’s near insolvency in the 1970s; the tragedy and violence of the terrorist attack of 9/11, and the mortgage disaster of 2008, where homes and jobs were lost, resulting in the Great Recession.

At this juncture of our history in 2017 there is a disease that is quietly spreading among our neighborhoods and our elected officials that could result in tens of thousands of New Yorkers being left with no place to live.

That disease is NIMBYism, the not-in-my-backyard resistance to getting almost anything built in a city that can and must continue to meet the needs of a growing population.

Neighborhoods resist the possibility of new jails that would be needed to close the facilities at Rikers Island. They resist new public spaces. They resist new homeless shelters.

And, most perplexingly, they resist plans to build the very affordable housing that they simultaneously clamor for — and that will make it less painfully expensive to live in a city where, for at least a generation, rents seem to have risen far faster than the means to pay them.

It is understandable that squeaky wheels would balk at the prospect of new development. What is unacceptable is that members of the City Council are letting these voices control the conversation.

We have seen numerous plans to build affordable housing — including in Inwood and Lower Manhattan, Sunnyside in Queens, and now Crown Heights in Brooklyn — all killed by a single vote of a single Council member.

The most outrageous example of this destructive one-vote power to kill a project took place over the summer, when Bronx Councilman Andy King opposed a plan to turn a vast empty lot alongside a Bronx MTA bus depot into a shopping center and 180 apartments for senior citizens.

Even though the local community board and borough president supported the project, King, with the help of Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, killed it.

Because of a pernicious tradition of deference to local members on any and all projects requiring city approval, all it takes is a single vote by one of the 51 members of the City Council to block the development of a building that could house 400 families.

This is not fair. It is undemocratic and unreasonable.

I understand what’s driving the opposition. There’s a small but vocal contingent of people across the city who see every potential development, no matter its character, as a gentrifying force that will drive up rents — and ultimately force out existing residents.

A more cynical and convoluted opinion I have never heard. The hypocrisy is exposed by the intense NIMBY opposition to homeless shelters, which, by anyone’s lights, are not gentrifying forces.

Mayor de Blasio has called for 90 new shelters across the city, citing pressing need. A proposal in the Council would rewrite “fair share” rules in a manner that will in effect make it nearly impossible to site those facilities.

But a shelter is just an apartment building for the very poor, and nearly half of the residents are children. In fact, the new shelters are being built to accommodate those who have come from their former neighborhoods — the very people being pushed out by the gentrification City Council members claim to decry. At no time in our city’s history has there been such a desperate need for additional homeless shelters as there is now, with over 60,000 people living in shelters. The city’s extensive efforts to move families with children out of shelters, and prevent new ones from coming in, has only resulted in those numbers remaining roughly the same as they were at this time last year.

It is time for stronger leadership by the mayor. In the face of disingenuous, regressive resistance to change, he must break the back of the tradition whereby a single Council member can upend a project that’s good for the city as a whole — and defeat the proposed “fair share” reform that would prevent new shelters from opening.

New York City has 8.5 million people, and growing. We must dramatically increase our housing stock or we will have even more homeless and doubled up families, with tens of thousands of children deprived of life’s most basic need, housing.