It’s all in the stock

NYC’s high-vacancy days of the 1970s have long ago ended, and the scant availability of affordable units continues its march, reaching acute levels last year. Only an average of 1.4% of apartments citywide were vacant during 2023, with vacancy rates less than 1% for all apartments cheaper than $2,400 a month, according to the triennial Housing and Vacancy Survey.

There are many avenues to a plausible answer here, but the answer itself remains the same: we need more housing of all types, particularly affordable housing, and we need it now.

There are many reasons to oppose a particular development, and we’re even sympathetic to some, like that builders can generally manage more affordability than they come to the table with or that sometimes projects are parachuted in without much awareness of the specific needs of particular communities. These issues can be and often are resolved through some pushpull with elected officials and community advocates.

Beyond that, though, we ask with absolute seriousness: what exactly is the alternative here? By which other process, as things stand today and with the laws and tools currently available to the city’s policymakers, can mixed-use developments with affordable housing be created? Because, regardless of any specific process complaints, opposition to the single current mechanism to get affordable housing is for all intents and purposes an opposition for generating any affordable housing.

This certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be creating new tools to deal with our housing crisis, and this page has supported practically every single such idea, from simplifying residential zoning codes to streamlining review processes to getting rid of the restrictive floor area regulation to tax incentives like 421-a.

These are good ideas that should be explored, passed and implemented, and much more useful than suing the Adams administration for dragging its feet in implementing an expansion of housing vouchers that ultimately can’t be used anywhere if there’s no housing. The emergency must be fixed before we start thinking about higher-order problems.

Unfortunately, some elected officials are playing the waiting game instead. That includes Council Member Crystal Hudson, who used her local veto — an unofficial policy that unfortunately remains despite having been ignored in other recent votes — to kill a rezoning for a lot on Pacific St. in Crown Heights, which would have produced not only 150 apartments but a child care center and some manufacturing space. How very wrong.

Unlike some of her colleagues, Hudson did not adopt an anti-development stance, but actually rooted her disapproval in a desire for more development, specifically her and Mayor Adams’ project for a broader Atlantic Ave. rezoning. Let’s be perfectly clear that we fully back this plan to create some 4,000 new apartments, of which well more than 1,000 would be below market-rate. The plan is an outgrowth of community support itself, and is just the type of ambitious high-impact effort that the city’s beleaguered housing stock needs.

Allowing this individual development to move forward doesn’t seem to impact that at all. It’d be one thing if the neighborhood rezoning were around the corner and Hudson could make the argument that it’d be neater for it all to happen at once, but it’s likely that the process might not be completed until next year. Why can’t we get a head start?