Small fears vs. Bill’s big plans

Sure, New York is a big, cosmopolitan city, but it’s also a collection of parochial towns. And one mark of the true New Yorker is hatred of change. At a certain point, each New Yorker fills out their mental map of their city, where things are and ought to be. Once that map is drawn, every time a bodega closes or a building rises, it feels like someone has rudely slapped a stain, an error, on your mental map or skyline.

New Yorkers are also a stubborn bunch, even embracing the stuff that causes agita, since it’s our agita. If you can make it here, right? As a city kid, I still feel out of place when I’m somewhere without streetlights, where birds don’t chirp at night because they know it’s time to sleep.

Speaking of agita, we pretty much all agree the rent is too damn high. The down payment? Downright astronomical. As Mos Def said, the cost of living is preposterous.

A big reason why: We hate change. So everyone is for more housing, just not in our neighborhood.

I can vouch that in my part of Brooklyn between Windsor Terrace and Kensington, in a little no-man’s-land of one and two-family houses and six-story apartment buildings, things are just right, with no need for new construction or new people fighting for a seat on the train or at the public school, thank you very much.

And because it’s nice and quiet, little rowhouses close enough to the Prospect Expressway where you can hear the traffic rumble by and that come with a long, crowded commute sell for seven figures. Two-bedroom apartments start renting at $3,000 a month. That’s nuts.

We live in a city that’s had a “housing crisis,” defined as a vacancy rate below 5%, since World War II. And that functionally has a 0% vacancy rate now except at the high end of the market, where landlords can afford to wait. A city where demand has been beating the hell out of supply for two decades, with no one stepping in to break them up. Where the last empty lots and easy opportunities for development were filled back when Ed Koch was asking, “How am I doin’?”

So it’s a huge credit to Mayor de Blasio that he’s spoken forcefully about the need to build up, as the only way out of the city’s affordability trap. And been clear that do- ing so will sometimes mean changing the character of neighborhoods, which are finally made up of the people as much as the buildings.

New York doesn’t build its own housing. Hell, it can hardly keep the roofs on the aging NYCHA buildings Washington and Albany have lost interest in supporting. What it can do is set rules for private developers that get housing built.

De Blasio is trying to do just that, while for the first time requiring those developers to set aside as affordable housing some units in the areas he’s trying to rezone.

He’s put real political capital behind those plans, as part of his effort to create or preserve 200,000 affordable units over 10 years, and has moved the ball forward despite furious political opposition that initially caught his administration flatfooted.

Some of that opposition inevitably accompanies any land-use plan in a city where every square inch is fiercely claimed and defended. Some came from his own “unaffordable political mistakes,” as an essay by my colleague Alyssa Katz put it.

But he’s admirably pushed forward, most recently with a key City Planning Commission vote Tuesday backing his East New York rezoning.

There’s a lot more to de Blasio’s plans. He’s doubled to $600 million the budget of the department of Housing Preservation and Development. Promised that half of the affordable units the plan would create would go to existing community members (policy that’s being challenged in court) to alleviate the concerns of current New Yorkers. And proposed a lot of particular rules to ensure that buildings are designed to match and contribute to the street life of neighborhoods, since how a building connects with the sidewalks is at least as important as where it meets the sky.

Of course, there’s also a lot to quibble with in the details and real reasons for fear as — contra Newton — what goes up just keeps going up. And there’s a big part of me that would love to have preserved the city in amber a couple of decades back.

Everyone loves the future, so long as it stays in the future. De Blasio, to his credit, is trying to deliver that future, starting now.

Want to know why the rent is too damn high? Ask the New Yorkers who can’t take change.