http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/30/opinion/new-york-housing-solution.html [click thru to the portion of the article including aerial views and maps]
How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers
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By Vishaan Chakrabarti
Vishaan Chakrabarti is the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a New York City architecture firm, and the former director of planning for Manhattan.
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New York City doesn’t have enough homes. The average New Yorker now spends 34 percent of pre-tax income on rent, up from just 20 percent in 1965. There are many reasons homes in the city are so expensive, but at the root of it all, even after the pandemic, is supply and demand: Insufficient housing in our desirable city means more competition — and therefore sky-high prices — for the few new homes that trickle onto the market.
Some New Yorkers harbor fantasies that instead of building more, we can meet our housing needs through more rent control, against the advice of most economists, or by banning pieds-à-terre or by converting all vacant office towers into residential buildings, despite the expense and complexity. Given the enormity of the crisis, such measures would all be drops in the bucket, leading many to worry that if we were to actually build the hundreds of thousands of homes New Yorkers need, we would end up transforming the city into an unrecognizable forest of skyscrapers.
This resistance to change is more than just the usual grumbling from opinionated New Yorkers; it has become a significant obstacle, and it threatens to stifle the vitality of this great city. As Binyamin Appelbaum of The Times argues in his analysis of New York’s housing crisis: “New York is not a great city because of its buildings. It is a great city because it provides people with the opportunity to build better lives.”
I Want a City, Not a Museum
New York’s layers of laws to protect existing buildings has led to a shortage of housing.
To do that, New York needs to build more housing, and it can. New York could add dwellings for well over a million people — homes most New Yorkers could afford — without substantially changing the look and feel of the city.
My architecture firm, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, previously worked with Times Opinion to imagine the future of the city’s rail infrastructure and streets. This time, we took a fresh look at housing.
We found a way to add more than 500,000 homes — enough to house more than 1.3 million New Yorkers — without radically changing the character of the city’s neighborhoods or altering its historic districts [click thru with link above to see the details]
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