Three years ago, the New York City Council passed a law mandating the production and release of a “fair housing plan” that was to analyze housing data and make recommendations down to a community district level. A preliminary report is now out (technically it was due last October, but who’s counting) and it comes with an eye-popping number: 700,000 new homes are needed over the next 10 years for NYC to have a healthy housing market.
Beyond the raw number itself, the main takeaway of the report — and what’s likely to be its most socially and politically contentious recommendation — is that the strategy must be an every-neighborhood one. While the city has obviously long been home to particularly high-density neighborhoods as well as outer-borough ones that are closer in style to suburbs, no part of New York gets to claim that it is outside the scope of this problem and its solution. The report notes that the citywide vacancy rate for apartments under $1,100 is under 0.4 percent — if that figure looks familiar to you, it’s because I’ve cited it in the past from the same source, the citywide Housing and Vacancy Survey that last happened in 2023, meaning the figure is probably even lower now — and then homes in on “low grower” neighborhoods like Staten Island’s Mid-Island – that is, the places that rank in the bottom third of areas according to how much housing they’ve produced in recent decades.
For the city to have any hope of reaching the 700,000 unit goal, not only do high-grower neighborhoods have to maintain their rates of growth, but these low-grower ones must significantly ramp up. That’s not intended as a punishment for the lower-density areas, but as an acknowledgment of the reality that no part of the city can exempt itself from the repercussions of the housing crisis. To put it more bluntly, the chickens will always come home to roost: if certain parts of the city are de facto forced to absorb the totality of demand, inevitably those areas will be saturated and the demand will move elsewhere, to those very neighborhoods that had hoped to exempt themselves. What happens then is that rents and prices will jump when a sudden surge of demand with nowhere to go pours into those local markets, with buyers competing directly against local buyers for the same existing housing.
This is why the sort of local anti-development protectionism that is often framed around avoiding gentrification is self-defeating. Unless you can tamp down demand — and there aren’t really many ways to make that happen that aren’t, well, problematic both morally and economically — then the demand will spread out to where there’s availability, which means your neighborhood, eventually. If you have not built to accommodate that, your NIMBYism will ultimately be fuel for far more gentrification as the external demand sucks up whatever stock you’ve got available and drives up rents for existing residents, which is precisely what they claim to want to avoid.
Whether we like it or not, housing is both a need and a commodity, and it is a commodity for which the main barrier to access isn’t just cost but actual availability. Generally speaking, the reason people lack food or struggle with their phone bills and so on isn’t because there’s not enough food or cellular service. That they can’t access these things I believe is an indictment of aspects of our economic organization, but not necessarily of our ability to have them available in sufficient quantities. Housing, on the other hand, is actually in short supply. Yes, there is an element here of corporate and individual greed in raising home prices and rent (I am particularly concerned about the encroachment of private equity into the city’s housing market). There are real questions to be answered around housing warehousing and landlord collusion and other mechanisms to increase rents and earnings.
At the end of the day, though, the main driver of the housing crunch is that we simply don’t have enough housing for the people who need that housing, particularly in large urban centers like New York City. We could fix each of those other issues and this would still be true, and rents would still be high. The U.S. population is growing and only getting more urban. People are going to move here, and they’re going to need somewhere to live, and putting our heads in the sand about the only real, long-term fix is a choice that will only get more expensive and harder to reverse.
What’s interesting about the 700,000 number is that it is intended not just as the number of new units needed to quell the immediate emergency (290,000) but the long-term target necessary for preventing the emergency from flaring up again (410,000). I think most of the estimates I’ve seen over the years have focused on immediate need; this one does too, pegging the contemporary housing shortage as requiring 290,000 homes. That’s a figure that the report interestingly disaggregates further by specific needs, like allowing people who don’t want to live with parents or roommates to move out (93,000 homes) and achieving a more sustainable vacancy rate (101,000 homes). But then it looks further afield, estimating the need to accommodate NYC population growth of 240,000 by 2035 and that a further 170,000 would be needed for the vaguer goal of establishing a “healthier housing market.”
This is a bit of an uncomfortable number in that it is an acknowledgment of the depth of the long-term need for housing in the city, which can be understood much more expansively than putting out the fire, which is usually what we’re talking about. The preliminary report also makes the case that what’s needed is more housing across income bands, not just affordable housing, for the same reason that building just in certain neighborhoods wouldn’t be enough: if only one type of housing is growing, the unmet demand in other sectors will ultimately pit people against each other, and the higher-income people will typically win. (Though the report does set a five-year target of 123,250 affordable homes, including a range from affordable set-aside for unhoused folks.) That allows this rough plan to fit in neatly with Mamdani’s existing plan to build 200,000 new affordable homes in the next 10 years. It’s that, plus much more.
There’s a big gulf between a housing market that’s “no longer at acute emergency” and one that’s “healthy,” and really we should be shooting for the latter even if the former goal is more pressing. After years of mayors and legislators tossing around numbers in the vicinity of 200,000 homes (often not just new but “new and preserved,” which is different) as the objective, this 700,000 figure is a little jarring. Now, I can’t exactly speak to this number’s validity as the “true” need. This preliminary report is relatively sparse on detail and methodology, clocking in at 57 pages of mostly graphics and bullet-pointed summary. The section on “methodology” is a single slide that mostly just restates the findings. Is this more aspirational or is this really a baseline goal to have a comfortable level of vacancies, and how is that being determined, exactly?
The good news is that these are questions that you — yes, you! — can ask. The city will have a feedback form open (which doesn’t appear to be live yet) where you can submit comments until Sept. 19; two public briefing sessions (on August 26 and Sept. 2); and even one-on-one conversations with a member of the project team part of the Where We Live NYC umbrella — a joint project of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Department of City Planning — that can be scheduled here. Feedback and questions will be incorporated into a future, final and presumably far more extensive report, due out in October.
One more bit of good news is that the city is perhaps better positioned than it has been in some time to actually act on these recommendations and create somewhere near this quantity of additional housing, courtesy of changes in the City Charter and city law that empower the municipal government and the mayor to more aggressively pursue residential development in neighborhoods across the city. As I’ve said before, the Mamdani administration is well-positioned here to be the one that finally tames the beast of the city’s housing crunch. This report is at least one part of the blueprint.
