Those of us fortunate enough to live anywhere but New York City may take comfort from reading the news about what is arguably NYC’s biggest campaign issue in 2025 -- the lack of affordable housing in the nation’s biggest city.
“There but for the grace of God go I,” we may say, shaking our heads in flyover country, where apartment rents and home prices may also be too high, but where there is at least some kind of availability.
But NYC’s problem is only local in part; many of the inputs are nationwide issues, which a new mayor, regardless of his self-confidence, cannot resolve on his own. Changes are needed at both the state capitals and the nation’s capital, if we want housing to be available and affordable again.
Since a safe and comfortable abode is a key element of the American dream, this is a challenge in which we all have an interest.
Full-on Marxist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani advocates the usual New York methods to address the problem: more rent control and more government subsidies.
Marxist-lite candidate Andrew Cuomo advocates a more national Democrat method: building more public housing, though at least his platform shows enough self-awareness to acknowledge that tax code adjustments are needed, too. His greater experience in government helps him offer a more robust platform than Mamdani does.
It is possible, frankly, that part of the problem will go away as employers flee the state, taking their workforces with them, opening up at least those newly-vacated residences to new residents. But that’s hardly a net positive solution for the city or the state.
In truth, the biggest problems with big city housing -- not only in New York but across the country -- are issues common to many blue cities and blue states, to which the leading mayoral candidates on this fall’s ballot would never dream of admitting.
Illegal Immigration
The easiest item to address is the massive influx of illegal aliens who have descended on this country’s big cities in recent decades, especially exploding during the four-year open-borders fest of the Biden-Harris regime.
Many of those millions landed in New York City, partially because it’s always been a magnet for everyone, partially because it’s a special magnet for criminals (to say NYC is a target-rich environment for gangsters and drug dealers is an understatement), and partially because the city and state government have literally advertised it as a magnet by declaring themselves a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state.
To make it worse, the city and state have been paying exorbitant funds for years to house many of these illegals, instead of spending a fraction of that on throwing them out. A bankrupt city can’t afford to spend a couple billion dollars per year of taxpayer dollars on housing, feeding, educating, clothing and entertaining people who aren’t even a part of their tax base.
Cooperating with the federal government in deporting all the illegals would be the single easiest step in solving their housing crisis. So they won’t even consider it.
Private Investment
In an economically booming area, there should be businesses falling all over each other in the rush to meet its housing needs. We shouldn’t need government to build public housing at all, because private housing should be happily filling that gap.
The problem is therefore twofold:
People and businesses are rightly fleeing New York as a tax and regulatory hell, so real-estate investors can’t tell how long this housing problem will last. There’s no point in spending a few years building a half million new apartments, condos, and houses if all those potential renters and buyers have left town by the time they’re built.
And the city and state have put incredible barriers in the way of new housing construction, making it more difficult to build cost-effective apartments, condos, and houses than ever before. Acolytes of the climate cult have tried banning everything from affordable single-phase gas furnaces and other inexpensive gas appliances to the glass-and-steel skyscraper construction that has been de rigueur in big city architecture for a century. The city and state both oppose traditional, effective energy production, such as natural gas, nuclear, oil, and coal, starving new construction projects of the working grid that modern housing needs.
A city government that tosses such outrageous regulatory changes into the mix, even if they sometimes quietly take them back, makes the location an unbearable risk for most investors.
What sane business will put its design team through the costly work of designing an apartment building or single-family home development, buying the land and filing for permits, once it realizes that the city will force them to change building materials and appliances, possibly multiple times during the course of the project, constantly changing its cost and price model, almost certainly ensuring the project will be a financial loss in the end?
Again, the obstacles that need to be removed are the tax-and-spend policies, the over-regulation, and the extremist anti-energy policies that are now fundamental to New York’s Democrat politicians, so they won’t even consider such a course correction.
Crime
Some parts of New York have always had a problem with crime, but the danger level has skyrocketed in recent years. As crime increases, potential rents and home sale prices plummet, the cost of both property and auto insurance climbs, and the addition of costly safety measures such as wrought iron fencing and security systems becomes unavoidable.
The spread of crime across the city therefore leaves fewer and fewer neighborhoods a cost-effective opportunity for investors. No matter how roomy, beautiful, and convenient a new home may be, it will never command the price it deserves if potential buyers fear its location.
Again, the solutions are obvious: catch criminals and prosecute them to the full extent of the law; reform sentencing guidelines to lock up the guilty for decades not hours; get a reputation for being so tough on crime that potential criminals move somewhere else and leave New York alone.
But non-prosecution and soft-sentencing have become fundamental policy standards for the modern Democrat, and both the city and state of New York are apparently inescapably in their clutches. And they will never consider such reforms.
On every issue, from building codes to crime, from confiscatory taxation to energy insanity, the leadership of New York is opposed to all rational solutions, and is in fact fully committed to the intentional worsening of the lives of New Yorkers for the foreseeable future.
While it is obvious to any objective onlooker that Zohran Mamdani is by far the worst choice, and will delight in making New York a worse place to live, that doesn’t mean that any option is likely to really solve the housing crisis, or any other crisis, for that matter, because NYC’s leadership is so intransigently wedded to such a broad array of destructive policies.
All we onlookers can hope for, looking in from outside, is that the rest of the country learns a lesson from this train wreck, and that other states have the sense to retreat from the myriad self-destructive paths that have tragically taken down the once-great city of New York.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.
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