Since the pandemic began to wane, New York-watchers have stoked fears about an urban doom loop: Millennials like me — liberated from the chains of our desks — would abandon Midtown Manhattan and perhaps the city or state altogether in search of lower costs of living. The commercial tax base would be obliterated, leaving no funds to support essential services like the subway.
To prevent this dystopian future, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams convened an expert panel that I served on, and they released the “Making New York Work for Everyone” plan (also known as the “‘New’ New York” plan) in December, a sweeping set of 40 proposals to keep the economy humming. The goals of the plan, broadly, are to reimagine the city’s business districts, to make it easier for New Yorkers to get to work, and to generate inclusive growth that positions the city to “lead the emerging industries of the 21st century.”
But now, it is budget season in Albany. The proverbial “three men in a room” (thankfully, no longer all men) — Governor Hochul; Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, the majority leader of the State Senate; and Carl Heastie of the Bronx, the speaker of the State Assembly — have until Saturday’s budget deadline to duke out which proposals have support from the State Legislature and get funding.
The three parties are aligned on a few important engines of post-Covid economic mobility, like making access to state-supported child care assistance easier. But the Legislature is opposing perhaps the most critical facet of New York’s pandemic recovery: a collaborative effort by the governor and the mayor to create 800,000 more housing units over the next decade. Of those, 500,000 would be in the city and the balance in the rest of the state — primarily in New York City’s commuter suburbs — near jobs and mass transit.
New York State has created 1.2 million jobs over the past 10 years, but only 400,000 new homes, contributing to inflation in rent and home prices, and despair among young workers. The new homes in the city are largely rental units in the boroughs outside of Manhattan, while homeowners in Manhattan and New York’s rail-connected suburbs have blocked attempts at new building.
So while millennials still overwhelmingly say they want to own, they are priced out of buying. Instead, they pay ever-escalating rents — now a whopping median of $3,400 per month in New York City — and are pushed into far-flung mass transit deserts, or out of the city entirely. At the same time, surplus office space in Midtown lies empty.
The governor and mayor put forward a package of common-sense proposals to ease New York’s housing shortage, and, apparently to the Legislature’s dismay, that includes building in New York’s wealthiest communities.
First, there is a set of proposals to modify the state’s Multiple Dwelling Law, which regulates apartment buildings in New York City. Some of these modifications would allow for easier office-to-residential conversion; others would enable projects with greater residential density, coupled with mandatory affordable housing. The Multiple Dwelling Law is an anachronism, increasingly out of touch with today’s realities. When the law was written in 1929, the intent was to set environmental and health safety standards as Manhattan rapidly urbanized. The law’s last major update was a 1961 attempt to deter “vertical slums,” during Robert Moses’ heyday.
The law restricts office-to-residential conversions to older buildings, even though there are more recent but still outdated Midtown offices, ripe for conversion. According to a recent study by the city, office-to-residential conversion has the potential to create 20,000 new homes, housing 40,000 people.
The law also restricts the square footage of the floor area of new residential buildings to 12 times the size of the lot the buildings are built on — even as Manhattan is covered in commercial buildings with floor-area ratios into the upper 20s. Some of the city’s most celebrated older residential buildings exceed the law’s floor-area ratio cap, and therefore couldn’t be built today — like Central Park West’s 1929 Beresford Building, home to Jerry Seinfeld and other celebrities.
Some Manhattan legislators have objected to the proposed Multiple Dwelling Law modifications, which include removing the cap, out of fear that a residential boom may result in buildings not in character with the neighborhood without actually increasing affordability. But under the proposed changes, new residential density in specific locations would still go through the city’s intensive local approval processes. Community feedback would be solicited for each project, in part to ensure buildings would fit the aesthetic of their surroundings. Increases to residential density would trigger affordability requirements on new buildings, through what’s known as the city’s mandatory inclusionary housing tool.
“The goal is not to produce more luxury, super-tall buildings. It is to instead create contextual, mixed-income, residential communities,” according to Moses Gates, vice president for housing and neighborhood planning at the Regional Plan Association. “If implemented properly, we have the potential to take a law from the 1960s and adjust it to fit today’s housing needs.” Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, has identified 171 lots on which 73,000 homes can be built with the right regulations in place.
Second, a set of proposals to spur housing production in the suburbs, called the Housing Compact, would require each of the city’s suburbs to achieve growth in new housing of three percent over the next three years. Each suburb could decide for itself how to achieve that growth — for example, by allowing accessory dwelling units, or backyard homes; redeveloping industrial sites and parking lots; or building up its main street. The compact would require zoning for an average of 50 units per acre in areas within half a mile of Metropolitan Transportation Authority stations to create more sustainable communities.
Suburban legislators have tried to paint the compact as radical, but it is simply inspired by measures that other forward-looking, housing-strapped states have already taken (California, for example, has recently begun to enforce mandatory growth targets for cities). Achieving the contemplated density would mean, for example, rows of multifamily townhouses clustered near Metro North stations — the type of walkable urbanism that is already ubiquitous on the edges of great European cities, like the wealthy suburbs north of Copenhagen.
The Legislature should realize that supporting the housing proposals backed by the mayor and the governor is not only good policy, it could turn out to be good politics. In New York State, the share of homeowners who are millennials is 30 percent — tied with California as the lowest in the country. But millennials and their younger cohort are poised to be a majority of the electorate in the next five years. And, if you want us back in the office, you need to build housing close to where we are working.
Cara Eckholm (@caraeckholm) is a fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Urban Tech Hub. She is a native New Yorker and millennial renter living in Brooklyn, who has also spent time renting in the Bay Area and in Copenhagen.
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