The City has released its draft Fair Housing Growth Strategy report, a blueprint for new housing development in NYC over the next ten years. It calls for dramatic changes across the city, in every corner.
It proposes NYC increase its number of housing units by 700,000, or 20%, over ten years. It’s about triple the rate we’ve been building in recent years.
That’s the equivalent of adding Philadelphia to NYC in just over a decade, but without adding any new land.
It’s also the equivalent of adding a sixth borough, but no extra space.
Queens, the city’s largest borough, has 896,333 housing units. The Bronx has 547,030 units, and Staten Island 183,692 has units, for a combined 730,722 units — about what is proposed to be added.
Each community board in the city would be expected to build a roughly proportional share of those new units to meet that goal.
That’s the equivalent of each Community Board adding a Hudson Yards (“the largest private real estate development in United States history”) or a Long Island City (“the fastest growing urban neighborhood in America”) in that time.
To meet these goals, in just the next five years,* Community Board 2, Manhattan (Greenwich Village, SoHo, NoHo, Hudson Square) would need to add the equivalent of 200 more of 5-11 West 13th Street, the 538 ft. tall tower under construction that will be far and away the tallest ever in Greenwich Village. Alternatively, 80 more of the 17-story 155 West 11th Street, or 65 more of the under-construction 300 ft. tall tower at 56 Great Jones Street, would also be required to meet those targets.
In Community Board 3, Manhattan (East Village, Lower East Side, Chinatown), in just the next five years the equivalent of 530 more of the 210 ft. tall, 15-story apartment tower at 52 East 4th Street would be required, or almost 40 more of the large new 24-story, 296-unit apartment block at 644 East 14th Street.
The housing the city and each community board would be expected to produce would be 75% market rate — which in our neighborhoods means super-luxury housing, unaffordable to all but the richest of the rich. Twenty-five per cent of the new housing the plan envisions is called “affordable.”
But 70% of that “affordable” housing would be in most cases unaffordable to at least half of all New Yorkers, and unaffordable to an even larger share of NYC renters.
The plan is premised on the belief that there is an overall housing shortage in NYC (as opposed to a shortage of affordable housing, which continues to rapidly disappear), and that large additions of new housing, no matter how expensive, will make prices more affordable for everyone, especially those most in need. But NYC actually has more housing now than it’s ever had, and more housing per person than it’s ever had. And historically, periods of lower estimated vacancy rates haven’t necessarily coincided lwith increases in prices. Plus many economists, planners, and housing experts dispute the contention that simply increasing housing supply will bring down costs, especially for those most in need.
Village Preservation has submitted its comments on the proposed plan HERE. While the official comment period for the draft plan ended on September 19, we strongly urge you to submit comments urging city officials to rethink the plan and approach.
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*The plan’s specific community board-by-community board housing targets only cover the next five years, as opposed to the specific citywide target, which reaches to ten years.