New York City housing shortage

In the post-war era, New York, like most American cities, saw a sharp decline in population as “white flight,” highway construction, and old commuter railroads allowed families to decamp from cities into new suburbs outside the city limits. Consequently, from approximately 1950 to 2000, New York City’s total population sat below its previous all-time high. This exodus from the city allowed rents to remain relatively affordable through the immediate post-war era.[7]

However, in the late 20th century cultural changes increased demand for city life as individuals and families became increasingly likely to remain in cities, or at least delay moves to the suburbs. Jobs returned to downtown centers and demand for housing in New York boomed.[8]

To absorb this demand, New York produced 2.2 units per job from 2001 to 2008. However, from 2009 to 2018 the City built just 0.5 units per job as land use regulation, historical preservation, and political opposition ground housing production to a halt.[9]

Consequently, the cost of housing production has skyrocketed in New York. With little available land remaining for development, long approvals processes, and onerous building code provisions, costs to produce housing have markedly increased at every step of the process. As a result, developers are unable to provide moderately-priced housing as the costs imposed by the City and local opposition forces have made housing for the middle class prohibitively expensive to build.[10] In addition to development restrictions, there are barriers which inhibit repartitioning existing units to accommodate more people. New York City housing codes restrict the number of people who are legally allowed to occupy a unit, as well as the number of bedrooms within a unit.[11]

Moreover, New York’s public housing stock, a vital tool for reducing homelessness and maintaining the number of affordable units, has fallen into disrepair as government management failed the City’s low-income residents.[12]

With production costs and zoning laws limiting private production of housing, and incompetence and criminal mismanagement reducing the efficacy of public housing, New York is facing a chronic housing shortage that increases costs for all New Yorkers looking to rent or buy a new home. Groups like the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and Open New York advocate for a resolution of the housing shortage through zoning reforms that would increase the rate of housing production.[13][14]

Between 2000 and 2012, the median rent of an apartment increased 75 percent in New York City compared to 44 percent for the rest of the United States. The increase impacted the poor and working class most. There was a loss of 400,000 apartments renting for $1,000 a month or less (constant 2012 dollars) and a resulting gain of apartments renting over this. This was not a small shift but saw 240,000 units renting for $601–800 disappear and apartments renting for $1,201-1,600 having the highest gains. Median rent in constant dollars increased from $839 in 2000 to $1,100 in 2012.[15]

Partially offsetting the growth in housing units was an increase in population to 8.6 million people. All boroughs, including the Bronx, are close to all-time population highs as of 2018. Factors include an increase in employment to 4.5 million jobs and a trend of decreasing crime.[16]

The city has had many periods of housing shortages in its history. Following a housing crisis in the 1920s, 700,000 units were built but in the 1930s people were again talking about a crisis. Mayors Fiorello H. La Guardia and William O'Dwyer dealt with slum clearance and building public housing. Rent control in New York, having begun as part of price controls on the United States home front during World War II, continued after the war. Robert F. Wagner Jr. and John Lindsay oversaw the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program. Ed Koch was mayor during a wave of housing abandonment which had to be addressed. This continued under David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.[15]

Homelessness of individuals and families became a major issue during the 1980s and 1990s. Mayor Bloomberg's term in office saw an economically resurgent city. During this period, rents in New York City rose more than 15 percent over the increase in the country as a whole. His New Housing Marketplace Plan pledged to create 165,000 units of affordable housing between 2002-2014, of which 53,000 would be new units and 112,000 preserved units. The cost for this program was $23.6 billion, of which $5.3 billion was public funds leveraging $18.3 billion in private funds.[15]

In 2016, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised an even more aggressive plan to build and preserve 200,000 housing units over ten-years and he introduced mandatory-inclusionary zoning requiring 30 percent of all new construction units to be affordable. The goals of the initiative, which was called Housing New York, were later increased to 300,000 affordable housing units by 2026.[22] By the end of his administration, in 2021, none of the goals of the program had been reached: although Mr. de Blasio claimed that he had succeeded in "fighting inequality".

• 421-a tax exemption, which promotes affordable housing in New York City by giving tax breaks to real-estate developers for building new multi-family residential housing buildings
• OneNYC, the official strategic plan for development of NYC
• San Francisco housing shortage
• California housing shortage
• Rent regulation in New York

• Barker, Kim (May 30, 2018) "Behind New York’s Housing Crisis: Weakened Laws and Fragmented Regulation" The New York Times
• NYC For All: The Housing We Need (November 2018) Office of the New York City Comptroller, Scott M. Stringer
• 2018 Housing Supply Report New York City Rent Guidelines Board