But you didn’t need me to tell you that.
As it turns out, about a third of New Yorkers pay fully half their income in rent, and while wages have been stagnant the last decade, the rents have gone up by some 9% in the last three years alone, 13% in Manhattan. Two thirds of renters rent from rent-subsidized or -regulated apartments at well below market rates – a stock that dwindles year by year as apartments hit the barrier of $2500 monthly and convert into market-rate apartments – yet can still barely afford the rates offered as they are still well above the national average.
Simply put, housing isn’t keeping up with demand, resulting in higher costs for everybody. Why hasn’t housing kept up? My guesses are twofold:
1) Historical preservation. Height limits and restrictions that attempt to “preserve the character of the neighborhood” are severely limiting the amount of potential housing stock. Now, this would be bad enough on its own, but it’s also being improperly enforced, where developers can overcome such restrictions at great cost by piling on air rights from neighboring properties, resulting not only in the undermining of what the regulations were attempting to preserve, but also ensuring that any new housing stock created in that manner would be as unaffordable as possible, as they would have to be luxury apartments or condominiums to compensate for the legal horsetrading involved in making them.
Simply put, if it’s not going to help – and rich people do what they want anyway – then what character is it preserving? It’s not the people. Both the East and Greenwich Villages do not have the same close-knit character that made them important to the city culture, and SoHo and the Lower East Side are cynical jokes – high end shopping malls where artists used to live. What’s the point of preserving the “character” of a neighborhood when every storefront is a Bank of America and every resident is a yuppie douchebag who works in finance? What’s the point of saving the buildings if nobody can afford to live there?
2) Suburban-style restrictions on new construction. I’m talking primarily of parking requirements. In my Manhattan neighborhood, all new buildings under the current zoning plan must include parking spaces for 50% of their units. Why? It’s wasted space. This is Manhattan: The pinnacle of a walking city, with more mass transit than the rest of the country combined. Why are rules like this still on the books? They raise the cost of construction – which in turn effects the cost of living – and add nothing of value. The chock-a-block pre-war tenements that comprise most of uptown never had these requirements, and they’re what house most of us in this city: By these rules we can’t even build the sorts of apartments we’re all dying to rent anyway!
Libertarians complain that rent regulation and rent control are strangling new development. I think the numbers proves that rent regulation and rent control are absolutely necessary to stop New York City – and Manhattan especially – from becoming a homogeneous playground for the rich. But what I can agree with them on is the necessity for a freer hand at development in order to capitalize on this incredible demand for this city. Officially, New York grew only by about a quarter million in the last decade. Everybody knows that’s complete bullshit – nobody who’s sharing a two-bedroom with seven other people is going to tell the truth to a census taker – but one of the things it’s shown is that we’re simply not providing enough places for people to live.
If the city can provide variances and tax breaks to luxury towers, they can change zoning rules and stop preserving entire neighborhoods for the rest of us. After all: If I had to choose between preserving the buildings and preserving the people, I would invariably choose the latter. Let’s not turn this into Paris or Venice: New York is not a museum city. It is a living city, and in order to do so it needs to breathe.
Now if only we had a Democratic candidate brave enough to carry this flag.