october 12–25, 2020 | new york 51lesson from past contagions: Disease
spreads wherever people cram together.
In theory, the covid recession should
help alleviate the shortage. Vacancies are up,
rents are down, and we hear there are good
deals to be had. But that’s mostly a Manhat-
tan, plus well-off slices of Brooklyn and
Queens, phenomenon and likely a brief one.
The rejuvenating tides of immigrants that
nourish the outer-boroughs have dried up
for now but will (assuming Donald Trump
is not reelected) flow again. So will the
stream of people propelled by fantasy, ambi-
tion, and eccentricity. In the meantime,
though, a lot of formerly low-incomefami-
lies are now no-income families, andmany
who were barely hanging on now aren’t. The
legions of the homeless have swelledin
recent years, and mass evictionsmay lie
ahead. People who fear ice are goingwith-
out government help. Left unmanaged,
these currents will sweep New Yorkback
from a new crisis to an old one: a city simul-
taneously prosperous and pauperized.
When it comes to getting the housingwe
need at prices working people canpay, we’ve
all been trapped inside a set of circularpara-
doxes. One of the most commonwaysto
create more affordable apartments—onede
Blasio has relied on—is to tuck them,a few
at a time, into market-rate towers.They
often wind up boosting rents intheentire
area, sharpening rather than alleviating
need, and affordable is a squishytermthat
doesn’t always mean cheap anyway.The
combination of pressure and incentiveshas
yielded bifurcated results: bulky complexes
in poor neighborhoods, tricklesofnew
apartments in well-off ones. BronxPoint,a
megaproject hard by the MajorDeegan
Expressway, will eventually delivermore
than 500 rent-regulated units (plustheUni-
versal Hip Hop Museum). But a22-story
building that is just starting to riseat the
corner of Broadway and West 96thStreet
will contain the requisite numberofafford-
able apartments: one.
“We have a trickle-down housingpro-
gram: Put up luxury units and hopethat will
make the rest of the market more affordable.
In reality, though, private developersare
facilitators of inequity,” says BarikaWil-
liams, the executive director of theadvocacy
organization Association for Neighborhood
& Housing Development. “My questionis:
How much are they willing to changethe
rules of the game?”
The future depends on a mayorwhocan
find a new game to play. ComptrollerScott
Stringer, another mayoral candidate,has
floated an idea for universal affordable
housing, which mandates that a quarterof
every new building with morethanten
apartments be set aside. The pointisto
bakeaffordabilityintoconstruction—to
makeit a given,alongwithplumbingand
fireexits.Buttheplan’s economicsare
vagueandthepoliticsdicey. IfNewYork
couldn’t keepupwithdemandevenin
boomtimes,themixofrecession,stricter
rules,andscantersubsidiescouldshut
businessdown,exceptperhapsinthe
mostrarefiedZipCodes.Stringerdoesn’t
seemtroubledbyhowprivatedevelopersmay react, since they build mostly for the
affluent anyway. Funneling subsidies
through them, as de Blasio has done,
means feeding what Stringer calls the
“gentrification-industrial complex.” Far
better to give the robust network of
community-based nonprofits (like Phipps
Houses, for example) a monopoly on pub-
lic dollars. “If you’re building truly afford-
able integrated housing and you’re creat-
ing a different economic model, then you
don’t have to rely on luxury developers.”
Luxury developers. The phrase drips with
contempt—a sentiment that may play well
during a campaign but that no sitting mayor
can afford to act on. If Stringer and other
progressives want more leverage, they will
have to negotiate a new relationship with
the real-estate industry, rather thanhope to
lock it out. It’s true that public subsidies help
developers get rich—Stephen Ross built the
mammoth Related Companies on afford-
able housing—but the fact is theyare the
ones with the capital. The federalgovern-
ment, however, has steadily choked off fund-
ing for public housing since theReagan
years. In 1998, Congress—looking to lock in
Republican free-market thinking—made it
illegal to add to the nation’s stock. (The
House recently passed a bill, sponsored by
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to repeal that
law; it’s not getting through the McConnell
Senate.) As nycha continues to decay from
a lack of basic maintenance, the immense
crater in the city’s finances has led de Blasio
to cut the affordable-housing budget by
40 percent. That move could stall the whole
recovery, Katz says: “After 9/11, the mort-
gage crisis, and Hurricane Sandy, affordable
housing was an engine of growth.” Heading
into the last lap of his mayoralty, de Blasio is
now pushing for Soho to absorb hundreds
of affordable apartments and a few thou-
sand market-rate ones. He may not get it
done before he leaves office, but the belated
move challenges his successor to rezone
upscale neighborhoods as well as poor ones.
(Stringer and Brooklyn borough president
Eric Adams have endorsed an upzoning, but
other candidates, including former de Blasio
aide Maya Wiley, have so far stayedsilent.)
Any new social housing has to besustain-
able, durable, flexible, and quicklybuilt, in
part to earn its residents’ affection,in both
poor and pricey Zip Codes. Last year, the
Housing Department held a competition,
“Big Ideas for Small Lots,” to find ways to use
scraps of publicly owned land that come in
hard-to-use shapes: skinny, steep, or curv-
ing. Among the finalists was the studio of
the late architect and critic Michael Sorkin,
a passionately articulate believer in a more
humane New York. He conceived an elegant
stack of narrow but well-lit homes con-In a year,
Bill de Blasio’s
successorwill
get thechance
tomakeNewYork
li fe easier, nicer,
and fairer—or
just keep us
going the way we
were before.
By Justin Davidson