High-rent New York needs affordable housing. Can the mayor deliver?

Once a manufacturing powerhouse with a vibrant working class, New York City has become unaffordable for middle-class nurses, teachers, and firefighters who keep it running.

Four decades of insufficient construction have driven housing costs to double the national average and shaved the rental vacancy rate to 1.4%, a quarter of the norm across the country.

To address the urgent needs, Mayor Eric Adams is focusing especially on one big idea: relaxing stringent zoning rules to welcome more types of apartments – and not just in traditionally targeted areas. “A little more housing in every neighborhood” is his catchphrase for the goal.

The ambitious effort has the potential to dramatically change the city’s neighborhoods, living conditions, and economic landscape – even as skeptics wonder if the targets are achievable.

With full-scale rezoning still on the drawing board, Mayor Adams and the city have been moving ahead with significant companion steps.  

Today, for example, the New York City Council unanimously approved a proposal to bring 7,000 new housing units – about a quarter of which will be designated as affordable – to the East Bronx over the next decade or so.

“If working-class people can’t afford to stay here, the city can’t function,” says Olivia Leirer, co-director of New York Communities for Change, an advocate for affordable housing. Housing experts say the city needs 20% more homes – another three-quarters of a million on top of the current 3.7 million units.

“A little more housing in every neighborhood’’

Mayor Adams’ plan involves creating districts with 20% more units – provided the additions remain affordable. Proposals include encouraging homeowners and faith-based organizations to build new units where feasible on their own unused land, allowing more apartments over shops, and ending mandated parking spaces in new complexes, which developers say are prohibitively expensive. 

The mayor aims to re-popularize single-room occupancies, or SROs, a 20th-century housing staple offering private bedrooms with shared spaces. One-third of New Yorkers live alone.

Another push is converting empty post-pandemic office buildings into housing. About 20% of the towers sit vacant. The city’s new Office Conversion Accelerator said in an email that many buildings have inquired about conversions, and 10 have active permits that could supply 4,000 homes over the next decade. Relatively few of the city’s office buildings can or will be converted, the email said.

Conversions are costly, yet some units would be affordable thanks to new city tax incentives that state lawmakers passed this spring, along with some other rezoning requests made by Mayor Adams.

Albany also renewed tax breaks for developers creating affordable units. The cuts replace a rebate that lapsed in 2022 and choked residential construction by 76%, according to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Eric Kober, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a retired city planner, says simpler provisions would have been more effective, but tax breaks are better than nothing: “Private developers are the people who produce these units, and you have to make it profitable for them.”

How zoning affects housing costs

Most elected officials, residents, city planners, and other experts agree restrictive zoning increases construction costs, pushes rents higher, and inhibits local economic growth. More money spent on rent means less for clothing, food, and entertainment. 

Brian Cain of the city’s Independent Budget Office says whether the City Council will pass the mayor’s initiatives this fall remains uncertain. Community promoters say rezoning destroys neighborhoods; tenant activists accuse them of NIMBYism.

Previous administrations have rezoned select areas, but Mayor Adams' administration would be the first since 1961 to achieve citywide repurposing. Mayor Adams aims for 100,000 more housing units over the next decade, with a “moonshot” goal of 500,000 by 2032. Some units would be reserved for low-income renters. Matthew Murphy, the Furman Center’s executive director, says the mayor’s moonshot goal is unrealistic – and the 100,000 falls short of what’s necessary, given expected demand.

The city planning department estimates 108,850 units are possible by 2039 – fewer than the already insufficient 25,000 annual average production of late.

In April, the mayor’s office announced the city is ahead of schedule toward its goal of creating or preserving 12,000 affordable apartments this year. Based on figures from the New York Housing Conference and the city, about half of new units created in 2023 were affordable.

Baaba Halm, vice president of New York’s Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit dedicated to affordable housing, says the city is a leader on this issue but has far to go.

Nationally, rent for median-income households is $1,300, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. In New York City, records show last year’s local median asking rent at $3,000. For this to be considered affordable, a family must earn $120,000 – almost twice the $70,000 median household income for city renters. 

“Newcomers can’t afford to come, and old-timers are finding it hard to stay,” says Manhattan’s borough historian, Robert Snyder.

Owning versus renting

Owning a unit can cost less each month than renting, but stiff down payments make ownership impossible for most, says Nishant Sondhi, a real estate agent and fund manager who raises money for developments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The woodsy northern Manhattan enclave of Inwood was rezoned in 2018 despite community protests. A working-class neighborhood home to five- and six-story apartment buildings and independent businesses, it will add several mixed-use, blocklong complexes. They range from 12 to more than 20 stories and will create 1,600 new affordable apartments and preserve 2,500 others, including The Eliza, an affordable, mixed-use housing-school-library complex that opened in June. More than 80,000 people applied for The Eliza’s 174 apartments via a lottery.

Ann Toran’s family has lived in Inwood since 1999. She worries about local car washes, grocers, restaurants, and longtime neighbors being priced out: “I don’t know where all these people are going to go.”

Andrew Wells, a high school science teacher who lives in Brooklyn, considered moving back to Texas after taking a second job coaching track to make rent.

“It doesn’t seem like a smart thing for a city to make essential jobs like teachers so hard to break into for a young single person,” says Mr. Wells, who has since gotten a raise and found a cheaper apartment – a fraught process that he says lasted all last summer.