A housing project on top of Grand Central Station? That seems to be the direction in which Mayor de Blasio's vision of affordable housing for New Yorkers is going. Up, that is. And the result is that Manhattan real estate developers couldn't be happier, while many of the new mayor's supporters are beginning to wonder about the man they worked so hard to elect.
The most recent reason for their concern surfaces last week, when the Mayor successfully coerced the developer of the old Domino Sugar plant on the East River in Queens to add more affordable housing units before allowing final approval of the project. A noble accomplishment, in one sense, and one that affirms the sincerity of his statements on the subject. But, as this article in The New York Daily News shows, de Blasio's choice to focus on this project also affirms the viewpoint he expressed earlier on the subject of affordable housing--that the solution may be to allow the development of taller buildings than the ones permitted by current zoning regulations.
If the result is to increase the building density of New York's cityscape in the same proportion that the Domino development does (and the photos that accompany that article do a very effective job of illustrating that proportion), than the Mayor's supporters--along with the rest of us urbanists--have real reason to worry. Perhaps the most significant one, from the vantage point of public safety, is the fact that we've tried this approach to public housing before, as some have pointed out. The high-rise projects of the 1950s and 1960s, almost without exception, were sociological and criminological disasters. It was, in fact, for this very reason that public housing was steered in a different direction in the 1990s, toward the construction of low-density townhouses. The Mayor might want to have a chat with his Governor about this, as that Governor, Andrew Cuomo, was also the HUD Secretary responsible for implementing that change.
Almost as bad is the idea that affordable housing must come at the expense of historic preservation, a key component of tourism (which, in turn, is a key component of economic development). That's where my reference to Grand Central comes in. Not surprisingly to those of us familiar with their "thinking," the Real Estate Board of New York has seen in de Blasio's plans an opportunity to crack down on what they describe as the "museuming" of the city, claiming that the Landmarks Preservation Commission has destroyed their ability to destroy what makes the Big Apple a world-wide tourist magnet. Read this, also from the Daily News, if you want an idea of how specious this argument is. My favorite part is the percentage of city real estate that's protected--four percent. Apparently, 96% just isn't enough for the 1-percenters.
Which brings me to a discussion of the real cause behind New York's lack of affordable housing: the new-found popularity of the city with the international uber-rich, and their financial ability to single-handedly triple and even quadruple or quintuple the "paper" value of the land they are buying. The ripple effect of this is to not only make the city more crowded physically, but also to make the value of real estate in general beyond the means of the middle-class, to say nothing of the poor. This isn't a question of supply and demand. New York doesn't suffer from a lack of places in which to put people. It suffers, like the rest of the county, from the irrational whims of a tiny minority that has, through political chicanery, acquired more money than most people can rationally used. And, as a consequence, the use of that money is propelled not by rationality, but by greed.
If de Blasio is serious about bring supply and demand back into the picture, and make the best use of the city's existing building stock (including many landmarkable structures), he would focus his affordable housing energies on preserving and retrofitting those structures as subsidized housing for middle-class and poor residents. Give long-term residents of the city, who helped keep it going during the lean years, priority in living there. And yes, it's acceptable up to a point to finance these ventures with land use incentives to build "up" in other parts of the city, provided that the incentives are structured to vary the distribution of the density, so that New York does not become a city of monoliths. But past that point, don't be afraid to slap luxury taxes on the new luxury developments. That won't stop the uber-wealthy from coming here, and it may assure that their wealth truly benefits the city as a whole. In any event, it will put a decelerator on the upward bidding of land values.
Preservation and adaptive reuse are the best way to honor the city's past and lay the foundation for its future. Anyone in the preservationist community could city hundreds of examples; but I'll leave you with this one, showing the creative use of former fire houses. That's the New York I want to see. That's the New York everyone's attracted to, rich or poor. And that's the affordable, sustainable New York that Bill de Blasio should focus on building.
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