New York City is in a housing crisis. In response, Mayor Adams and Big Real Estate (the made up of the ten or fifteen families and corporations that own and build New York’s biggest buildings and developments) propose the solution of zoning changes they have branded “The City of Yes” (COY). There are many good ideas in the third part of the proposal, the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (COYHO). But implementation primarily relies on market-driven solutions, which means the most profitable of the ideas will likely be built, while others won’t. There are few requirements and no funding for housing most New Yorkers can afford.
I am an architect and urban designer in New York, Chair of CNU NYC <https://cnu.nyc/>, the local chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism <https://cnu.org/>. I have been a YIMBY for decades, working around the country as an architect and urban designer to advance the cause of walkable, sustainable, and equitable neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Members of the well-organized and well-funded YIMBY movement call me a NIMBY, because I care about New York City, good architecture, strong urbanism, and affordable housing for all.
I’ve been writing about the COYHO in the Straus News community newspapers in New York like Our Town <https://bit.ly/COY1>, in an ongoing series on the design website Common Edge <https://commonedge.org/>, and on my blog <https://blog.massengale.com/2023/03/23/nycresheight/>. Here are a few points that are not in many of the bullet point lists I’ve seen from various groups. I’ve covered all the points in greater depth in the[City%20of%20Yes%20articles%20listed%20here]City of Yes articles listed here. <https://www.cnu.nyc/newurbanism/coyho/>
Yes to Bigger Profits for Big Real Estate
The most profitable buildings in the history of New York are the super-luxury supertall apartment towers on Billionaires’ Row on 57th Street. Because of that, COYHO has new ways to build them. The new R11 and R12 zones have FAR of 15 and 18: before Governor Hochul got rid of the 63-year-old, statewide 12 FAR cap this year, supertall developers had to rely on a combination of commercial and residential zoning to get what they wanted, limiting the areas where they could build. But new tools make it easier to transfer air rights, and therefore easier to build supertalls in more places: if COYHO is approved as written, the next generation of supertalls will be in midtown and downtown, where air transfer rights are unlimited. It remains to be seen what will happen on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, within view of Central Park. COYHO will allow towers up to 1,000 feet without using R11 or R12, which have Mandatory Inclusive Housing requirements. Any luxury housing developer with an option to avoid a permanent commitment to dealing with affordable tenants will do that.
With over 100,000 people per square mile, the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan are already two of the three densest residential neighborhoods in the Western world, more than twice as dense as the historic neighborhoods in London, Paris, and Rome. Like all the most popular residential neighborhoods in New York, the Upper East Side and West Side were built with height limits far lower than allowed today, even before the City of Yes. Despite what Big Real Estate says, residential neighborhoods were not governed by the 1916 zoning, which was for commercial districts, but by regulations that limited buildings to 1.5 times the street width or 150 feet, whichever was less. That limited buildings on side streets to 90 feet tall. The height limits gave air and light to the apartments, streets, and neighborhoods where people lived.
The booming economy of the Roaring Twenties brought some oversized buildings that skirted or simply broke the rules. The most egregious examples were apartment hotels, which were supposed to be in the business districts regulated by the 1916 zoning. These abuses contributed to a new statewide Multiple Dwelling Law in 1929, which allowed taller buildings on large lots of 30,000 square feet of more. These could have 150-foot towers on 150-foot “podiums” or bases that maintained the street wall. Only five of those exceptions were built before the 1961 zoning resolution thirty-two years later: four on Central Park West (the famous twin-tower buildings that reduced bulk above the base) and one on the East River, before Robert Moses built the FDR Drive (River House).
Towards the end of the 20th century, developers discovered they could charge a 30% premium for apartments that towered above their neighbors. The Chair of the City Planning Commission at the time, Joe Rose, said “Views have become so prized that we unleashed an intense desire for building height without regard for neighborhood character or scale. Each new building tries to achieve better views by being taller than the last. The consequence has been a powerful inducement to break away vertically as far as possible from the neighborhood pack. While there is nothing wrong with nice views, it is not necessary to have a city shaped by a desperate grab for them.”
Rose proposed new zoning that emphasized neighborhood character and limited the height of residential towers. A third-generation New York developer, Rose spent the first few years of his time in office selling the plan to the development community. When he finally put his proposal on the Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s desk, however, there was a phone call from Big Real Estate within half an hour that killed the plan. Twenty-five years later, we have Big Real Estate’s counterproposal in City of Yes—which we can already see in special permit buildings all around us. Hudson Yards and Billionaires’ Row are the poster children for the City of Yes in Manhattan.
Rose called the 1961 zoning resolution an ideological statement of Modern planning that did “violence to our urban fabric.” He saw historic districts as New Yorkers’ response. The first historic district was Brooklyn Heights, which came four years after the 1961 zoning. Today, there are over 160 historic districts. Parasitically, Big Real Estate wants to profit from the value the historic districts have created by building alien invaders towering over their buildings and streets. COYHO will make it easier to do that.
Build Baby Build
Calling recent development “market-driven” is accurate to a degree, but much of it has been subsidized by New York’s taxpayers. The newly Neoliberal New York City subsidized the public-private construction of Hudson Yards, contributing more than $5 billion in direct and indirect subsidies. Widely known as Dubai-on-Hudson, it is one of the most unpopular places in New York City. The city built waterfront parks on the Hudson and East Rivers—obviously a good thing—that created luxury housing sites on former industrial land. New York then sold air rights from the parks to the neighboring buildings, so those could be taller. Previously, no one thought parks had air rights to sell. The parks, like the Highline, were unaffordable housing generators. Contrast this with Battery Park City, built by a public body with the authority to create bonds. Battery Park City is a profitable development that makes a payment to New York City every year.
Recent history shows that the construction of expensive condos and rental apartments in New York City does not “trickle down” to lower prices for anyone, whether on Billionaires’ Row, along the river in Long Island City, or anywhere else. The most profitable building in the history of New York, the seventy-story condominium at 220 Central Park South, has slightly fewer apartments than the twenty-story building it replaced. But those were rentals. Approximately more than a third were rent stabilized (and more than half the occupied apartments when the building was sold were rent stabilized). One of the apartments in the new building sold for $238 million to a Chicago hedge fund manager as his New York pied-a-ciel. Although it is not his primary or even secondary residence, it is the most expensive residential property of any kind ever sold in America.
Choosing a place to live, or finding a place where we can afford to live, is more complicated than buying a widget. For every article that points to supply and demand in housing and says “restrictive zoning” is the problem, there is another study that says no. Politics, economies, and housing are all local, and many of the issues in Manhattan are different than the problems in Manhattan, Kansas. Location, location, location and New York’s standing as a global city for the global rich contribute to our problems. So does the way New York State and New York City cater to Big Real Estate in what Sam Stein calls “the Real Estate State.”
Joe Rose’s cousin Jonathan Rose is a prominent affordable housing developer. He is also the author of a book called The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life. <https://www.cnu.nyc/newurbanism/the-well-tempered-city-reviewed/> A New Yorker, Rose complements and amplifies many of the points made by the great New York urbanist, Jane Jacobs, in particular her emphasis on the complexity of cities. It is a mistake to boil the planning of cities down to the single-issue factors that the City of Yes, Big Real Estate, and YIMBYs emphasize: height, density, or the number of new building permits being the usual ones. Looked at in isolation, these factors can support the supply-and-demand argument, implying that all we have to do is to remove restrictions and we will have housing for all. Jacobs, however, convincingly made the case that these simplistic arguments “go about the problem from the wrong end.” They might produce higher profits, and even higher property taxes, but they diminish the city and city life.
We Deserve Better
On Billionaires’ Row, in Long Island City, in downtown Brooklyn, and along the Hudson River, New York developers have built tens of thousands of new apartments recently. But they are almost all expensive, they frequently sit on one-way, suburban-style streets, and most of them could be in any city in the world that has apartment towers. New Yorker Leah Goodridge, one of the three New York City Planning Commissioners who voted against COYHO, said afterwards, “There were lots of Black and brown New Yorkers who came and testified against this project.” What they asked, she added, is “Why are we giving away the city to private developers? What are we getting in return?”
Affordability is a large part of what many New Yorkers worry about. There is also the nature and character of the city we love and choose to live in. Walking around the most loved New York neighborhoods, we see their buildings are lower and their streets are more comfortable places to be. New Yorkers put up with small apartments and take part in public life outside their apartments. In New York City, most of our public space is in our streets. This is not “just about aesthetics,” a common YIMBY dismissal. Many of the places Big Real Estate has built are not places where New Yorkers want to be. They are frequently what New Urbanists call “density without urbanism,” with placeless towers sitting on auto-sewer streets.
We deserve better. City University of New York Professor David Harvey said it well: “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, or what aesthetic values we hold.”