My point here is that I'd start with trying to build enough housing before spending political capital on marginal things that neither unlock supply nor generate much revenue.
In 1961, NYC adopted a zoning plan that saw zoned capacity reduced by 80%. These sort of changes to zoning happened around the country in the 1960s and 70s in response to red lining being made illegal. If you can't prevent black people from living near you by law, maybe you could instead prevent anyone from living near you and guarantee a supply side crisis such that the wealthiest individuals in the economy are who can afford to be your neighbors, and in 1961 surely they won't be black. You should look up the median income differences between a white nycer and a black nycer today, it is shocking. Median household wealth for whites just within the scope of new york state, not even at city resolution, is nearly 15x higher (1).
Today, 80 years later, we have kept the racist-by-transitive-property laws on the books all over the country. And as such, cities remain highly segregated by both race and class. Civil right era in terms of housing was essentially a failure to achieve any change from this status quo.
1. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-racial-wealth-gap-in...
There is an unbelievable shortage of housing that is solvable only by increasing supply and building upwards. It’s not even single-family homes; why are there any one-story buildings in the lower east side?
Yes. I feel like Americans and New Yorkers have been very clear about what they want in housing: more of it, and cheaper.
I currently live in Manhattan, have lived here for years, and I support relaxing zoning at least to the point where most Manhattan neighborhoods can ~double their building heights. YIMBYs are everywhere. Not everyone can be fortunate enough to get a stabilized unit (like me) or to have bought decades ago when prices were low.
> add massive housing blocs carte blanche
IMO this is dichotomous thinking that is actually brought on by zoning rules.
It is very difficult and very expensive to get construction approved, so the only projects that make sense to fund are towers full of units, which can attract more rent and therefore higher returns per lot, justifying the risk and expense of permitting.
If you just deleted zoning restrictions carte blanche and made it much easier to build (an automatic "Yes" if you meet basic criteria), then a lot of sagging and old 1-3 story buildings which are everywhere in Manhattan would get naturally replaced with six- to eight-story buildings. This is the natural evolution of a built environment.
The amount of additional housing and commercial space that comes online from this is huge, and there's no need to dot the city itself or even Brooklyn/Queens with commie blocks
As a moderately wealthy former New Yorker? I say no. If we put it to a referendum? I’d give it even odds. If the referendum were for developing part of Central Park into public housing? I’d guess it would pass.
Tourists don't vote or show up to community-board meetings. The top of the park is closer to Harlem. That is why it would be easier to bulldoze.
Tokio, Singapore, Amsterdam- all ghost towns.
It just does not scale like people think. And that is why the price has to go up, and that is the forcing factor for max capacity of any given parcel of land.
The fact is we all can’t live in the same city. And people need to do what we did in the past. And that is move to new locations that are cheaper.
Every hot spot today once was a crappy place, it was over time that it became the desirable place. That is just how it works. You got to move and live where you can afford.
Every city has a max amount of occupancy, and density. It’s so silly to even think about this on the individual level. I can find 1BN people who want to live in NY today if told today they could have a place today for $500 a month but 1BN other people are also joining would instantly turn down the offer.
He is right.
I feel like that was the backdrop to about half the movies I watched in the '80s.
The people that have second luxury homes in new york are the people that spent through the roof to avoid mamdani being elected
I’m not an “eat the rich” person, but these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem are a crime. I don’t necessarily fault the billionaires for this, I fault the politicians who sat back and watched it happen, approving all the projects along the way.
Vacancy rates are extremely low in NYC at 1.4%. Anything below 5% indicates drastic under-supply of housing. I don’t think that vacant real estate for billionaires is a significant contributor; it’s almost exclusively an issue of supply.
1 Wall St, for example, kept 85% of its units arbitrarily off market in order to prop up rents, and thus imputed property valuation. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be encouraged by the state and financial system, but guess what we do!
If I might put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, I think the recent obsession with upzoning is to distract from the possibility of regulating landlords—as if there were any large number of people opposed to upzoning before....
As a result, Midtown is now one of the few places in New York's metropolitan that can reach the millions of people in the five boroughs and the suburbs all at once, which means the labor market is substantially larger than what it is in Lower Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn, and makes it massively more attractive for employers.
So that 2.5x square footage is more like 1.5x when it comes to the number of units of like quality/liveability you can pack in.
It needs a good _downzoning_ to be liveable again.
The market prices full one-bedrooms at less than this in most of Manhattan. Flophouse beds would cost a fraction of this and they would get cheaper the more of them you have. They’d also slow the growth of rent price in NYC.
Let’s take your example at face value. Suppose Manhattan added one million beds to its existing ~3.8M bedroom housing stock via the “missing middle” housing that you described, perhaps over the next ten years. These might have small private bedrooms and shared kitchen/office/bathroom facilities. They might even include dorms, but I’ll focus on single-room occupancy units. You’d get the space for this from some mix of re-developing office buildings or upzoning or re-developing low-slung buildings.
The rent of these single-room occupancy units would be a fraction of the rent of a normal place. The people living there would be far less rent-burdened than they would have been otherwise, freeing up more income for consumption or savings/investment, boosting economic activity. Some of them would be new residents, whose income taxes (if they pay them) and spent dollars/sales taxes would be a net benefit to the city budget. Some of them would otherwise become transiently homeless due to affordability concerns, which would be destabilizing for them and expensive for the city due to homeless program spending.
Others would be people who currently live in apartments but would move to these units because they prefer cheaper rent, greater privacy (they might be sharing a room today), a newer building, or the greater efficiency of having multiple bathrooms. Maybe right now they are sharing e.g. a four-bedroom one-bathroom apartment with three strangers in Hell’s Kitchen for $1400/month. These people would otherwise be in the housing market for a full apartment, and removing them leaves more full apartments for people who want to occupy them, either alone or with roommates. Ergo we get downward pressure on full apartment rents.
The flophouses and dorms and SROs were a key part of the housing market that kept Manhattan more affordable and therefore livable in the 20th century, when density was up to 40% greater than it is now. It was deeply shortsighted to get rid of them. The idea that we should downzone even further makes no sense to me; you get to decrease affordability and decrease the economic benefits of agglomeration to the local economy at the same time, all so… there are fewer people on the subway, I guess? I disagree with the “too much density” argument on its face anyway. Density has clear economic benefits via agglomeration and productivity gains; diverse and dense housing stock via upzoning increases affordability via supply/demand and filtering effects; and the way you manage density is through appropriate infrastructure spending on housing, services, and public spaces which—you guessed it!-becomes cheaper per person the denser you build. Seoul has twice the density of Manhattan.
I live here. The thing making Manhattan unlivable is that a one-bedroom is $4500 in the east village due to not enough supply. Fix the housing costs by building more of any and all kinds of housing and then we can deal with the other problems via better governance and increased tax revenues. There’s nothing we can do otherwise that isn’t just rationing or some other bandaid solution.
???? Can you provide the citation for higher density in the early 20th century?
> I live here. The thing making Manhattan unlivable is that a one-bedroom is $4500 in the east village due to not enough supply.
And there is never going to be enough supply. Your only choice is to Detroitify your city.
"Just build more" in Manhattan is beyond ridiculous. It's literally the definition of madness: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result".
It was a quick google search and the value was taken from the Gemini result, which is not great practice. Thank you for asking for citations. Unironically! Good discussion on this site matters to me, and I want my positions to have strong foundations.
I looked into it more deeply and have found the actual numbers. The 1910 density was more like 54% higher.
Manhattan reached its peak population of ~2.3M around 1910, with a built-up area on the island of ~4,000 hectares=15.44 square miles. This gives a population density of 149k people per built-up square mile. This is per NYU professor Angel Shlomo's 2015 paper, which seems to be the most in-depth analysis I could find ([0]). We use built-up area because north Manhattan still had large tracts of uninhabited farmland at the time; this area should be excluded to better represent the experience of the residents.
Manhattan's current population is ~1.66M (per [1]), and I am estimating the current built-up area at 4466 hectares=17.24 square miles, as this was the exact built-up area given in [0] for 2013. I am assuming Manhattan was, then and now, basically fully built-up and therefore the area is unchanged. (If I'm wrong, then I would guess there's actually more built-up area now, and therefore the population density is lower, strengthening my POV.)
This gives a current Manhattan population density of 96.3k residents per built square mile. This means the peak density in 1910 was actually (149k/96.3k=)154.7% what it is today! My initial Google estimate was undershooting it.
Ergo Manhattan today is nowhere near its historic density.
From all this, I think it is clear that Manhattan and NYC are nowhere near their carrying capacity. There are other safe, clean metros on planet earth with much higher density and lower housing costs (e.g. Seoul), and the thing preventing greater density and lower costs isn't some fundamental upper bound or even economic incentives: it's just zoning.
What has changed since 1910? New York City has much better infrastructure that would allow even greater density in the city, outer boroughs, and surrounding area without negatively impacting quality of life. Modern building techniques allow us to build far more than six stories high without imperiling residents in tenement housing. There is a robust subway and rail network that allows commuters to come from other, even less dense areas. I think we could build to these historic densities much more safely and pleasantly now, which is also the opinion of the authors of [0].
> And there is never going to be enough supply.
I simply do not understand your rationale. We have not seriously tried to provide enough supply, due to the zoning constraints.
In 2023 there were ~3.7M housing units in NYC ([2]). We are adding ~9,450 units every quarter ([3]), for a total of ~38k units per year, a yearly increase of about 1%. This is a drastic undershooting of NYC's own goal to build 500,000 new homes from 2022 to 2032, which would look more like 13k to 14k new units per quarter ([3])—and some groups estimate that the housing shortage is even more than that 500k units. It takes 3.4 years on average to build a unit in NYC and more than four years to build an apartment in Manhattan ([3]), which is absurdly slow, and the vacancy rate is an absurdly low 1.4% where ~5% is the marker for a healthy real estate market ([2]+general knowledge).
Manhattan (and NYC in general) has onerous zoning and review requirements that prevent the adequate building of new housing to meet demand. Of the existing building stock, fully 40% of it would not be permitted nowadays, primarily because they are "too tall" or "have too many apartments," "too many businesses," or any number of other absurd requirements in a city with extremely high housing costs ([4]). There are even regulations around having enough parking spots in parts of Manhattan, a place with ample public transit, lots of street parking, and subsidized van service for the disabled. These buildings are the backbone of our urban core; they provide housing for hundreds of thousands of people and commercial space that drives much of the NYC metro area's economy, the GDP of which is over $2T and makes up ~9% of the US economy ([5]).
Conversely, there are many land uses in Manhattan that fit these zoning requirements and are ridiculous and uneconomical uses of land. For example: a small parking lot structure in the West Village (of which there are a depressing number) is a valid usage of land, while an eight-floor apartment building with an elevator and retail space on the bottom is "too tall" and disallowed because it would exceed the 80-foot limit in the village. How does another small parking lot serve a city gripped by housing crisis that is caused by a shortage of units—which also has excellent rail connection and plenty of parking already—better than an apartment building? The apartment building could even be on top of a parking garage if we wanted it to, but adding the residential space and/or more commercial space (which raises incomes via agglomeration and therefore improves affordability by higher salaries relative to housing) is not allowed because it runs afoul of height restrictions.
This is irrational policy that directly contributes to the housing crisis.
> Your only choice is to Detroitify your city.
It's interesting that you claim densifying Manhattan will turn it into Detroit.
I claim that Detroit was hollowed out precisely by anti-density and pro-suburbanization practices. I'm lazy and have been typing forever at this point, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit#Population_....
When you send factories to the suburbs and then put highways straight through the neighborhoods in your city where people actually live and work, that's not densification leading to bad outcomes. It is detonating a city via discriminatory urban policy and then falsely claiming it is the natural end result for those pesky cities and their residents.
[0] https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/uploads/content/Manhattan_De...
[1] https://censusreporter.org/profiles/06000US3606144919-manhat...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/content/tenantprotection/pages/fast-fact...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/nyregion/nyc-housing-deve...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
[5] https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2025-12/NYCEDC-2025-Stat...
(This is a more readable but much less detailed intro to [0]: https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...).
>I claim that Detroit was hollowed out precisely by anti-density and pro-suburbanization practices.
>When you send factories to the suburbs and then put highways straight through the neighborhoods in your city where people actually live and work, that's not densification leading to bad outcomes. It is detonating a city via discriminatory urban policy
Isn't this overstating the role of policy?
1. Wage arbitrage by the Big 3 to avoid urban auto unions out to the suburbs
2. Post-WW2 economic manuf. wind-down [1]
3. Post-WW2 highway build-up enabling suburbia
Looking at the things out of Detroit's hands, I don't think we should lean on policy as much because policy can't nail the factories to the ground or prevent their closure. The economic trends simply appeared much more powerful than city policy.
The fate of the Detroit city limits auto cluster could have been sealed with the war end. Businesses often want to escape high costs if they can do so without giving up their operation or market share, and they were able to do just that with the MI suburbs and highways.
Policy might have been able to delay the collapse if, like you promote, the city managed to encourage building housing to relieve the rent and home price pressure. However this seems nigh impossible in practice (even in NYC?) because property owners are politically connected and generally do not like values to go down, a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs [2].
[1] https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2...
[2] https://1889institute.org/the-problem-of-diffuse-costs-and-c...