Yesterday, I was quoted in this article by Gabriel Frank in Multi-Housing News (thanks Gabriel) discussing the Adams’ Administrations focus on converting 136M square feet of office in NYC to residential, with a preference for affordable housing.

Mayor Adams highlighted the most important problem of affordable housing in NYC: the supply of developed housing space in NYC is simply not meeting the demand.

While both the production and preservation of affordable housing in NYC have historically been impressive in scale, we simply are not developing enough housing to address a growing mismatch between the supply of affordable housing and the demand for it. That mismatch has been growing worse over the last 50 years. Over that period, housing costs have skyrocketed by 20 times (thank you to Ingrid Gould Ellen from the Furman Center for this research, which she presented at the AIA/NYU Urban Lab “NYC’s Affordable Housing Crisis” event in May 2022). Simultaneously, the average household income in NYC has been stagnating, increasing the number of New Yorkers that need affordable housing (Ibid).

Production and preservation of affordable units accomplished by NYC hit a 30-year peak of 32,517 units in fiscal year 2019. Looking solely at the new units created to address the deficit of 998,200 units needed to support existing rent burdened New Yorkers, production of strictly new affordable units by NYC from 2014-2021 averaged 9,571 per year (versus those preserved). At that rate, it would take almost 50 years of production to address those rent burdened today. That 50-year figure assumes no population growth and no loss of units to either regulation nor physical degradation. (For citation and math supporting this paragraph see NYU Urban Lab’s Paper, page14: https://lnkd.in/e5S7Sizb)

The essential problem is that population growth has outstripped housing supply in nearly every decade since the 1920s. Development controls have prevented large scale development of housing to keep pace with demand. That classic supply/demand mismatch has caused housing prices to skyrocket. Development controls have prevented the market from responding. This new announcement represents a positive shift in the right direction.