Make sure to check out our 2024 Policy Agenda here
Who we are
Open New York is a member-driven pro-housing organization. We advocate for equitable development that expands all housing options for New Yorkers, including both affordable and market rate housing. Affordable housing means affordable housing for everyone: those earning minimum wage, working families, public servants, immigrants, young people, seniors, those who recently arrived and the longtime residents – all New Yorkers.
Why are we talking about housing?
The current lack of housing in New York City and across the metro region is a result of government policies that have greatly restricted the ability to build new housing. We believe that the City and State should pursue policies that will increase housing production immediately. Current practices have restricted the growth in the overall housing stock, which directly affects the types of homes that can be built. Thus, there is both a shortage of housing and a mismatch between the housing that the City is building and the diverse needs of its population.
We identify two distinct, but intersecting problems: First, New York has not built enough housing. New York’s failure to build enough housing appears as overcrowded apartments and rents and home prices that have been rising faster than incomes and inflation for years. The lack of housing in New York City and the surrounding suburbs has increased housing costs, curtailed economic growth, and limited mobility, which in turn has contributed to increasing inequality both within the metro area and across the regions of the country. Overcrowded housing – more than one person to a room – has long harmed New Yorkers’ health and most recently aided viral transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic.[1]As housing supply has become more constrained, the number of homes that are affordable to low- and moderate-income families has declined, giving those families fewer and fewer options to live in adequately sized homes or in the metro area.[2]
Second, current patterns of housing reflect a legacy of exclusion and racism that is not just the result of private behavior, but explicit and implicit government policy. Exclusionary policy mechanisms and practices included restrictive covenants, redlining, discriminatory treatment in lending, and the siting of industrial facilities, parks, and freeways that displaced people and damaged communities. Segregation is not only a matter of history; it continues to exist today. By one measure, New York City is now the second-most segregated metropolitan area in America.[3] There is a direct line between restrictive zoning and metropolitan segregation patterns.[4] For example, the 1961 Zoning Resolution, which is still largely in place, strictly dictates what can be built and where, stifling necessary growth in housing production over time, especially in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods, thus perpetuating segregation while too often producing gentrification and displacement. Land use and public participation processes that give disproportionate weight to the input of the affluent and politically-connected have also helped produce inequitable outcomes. “Black Lives Matter” extends to housing policy that actively creates a more just City. Building more housing is a necessary tool to address the legacy of discrimination and exclusion that spans centuries.
What do we support?
We support making high-quality housing more abundant and available in neighborhoods across the region. Crucially, New York City should be focused on adding more housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods which are wealthier than average, and centrally-located with convenient access to jobs, public transit, and highly-resourced schools. The amenities of high-opportunity neighborhoods should be available to more New Yorkers. New Yorkers should have more choices about where they live. New York’s outdated and unduly restrictive land use codes are exclusionary. We can do better.
For a full description of our 2023 policy agenda, go here.
Affordability
We would like to see a New York that is open and accessible to all. Providing abundant housing is a key step in supporting broad-based affordability to New Yorkers at all income levels. New York City, which has not allowed market-rate housing to keep up with its growing economy, has simply given up on this task in the last 60 years. The City’s choice to restrict housing construction has made too much of the market-rate housing stock unaffordable to too many New Yorkers. We have an opportunity to fix this by building housing in desirable places.
Figure 1: New York City Housing Production by Decade
Many types of housing interventions are necessary to provide housing to all New Yorkers. While New York has an extensive legal architecture for preserving affordable housing, the City must expand subsidized and publicly-owned housing to achieve the scale necessary to meet the needs of the lowest-income City residents.
Housing and the environment
Housing policy is climate policy. The most important thing that New York City can do to fight climate change is make New Yorkers’ low-carbon lifestyle available to more people. New Yorkers’ annual greenhouse gas emissions are roughly a third of the US average.[5] There are multiple important pathways by which housing impacts emissions: first, through buildings’ own energy usage, and second by dictating how many people live where. Housing policy influences travel patterns and transportation emissions. New York City’s density and reliance on low-carbon transportation enable a low-carbon lifestyle by default.
By sector, transportation is responsible for more emissions than any other sector in New York State,[6] but we continue to enforce outdated limits on density in our most transit-accessible neighborhoods. Only 45 percent of New Yorkers own cars, and in Manhattan, where commutes are short and largely car-free, that number is 22 percent.[7] New York City has the lowest rate of car commuters in the country with roughly two-thirds of New Yorkers commuting to work (pre-COVID) without a private car.[8] We should enable more New Yorkers to take advantage of short and car-free commutes by building more housing near convenient public transit. When New York City does not build enough housing and forces workers to drive or endure longer commutes, or live in a distant metro area, we increase emissions.
In short, building new, efficient, multi-family housing in New York City close to jobs and transit is an effective climate strategy.
Homelessness
No New Yorker should need to sleep on the streets. New York City has the largest population of people experiencing homelessness in the country, with roughly 100,000 people officially in the City shelter system.[9] Declines in housing affordability is a primary cause of rising homelessness.[10] Thus, we advocate for more homes, especially supportive and transitional housing options. In addition, we advocate for reforms that make it easier for people to access the transitional housing that is available. Taken together, we endorse a Housing First approach, which has strong results in cost effective fashion.[11]
Location matters too, and we support expanding shelters and supportive housing especially in areas where they are currently lacking, and strongly oppose lobbying and litigation efforts by neighborhood groups that seek to prevent new temporary shelters, permanent shelters, or permanent supportive housing from being built for our homeless neighbors.
How we advocate
A diverse City needs a diverse set of solutions. We are involved at multiple levels and pursue a variety of approaches. Moving from smallest to largest, we advocate for individual projects, for comprehensive neighborhood upzonings, and for City and State-wide policies. Open New York members engage in public comment processes including those at Community Boards. We have written a detailed plan for SoHo/NoHo. We stand for open and inclusive communities and join with residents and advocates against displacement such as the unfair treatment and relocation of previously unsheltered New Yorkers housed in the Lucerne Hotel.
We also made a full set of endorsements in the 2021 New York City electoral cycle, and we released a comprehensive policy agenda for 2023.
We join with a wide range of groups and interests to work to solve the crisis of housing affordability in our city. We aspire to expand our reach and range as Open New York grows.
References
| 1 | NYU Furman Center (2020) “COVID-19 Cases in New York City, a Neighborhood-Level Analysis.” |
|---|---|
| 2 | See, e.g., Dumont, Andrew, “Housing Affordability in the U.S.: Trends by Geography, Tenure, and Household Income. September 27, 2019 Link) which finds that the housing cost burden experienced by renters is concentrated among middle-income households. |
| 3 | Governing.com. “Residential Segregation Data for U.S. Metro Areas.” Link |
| 4 | Jessica Troustine (2020) The Geography of Inequality: How Land Use Regulation Produces Segregation. Link |
| 5 | New York City Mayor’s Office of Sustainability (2016) “Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Link |
| 6 | EIA. “2017 State energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by sector.” Link |
| 7 | New York City Economic Development Corporation (2018) “New Yorkers and Their Cars.” Link |
| 8 | Badger, Emily. “The U.S. Cities Where the Fewest Commuters Get to Work by Car.” CityLab. October 28, 2013. Link |
| 9 | The New York Times. “A Record 100,000 People in New York Homeless Shelters” Link |
| 10 | Coalition for the Homeless. “Myths and Facts.” Link |
| 11 | National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Fact Sheet: Housing First.” April 2016. Link |