The city has debated housing production since its inception. The fight isn’t only about density — it's also about design and culture.
In 1869, The New York Tribune heralded a new development in Manhattan: “Few people who pass through Broadway are aware that … there is now in course of erection … one of the largest and most magnificent hotels on the Western Continent.”
The following year, the eight-story Grand Central Hotel opened with 630 rooms and three elevators reputedly capable of whisking guests to the top floor in just 30 seconds. Though called a hotel, it was also, like many grand establishments of the era, a long term residence — home to single men and even wealthy families, who lived there for months or years at a time, alongside short-stay travelers. It offered residents hot-water baths and in-house dining, without the need for servants of their own.
In effect, this style of hotel living served as New York's earliest experiment in middle- and upper-class communal housing — a precursor to the purpose-built apartment buildings about to transform the city.
It also set off a moral panic. The outrage wasn't really about the building's size. It was about what this new way of living seemed to represent. And that, as it turns out, is a pattern that has defined New York's housing fights ever since: Resistance to density is rarely about density itself.At the time, critics feared this new form of communal living would erode societal norms. One New York Tribune journalist warned, in language that has not aged well, that “hotel life is agreeable and desirable for masculine celibates,” but that any man would be unwise to take his wife there, given the “demoralizing influences” and “potent temptation.” In 1879, The New York Times lamented the rise of “lazy and fashionable women” no longer willing to endure “the drudgery of housekeeping.”
These were the NIMBYs of the 19th century.
New York’s housing debates have long been framed as fights over density, neighborhood character and the perceived threat of social change. What changes over time is not the structure of the argument, but the building type being argued about. This history matters because recent research confirms that opposition to development is often shaped less by density itself than by the way density is designed and perceived.
Today, New York City is experiencing the most severe housing affordability crisis in decades, laying the groundwork for the most ambitious housing reforms the city has attempted in decades.
The recently approved City of Yes zoning reforms seek to accelerate housing production by legalizing more housing types, easing parking requirements, encouraging office conversions and modestly increasing density across large portions of the city. Those changes are now being reinforced by a series of City Charter reforms and state-level housing initiatives designed to further streamline development, expand infrastructure capacity and accelerate housing production.
Together, they represent a significant political shift away from decades of scarcity-driven planning and toward a more explicitly pro-growth housing agenda. State and local leaders have increasingly embraced these policies to improve the city’s affordability, economic competitiveness and ability to retain middle-class families.
But even if these reforms succeed politically, they may still fail to meet ambitious housing goals if policymakers misunderstand what actually drives neighborhood-level resistance to development, often described as NIMBYism.
Too often, housing debates reduce opponents to selfish obstructionists. In fact, what people often resist is not density alone, but forms of development they perceive as placeless.
Multifamily living dates back to ancient Rome’s insulae — apartment blocks that could occupy entire city blocks and rose several stories high. The Roman architect Vitruvius defended them on practical grounds: With the city’s growing population, “it is necessary to increase the number of dwelling-places indefinitely.” Two thousand years later, his logic still applies to a city with very little land left to build on.
What was new in 19th-century New York was not the building type but the question of who would live in one. Density was for tenements. Respectability meant a house.
Living in a tenement would have embarrassed the “middling class” of “book-keepers, artists, editors, clerks, lawyers, copyists, mechanics, and members of other professions and trades who desire privacy” — but those families could not afford single-family homes in Manhattan either. The challenge for architects was to design buildings that stood apart from the negatively perceived tenement while still accommodating middle-class life. Calvert Vaux, the architect and landscape designer best known for co-designing Central Park, was among the first to argue that multi-family living needed a rebrand, urging New Yorkers to look to Paris.
Drawing on Paris, Vaux and his peers adapted the Haussmannian model into elegant, respectable apartment buildings. The first rose on East 18th Street in 1869: Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Flats, set on a block of mostly single-family row houses and given a facade to read as one. As the Tribune reassured anxious readers: “It is an attempt to introduce in this city the style of house-building almost universal in Paris . . . This is wholly different from the plan of the tenement house.”
The same architectural type that was viewed as a moral hazard on the Lower East Side became — with larger suites, indoor plumbing, a mansard roof and a Parisian pedigree — a sign of cosmopolitan refinement. They called it the “French flat.” By the time the Dakota opened in 1884, the same building category that had threatened society a decade earlier was being marketed as luxury.
Two recent studies point in the same direction: Opposition to new housing is shaped not only by density, but also by whether development appears architecturally attractive, context-sensitive, pedestrian-friendly and visually coherent with its surroundings. In other words, people are more willing to accept new housing development when it feels integrated into the neighborhood rather than imposed upon it. Respondents were consistently more supportive of development when it reflected local architectural patterns, incorporated pedestrian-friendly design and appeared integrated into the surrounding urban fabric.
Too often, housing debates reduce opponents to selfish obstructionists. In fact, what people often resist is not density alone, but forms of development they perceive as placeless. Even people who don’t live anywhere near a new development tend to oppose it if it’s out of context. But in an area where density is already the norm, people are more likely to accept it.
In that sense, architecture and urban design are not secondary to housing politics. They are central to it. The Department of City Planning learned this lesson the hard way when the 2003 rezoning of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn failed to consider how buildings met the street. The result was bulky, generic architecture and an unappealing streetscape. Fourth Avenue came to be known as the “canyon of mediocrity.”
Fast forward to the Gowanus redevelopment that is taking shape today, and the story is very different. While there is the inevitable grumbling about the loss of historic brick warehouses, for the most part this large-scale redevelopment demonstrates that an entirely new neighborhood of well-designed large-scale buildings along a continuous public promenade — which includes significant affordable housing — offers a far more compelling model for what large-scale density can look like.If City of Yes and related reforms are implemented primarily as mechanisms to maximize unit counts without equal attention to design quality, political backlash may intensify rather than recede. The challenge facing New York is not simply whether it can build more housing quickly, but whether it can build more housing that people can feel proud of.
Today, it is hard to imagine apartment living itself as controversial. Most New Yorkers live in one. But the deeper lesson of New York’s housing history is not merely that cities must grow. It is that successful urban growth has almost always depended on making density feel desirable, legible and integrated into the social and architectural fabric of daily life.
The first real test will be the South of Prospect Neighborhood Plan, the first major rezoning recently announced by the Mamdani administration. This proposal has already opened up a debate about neighborhood character. In interviews, some residents of the Victorian-era Beverly Square just off Coney Island Avenue support a rezoning of the commercial corridor but do not want tall glass towers looming over their leafy green oasis. Threading this needle will be critical to showing New Yorkers that new housing can be built sensitively — sometimes referred to as “gentle density.”
If policymakers fail to take seriously the underlying causes of NIMBYism — particularly the human desire for beauty, harmony and belonging — then no amount of regulatory reform, zoning liberalization or shifting of political power will automatically produce places that endure because they are genuinely beloved.
