New York City has ample locations to produce thousands of units at a time. We need an aggressive strategy to turn parking lots and underutilized spaces into housing.
When the topic turns to producing new housing in New York, we often hear that there are no more big sites to build on, hence no chance to create new critical masses of apartments for the city. We exhausted those opportunities back in the Koch administration when swaths of vacant land turned into scads of homes, the argument goes, and can’t do that again. So our only hope is to gently rezone, neighborhood by neighborhood — settling for single after single, and no home runs.
The theory is false. Even a cursory look around the city reveals a number of currently uninhabited places where we can take big swings at producing housing, generating many thousands of units at a time. Any housing strategy should take direct aim at these sites.
Some history: Before East Brooklyn Congregations began rebuilding East Brooklyn in 1983, the experts of that day had decided that East Brooklyn, the South Bronx and other deteriorated areas could never be rebuilt. Investing in those areas would only throw good money after bad.
It took two affiliates of Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), an organizing network that preaches and practices a process of deep listening to the longtime residents of a community, led by community and clergy leaders who never gave up on their neighborhoods, to prove those experts wrong. The IAF, founded by Saul Alinsky, knits those leaders and their institutions together into a power base capable of both protecting communities from those who seek to exploit them and of designing and implementing strategies that benefit local residents. That base, led by those leaders, then pushes public- and private-sector power players to react and respond to those priorities.
Around the same time, the naysayers looked at the approximately 100,000 vacant apartments citywide, many along the Cross Bronx Expressway, and asserted that those buildings would never be returned to useful life. But thanks to the pioneering approach of the Community Preservation Corporation, led by Michael Lappin and imaginative City housing and preservation leaders like Felice Michetti, Paul Crotty and Mark Willis, almost every single abandoned building was renovated and almost every abandoned unit fully occupied.
We have seen big swings happen in the last decade, too. In the 1980s, few thought the vacant acres of East Brooklyn and the South Bronx would ever be rebuilt. In the 1990s, few thought the site in Spring Creek, then filled with weeds and discarded tires and debris, would ever support a new and vibrant community.
Just as it has in the past, the City can prove naysayers wrong and produce many thousands of units over the course of the next decade. It just requires focus, funding and political will. So let’s talk about those big sites — and then about the staff and subsidies necessary to turn them from fallow or otherwise underutilized tracts into vibrant communities.
First, sites
Some of the locations we and others have identified are controlled by the State, some by the City, some by the feds, some by others. Depending on which is the case, what it’ll take to turn them into homes can be more or less complicated. But in every case, there is a pathway.
First, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. Creedmoor is a State-owned site that’s dramatically underutilized. Until our affiliate, Queens Power, went into action, the mostly abandoned Creedmoor site was not considered a promising place for new housing. Various plans had been proposed, one of the more recent by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, only to generate local civic hostility and then simply fade away. Meanwhile, its 50 acres of tragically underutilized property, one of the best sites in Queens, stood mostly vacant. In 2023, we commissioned a new plan designed by the architecture firm of Alexander Gorlin to show the public and the State how a development of mixed densities could transform that site into a vibrant and attractive new neighborhood.
After a year of pressure and negotiation, Queens Power leaders persuaded Gov. Kathy Hochul to start the process that will lead to the construction of more than 2,000 new affordable homes and apartments there. That effort, now moving through the early stages of environmental and other reviews, will rival the construction at Spring Creek in its impact.
Second, Mott Haven. In the South Bronx, just south of 149th Street, there is an area above Metro-North tracks that could be platformed, enabling the construction of 1,000 or more affordable homes and apartments. This area lends itself to a new development because of the narrowness of the gap between adjacent streets. Architects Alexander Gorlin and Quncie Williams still have the scale model they prepared at our request years ago. We’ve dusted it off and are ready to show it to the next mayor’s housing team. It’s the kind of bold effort that a fresh, new administration would be much more likely to implement.
Third, Sunnyside Yards in Queens. The Sunnyside Yards area in Queens is another location that, once platformed, could hold many more homes and apartments. Both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations had ambitious plans to reimagine the site, but neither they nor any alternative vision has happened yet. It is indeed an expensive, complicated undertaking — but this is a 180-acre rail yard. The opportunities are boundless.
Fourth, Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. This is vacant federal land in Marine Park, once used as the city’s first airfield, that’s more recently been employed as a site for an emergency migrant shelter. It’s aching to become something more. A plan cooked up by a Brooklyn law student would redevelop the site into a medium-density community with as many as 15,000 to 20,000 units. He wants to call it Hero Village and set aside housing for members of the NYPD, FDNY and National Guard. That should be negotiable, but the idea of converting underutilized open space into places for people to live should not be.
Fifth, Aqueduct Raceway in Queens. The racetrack and its flagging operations, which could easily be folded into nearby Belmont, are a whopping 210 acres of underutilized land, 50 of which are parking lots. Those and other sections could be easily transformed into new housing, as City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has proposed.
Sixth, a dozen City-owned golf courses. Brad Lander made this idea — identifying a few courses for redevelopment to produce 50,000 units — a major theme in his mayoral campaign, which could carry into a high-level position in the next administration. Here, we would have to balance the open space and recreational values that the most heavily used courses provide with the housing needs of those paying exorbitant rents. But it’s surely worth aggressive exploration.
Beyond. Megasites aside, packages of somewhat smaller sites could generate scores of new units. Our leaders and organizers have already identified and even commissioned plans for 69 sites at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments.
NYCHA is not opposed to this strategy, at least in theory. In fact, NYCHA has developed eight infill sites, including Redwood Senior Living in East New York, spearheaded by East Brooklyn Congregations. But it has taken eight years to complete the development. That is a glacial pace, and it fails to take the fullest advantage of the 69 other NYCHA sites that we have identified.
There is an added value when building on NYCHA sites and accommodating NYCHA seniors now living in oversize NYCHA units: Those units are freed up for the scores of families and individuals on the endless NYCHA waiting list.
And working with NYU’s Furman Center, our research teams have also identified 1,009 vacant City-owned sites that could be built as of right now if the City focused on them. None of this includes the hundreds of sites owned by closed or shrinking religious institutions, which we estimate could house at least 10,000 units.
But sites alone aren’t enough; we need subsidies. While freeing up sites is generally the critical first step in the process, sites go nowhere without public funding to kick-start development. While today there are billions in housing subsidies available, they’re almost all spoken for; more sources are desperately needed. When the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) pioneered the critical mass renovation of thousands of apartments, it tapped into union pension funds, backed by essential insurance support from the State of New York Mortgage Agency (SONYMA). Mike Lappin, the former CEO of CPC, described this dynamic in detail in City Limits: “How did the CPC investments measure up to the comptroller’s ‘triple bottom line?’ First, the investments were secure. From 1983 through the end of 2011, over $1.5 billion of CPC loans was invested by the City and State funds without a loss of either interest or principal. The losses that did occur, about $6 million, were fully covered by the SONYMA insurance. This record of no losses has continued to the present day.” Since the big swings that occurred from the 1980s through the early 2000s, later generations of bankers, union bureaucrats and others decided to be more “prudent.” In the name of prudence, this flow of capital dried up.
It should be made to flow again. In the current crisis, the State of New York, already a significant player in the field, would need to increase its financial commitments to the range of housing opportunities mentioned here, as well as reasonable proposals from other groups.
Producing far more housing requires more staff. The severely understaffed and undersupported program officers at the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) would welcome a rapid expansion of their teams so that developments languishing in the current pipeline could be reviewed and processed in a timely manner.
Speeding up development by adding agency staff would dramatically reduce the cost to builders, who now expect a multiyear gap between submitting proposals and approval. The meter keeps running during this period, with the costs ballooning and driving up the price of each new or renovated unit. If a builder can get from concept to groundbreaking in two years, instead of five or six, that represents years during which staff, consultants, lenders, and lobbyists no longer need to be paid.
The city is home to scores of top legal and underwriting professionals who once worked for HPD and the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Outsourcing some of this work to them while the next generation of in-house staff members is being recruited and brought up to speed would both make good sense and would expedite the review process. The development staff at NYCHA would also need to be beefed up. Or it would be worth exploring if the professionals at the School Construction Authority — in our minds, the most productive public agency delivering new buildings — could take over the delivery of projects that would entail City construction, such as building senior residences on NYCHA sites.
The next mayor has an enormous opportunity to set the pieces in place to stimulate the next great wave of affordable housing work in the city. It’s not as hard as it looks. The land is waiting to be turned into real places for real people to live.