The fate of New York is riding on whether the city can increase the supply of housing.
New York City is living through its worst housing affordability crisis in a century. While the City and State distribute billions of dollars in housing subsidies each year, maintain the most robust rent-stabilization program in the nation and sustain a public housing system that is home to a population larger than many cities, almost all of the personal outcomes associated with housing here are terrible. Around 86,000 New Yorkers stayed in a City-run shelter on a typical night in August 2025. The median New York renter spent 31% of their income on rent last year. Only 1.4% of rental apartments are available for rent — including an infinitesimal 0.4% of apartments that cost less than $1,100 per month. In 2023, only 53% of NYCHA Housing Choice (Section 8) voucher holders — already a small subset of those eligible by income — were able to secure an apartment before their voucher expired.
All of these devastating statistics are rooted in the fact that we have not built nearly enough homes to accommodate all those who want or need to live in New York City. Some of the most centrally located neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn are actually losing homes as people with means combine multiple apartments, and their neighborhoods do not add enough new homes to make up the difference.
How did we get here?
Our crisis is in part a product of New York City’s success. Since the high-crime, high-dysfunction late 1980s, we have increasingly become a city in high demand. Between 2011 and 2023, the city added almost 900,000 new jobs but only 350,000 new homes — a difference of almost three new jobs for every home built. Removing the pandemic-related job losses of 2020 from the average, that ratio leaps to almost 6-to-1. That shortfall shows up in everyday life: Rents climb faster than paychecks, people in their 40s live with roommates, and many workers must commute from far-flung suburbs. Scarcity also tilts the playing field against housing voucher holders and renters with lower credit scores; with dozens of strong applications, landlords pick the safest prospect, and vulnerable populations fall further behind.
Other big cities prove that scarcity is a choice. Tokyo adds roughly 80,000 homes a year — two to three times New York’s pace — and rents there stay moderate even as its population rockets past 14 million. Houston allows townhomes and small apartment buildings on most blocks, keeping supply high and virtually ending chronic homelessness. Austin expanded its housing stock by 14% in two years — New York managed 2% — and saw rents fall 22%. Auckland upzoned transit corridors, which sparked a construction boom that flattened rents within three years.
The lesson is consistent: Sensible zoning to allow more homes of all kinds, along with streamlined approvals, can unlock the construction needed to curb rent spikes.
New York has produced lots of housing at a rapid clip before. In the 1920s, the city added nearly 730,000 new homes, nearly four times what was added in the 2010s. As recently as the 1960s, we built twice as many homes per year as we build today. In the intervening decades, a combination of new restrictive zoning rules, layers of paperwork and changes to public review processes has resulted in a city where it is impossible to add enough homes to meet need.
Now and again, you’ll hear antidevelopment voices suggesting that the city is “full,” and that adding lots more people will stress infrastructure and services. Any such argument defies the very essence of New York City as a place where openness, diversity and entrepreneurial energy are its engine — meant to be fueled, not stalled.
It also defies the dynamic history of New York City development, which has been defined by the renewal and regeneration of buildings (think East Midtown, where 19th century brownstones made way for the Chrysler Building in the 1930s), the creation of new neighborhoods via land reclamation (think Battery Park City) and the organic growth of apartment buildings of different sizes and forms (think Astoria to Jackson Heights, where single-family houses along Broadway and Steinway Street evolved into the three- to six-story walk-ups above storefronts that still anchor commercial corridors).
The story of why New York City slammed the brakes on housing production is complex, mixed with both good and bad intentions, and outdated policies linger on the books even as the challenges we face have changed dramatically. Guardrails that were initially necessary to protect working-class and nonwhite New Yorkers from poor labor standards, industrial pollution and urban renewal overreach have been co-opted over the decades by well-resourced homeowners and other moneyed interests to freeze many neighborhoods in place. Many rules that were created to prevent displacement and protect residents have come to drive up rents citywide and push the very working- and middle-class New Yorkers those rules were meant to protect out of their homes.
The evolution of zoning rules tells the tale. The first half of the 20th century saw rapid growth under (mostly) reasonable zoning laws that attempted to promote resident health and safety. But in 1961, an overhaul of the City’s zoning framework introduced more prescriptive zoning that significantly restricted housing density across the city. Charter revision commissions in 1975 and 1989 established the contours of the current Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), meant to counter the overreach of years of top-down master planning with a more decentralized decision-making process. The resulting process incorporated advisory opinions from community boards and borough presidents and binding votes from the appointed City Planning Commission and City Council.
While the process has many strengths — a predictable seven-month “clock” to ensure projects don’t stall forever, as well as clear, uniform steps aimed at transparency and accountability — our housing shortage today is far more severe than it was in 1989, and ULURP’s built-in political incentives skew against approving housing in the places we most need it.
In theory, ULURP gives every project an objective review. In practice, the local Council member’s unwritten veto — “member deference,” whereby the Council rarely, if ever, bucks the judgment of the member in whose district a given project sits — means no major plan lacking their support has passed since 2009. Well-funded developers can slog through, but small builders rarely bother. Layers of environmental paperwork invite delays and lawsuits, so even modest projects can take years or collapse under the weight of waiting.
Ironically, public-sector-led affordable housing projects, which should have widespread support, face even greater barriers. Since 2022, the city has lost more than 3,500 proposed apartments — nearly 1,000 of them income-restricted — when they have been downsized or withdrawn through the public review process.
What began as efforts to protect neighborhoods and give residents a voice has hardened into a system that freezes much of the city, favoring wealthy enclaves and worsening the housing crunch.
How to fix it
Fortunately, an emerging coalition of advocates and political leaders has, since the late 2010s, paved the way for new opportunities to build more homes more equitably. In response to the Bloomberg administration’s zoning changes — which significantly limited housing growth in predominantly white and wealthy neighborhoods, paired with upzonings lacking required affordability — the de Blasio administration initiated efforts to build more, and more inclusively. De Blasio’s policy agenda began with mandated affordability in new upzonings, but even then, it did not initially focus on the wealthiest neighborhoods where the tool would be most effective. Yet by the end of de Blasio’s mayoralty, new grassroots activism and political leadership helped refocus the priority on mandating affordability in neighborhoods that needed it most. Proposals in this policy legacy in neighborhoods like SoHo/NoHo (2021), Gowanus (2021) and Windsor Terrace (2025) — neighborhoods that previously would have been assumed politically off-limits to growth — have since been successful.
Under Mayor Eric Adams, the big wheel has turned faster still. Last winter, the City passed City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the most significant set of major citywide changes to restrictive and exclusionary zoning rules in a generation, along with a $5 billion package of complementary investments known as City for All. City of Yes pared back parking mandates, legalized backyard accessory units, granted height bonuses for buildings that lock in permanent affordability and more. Spread across every neighborhood, these changes could yield more than 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years and, just as crucially, have forged an even broader prohousing coalition with a necessary citywide approach. While a major step, ultimately these gains cover only a fraction of the roughly 800,000 homes experts say we need in the next decade.
Closing the gap requires bold action on multiple fronts. The New York City Charter Revision Commission approved reforms that would help curb the influence of the well-housed minority from vetoing new homes in the districts where they are most needed. Four important ballot questions offer voters in November a rare chance to realign the rules toward fairer, more abundant housing citywide. The next mayoral and City Council administrations must build even further on this momentum in all corners of the city with ambitious neighborhood and citywide reforms.
The 2025 primary election cycle sent promising signals. Nearly every mayoral platform included strategies to build more homes, more quickly, demonstrating just how much the conversation has shifted. Prohousing City Council members won reelection handily, including those who had taken hard votes for more homes. Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani captured the Democratic Mayoral nomination after centering affordability and energizing many young New Yorkers fed up with the status quo. Mamdani was a proponent of City of Yes and has notably evolved his thinking about the need for both private- and public-sector housing and a broader agenda of effective governance.
However, no mayor or City Council can solve the city’s housing shortage on their own. For better or worse, New York State government holds many crucial levers that contribute to the shortage, including decision-making over the City’s regressive property tax system and the overly litigious environmental review processes that are often weaponized to delay or kill proposals for new homes, especially in well-resourced neighborhoods.
New York State has also failed to update its basic zoning framework to curtail the many restrictive and exclusionary rules that its municipalities have created over the past 80 years. Unlike counterparts across the country, New York lawmakers have chosen not to enact a statewide legislative mechanism to push forward home construction in areas that continually block new homes. Westchester and Long Island have some of the most restrictive and exclusionary zoning in the nation; their lack of growth also exacerbates the severe housing pressures within New York City’s bounds when it can’t spill over into neighboring suburbs.
The outcome is unsurprising: few affordable options, particularly in areas with high-performing schools, and a perpetuation of the patterns of segregation under the guise of “local control.” Legalizing modest apartment buildings near regional transit stations, allowing homeowners to build backyard cottages or granny flats and setting enforceable targets for affordable housing growth are all critical solutions that other states have embraced.
In 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out a promising blueprint including solutions to many of these problems, but it ran aground. And since then, she has shied away from pressing ahead on many of the most impactful ideas. The Legislature has shown interest in a smart first step with the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act, which streamlines the ability to build affordable housing on land owned by faith-based organizations across the state, but did not pass the bill this past legislative session. Without an assertive Albany, even the boldest mayor will be stuck playing whack‑a‑mole with rising rents.
The bedrock beneath every issue
Housing is the foundation of civic life. When homes are scarce and expensive, teachers leave, storefronts go dark and neighborhood ties fray. New York spends more per capita on affordable housing than any other state in the nation — almost $1,000 per person per year. California, the closest second, doesn’t clear $750 per person. Yet dollars alone cannot solve shortages created by outdated rules. Fix the housing-production bottleneck — make it easier to build more homes of all types in the neighborhoods people most want to live in — and the rest gets easier: Rents stabilize, voucher holders can find homes, families stay and grow, and overcrowding eases. Ignore production, and displacement, homelessness and fiscal stress all worsen.
New York City missed keeping one of its congressional seats in the 2020 reapportionment by just 89 residents. Since then, more than half a million people have left the state. If the trend holds, we will likely lose yet another two seats — or three — after the 2030 Census, shrinking our voice over transit funds, disaster aid and every federal program the city relies on, and eroding New York’s importance in the Electoral College.
Time is short. Act boldly, and we can keep the promise that anyone who wants to build a life here can find a place to live. Shrink from the task, and we will see rents climb, the tax base erode and New York’s seat at the national table grow smaller. The choice — build or bust — is ours, and the clock is ticking.