The Quality of Quantity

A welcome consensus is starting to emerge in New York City: If we are ever to make our city more affordable, we have to build more apartments to address our severe housing shortage. In a win for housers, virtually every mayoral candidate has proposed to increase housing production, but the devil will be in the details — what kind of housing, where, built by whom and for whom? Reasonable minds agree that we need to ramp up housing supply to address the city’s success of increased demand, but what will we demand of this supply?

With all this talk of quantity, shouldn’t we, in this, the greatest city on earth, equally insist upon quality?

Fran Lebowitz, Gotham’s famed raconteur, once observed that “No one can afford to live in New York. Yet, eight million people do. How do we do this? We don’t know!” I often wonder when it was that people considered New York affordable: during the time of our Indigenous predecessors, the Lenape? There was of course the 1970s, when the city lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and communities of color were ravaged by crime — is that the era for which people pine? Put differently, our current struggles with affordability are due to decades of magnetic success most places would envy: Millions of residents want to stay, while newcomers of all stripes and means want in. The statue in the harbor is doing her thing.

Our Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has understandably focused on the struggles of everyday New Yorkers to make ends meet with his populist oratory, a luminous smile, impactful social media and head-scratching policy prescriptions. (I visited the Soviet Union before its collapse. Government-run grocery stores? No, thank you.)

One of Mamdani’s central campaign promises — freezing the rent in rent-stabilized housing — was enacted before by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Yet little evidence points to increased affordability during de Blasio’s eight years as mayor, particularly for low-income New Yorkers, despite that administration’s laudable achievements in other key policy arenas such as building working-class housing and establishing universal pre-K. As cited by the Community Service Society, the 2017 Housing and Vacancy Survey found that the city’s affordability crisis did not subside under Mr. De Blasio, but to be fair, the City has been in an official state of “housing emergency” since the 1960s: There are no quick fixes here.

With over 100,000 homeless people in our shelters tonight, including countless children, it should be painstakingly clear that our entire housing system is broken in terms of both process and product. The Adams team deserves immense credit for its City of Yes zoning amendments to produce more housing; recent recommendations from the New York City Charter Revision Commission, which will be voted upon this November, bring additional hope for achievable reform. But much more must be done.

No matter who wins the mayoralty this year, they must adopt an all-of-the-above approach. For the nearly half of New York City apartments that are rent-stabilized, the incoming administration should of course advocate for a fair balance between struggling renters and their landlords, who must maintain their buildings in the face of rising costs. But the new mayor must also deal with the crisis in the remaining half of our housing stock — apartments that are market rate rather than rent-stabilized — by significantly advancing housing construction for both renters and those who aspire to own. The Koch, Bloomberg, de Blasio and Adams administrations all enabled new housing, albeit in different ways for different eras, but construction takes time while we continually fall behind the curve of extraordinary ongoing demand overwhelming this limited new supply, which in turn causes ordinary people to doubt the supply-demand analysis as their rents continue to rise.

But perhaps the political challenge isn’t the veracity of the analysis but the appeal of its aesthetic. Technocrats speak of facts; populists — who are all the bipartisan rage today — speak of emotion. The first is a rhetoric of light, the second of heat. Perspiration without inspiration is just sweat, so how beyond sweating over our inability to produce sufficient housing do we inspire people to actually want more housing in their neighborhoods? It is abundantly fashionable today to blame community groups for our inability to build, but perhaps the greater fault lies with the policy wonks who must learn to not only be impatient for new housing, but to be inclusive and inspirational as well.

As an architect, my first impulse is to focus on homes, not housing. Little is more intimate than the space of one’s dwelling, where one makes love and dinner, where one raises children while praying for a raise. Eighteen months ago, in The New York Times, my team and I proposed a plan for building homes for 1 million New Yorkers. In our plan, we visualized the spaces and places where people across the city can be housed near transit and out of flood zones, with images that helped readers understand new buildings in relation to the scale of their neighborhoods. Much to my pleasure, the article inspired many everyday New Yorkers, from whom I heard in droves. A number of the random emails I received spoke to the aesthetics — “if only new housing in our neighborhood could feel like that,” people would suggest, often employing language not about how the imagined architecture looked, but what it meant for them as an experience. The green-eye-shades among us will immediately jump to the conclusion that I am advocating spending more money on design, and they would largely be right, but with fewer dollar signs than they often fear and more intelligence than they typically summon. How is this for math: If your building cost 5% more in order to be attractive, and this shaved precious time off your approvals process while helping you sleep better at night as a good citizen, isn’t that worth the trade-off?

Efficiency and experience don’t have to be at odds. My firm has been working on a deeply affordable development in East New York called the Innovative Urban Village, and while the construction budget is tight, our aspirations are not. We are designing more than 2,200 homes, including some homeownership opportunities, in handsome brick apartment buildings for individuals and families over a range of low to middle incomes, all organized around social infrastructure, public space and a performing arts center. So far, the community acceptance level has been extraordinarily high and the dialogue respectful, with an atmosphere of mutual trust that I do attribute, in part, to their embrace of the design as their own.

As the winds of change blow through our politics this autumn, I can only hope some leaves will settle on this side of beauty, which will only happen if we embrace it as egalitarian rather than elitist. Otherwise, we have descended so far down the political rabbit hole that the aspiration of high quality for the public — so commonplace from socialist Europe to capitalist Japan to our own exquisite Grand Central Station — has become elitist in the eyes of today’s political elite.

The quality of mercy is not strained, and neither is the quality of our lives. We no more have to choose between neighborhood character and inviting new neighbors than we do, for instance, between additional train capacity and beautiful architecture at Penn Station. Such attempts to pit need against desire, efficiency against experience, are the constant challenge my profession confronts in this still Puritanical society. As the richest city in the richest nation on earth, these are false choices we must reject, lest we end up with nothing but rejection of all construction by a beleaguered public.

We do not have to tell communities that we need to churn out ugly modules of housing — a notion they will rightfully spurn — in order to achieve expeditious delivery of quality homes. As we propose much-needed new construction in people’s neighborhoods, we must learn to be inclusive, impatient and inspirational, trusting that creating spaces and places of both affordability and beauty fulfills our most basic human desires.

When I look out my apartment window, I not only want to see a city that current and future New Yorkers can afford, but will cherish. That isn’t elitist or profligate or technocratic. It’s human.