Major development projects can employ and house people at scale.
Building big is an immutable identifier of development ambitions in New York City and has been ever since consolidation transformed New York into a city of five boroughs in 1898. As New York transitioned into a modern city, real-estate forces inaugurated a new era of city-building. Real-estate activity loomed large in the life of the city. It became inseparable from the idea of New York itself, aligned to its culture of commerce economically, politically and socially — and so it remains today.
But today, with New York seemingly built out, our ambitions for city-building are much smaller than they used to be. This is a mistake. The city might seem full, but we still have the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to think big.
Once, driven by rapid business expansion and surging population growth, New York’s builders pursued a pattern of building at scale. Their works created New York’s iconic density evident in skyscrapers (which, relative to what’s come after them, don’t seem to scrape the sky any longer) jammed into the historic streets of Lower Manhattan, later generations of office towers in Midtown Manhattan and the newest residential towers in Brooklyn and Long Island City. Less photogenic, but equally essential to the story of New York’s prominence in city-building, are the many acclaimed landmark housing projects for wage-earners and middle-income families. Think Stuyvesant Town, Co-Op City, public housing projects and so many others.
Housing the most people in the most economic manner while managing the risks of large-scale building dominated the urban dialogue in New York City during the first decades of the 20th century. Innovative experimental projects of ambitious scale made New York a pioneer.
As a condition for the city’s continued economic prosperity and social health, the need for affordable housing at scale is ever more pressing today, and the city’s legacy of building big offers a prelude to thinking about the future.
Experimental urbanism
The last great wave of urban construction came out of necessity. Housing conditions in New York City at the turn of the 20th century were in dire need of reform. Old, overcrowded, inferior tenement housing built on the cheap during the 19th century needed to be replaced, and its design seriously reconsidered, to provide tenants with adequate light and improved sanitation and safety. Additionally, thousands of new dwellings were needed to accommodate a population explosion driven by waves of immigrants and others drawn to employment opportunities. Lot-by-lot development of tenements, the building pattern of the previous century, even when improved in design, was not up to the task of meeting the residential demands of an enlarged and rapidly urbanizing city. Large-scale projects were necessary, and they, in turn, imposed new demands on residential form and site design to mitigate the impact of increased densities.
Acting on different motivations, a certain set of builders, architects, philanthropists, union leaders and insurance companies worked through new ideas of providing modest-cost housing and planning complete residential communities. In short, the drive for scale inspired innovative experimentation.
Some of the city’s housing experiments evolved from different motivations. Wealthy philanthropists who aimed to address low-income housing problems founded City and Suburban Homes Company to build projects that could offer low rents because of large-scale organization and an investment model of limited returns: “philanthropy plus 5%.” When completed, the firm’s earliest projects in Manhattan, Avenue A Estate (1901-1913, 1,257 apartments plus a hotel) and First Avenue Estate (1898-1915, 1,059 apartments), were the largest low-income housing communities in the world; both are New York City landmarks. The most prolific of limited-dividend companies, City and Suburban Homes, after 25 years of operation, housed more than 12,000 tenants. Its success encouraged others to enter the field.
As successful as it was, however, the model could not address the full scale of New York City’s housing problem.
In 1922, prompted by a housing crisis and lobbying by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the New York State Legislature passed a law, the so-called “Metropolitan Bill,” enabling all life insurance companies operating in the state to invest up to 10% of their stated assets in residential development, with profits capped at 6%. Metropolitan Life responded with plans designed by architect Andrew J. Thomas for a project of 2,125 apartments built in five-story buildings around small interior courtyards on parcels still used for truck farming in Long Island City, Queens. Such scale, the company believed, would create economies in construction, operation and financing that would offset regulated rents. When completed in 1924, the complex (38 buildings, 1,500 apartments, currently called Cosmopolitan Houses) became the largest low-rent housing project in the country, rented mostly to middle-income households.
In 1938, new legislation drew life insurance companies, with their deep pockets of capital, into city-building at even greater magnitudes of scale. Large-scale housing appeared to offer a secure and profitable investment, and the civic-oriented investment was as well good publicity for the industry. Led by Frederick H. Ecker, Metropolitan Life completed four enormous market-rate housing projects: in the Bronx, Parkchester (12,272 units, 1940-1941); in Manhattan, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village (8,755 and 2,495 units, respectively, 1947-1949) and Riverton Houses (1,232 units, 1947-1948). The favorable economics of housing investment at the time, sweetened with tax abatements, influenced others: New York Life Insurance Company (3,008 units in Fresh Meadows, Queens, 1949; 582 units in Manhattan House, Manhattan, 1951) and Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States (1,130 units at Fordham Hill, Bronx, 1946-1950; 1,221 units at Clinton Hill Apartments, Brooklyn, 1943-1955). By 1955, these big-three life companies had sponsored more than 33,000 housing units. As conservative fiduciaries, they were unlikely developers to take on the risk of constructing innovative, large-scale, planned communities affordable to middle-class renters in America’s most expensive city.
The developer Alexander Bing, retired from his successful family real-estate company Bing & Bing, founded City Housing Corporation specifically to build a “garden city” under a limited-dividend investment format. Sunnyside Gardens, Queens (1924-1928), one of the most significant planned residential communities in New York City, gained widespread recognition for the way its architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright designed low-density housing, amenities and landscaped open courtyards to foster a neighborhood that would meet the social as well as physical needs of its residents. By combining large-scale residential design and site planning (more than 600 buildings developed on 16 blocks covering 77 acres) with low-cost capital, Bing and his associates found a physical solution to the housing problems of the time. Desirous of promoting ownership rather than tenancy, the firm leveraged scale to keep selling prices low, and Bing’s real-estate skills enabled it to innovate homeownership financing mechanisms unique for the time. Today, it is a New York City historic district.
During the building boom of the 1920s, two profit-seeking developers, Fred F. French and Henry Mandel, pioneered large-scale walk-to-work residential enclaves that aimed to keep the middle-class urban worker in the city by providing well-built housing at a modest cost. Each believed modest rentals could be achieved by building at scale in older neighborhoods where land could be purchased at a relatively low cost based on existing antiquated or deteriorating structures. With Tudor City (1927-1930, 2,800 apartments on 14.5 acres formerly known as Prospect Hill), French aimed for suburban ambience in the city and advertised his project as “a garden spot in the center of New York” with built-in amenities to make urban living convenient, an antidote to a city growing taller, more commercial, more congested and noisier.
In London Terrace (1929-1930), Mandel also built “a city within a city” but hewed to high-density urban modernity in a massively scaled block-long complex of 14 continuous buildings (23rd to 24th Street) containing 1,665 apartments rising straight up from the street. Known as “the world’s largest apartment house under one roof,” Mandel planned London Terrace as an oasis offering residents an elaborate array of services and every accommodation for modern urban life. Both pioneering large-scale developments were speculative ventures based on an ideal. Both drove a dramatic shift in the fortunes of surrounding areas. Both used eponymous financing plans to support their development activities. And both created lasting legacies of city-building.
The most notable of builders of housing for the working class, Abraham E. Kazan and his United Housing Foundation, joined forces with the power of the city’s labor unions to build an alternative vision for housing based on the idea of cooperative ownership. They planned housing not just as a collection of residential buildings but as complete cooperative villages, and they followed through on that ambition in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Over the course of 40 years, Kazan oversaw the development of 40,000 cooperative homes in New York City in large-scale projects built on a not-for-profit basis. The first project, Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, is today the oldest surviving limited-equity housing co-op in the United States (11 buildings erected between 1927 and 1970, 1,468 units). Rochdale Village in Queens became the largest housing cooperative in the world when it opened in late 1963 (5,860 apartments housing some 25,000 residents in 20 buildings laid out in a massive 170-acre superblock with its own food stores, nursery schools and credit union), only to be surpassed in size by Co-Op City in the Bronx (1960-1964, 35 high-rise buildings with 15,372 residential units on 320 acres). Housing co-ops were not new to New York, but Kazan’s legacy of building limited-equity co-ops, firmly rooted in the city’s labor movement, uniquely contributed to the city’s history of housing.
New York City’s growth and prosperity during the 20th century hinged on its ability to house the policemen, firefighters, tradesmen, garment workers, teachers, nurses and doctors, clerical and professional office workers and wage-earners who fueled the urban economy. The housing experiments I noted above represent approximately 82,000 dwelling units. More than bulk, the significance of building at scale on the land opportunities of the time enabled the creation of communities with open spaces and social infrastructure for urban life. Often cited as touchstones in the physical history of New York, these legacy communities established a template of ambition that inspired others then as it should today.
21st-century opportunity
What to make of this legacy? How to learn from it today?
Land that made such building at scale possible — the truck farms and rural estates of the outer boroughs and deteriorated tenements of Manhattan past their useful lives — is today no longer available in our built-up city, and the land reclamation projects that enabled large-scale projects like Co-Op City, Starrett City and Battery Park City are today environmentally constrained. With fewer opportunities to build at scale, sites like the Sunnyside Yard and Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens and Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn present tantalizing possibilities.
Consider, for example, the 180 acres of the Sunnyside Yard site, the largest undeveloped public site in New York. It offers a rare opportunity to create housing at scale based on a long-range framework for sustainable growth, planned in innovative ways that improve connections to well-established surrounding neighborhoods. Development of the Yard offers what building housing lot-by-lot cannot: the opportunity to build communities that sustain quality urban life.
The scale of the site can provide some 12,000 to 15,000 mixed-income housing units; open space and supporting social infrastructure of schools, libraries and childcare and health care centers; and a start-from-scratch chance to rethink core physical infrastructure for support of urban living.
Building a deck over much of the rail yard would create new publicly controlled land to serve the City’s future priorities, renew New York’s historic ambition to expand beyond its physical topography and further its legacy of innovative city-building.
The Sunnyside Yard Master Plan was completed in March 2020 after years of planning, wide-ranging community engagement and extensive technical engineering work. It was not a thought exercise but rather a major effort to understand the constraints and opportunities, in consultation with communities, of creating a realistic basis for development of City priorities at scale.
Since its completion, changed economic circumstances might necessitate amendments or adjustments to the plan and its mix of uses. As policy, however, the fundamental ideas undergirding it are consistent with public priorities for mixed-use, mixed-income, community-based development. We do not need to start the planning over.
Incremental lot-by-lot development alone cannot meet the scale of today’s housing needs. The bold development of the Sunnyside Yard would take several decades, but today is the time to start structuring that process. The site presents complications and challenges, but New York City has the technical expertise and skilled public- and private-sector players necessary to bring a project of this scale to fruition within the time frame of other ambitious projects.
Creating new communities at Sunnyside Yard — as was the case in the award-winning development of Battery Park City with its 8,275 residential units, 11 million square feet of office space, 36 acres of parks and four public schools — requires a large up-front public investment to build the platform for growth. It could be done incrementally, and a place to start would be a section of about 25 acres where a deck is easiest to build.
Beyond the essential financial heft to build the infrastructure that would take the opportunity from plan to reality, officials at each level of government need to commit political capital to this project. And that commitment needs a strong governance structure to propel the project forward.
To restate the obvious: The need for housing is great, and few opportunities exist in New York City to increase mixed-income housing at scale — which development of Sunnyside Yard could make possible. Mayor Mamdani needs to take the long view and embrace this priority.
Disclosure: The author was an independent advisor of the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan Steering Committee.
