Upzoning for equity

New York City and the region as a whole are in the midst of a profound housing crisis, generations in the making. Homebuilding in the city has fallen desperately behind levels that are needed to keep prices stable — never mind drive rents down. The housing crisis is fundamentally a housing shortage: last year, the five boroughs permitted fewer new homes per capita than either San Francisco or Baltimore.

Wealthy neighborhoods have particularly shirked their responsibility to build their fair share of housing. When the de Blasio administration looks for opportunities to “upzone” — that is, to change the zoning code to permit larger buildings — they find them in the lowest-income neighborhoods. East Harlem and Inwood in Manhattan, Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, East New York in Brooklyn, Far Rockaway in Queens, and Bay Street on Staten Island have all accepted or are working through rezonings for more housing. The only neighborhood that the de Blasio administration has considered rezoning that isn’t poor is Gowanus, an industrial area where there aren’t many residents to complain. Open New York believes this is an unfair dynamic, which must change if New York is to lay any claim to being a progressive city that makes room for people of lesser means.

SoHo and NoHo are rich in transit, rich in history –and rich, period. Yet affordable housing in the purple areas in the center is impractical to build under current zoning, which only permits light manufacturing and boutique office space.

The Department of City Planning’s reconsideration of zoning in SoHo and NoHo is an opportune time to challenge this unfair pattern of development. The city is looking to clean up zoning rules which, bizarrely, forbid retail in the M1–5A and M1–5B districts that blanket SoHo and NoHo. Open New York thinks this is also the time to make room for more neighbors in two of the city’s most exclusionary neighborhoods. The city should upzone the neighborhood within the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing framework common to all rezoning during the de Blasio administration, requiring developers to build affordable housing alongside market-rate rental apartments. Not only would the additional density be more than appropriate in a very in-demand neighborhood with some of the best transit in the western hemisphere, but housing is a bigger need in New York City than the boutique office space currently allowed.

We recognize this won’t be easy — many existing residents entered the neighborhood as early-wave gentrifiers decades ago, and have profited from growing amenities and property values shooting into the stratosphere. More recently, fabulously wealthy investors and homeowners have bought into a neighborhood whose outward appearance they expected to never change. Both are groups who are rarely asked to shoulder any responsibility for housing New Yorkers and would-be New Yorkers without six-figure jobs, who didn’t have the good fortune to buy or rent lofts back when they were still halfway affordable.

Despite the difficulty of rezoning Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, it is necessary if neighborhoods in the outer boroughs and uptown are to be saved from the SoHo-ification that will continue to send overflow demand from Manhattan into the outer boroughs, gentrifying Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island — and eventually beyond. We also hope that it could make room for the next generation of artists, who can’t afford to buy or rent in the current market.

To that end, Open New York has identified two ways for SoHo and NoHo to accommodate more housing — which we believe should be a higher priority than the boutique office space currently allowed — while at the same time preserving the cast iron buildings that make the neighborhoods unique. The first strategy is to rezone the neighborhoods’ underdeveloped edges for mixed-income, high-rise housing, with mandatory affordable housing set-asides, at rents that low-income New Yorkers can actually afford. The second is to allow infill on vacant or near-vacant lots in the cast iron heart of the neighborhood, while matching the density of pre-war buildings on the same block.

Furthermore, we would also support exploring the pedestrianization of the neighborhoods’ historic districts, both to discourage car use and make the walking experience more pleasant, while also making room for the additional residents that new housing would bring.