As New York City rents have risen into the stratosphere in recent decades, City officials and policy wonks have mostly sought to respond by building new housing, arguing that increased supply is the only way to bring down rental costs.
Michael Bloomberg rezoned huge sections of the city to allow for taller buildings, leading to the apartment towers that today crowd downtown Brooklyn and the Williamsburg waterfront. Bill de Blasio vowed to build or preserve 200,000 units of housing, in part by relaxing zoning rules and removing other regulatory barriers to construction. Eric Adams's "City of Yes" upped that goal to 500,000 units, largely by making it easier for developers to build. And Zohran Mamdani has made housing construction one of the pillars of his affordability agenda, first with his appointment of two City of Yes stalwarts as his deputy mayor for housing and City Planning executive director, and most recently with this month's’s trip to the White House to revive a de Blasio-era plan to build 12,000 units of housing over the Amtrak-owned Sunnyside railyards—hoping to sell Donald Trump on the plan by letting the president pose with a fake 1975-style Daily News front page reading "TRUMP TO CITY: LET'S BUILD."
"I’m looking forward to building more housing in New York City," Mamdani captioned his photo alongside Trump on social media. Freshly installed deputy mayor for housing Leila Bozorg, meanwhile, has called for "progressive people to come together" to work on protecting existing tenants while also "addressing our housing shortage."
It's a sign of how political consensus for building our way out of the pandemic of crazy-ass rents has grown in the past few years. That's been especially true since last year’s publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book "Abundance," which argued that local zoning laws and building codes were keeping rents overinflated by preventing the housing market from creating enough new housing—and that lowering housing costs was a noble enough goal to override any lingering qualms about running roughshod over existing neighborhoods.
It makes a sort of common sense: The basics of supply and demand dictate that if something is scarce, the price will go up. So if the rent is too damn high, it seems only logical to bring it down by loosening red tape to flood the zone with new apartments.
But that idea, according to a major new housing study, is dead wrong.