When I was growing up in New York, I took a trash bag with my clothes to school because my mother was worried that the lock on our door would be changed and we would end up on the street without warning. Housing insecurity is a global crisis that transcends national wealth or geography. Today millions of families and children face, just as I did, housing insecurity. Research has shown that stable housing is crucial for health, education, employment and intergenerational prosperity.
Housing insecurity is not just a big city problem. The United States is short of at least 3.8 million homes, which has caused a surge in rents and purchase prices that far exceeds wage growth. This housing crisis affects us all – people who find themselves homeless, young adults who cannot afford to leave their parents’ homes, families who are crammed into cramped apartments.
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Racism, bureaucracy and real estate conservatism
Many factors contribute to this situation.
When I was growing up in New York, I took a trash bag with my clothes to school because my mother was worried that the lock on our door would be changed and we would end up on the street without warning. Housing insecurity is a global crisis that transcends national wealth or geography. Today millions of families and children face, just as I did, housing insecurity. Research has shown that stable housing is crucial for health, education, employment and intergenerational prosperity.
Democrat Eric Adams, a former police officer, was elected mayor of New York in November 2021. He has served since 1is January 2022.
Housing insecurity is not just a big city problem. The United States is short of at least 3.8 million homes, which has caused a surge in rents and purchase prices that far exceeds wage growth. This housing crisis affects us all – people who find themselves homeless, young adults who cannot afford to leave their parents’ homes, families who are crammed into cramped apartments.
Read alsoUSA/Real Estate: Housing resales at their lowest since 2010
Racism, bureaucracy and real estate conservatism
Many factors contribute to this situation, but the heart of the problem is that we are not building enough housing. The reason is simple: For generations across the country, well-housed people have opposed building projects in their neighborhoods. It is time to change the narrative and, on the contrary, to say “yes” to new housing.
It starts with understanding how we got here. Racism made us say “no”. Discriminatory housing policies sidelined black and brown families, effectively excluding them from the path to prosperity. Practices such as occupancy density caps as well as bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles have prevented the construction of high-density housing developments in urban and suburban neighborhoods, and are part of this legacy of classism and racism.
Bureaucracy and inertia made us say “no”. In New York, the process of changing zoning rules has turned into a labyrinthine journey that sometimes takes years to complete and raises millions of dollars for new real estate projects.
Finally, political and cultural rhetoric made us say no. Minority but very active groups block any new construction, saying “not in my backyard” (nimby, “not behind my home”) whenever someone proposes a new investment that would benefit those in need. Some – spread across the political spectrum – choose politics over people.
In New York, we recently saw a small group of landlords try to block a relatively modest project to build 350 housing units in the Bronx, including affordable apartments for retirees and veterans. Neighborhood meetings have turned into verbal fistfights peppered with racially charged language. Threats were made against local elected officials. In May 2022, a project to build 900 new apartments in Harlem had to be scrapped because due to local opposition there were not enough votes to approve the necessary zoning change. Instead of providing cheap housing for hundreds of families, the site is now destined to become a truck depot.
$22 billion in public investment
Since I took office (on 1is January 2022), we have set out to chart a new direction. We are becoming the city of yes – “yes in my backyard” (yimby, “yes in my block of buildings, yes in my neighborhood”). We’re proposing dozens of changes to New York’s zoning rules to make it easier to build new homes that will benefit families of different economic means and right the racist ills of the past. We use new technologies and innovative processes to accelerate the approval of new projects by public agencies. And we’re trying to improve the political process by which larger projects are approved, so that the whole city, not a handful of opponents, has a say in decisions that determine whether a high proportion of New Yorkers may or may not continue to live in the city that is theirs.
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We will support these changes with $22 billion in public investment in housing over the next decade – the largest housing effort in the city’s history. And we will accelerate the construction of housing for homeless individuals and families.
We are not alone. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu recently signed an executive order accelerating the construction of new housing. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature are now requiring all counties in the state to take responsibility for increasing housing construction. And we look forward to working with our state legislature to increase construction throughout the region.
These efforts will only have results if we remain united. The voices that say “no” have always been the loudest – and we must answer them with a chorus of “yes” to be able to drown “nimbyism” under “yimbyism”. The housing crisis concerns us all. We must all work together to solve it.
The perspective of Eric Adams, Mayor of New York City, for The Economist
