Confronting The Crisis of Affordability
Beyond all the campaign trail chronicles, the poll numbers, the advertising buys, the perceptions of the candidates, one factor overall dominates the voter's decision process - the state of the city.
New York City was heading towards bankruptcy in 1977 when we tossed out incumbent Abe Beame in favor of Edward Koch. In 1993, after suffering consecutive years of more than 2,000 murders, we turned out David Dinkins in favor of Rudolph Giuliani.
The state of the city today, four years after the attacks of September 11, is indisputably good. Murder rates are approaching 40-year lows. The streets are safe, City Hall has so far been spared any significant scandals, and economic development is booming in all five boroughs.
But this very success creates its own problem. This is the Catch-22 of good times - as New York City prospers, the middle class gets squeezed. It becomes increasingly difficult for average folks to live here affordably.
The crisis of affordability has been a staple of Fernando Ferrer's campaign for mayor. Even Conservative Party candidate Tom Ognibene has focused on the financial pressure facing long-time residents of outer-borough communities. It is a rare point of cross-spectrum consensus, as neighborhoods from Harlem to Middle Village feel the squeeze of increasing property values and concurrently higher property taxes.
At a time when the average apartment in Manhattan costs more than a million dollars, the average income for a family of four in the city remains just over $60,000. Money Magazine recently named Manhattan as again the most expensive place to live in the United States, calculating that the cost of living here is 138% more expensive than the national mean. San Francisco came in second, at 98% above the mean - a comparative bargain. Or to compare quality of life costs another way, two season tickets to the Yankees next year would set an average New York City family back almost $6,000 - or 10% of their pre-tax annual income.
But can a mayor be held responsible for the increased difficulty of affordability in the city? The mayor is not an economic czar and we are not living in the New Deal era. When the successful governance of a city results in an economically vibrant environment, desirability rises and affordability decreases. What can a mayor reasonably expected to do to control such market forces? Local variations on price controls have been tried in the past, with the perverse effect of ultimately compounding the problem they tried to address.
Rent control and rent stabilization efforts during the mid-20th century were intended to alleviate economic pressure on existing tenants, but they created a two-tier system of scarcity by design, restricting supply amid rising demand. The result has been that rent-controlled apartments are absurdly good bargains for those lucky enough to stumble into them, but their presence has effectively and artificially raised rents on the rest of us.
In the more recent past, when crime and incivility wrecked once-proud neighborhoods in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the decision of many families to move out to the comparative safety of the suburbs was derided as "white flight." But now that crime has been on the decline for 10 consecutive years, and neighborhoods are being revived, the flip side is attacked as "gentrification." Using this lens of analysis, all neighborhood evolutions are lose-lose propositions.
The effect of our city's resurgence is seen in the building boom that is evident across the city. Combined with intelligent rezoning efforts, this increase in housing supply ought to alleviate price pressure. But given the high cost of building in New York, developers are setting their sights on the luxury market, aiming for initial tenants with incomes of over $100,000. Given this current market reality, mandating affordable housing has become an almost bi-partisan rallying cry, with calls for requiring 20% or 40% of units in new buildings to be set aside for moderate- or low-income buyers or renters. This is far preferable to the crude and stigmatizing public housing projects solutions of the past, but whether it is practical or sustainable has yet to be seen.
Given the centrality of the affordability debate in this year's mayoral race, it is surprising that at least one possible step toward a solution has been absent from the debate - construction reform.
The cost of construction in New York City is inflated between 30% and 50% compared to competing cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas, according to some estimates. This is because of a variety of factors, including regulatory complications, zoning issues, building code red-tape, and corruption. Past investigations of local construction contractors by the district attorney of New York county, Robert Morgenthau, suggests that as much as 20% in corruption cost was added to the cost of projects undertaken in the 1990s. With the current construction boom underway, we are subsidizing these inefficiencies and passing the costs on to consumers.
The construction unions were early and enthusiastic supporters of Mayor Bloomberg's campaign, and Democratic candidates generally do not have the political will to take on influential unions. But with the political capital gained by the victor of this election, construction reform in the form of a construction commission aimed at reducing the influence of organized crime - along with further reduction of Buildings Department red tape and less rigid zoning laws - could be powerful ways to help restore sanity and affordability to the New York real estate market.
Great cities, especially New York, depend on a strong middle class for stability and long-term survival. The affordability crunch is a creeping threat to our city, but it is also a marker of our success at restoring the desirability of New York as a destination. Unrealistic demands that a mayor can somehow solve these market pressures are more demagoguery than reasoned civic debate, but creative solutions to the problem are not too much to expect from City Hall in the coming four years.
