Mayor Bloomberg says he wants more affordable housing in New York City, but the plight of one developer hoping to build just that is becoming a scandal on Mr. Bloomberg’s watch. Toll Brothers Inc., a Pennsylvania-based developer famous for sprucing up the Jersey suburbs with upper-middle-class subdivisions, has been waiting since 2004 for the Department of City Planning to certify the rezoning of a two-block slice of land along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

Toll Brothers recently had to withdraw an application for a state-funded environmental cleanup of the site because of the city’s tardiness. And even if Toll Brothers gets city approval to go ahead with rezoning, it will still have to embark on a 7-month process of more hearings and reviews before it can begin building the mixed-income urban village of townhouses and apartments it has planned.

Toll Brothers doesn’t want to talk about its problems in Brooklyn (“Use your imagination,” one of its vice presidents, David Von Spreckelsen, said). But the situation is an example of how politicians, while intoning about the need for affordable housing and proposing more rent and construction subsidies and other handouts, operate a system of onerous and costly zoning and landmark regulations that drive developers like Toll Brothers away from this city.

It hasn’t always been this way. In 1916, the zoning code book was a svelte 35 pages, which helps explain how the Empire State Building could be built in a mere 13 months. During the construction boom of the 1920s, buildings were going up at the incredible rate of one a working hour, and many of them offered apartments that the construction workers themselves could afford.*

These days, the zoning code is a phone-book-thick, 2,520-page document so complex that developers are almost guaranteed to have to seek rezoning for their projects. As in the case of Toll Brothers, the rezoning process can take years, and the environmental impact review alone takes an average of 18 months. All of which helps make million-dollar condos about the only new housing developers will touch.

To say nothing of roadblocks developers face at the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Any property more than 30 years old with “a special character” can be declared a landmark and block development, which, as Toll Brothers is about to find out, leaves things pretty wide open. Situated on the two-block stretch of property Toll Brothers is trying to rezone is a late-19th-century concrete warehouse that, in any other context, would be called an eyesore. Yet a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, Linda Mariano, told a reporter of the Brooklyn Papers that her group saw it as “archeologically sensitive.”

If Mr. Bloomberg is serious about making New York an affordable place to live for people with middle-class incomes, the answer is neither more subsidies nor more regulation. The right way to go is to make it possible for developers to do their developing by slashing the regulations that discourage building, keep the housing supply down, and push prices up. Otherwise, says a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Peter Salins, “The price you pay is you get less development, and you especially get less development of the ordinary sort.”

A spokeswoman for the city planning department, Rachaele Raynoff, said the process takes a long time because it is designed to protect New Yorkers. Maybe so, and the planning department, under Amanda Burden, has done some fine work in rezoning Manhattan’s West Side and parts of the Brooklyn waterfront. Some of the work is evident in the building boom under way in the city. Even so, when a big developer like Toll Brothers, whose cofounder Robert Toll talked to the Wall Street Journal last month about the company’s desire to do more in New York City, runs into this sort of resistance, it is a sign that there is more the city can do.

* These facts are laid out in an article by William Stern in the Autumn 2000 issue of City Journal, “Why Gotham’s Developers Don’t Develop.”