Reminder: The Place You Live Is Not New York (Unless It Is)

There's a famous New Yorker cover showing a map of the United States from the perspective of Manhattan. Looking west, it depicts 9th and 10th Avenues, the Hudson River, and then in the background a handful of open fields and the Pacific Ocean. Of course, the joke is that, to New Yorkers, anything west of Jersey City might as well not exist.

Media narratives around hot-button issues, in all seriousness, tend to be really shaped by the experience of unrepresentative places like New York City. These places get outsized attention in part because they are where prominent members of the media live and prominent publications are based.

This bias is visible in widely shared understandings about affordable housing: what it looks like and how to get it. It’s no surprise that activism around affordability and displacement is really well developed in the nation’s most expensive big cities, like NYC and San Francisco. The issue has profound stakes for people, and it drives local politics. Combine that with the aforementioned media bias, and all of America gets to hear from the people who are doing housing activism in New York. They set the tone.

This would be fine except that housing activism in the rest of the country ends up being shaped by narratives that really only make sense in places like New York City. And narratives that are, in fact, deeply counterproductive in most other places.

Here's an example. Innovation QNS is a $2-billion redevelopment project in Astoria, Queens, directly across the East River from Manhattan. A consortium of large developers is converting several blocks of parking lots and industrial areas into a complex that will include multiple 20+-story buildings and feature 3,000 apartments, retail, dining, and other commercial space, and two acres of parks and public space. The project has been in the works—and deeply locally controversial—for years, in a neighborhood experiencing some of the most intense cataclysmic money of anywhere in the U.S.

Western Queens (including Astoria and Long Island City) is one of the hot spots of gentrification, not only in New York but in America. Like Manhattan, it is experiencing dramatic transformations driven as much by global capital as by local demand. Queens is historically one of the more affordable boroughs; now, working-class residents and communities fear displacement, as rents soar to unprecedented levels.

Any multibillion-dollar project is going to be a high-stakes negotiation involving the local government, local stakeholders, and the developer. In this context, the stakes only get higher. In Astoria, these residents mobilized, with local politicians on their side, and a prolonged pressure campaign won them some really significant concessions from the developers of Innovation QNS.

They organized protests and petitions. They denounced the project in fiery terms as a gentrification bomb. Most significantly, in support of this grassroots stand, local council member Julie Won conditioned her support of the project on the demand that far more of the project’s apartments be reserved for residents of low and moderate incomes. (In other words, “affordable housing” in the “capital-A” sense used in the housing industry, meaning legally binding restrictions on rent and occupancy.) As a result of Won and community activists forcing the developer to the negotiating table, what was originally slated to be 25% affordable units is now going to be 45%, including 658 apartments for extremely low-income households (up to $36,000 for a family of three, according to Curbed). The concessions also include a raft of community benefits, including a $2-million anti-displacement fund and relocation assistance for local businesses. (The financing details are unclear to me. In September, two months before final approval, the developers indicated that any affordable units above the 25% threshold would require funding partnerships with the city or other sources of subsidy.)

Ultimately, I believe the concessions won in this case are a good thing for Queens. This is a significant victory for working-class people in Astoria, and a significant influx of affordable housing in a place where the market left to its own devices would produce exactly zero such apartments. But it’s also the kind of victory that is only really possible in a place like, well, Western Queens. Midtown Manhattan. Northern Brooklyn. Eastern San Francisco. Southeast DC. Places where multibillion-dollar redevelopment projects are actually a thing.

The model for producing affordable housing in Astoria was this: do politics, mobilize and make demands that you can credibly back up, and ultimately that will allow you to skim a bit of profit off the top of an overheated market in order to subsidize homes for people who can’t come close to affording market rate. And that act of skimming basically requires that the market be overheated—there’s got to be some windfall money sloshing around, in the first place. This approach wins battles, but it almost by definition cannot win the war.

That is not a model that works in 99% of America. Heck, it doesn’t work in most of New York City—outside the handful of places where mega-developments occur. And it is certainly not a model that scales up to deal with housing unaffordability as the systematic issue that it is.

However, I routinely hear people in very different places echo the rhetoric of New York activists: they start to insist that the only way you get affordable housing is if you demand it from market-rate developers. You have to pressure them, pillory them in the press, and put every procedural obstacle in their way to force them to the negotiating table. And by doing so, you will drag them kicking and screaming to build something that serves the community and not just their bottom line. Which, it’s implied, they could have afforded to do all along if they were just less greedy.

It’s important to understand two things. One is that most developers don’t reap giant windfalls. Anywhere you go in America, new construction housing largely isn’t affordable on a modest income, for a simple reason: new construction is expensive to do. The rents may be high, but so are the costs—land, labor, materials. The average subsidized housing unit costs significantly more to build than the resident can afford to pay. That’s why it’s subsidized.

The cost of every part of the development process is too high, and this is a wicked problem that requires a lot of unraveling. Simply demanding affordable housing doesn’t resolve it, because the problem isn’t merely political: it’s economic. It’s structural.

The other thing you must understand is that most development sites aren’t like the Innovation QNS site: so one-of-a-kind and valuable (read: across a modest river from the epicenter of American wealth and productivity) that someone is going to build something and make money doing it, even if the negotiations take years. NYC’s elected officials have extraordinary leverage over a developer in a place like that.

Your average five-story apartment building on a former parking lot, laundromat, or auto body shop in Middle America has almost nothing in common with this scenario. The developer isn’t going to come to the table in the face of a long list of demands or requirements for community benefits. They’re going to walk away. There are other projects they could do, in a different city, on a different street, or of a different nature. They’re not going to be bullied into losing money.

Yet activists even right here in Southwest Florida, where I live, shout, “Why are we letting them build market-rate housing?! Why aren’t we demanding it be affordable! They should have to give back to the community if they want us to let them build!” when a mid-rise building is proposed on a stroad in a middle-class neighborhood. Elected officials have pushed for affordability requirements even as a condition of allowing new duplexes.

They may be, knowingly or unknowingly, taking their rhetorical cues from activists in New York. But here, the line doesn’t make sense. These are empty threats. If the concessions the city demands are too costly, developers will walk away from the table.

In the words of the immortal Gene Wilder (as Willy Wonka), “You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir.”

The public won’t even be aware of the developers who “walk away,” because this isn’t done publicly. Rather, these are projects that just never get proposed, because the cost of navigating the public process to get permission to build isn’t worth it. There’s no money to be made.

We know this happens. One of the canonical examples is from Portland, Oregon, where a few years ago, inclusionary zoning requirements that kicked in at 20 units per building resulted in a marked surge in the permitting of 19-unit apartment buildings in Portland. This was accompanied by a significant falloff in the overall number of new apartments proposed in Portland.

In the big picture, I've written about how one of the root causes of our housing crisis is that we have made almost every new housing project, in many cities, subject to a lengthy bureaucratic process involving negotiation and concessions. This makes it so you basically have to be a connected insider who can hire a hot-shot attorney to build new homes at all. Small-scale developers don’t even try.

The folks who simply don’t want anything to be built at all—your classic NIMBYs—understand very well that it serves them when every project is a high-stakes negotiation. They want housing advocates to have to fight project by project to get new housing approved.

It might serve activists in Astoria or elsewhere to extract the maximum concessions they can out of a high-stakes negotiation over new development. But it does not serve the broader cause of housing affordability—bringing the actual market rate of rents back in line with people’s ability to pay—when every project is a high-stakes negotiation. It sets that cause back catastrophically.

What we need to do to improve affordability is something dramatically different. We need to allow the next increment of housing as of right. Everywhere. We need to remove barriers to doing small-scale infill, so that we can get a thousand small projects from incremental, neighborhood-based developers that proceed with very little fuss and with no organized, mobilized opposition. We need to invite a different kind of developer into the game.

These projects won’t be happening in places like Astoria, Queens. They’ll be happening in places like outer Queens (where the ad-hoc addition of subdivided, basement apartments has already long been the borough’s greatest source of new affordable housing); in places like South Bend, Indiana; in places like Memphis.

These projects won’t involve capital-A Affordable Housing. They won't have Community Benefits Agreements or inclusionary zoning requirements attached to them—because it’s ridiculous to attach such requirements to a small-scale project. But because they will deliver housing at scale, you'll start to see the scarcity that is driving up rents in high-demand areas actually alleviate.

Progressives tend to scoff at the notion that market-rate housing supply can ever grow enough to meaningfully keep housing prices down, and in a place like Astoria, they're almost certainly right. These are places that are so exorbitantly expensive that there is no hope that market-rate development will be affordable in the next few decades, barring a catastrophic collapse of New York’s economy. The people waving protest banners and talking a hard line about community benefits agreements in Queens aren’t naïve about economics: they are behaving completely rationally for their context.  If you’re inclined to be an “It’s the supply, stupid!” brand of YIMBY, lay off them.

But virtually everybody else’s context is not their context. If you don’t live in NYC, but you’re caught up in housing narratives that originated in NYC, then please gently remind yourself that you don’t live in NYC.

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