Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at two housing developments with our architecture critic, with an eye toward lessons that can be learned as the city continues its struggle with a housing crisis.
Is it possible to put a dent in the city’s housing crisis?
Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times, visited two new developments that he says are promising — Innovative Urban Village, a $1 billion project on the nearly 11-acre site of a megachurch parking lot, and Rockaway Village, an $855 million development on 10 acres that has been completed in phases, starting in 2021. Some 70,000 people entered the lottery for the remaining 340 apartments there.
I talked with Michael about the two developments and what they tell us about the challenges in building new housing.
You liked what you saw. Why?
When many New Yorkers think of subsidized housing, they think of something that looks cheap and sad. Both of these projects are intelligent, handsome and straightforward complexes, and they’re urban-minded. They have new streets and sidewalks and stores at ground level. They feel like neighborhoods rather than just midcentury “tower-in-the-park” housing developments.
As New Yorkers, we’re often so overwhelmed by the numbers of affordable apartments that the city needs that we can’t imagine anything making a dent in that. These two projects certainly don’t make a big dent, but they’re going to house 10,000 people.
Did the two buildings you saw at Innovative Urban Village benefit from fast-tracking? Will the others that are planned?
These projects started long before the fast-tracking charter amendment, which was approved just last year.
The idea behind fast-tracking is not that it is the key to solving the housing problem; it’s that it’s a step toward undoing layers and layers of approvals and reviews, in essence a vetocracy created since the 1960s to let everybody have a say, but also to make it difficult and expensive to build even a modest development.
Whether this actually has any meaningful effect remains to be seen. Some districts targeted for fast-tracking, like the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, don’t have a lot of available land.
Where is Innovative Urban Village, anyway?
It’s in East New York, in Brooklyn, where there are other new housing developments that have added thousands more apartments in the wake of a rezoning of the district under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But de Blasio has been out of office for years. Is this a sign of how long it takes to get done?
Great point. There’s a real disconnect in the minds of voters, I think, between the identifying of a problem like the housing shortage and being able to see meaningful change to address it. Housing projects take years to go from concept to completion. Innovative Urban Village is still several years off from being completed.
The problem of time is important and profound. The Brooklyn Bridge was supposed to take five years and cost $5 million. It took 15 years and cost $15 million. People were outraged at the time. While the bridge was under construction and going through troubles, it was regarded as a fiasco. That $15 million is equivalent to around $170 million today. There are some apartments in New York which cost that now, and building the Brooklyn Bridge at all today seems almost inconceivable.
We’ve lost hope. I wanted to highlight these housing projects just to say that the effort to build affordable housing is not in vain. We have to understand that the process is complicated and will probably take longer than a single generation.
That is difficult to accept for people looking for an affordable apartment right now.
You wrote New York should take a page from Austin, Texas. Why?
Austin has become the great example of an approach that is less regulated and more open. Austin eliminated obstacles and greased the wheels for development. That brought down rents across the board much more effectively and rapidly than mandating affordable units in new developments, which is what New York is trying.
Austin was expensive and unaffordable like New York a decade ago when it began to undo all sorts of regulations, and it has added over 120,000 new apartments. Rents there are now below the national median.
I don’t think New York will ever be Austin. But we definitely can see that the pendulum has swung too far in the city and across the country in terms of regulatory bureaucracy, and much of what the city has been trying to do in recent years is to get the pendulum to swing back to a place where it’s easier to build housing.
And the project in Far Rockaway has, among its 5,000 residents, 46 people from shelters with mental health issues?
When you have projects with deep affordability, meaning when you’re trying to help people who are not just lower middle class but often struggling in the bottom 30 percent of the city’s income brackets and may be coming out of shelters, it’s very complicated financially — and often in terms of the range of challenges and traumas these residents may bring.
How to get that balance right in a project like Rockaway Village? It requires more services, more security — and that raises costs. The calculus of affordable housing is very complex and difficult.
There’s no easy answer to these challenges. but the fact is that we share the same spaces, and we need to manage to live with each other. That’s not a platitude. It’s the reality of city life. We are in this together.
The Monday Quiz
This question comes from a recent edition of New York Today. Click an answer to see if you’re right. The link is free.
Halima Salman, a 27-year-old Brooklyn woman, was convicted of charges that she trained with the Islamic State terror group and faces up to 10 years in prison. How old was she when her father took her into ISIS-controlled territory?
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day with a high near 67. It will be partly cloudy tonight, with a low around 50.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Election Day).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I just don’t want them eating my grapes.” — Jim Frey, who owns a vineyard in Woodbury, Conn., and is trying to protect his crop from black bears. Scientists suspect that the bear population in Connecticut has grown and has become more habituated to people.
The latest New York news
-
And the winners are: In his first time competing, Andreas Almgren of Sweden won the men’s marathon in 2 hours 6 minutes 1 second. Sheila Chepkirui of Kenya, who finished first in 2024, won the women’s race with a time of 2 hours 24 minutes 36 seconds.
-
Connecticut senator has a stroke: Senator Christopher Murphy, 53, was hospitalized on Saturday after he had a stroke. His chief of staff said that “we are optimistic he will make a full recovery.” Murphy had been scheduled to go to Bedford, N.H., on Sunday for an event supporting two Democratic candidates.
-
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants the left to evolve: As she has campaigned across the country for liberal candidates, the representative has tried to nudge the progressive movement toward becoming less intimidating and more welcoming.
-
Doing the most for Halloween: Heidi Klum, who is known for her elaborate, sometimes grotesque costumes, held her annual Halloween party in the East Village on Saturday. See some of the zaniest looks here.
-
Before there was a city: According to the ecologist Eric W. Sanderson, Prospect Park was once made up of peat bogs and LaGuardia Airport was once an oyster reef. Sanderson’s book “Before New York” looks at how a region with forests, wetlands and waterways became the city.
METROPOLITAN diary
Strawberry Fields
Dear Diary:
The buskers took turns Playing Beatles classics At the Strawberry Fields memorial On the west side of Central Park Next to me sat a mother and son They wore identical feather earrings They wore identical smiles When the busker played “Come Together” The audience roared While the boy with the feather earrings Pointed out to me John Lennon was the greatest songwriter Ever … When I mentioned Paul was better The boy with feather earrings replied Then maybe this isn’t the place for you I didn’t disagree
— Danny Klecko
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Luke Caramanico and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
The post Two New Housing Projects That People Really Want to Live in appeared first on New York Times.
