The pandemic disoriented us in many ways. In New York City, one of the most dizzying changes was a rental rate boomerang between 2020 and 2022. First, apartment rates dropped steeply, and many renters celebrated the pandemic deals they had secured in high-demand neighborhoods. Soon enough, though, rents shot back up with renewed vigor, sending the cost of living in New York, America’s biggest city, to even more stratospheric levels. By June 2022, the average monthly rent on a new lease in Manhattan had risen above a staggering $5,000.
I always knew New York City was an expensive place to live. That’s one reason I had wanted to write about housing for the Metro desk, a beat I started covering in 2021. But the Covid-era phenomenon underscored how absolutely nutty the city’s housing market is. And it illustrated something curious about New York City: Even though it can feel impossible to live here, it is still one of the most sought after places in the world to live.
Why does it have to be this way? Why must people at almost every income level (except those of exceptional wealth) feel they are stretched thin and just scraping by in order to live here? That’s the question at the heart of my beat, and of the five-part newsletter I published this month, The Housing Crunch.
I’ve covered most of the story lines running through this busy beat in these last three years, like the challenges confronting public housing; evictions; neighborhood planning; population change; tenants versus landlords; the fight over rent regulation; the housing shortage; the dangers of illegal basement homes; and more.
I noticed, though, that a lot of the conversations around these newsy issues felt too complex and overly contentious; people would talk past each other instead of trying to explain what was really wrong in a more sober and objective way. I had a feeling that to really communicate with people about the many problems arrayed across the housing landscape, we needed to cut through the noise.
Last year the executive editor of The Times, Joe Kahn, told me that he would really like to see us find a way to portray New York City’s housing crisis in a really granular fashion, explaining with as much detail as possible what stands in the way of solving it. Around that same time, Nestor Ramos, the Metro editor, proposed that we try a short newsletter series on the subject of housing. I talked with my editor at the time, Sarah Garland, and we both agreed that we could marry these ideas and do something that might resonate with our readers.
That’s how the idea for The Housing Crunch was born. And after a few months of reporting and writing and editing with my new editor, Shauntel Lowe, we published the first part, which focused on the thorny definition of the term “affordability,” on Nov. 12.
Compared with anything else I’ve written in my six-plus years at The Times, this series has generated the biggest reaction, by far. Dozens of people, including struggling renters, frustrated landlords, housing investors, policy wonks, city officials and more, have emailed me to share their experiences. I think the series has succeeded in cutting through the noise, at least a little bit.
The housing issues confronting New York City are not going away. As we describe in the series, it is a housing shortage that is at the heart of many of the problems. The city clearly needs to allow more homes to be built to make things more affordable in the future. And that, to some degree, may be happening.
But, as I write in the final newsletter, I think what’s missing from most of the discourse is a conversation about what the final goal of change should actually be.
What should New York City look like in, say, five, 10, 25 or 100 years? Will the city’s population be growing or shrinking? Will there be enough homes for artists, finance executives, tech workers and people who work in elder care? How should scarce public resources be distributed in order to help the lowest-income people and working families?
These are not easy questions. They will continue, I imagine, to animate the discussion around housing here in one of the most expensive places to live in the world.
And I hope to be there to chronicle how it all shakes out.
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