#nyc-housing-plan

#nyc-housing-plan

"The landlord did not pay attention to this house whatsoever. We didn't even know we had a landlord."

How buildings are designed impacts people's lives every day. If every day you're living in a space where you can't use your home, that gnaws away at you.

His monthly rent has climbed to more than $11,000 a month, from roughly $2,000 when he first opened. Produce costs have spiked under new tariffs. Utilities and fees keep rising. And customers already drained by soaring housing costs are buying less.

The report, published Tuesday, calls for NYCHA to keep better tabs on its vacant homes, the majority of which are awaiting-often extensive, and legally required-remediation work after the prior tenant moved out and before they can be rented again.

In his four years as director of the New York City Department of Planning, Dan Garodnick oversaw one of the most sweeping changes to the city's zoning rules in decades. The policy, called City of Yes, initiated a collection of revisions to boost housing, including updates that allow new apartment projects to add bulk used for affordable housing, homes to convert basements or add backyard cottages as accessory dwellings, and more office buildings to be converted into residential space.

The New York Real Estate Board recently confirmed what every New Yorker feels: we are in a housing free-fall. With a staggering shortfall of up to 540,000 units and a vacancy rate of just 1.4 percent, the pace of new construction is glacially slow. But the solution might be hiding in plain sight, tucked away behind the chain-link fences of our city's woefully underutilized golf courses.

I was shocked at how vividly the contrast of the city's low and high density came to life when I visited the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. What the model most powerfully shows is that most of the city is actually a suburb of one and two-story buildings. The New York of our minds, towering structures and vast numbers of people, is really quite limited.