Midtown Housing Options Must Expand

There is much to recommend and much that is imaginative in the housing elements of Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams’ plan to aid the city’s post-COVID comeback. Notably, the “Making New York Work for Everyone” proposal to relax the arbitrary state law limiting housing density by limiting a building’s footprint provides an option profitable development may need.

But making possible the conversion of empty older office buildings into apartments New Yorkers — including newcomers — can afford could benefit from still more imaginative approaches. The city has long over-relied on rental subsidies and tax breaks to bring down rents. The new report proposes more of that approach

Instead — or in addition to — a Midtown revival needs what’s called “naturally occurring affordable housing” (NOAH). It’s housing whose rent — or purchase price — can be naturally low by virtue of its size and configuration.

Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose one-time deputy Dan Doctoroff led the Hochul/Adams effort, was on to this idea in 2015, when he proposed a pilot zoning change permitting “micro-units”: apartments smaller than 400 square feet. Simply put, a building filled with a greater number of smaller units will lead to a lower price for each. As more and more Americans choose to live in single-person households, this concept could be attractive.

Housing affordability historically relied on making possible the construction of a variety of housing types. It’s worth recalling that the single-family homes of Levittown, historically vehicles for upward mobility, were just 750 square feet. Housing affordability requires options. In the outer boroughs, that means two and three-family homes, not just single-family. In Jackson Heights, it means safe conversion of the illegal basement apartments in many row homes.

In Midtown, it means zoning that could permit dormitory-style group living, in which suites surround shared kitchens. It could mean revived single-room occupancy “hotels” with shared cooking and baths. It would mean relaxation of outdated city housing code rules which effectively limit the unnumbered of unrelated persons in a unit. Cohabitating couples with children should have the chance to share quarters. Market-savvy developers, if allowed, will come up with other options to cater to a changing market and new demographics.

Dormitory-style housing could be a particularly good option for the “supportive housing” needed by the mentally ill whom Adams is rightly sweeping off the streets. Space, kitchen and bath requirements inevitably drive up costs better spent on crucial services.

“Making New York Work for Everyone” highlights one key barrier — the fact that newer but still outdated office buildings are barred by state law from housing conversion at all. That has, it notes, “limited the options available for reusing them to add to the overall vitality of the district.”

The report pledges an effort to “refresh these regulations to allow more conversions of a broader range of office buildings within New York City’s business districts.”

But such change should not assume that traditional residential configurations should be the only permitted changes. Nor should a vision for affordable housing assume that subsidy, whether direct or indirect (through required “inclusionary” units) is the only way to ensure income diversity. More than a third of the city’s housing is already price-regulated, subsidized or publicly-owned, and yet our housing crisis is perennial.

Broadly, if the sudden surfeit of empty office buildings is to be converted into housing, we need to get the most out of its space — and provide an imaginative range of market options for the changing preferences of younger residents.

As the report points out, outdated industrial zoning long stood as a barrier to new residential housing, even as artists moved in anyway to transform Soho and Tribeca. (This history is recounted in the excellent current exhibit on the city in the 1960s at the Jewish Museum). Relaxed zoning that paves the way for NOAH will acknowledge that the office and commuting model is no more likely to return that the old garment factories.

That history suggests that abetting the Midtown comeback will require Adams and Hochul not just to work together on legislation but to stand up jointly against vested interests. The hotel employees unions are content to date to see properties remain closed, in the hopes that they will eventually restore bellhop jobs. Major developers prefer complex affordable deals which are barriers to entry for upstart competitors. Undertaxed neighborhoods will oppose the property tax reform that will be new, non-luxury housing pencil out.

Truly making New York work for all — or at least boosting Midtown’s chances for rebirth and reinvention — will require both more imaginative ideas and, on the part of a mayor and governor who say they want to work together, demonstrations of political courage.