Thanks, but no thanks

Suggestions for the new mayor on how to create "affordable housing" from New York Magazine:

Give Queens a skyline.
The lion’s share of affordable New York will be constructed outside Manhattan, because of simple math—there’s more buildable land, and it’s less expensive. Western Queens is the likeliest focus. (Brooklyn, too, but there’s more being built there already.) Vishaan Chakrabarti, the SHoP Architects partner and Columbia University urban-planning maven, puts it this way: “Queens Boulevard, Long Island City—there’s [property] ten, fifteen minutes from Manhattan by subway that still has one- and two-story buildings. Queens, clearly, to me is the future of New York in many ways. I wouldn’t limit it to Queens, though—there are areas in the Bronx that have good subway access, and then St. George on Staten Island.” And those 200,000 units De Blasio wants? “Almost a Co-op City per year. I’ve been on the battlefield—it’s not easy, and it’s a lot of progressive politics rubbing up against each other.” Racism, classism, NIMBYism, ageism, and every other ism will come into play. So will every tool the administration has at hand: tax incentives that tilt the economics toward building at the middle of the income range; subsidies for lower-end building; and rezoning even in the wake of Bloomberg's rezoning.

Quit making everyone build a garage.
Almost every new residential building, notes the urban-planning strategist Alexander Garvin, is forced by law to include parking. It’s a dated requirement from the early sixties, one that cannibalizes land and makes every building more expensive.

Tax the hell out of vacant lots.
In New York (as in most cities), land and buildings are taxed as one entity, meaning that developers can accumulate land for years, waiting for a booming market to put something up. “Split-rate taxation” taxes the land itself at a higher rate, encouraging developers to build something sooner rather than later.

Do more horse-trading.
Bloomberg’s 80/20 zoning—80 percent of units are market-rate, 20 percent for people of modest income—can be taken further. Chakrabarti and his colleagues are working on 50/30/20 buildings, where the 30 is middle-income. And De Blasio ally Bertha Lewis suggests we could flip the 80/20 ratio entirely.

Lower permit costs.
It costs twice as much to put up a building here as in Chicago. Some of that is the price of land, but a 2005 study by the economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko revealed the surprisingly large role played by permit costs. “I’d like to see just a quicker, easier permitting process,” says Glaeser.

Stop wholesale landmarking.
Individual landmarks should surely be preserved; ditto certain blocks or districts that are genuinely of historic value. But when historic districts are widely extended, they significantly reduce the buildable area of the city, argues Glaeser, meaning rents go up everywhere else.

Live at the Javits Center.
No, seriously, says Chakrabarti: “I would look at moving the Javits Center to Sunnyside Yards” and replacing it with apartment buildings as the No. 7 train extension arrives. “It’s a huge opportunity for a new neighborhood.”

Sell off Manhattan’s projects and build bigger, better housing in the boroughs.
It’d be close to politically impossible, but relocating 115,000 NYCHA residents to the outer-boroughs could generate enough money to build several times as many units of affordable and true project housing in less expensive parts of the city. Consider: The housing projects of the Lower East Side are bigger than Stuyvesant Town, which sold for $5.4 billion.