Tag Archives: neighborhood

The Dense State of NYC’s Housing

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NYU_Campus

NYU’s Furman Center released its State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2014. I found its discussion of urban density to be the most notable aspect of this nexcellent and data-rich annual report. The discussion on density concludes,

The renewed attractiveness of New York City since the 1970s means population will likely keep increasing, and so will population and housing density. In 2010, few other U.S. cities had any neighborhoods that matched the density experienced by the typical New Yorker. Yet, by recent historical standards, today’s density levels are not extreme. In recent years, the typical New Yorker lived in a lower-density neighborhood than the typical New Yorker in 1970, as population growth in the city since 1980 was focused in moderate-density neighborhoods. Further, while great disparities in education and crime across neighborhoods exist, these differences are not generally associated with density levels.

High density cities like New York are playing an increasingly important role in the economy as drivers of productivity and innovation. This means the accessibility of the city to new residents is important both for New Yorkers and the nation. We have demonstrated that significant numbers of new residents can be accommodated without elevating density to levels above what the city has historically experienced, and that high-density neighborhoods do not perform lower on key quality of life indicators. City officials will need to ensure that neighborhoods have sufficient infrastructure to accommodate their new residents. (20)

This last point is key: density is not a problem so long as the appropriate infrastructure is built to support it. And while current residents are concerned about the impact of local increases in density, the city as a whole benefits from the increased economic activity and cultural creativity that comes along with heightened density. The De Blasio Administration knows this. Other local elected officials should sign on to increased density along with thoughtful zoning and infrastructure policies.

As a final note, I would compare the transparent acknowledgement of the report’s financial sponsors in the front matter with the much less transparent acknowledgment found in Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies State of the Nation’s Housing 2015 report that I blogged about yesterday.

Wednesday’s Academic Roundup

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Housing out of Thin Air

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NYU’s Furman Center has posted a policy brief, Creating Affordable Housing out of Thin Air: The Economics of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning in New York City. It opens,

In May 2014, New York City’s new mayor released an ambitious housing agenda that set forth a multi-pronged, ten-year plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. One of the most talked-about initiatives in the plan was encapsulated in its statement, “In future re-zonings that unlock substantial new housing capacity, the city must require, not simply encourage, the production of affordable housing in order to ensure balanced growth, fair housing opportunity, and diverse neighborhoods.” In other words, the city intends to combine upzoning with mandatory inclusionary zoning in order to increase the supply of affordable housing and promote economic diversity. (1)
Inclusionary zoning, “using land use regulation to link development of market-rate housing units to the creation of affordable housing,” is seen by many as a low-cost policy to support a broader affordable housing approach. (2) There is a limit to the reach of such a program because developers will only build if the overall project pencils out, including any units of mandatory inclusionary zoning.
The policy brief’s conclusions are important:
In many neighborhoods, including some that the city has already targeted for the new program, market rents are too low to justify new mid- and high-rise construction, so additional density would offer no immediate value to developers that could be used to cross-subsidize affordable units. In these areas, inclusionary zoning will need to rely on direct city subsidy for the time being if it is to generate any new units at all regardless of the income level they serve.
Where high rents make additional density valuable, there is capacity to cross-subsidize new affordable units without direct subsidy, but the development of a workable inclusionary zoning policy will be complex. The amount of affordable housing the city could require without dampening the rate of new construction or relying on developers to accept lower financial returns or landowners to be willing to sell at lower prices will vary widely depending on a neighborhood’s market rent, the magnitude of the upzoning, and, to a lesser extent, on the level of affordability required in the rent-restricted units. Where developers must provide the required affordable housing, and whether they can instead pay a fee directly to the city, also bears heavily on the number of affordable units a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy has the potential to generate, but raises other difficult issues. (14-15)
The de Blasio Administration’s housing and land use team is very sophisticated (including the Furman Center’s former director, Vicki Been, now Commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development), so the City will be well aware of these constraints on a mandatory inclusionary housing program. Nonetheless, it will be of great importance to design a flexible program that can adapt to changing market conditions to ensure that such a program is actually a spur to new development and not merely a well-intentioned initiative.

Segregation in the 21st Century

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NYU’s Furman Center has posted a research brief, Race and Neighborhoods in the 21st Century. The brief is is based on a longer paper, Race and Neighborhoods in the 21st Century: What Does Segregation Mean Today? (One of the co-authors of the longer paper, Katherine M. O’Regan, is currently Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at HUD.) The brief opens,

In a recent study, NYU Furman Center researchers set out to describe current patterns of residential racial segregation in the United States and analyze their implications for racial and ethnic disparities in neighborhood environments. We show that 21st Century housing segregation patterns are not that different from those of the last century. Although segregation levels between blacks and whites have declined nationwide over the past several decades, they still remain quite high. Meanwhile, Hispanic and Asian segregation levels have remained relatively unchanged. Further, our findings show that the neighborhood environments of blacks and Hispanics remain very different from those of whites and these gaps are amplified in more segregated metropolitan areas. Black and Hispanic households continue to live among more disadvantaged neighbors, to have access to lower performing schools, and to be exposed to more violent crime. (1)

And the brief concludes,

Black and Hispanics continued to live among more disadvantaged neighbors even after controlling for racial differences in poverty, to have access to lower performing schools, and to be exposed to higher levels of violent crime. Further, these differences are amplified in more segregated metropolitan areas. Segregation in the 21st century, in other words, continues to result not only in separate but also in decidedly unequal communities. (5)

This conclusion makes clear that segregation is not merely the result of poverty. It is important to understand how segregation persists even though the legal support of segregation has been dismantled. Richard Brooks and Carol Rose’s work in this area is a good start for those who are interested.

Location, Location, Location of NYC Affordable Housing

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NYU’s Furman Center has released a white paper, Housing, Neighborhoods, and Opportunity: The Location of New York City’s Subsidized Affordable Housing. The report opens,

Rent burdens for low- and moderate-income renters continue to grow in New York City, inviting calls for more affordable housing. While the primary goal in developing affordable housing should arguably be to provide safe housing at a reasonable cost so that households have more residual income available for food, medicine, transportation, and other essential goods, housing programs also take people to particular neighborhoods. New York City neighborhoods provide widely varying access to services and opportunity. Thus, city policymakers need to pay attention not only to the number or quality of subsidized, affordable units produced, but also to the characteristics of the neighborhoods where those units are built. (1)

In order to provide some data about that, the paper examines where 235,000 units of subsidized rental housing are in New York City. Unsurprisingly, many of the units are in neighborhoods like Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn where land costs were historically low.The paper studies important characteristics of neighborhoods where the subsidized housing stock is located: isolation from the rest of the City; student performance; public amenities like parks; public safety; poverty; and housing cost. It also looks at how these characteristics have changed in the 2000s.

One key finding from the report that will be of interest to those who think about how New York City is changing over time: tens of thousands of properties have opted out of affordability restrictions, particularly in more expensive neighborhoods like Manhattan below 96th Street, and it looks like tens of thousands more will opt out over the next decade.

As the Mayor’s team develops its affordable housing strategy of building and preserving 200,000 units of affordable housing, this report presents some sobering data on the affordable housing challenges that the City faces. My takeaway is that the City should be doing more to encourage housing construction more generally to increase the overall supply, in addition to subsidizing affordable housing directly. Subsidies will never create enough units on their own to house all of the people who call and want to call NYC “home.”

Housing Opportunity for Kids

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The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities issued a report, Creating Opportunity for Children: How Housing Location Can Make a Difference. There is some research on the positive effects that homeownership has on outcomes for children. But it is hard to determine whether it is homeownership per se which causes the positive effects as opposed to a stable housing situation more generally. Thus, further research on the role of stable housing options, like that found in this report, is quite welcome.  This report finds that the Housing Choice Voucher program

has performed much better than HUD’s project-based rental assistance programs in enabling more low-income families with children—and particularly more African American and Latino families—to live in lower-poverty neighborhoods. . . . Having a housing voucher also substantially reduces the likelihood of living in an extreme-poverty neighborhood, compared with similar families with children that either receive project-based rental assistance or don’t receive housing assistance at all. (6)
The report concludes that

Based on the evidence on how housing location affects low-income families, particularly children, and the performance of federal rental assistance programs on location-related measures, we recommend two closely related near-term goals for federal rental assistance policy: 1) federal rental assistance programs should provide greater opportunities for families to choose affordable housing outside of extreme-poverty neighborhoods; and 2) the programs should provide better access for families to low-poverty, safe communities with better-performing schools. (7)
The report also recommends four policy changes to achieve these goals:
  1. Create strong incentives for local and state housing agencies to achieve better location outcomes.
  2. Modify policies that discourage families from living in lower-poverty communities.
  3. Minimize jurisdictional barriers to families’ ability to choose to live in high-opportunity communities.
  4. Assist families in using vouchers to live in high-opportunity areas. (7-8)

This is a pretty hefty report and it is worth digging into more deeply.

The Divided City — New York Edition

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Richard Florida and colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute have posted a report, The Divided City:  And the Shape of the New Metropolis. The executive summary explains that

To better understand the relationship between class and geography, this report charts the residential locations of the three major workforce classes: the knowledge-based creative class which makes up roughly a third of the U.S. workforce; the fast-growing service class of lower-skill, lower-wage occupations in food preparation, retail sales, personal services, and clerical and administrative work that makes up slightly more than 45 percent of the workforce; and the once-dominant but now dwindling blue-collar working class of factory, construction, and transportation workers who make up roughly 20 percent of the workforce.

 The study tracks their residential locations by Census tract, areas that are smaller than many neighborhoods, based on data from the 2010 American Community Survey. The study covers 12 of America’s largest metro areas and their center cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Detroit. It examines these patterns of class division in light of the classic models of urban form developed in the first half of the 20th century. These models suggest an outward-oriented model of urban growth and development with industry and commerce at the center of the city surrounded by lower-income working class housing, with more affluent groups located in less dense areas further out at the periphery. It also considers these patterns in light of more recent theories of a back-to-the-city movement and of a so-called “Great Inversion,” in which an increasingly advantaged core is surrounded by less advantaged suburbs.

 The study finds a clear and striking pattern of class division across each and every city and metro area with the affluent creative class occupying the most economically functional and desirable locations. Although the pattern is expressed differently, each city and metro area in our analysis has evident clusters of the creative class in and around the urban core. While this pattern is most pronounced in post-industrial metros like San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, and New York, a similar but less developed pattern can be discerned in every metro area we covered, including older industrial metros like Detroit, sprawling Sunbelt metros like Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas, and service-driven economies like Miami. In some metros, these class-based clusters embrace large spans of territory. In others, the pattern is more fractured, fragmented, or tessellated.

 The locations of the other two classes are structured and shaped by the locational prerogatives of the creative class. The service class either surrounds the creative class, being concentrated in areas of urban disadvantage, or pushed far off into the suburban fringe. There are strikingly few working class concentrations left in America’s major cities and metros. (iv)

As a New Yorker, I was particularly struck by the map of New York City on page 12. It is striking to see how few blue-collar communities are left in the City and how starkly divided the rest of the City is between the “creative” and “service” classes. This is not particularly surprising, but striking nonetheless.