New York City housing shortage
For many decades, the New York metropolitan area has suffered from an increasing shortage of housing. As a result, New York City has the second-highest rents of any city in the United States.
Shortage has long been usual. According to the Plan for New York City of 1969, "It is obvious that a great deal is wrong. The air is polluted. The streets are dirty and choked. The subways are jammed. The waters of the rivers and bays are fouled. There is a severe shortage of housing." Since the middle 1990s construction has greatly increased in the city. Between 2009 and 2018, according to the New York City Comptroller, New York gained 500,000 new residents, but built only 100,000 new housing units. Mayor Bill de Blasio has described the affordability of housing as "the biggest crisis facing our city".
Supply factors
There was a 19 percent increase in the number of housing units between 1970 and 2016, although growth in new construction slowed after 2000 from over 7 percent to 5.3 percent. Newly-constructed housing units are renting for $400 a month over existing units in 2018, which is eight times the difference between new and existing units that existed in 2000. The privately-funded new construction has not been focused on families with the greatest need. A large percentage of new construction has been studio and one bedroom apartments and there is a great need for larger units to service families. On top of the 19 percent increase in new housing units, hundreds of thousands of rent regulated units have been lost.The units lost were those the lowest-income families in New York City would find affordable. Looking back over history, New York has always had an affordability crisis with a 5 percent vacancy rate. This is the reason the government has traditionally stepped in to subsidize housing. There is a 2 percent vacancy rate in rent stabilized units. So the affordability crisis is how the city can build and preserve housing units that serve low and moderate-income households.
Vacant units
In 2014, there were 182,600 vacant units unavailable for rent or sale. A large majority of these units were either bought for investment or used only occasionally by owners who live elsewhere while others are used as illicit short-term rentals. In two years this number had increased to 248,000 units and represented 8 percent of the city's housing stock.Demand factors
Between 2000 and 2012, the median rent of an apartment increased 75 percent in New York City compared to 44 percent for the rest of the United States. The increase impacted the poor and working class most. There was a loss of 400,000 apartments renting for $1,000 a month or less and a resulting gain of apartments renting over this. This was not a small shift but saw 240,000 units renting for $601-800 disappear and apartments renting for $1,201-1,600 having the highest gains. Median rent in constant dollars increased from $839 in 2000 to $1,100 in 2012.Partially offsetting the growth in housing units was an increase in population to 8.6 million people. All boroughs, including the Bronx, are close to all-time population highs as of 2018. Factors include an increase in employment to 4.5 million jobs and a trend of decreasing crime.
Impact of affordable housing shortage
Overcrowding
Almost 1.5 million people live in overcrowded conditions in New York City. Overall crowding rose from 7.6 percent in 2005 to 8.8 percent in 2013. Overcrowding is not limited to low-income households, but is found at all income levels.The California Health and Human Services Agency defines "severe overcrowding" as more than 1.5 persons per room. The severe overcrowding rate in the nation is 0.99 percent and is 3.33 percent in New York City.
Homelessness
In 2018 there were 63,495 homeless in New York City, including over 23,600 children. Total homelessness in the city had increased by 82 percent over the last decade. According to an agency funded by the New York State Education Department, there were 104,088 students living in temporary shelters and identified as homeless in the city's school system for the period 2016-2017.There is a huge cost to the city to provide for the homeless. Following a 1981 consent decree arising from Callahan v. Carey, the city is required by law to provide shelter to any eligible person who asks for it. To shelter one family in one of the 167 family shelters costs $34,573 a year. $1.04 billion was budgeted for 2014 to provide homeless services, up from $535.8 million in 2002.
Government initiatives
The city has had many periods of housing shortages in its history. Following a housing crisis in the 1920s, 700,000 units were built but in the 1930s people were again talking about a crisis. Mayors Fiorello H. La Guardia and William O'Dwyer dealt with slum clearance and building public housing. Rent control in New York, having begun as part of price controls on the United States home front during World War II, continued after the war. Robert F. Wagner Jr. and John Lindsay oversaw the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program. Ed Koch was mayor during a wave of housing abandonment which had to be addressed. This continued under David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.Homelessness of individuals and families became a major issue during the 1980s and 1990s. Mayor Bloomberg's term in office saw an economically resurgent city. During this period, rents in New York City rose more than 15 percent over the increase in the country as a whole. His New Housing Marketplace Plan pledged to create 165,000 units of affordable housing between 2002-2014, of which 53,000 would be new units and 112,000 preserved units. The cost for this program was $23.6 billion, of which $5.3 billion was public funds leveraging $18.3 billion in private funds.
In 2016, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised an even more aggressive plan to build and preserve 200,000 housing units over ten-years and he introduced mandatory-inclusionary zoning requiring 30 percent of all new construction units to be affordable. The goals of the initiative, which was called Housing New York, were later increased to 300,000 affordable housing units by 2026.