Mayor de Blasio is trying to create 200,000 new units of affordable housing in New York City over the next decade. An essential element of his strategy is to increase floor-area ratios (FARs) in return for developers’ leasing some percentage of the new units for rents below market rates. The entire strategy depends on the mayor’s persuading City Council to “up-zone” land – that is, increase the densities permissible under the NYC Zoning Resolution.
The obvious obstacle to this plan is that New Yorkers – like everyone else – tend to oppose new construction in their neighborhood. The wagons are already circling: Just blocks away from where I live, the neighbors are rallying against a couple of new towers with affordable units, ostensibly because they are too close to the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. But these neighbors’ politics ought to favor de Blasio’s plan, right? After all, de Blasio is standing up for affordable housing, a left-liberal goal, and the NIMBY neighbors are liberal brownstone types who allegedly support such goals. So de Blasio and his housing team (including NYU Law’s own Vicki Been, de Blasio’s new housing chief) ought to be able to talk the NIMBY folks out of their opposition, right?
Wrong. It is not just that neighbors’ fear for their condo down payment tend to trump their liberal sympathies for the poor. As David Schleicher and I argue