Why is it that political leaders from the left, with affordable housing as a main platform plank, suffer from the same criticism – the perception of too easily capitulating to real estate interests, caring little about the hazards of extreme density and any vision for urban planning. Could this New York Times column by Gina Bellafante have been written about Vancouver?
While the laws of supply and demand ought to dictate that vertical building leads to more reasonably priced housing, in TriBeCa and elsewhere in the city, the construction and sale of $20 million apartments seems simply to result in the construction and sale of more $20 million apartments.
… more than 60 other neighborhood groups across the city to form an alliance called New Yorkers for a HumanScale City with the goal of ending “the violence that real estate developers have inflicted on our skyline, parks, public areas and cityscape,” as the website informs us.
… the perception that the current mayor too easily capitulates to real estate interests, that he cares little about the hazards of extreme density and lacks any vision for urban planning, is very real. This line of thinking certainly didn’t lose credibility after a report in The New York Times last week indicating that the mayor’s Campaign for One New
York, which has given money to private consultants who advise Mr. de Blasio, received over $1 million from the real estate industry. …
When Mr. de Blasio’s dissenters talk about an erosion of the quality of life in New York, they are in many cases talking about the cascade of problems that aggressive development and gentrification bring. …
The de Blasio administration has consistently defended its development agenda on the grounds that its ambitious affordable housing plan, so essential to the city’s survival, cannot be conducted without it. Those wary of development counter that you can have affordability while still maintaining neighborhoods that are aesthetically intact
— areas that don’t feel destructively overcrowded or inauthentic — but those detractors are themselves hampered by a lack of any prescription for how that might be achieved.
At the same time, the sentiment at the heart of their grievance, often dismissed by the political sector as evidence of pointless nostalgia or naïvete, is a sound one. “Under what property regime are light and air not a common good?” Ms. Ellsworth said. “In New York we have ceded that idea to the notion that ‘build up, sell out, you’re good.’ ”
Another strain of complaint revolves around the way the de Blasio administration engages communities in development plans. There are community board meetings and extensive land review processes, but typically the idea for what will happen to plot X or Y begins with real estate interests rather than ordinary people. The discussion, in effect, happens too late. This is hardly a new approach, but one the mayor’s early supporters believed his progressive politics would compel him to reshape. …
It will take a long time for the de Blasio administration to build and preserve the 200,000 units of affordable housing to which it has committed itself. In the meantime, New Yorkers see neighborhoods and ways of life disappearing. Politically, Mr. de Blasio is at risk of losing his hold on the inequality narrative that got him elected.
