This week, the City Council unanimously approved the One45 mixed-use housing complex in Harlem, which is expected to bring some 1,000 units of housing and several amenities to a lot now occupied by a truck depot on 145th St. and Lenox Ave. Any new development of such size is a notable event, but this one has the particularity of having existed in a sort of procedural limbo for over four years, since its first version was proposed by developer Bruce Teitelbaum.
In the interim, the project had transformed to include about a third designated affordable units, including a set-aside for seniors, but was temporarily killed in part by the insistence of former Councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan, one of the shortest-serving ever members of the Council, who insisted on 100% affordability to the point that the project was withdrawn. In the end, with the development still mired in some local controversy, the Council decided that if change is inevitable, the change may as well occur in service to one of the main things on everyone’s minds right now, especially going into the November mayoral election: the ability to afford to live here.
This was the basic argument on either side of the issue; the opponents said that One45 was not affordable enough, and would generate gentrification in the community, while supporters pointed out that gentrification is already happening and only exacerbated by the lack of available housing stock. In the end, I think the Council made the right call, acknowledging that there are always complications and trade-offs but that we can, in fact, somewhat predict the outcomes of public policies or be confident that they’ll produce certain effects, in this case a more affordable housing market in Harlem.
If you’ll allow me to get a tad esoteric for a second, I want to talk about the basic concept of cause and effect. Specifically, I’ve perceived over my years of reporting on New York City politics and the broader at the national political landscape that there is a tendency to pretty heavily extrapolate around proposed policies that are designed to make places like NYC more affordable and livable for what is a broad but often-threatened middle and working in class. The long-running feud between then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio basically began over de Blasio’s desire to increase taxes on the richest New Yorkers to fund universal pre-K, which is now considered among his greatest achievements as mayor. The sky didn’t fall, nor did it when business leaders warned that a 2016 deal to increase the state minimum wage would cause a business exodus (it didn’t).
In a recent manifestation of this phenomenon, it was said that the prohibition on making renters pay exorbitant broker fees would somehow imperil access to or the affordability of apartments in New York City. The basic premise was that landlords and property managers hired brokers to conduct a particular service with the knowledge that the service would be paid for not by them, but by the renters. If landlords were forced to pay these fees themselves, they wouldn’t just absorb them, but instead bake those additional costs into rent prices, thereby raising rents for everyone. That, plus some landlords would not list their apartments at all, left without the option to have an agent do the grunt work of listing and promoting the units for what was effectively no cost to them.
This always struck me as a little absurd for the basic reason that housing is the hottest commodity in the entire city, and from a purely economic standpoint, I had a hard time believing that getting would-be tenants into that housing absolutely required the intervention of very handsomely compensated intermediaries. I don’t want to out-and-out disparage the work of brokers, some of whom I’m sure are very dedicated, but it was clear to me from the beginning that throwing together a listing with a couple photos and then showing a few people around an empty apartment, if that, was not a service that was inherently worth thousands of dollars on the market. The reason it commanded such a price was purely because renters had no choice: landlords had hired these intermediaries, and if the renter wanted the apartment — which is a commodity that they need to live — then they had to pay the fee.
Now that the landlords can’t simply foist this cost onto renters, it turns out that maybe this was not quite as crucial of a service after all. An analysis of listings by StreetEasy recently found that rents had gone up only marginally in the immediate aftermath of the law going into effect, with asking rents only about a percentage point higher than the no-fee rents that were listed prior. Obviously, at just about a month since the law took effect, we only have an initial snapshot, but we have confirmed at least that the crowing about an immediate hit to the rental market was not correct.
On a more macro level, I see the same dynamic going into overdrive now as it seems ever likelier that Zohran Mamdani might win the mayoralty. The most basic and most frequent of these extrapolations is that all of the wealthy New Yorkers that make up a big chunk of the city’s tax base are going to pack their bags and decamp to Florida or wherever if he is elected. To that, my response is: no they won’t. People live and work in New York City for a variety of reasons, ranging from the cultural and urban amenities to the industries that are based here to the fact that, if we’re being honest, they absolutely love to hand-wring and complain about the city’s policies and leaders, but would be listless elsewhere, particularly anywhere less interesting.
None of this is to say that I personally think that Mamdani is our savior or that all of his policies are perfect. I’ve seen some fair questions raised about, for example, the free bus program or the idea of a network of city-owned grocery stores, an initiative that was to some extent tried and found to have some acute issues in Chicago. There are some inherent risks and unanswered questions around his initiatives, just like there are with any ambitious policy proposals. But people also said that de Blasio’s election would plunge the city into some sort of bad-old-times hellscape of 90s crime, and he ended up presiding over the safest period in New York City history.
Part of what irks me about this line of questioning is that I think the much more salient and existential question for New York City’s future is not whether a handful of very wealthy people will stick around, but whether the city’s middle class will. We have not really seen any exodus of the rich — the city in fact now has more millionaires than ever before, significantly more millionaires than there are total residents of New Orleans — but we have certainly seen a displacement of working New Yorkers.
Let me go through a little bit of potential cause-and-effect that I think is far more plausible than the fantasies about a socialist mayor driving away all of the job-creators or whatever, in part because it is already happening. Middle class New Yorkers who have the means to relocate will often do so, in particular when they are seeking solid enough footing to establish themselves and potentially start a family. Young people in an economy that is ever-more mobile and with many opportunities for remote work will see the potential of a similar standard of living for a fraction of the cost in Philadelphia or Austin and head for the exits. This will age the city’s population and strip it of the workers actually needed to keep all of its services and businesses, big and small, running. We actually have plenty of data around what it looks like when societies age and contract as young people leave and those who remain find it too expensive and cumbersome to have children, and none of it is good.
So having things like a new minimum pay for grocery delivery workers, or ending broker fees or building more affordable housing, and paying for it with higher taxes on the wealthiest is not a giveaway, as it’s often framed. All policies can have unintended consequences, but it’d be nice if we could talk about establishing a basic standard of affordability as a need. This is as equally existential for the city as keeping wealthy residents happy enough that they won’t threaten to leave.
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