But the real villain, especially in Manhattan, is "preservation" and zoning rules used to fight new buildings.

I’m no expert in these matters but if it wasn’t for “preservation” and zoning rules wouldn’t we loose all the brown stones on the upper west side? Now that would be a great loss to a city like New York.
Compare the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, on the West side, the streets are mainly lined with old beautiful brown stone townhouses while the East side there are way too many high-rise residential apartment buildings. The townhouses create a sense of neighborhood. It’s an intimate setting and makes it easier to get to know your neighbors.
I think, in NYC, we’ve got to preserve our neighborhoods and history. That means no new high-rise apartment blocks in place of old brown stone townhouses or synagogues or churches.
My opinion is biased; I live in the city in an old brownstone townhouse.
One more point. Every time I hear about getting rid of the old for new apartment blocks give me nightmares about Robert Moses style destruction.

It's really nice to have pretty brownstones for the rich people who can enjoy them. For the rest of the city, it imposes either incredibly high rents or long commutes from Jersey or the outer reaches of Queens and Brooklyn.

But whether we preserve existing brownstones is different from the issue of blocking new highrises in empty space or non-historic lots. The story posted is all about blocking a building not because of what it would replace but because people didn't want a tall building nearby.

I think NYC Housing is so expensive mainly because there is a limited amount of space in NYC and the people who want to live there continues toi grow. True, building a 14 story building might help in the short term but if you increase housing the end result will probably be increased demand (more people look to NYC instead of NJ) and continue to rise.

Actually, not all brown stones are occupied by rich people. I would be an example of that. Isn't that the reason why they have rent controlled apartments? It’s a different story that it's almost impossible to get your hands on one of these rent-controlled apartments.

The rents in the last few years have gone up due a combination of reason. The economy has been good and people can afford to pay more rent. The city has gotten much safer than it was in the 70s and 80s, more people are raising their kids in the city and why commute when you can live in the city. The high cost of heating and maintaining the apartments has also added to rent increase.

Also you assume that these new high-rises would be for the not so rich who live in queens and the outer boroughs. I doubt that's the case. The people that end up living there are just as rich as the person who owns the town house down the street but by building this building they've gone and destroyed the neighborhood.

There is "limited space" in New York only if you limited the height of residential buildings. It is actually ridiculous to impose height restrictions when there is so much demand to live in the limited space available in Manhattan.

As for non-rich people living in rent-controlled brownstones-- yes the fact that it's almost impossible to get one means that it's largely irrelevant for most other working folks in the city.

I'm not arguing for knocking down every existing brownstone and replacing it with a high-rise, but every regular boring building and empty lot should have height restrictions removed to allow high-rise apartments. I'm all for zoning the first couple of floors for vibrant commercial life, even requiring facades that fit with the neighborhood, but packing more people into desired space in the city is a basic requirement for cutting housing costs in the city.

The economy was good all over the country, but housing prices mostly skyrocketed in areas where there was limited land and often growth limits on new housing.

Not really.

The real villain, IIRC, is that *land* is undertaxed in NYC. That is, NYC taxes improvements on land (buildings, etc) at a far higher rate than the land itself.

Google on "Henry George" and "land value taxation".

Nathan, you are missing the point. The Synagogue seeks a zoning variance under the Landmark Law because of the "preservation purpose" of funding restoration of the landmark Synagogue. Thus, the only purported preservation purpose is financial -- permitting the Congregation to finance preservation from income from the Tower. However, this supposed preservation purpose amounts to shifting the cost of preservation from the Congregation to its neighbors, many of whose property values will precipitously decline as a result of the Tower rising directly in front of their windows. Thus, the benefit to some of the wealthiest New Yorkers, like the Rudins, comes at the expense of the Synagogue's neighbors.

If you are advocating repeal of the Landmark Law to permit unrestricted development in any area, that's another matter. (Perhaps Paris should have such a lack of restrictions as well.) But the existing law and zoning is clear, and the Synagogue's proposal amounts to shifting its burden to its neighbors, many of whom are not as wealthy as the Synagogue.

Finally, the proposed Tower will be one to a floor multi-million dollar condos -- hardly a contribution to any affordable housing crisis.

This is another case where Manhattan's problem is the exact opposite of the problem everywhere else in the U.S.

The trend, and the demand, essentially everywhere in the U.S. outside of that one island, is for less density, not more. Cities are suffering because of lack of demand to live there, not too much demand. New construction is happening in the form of McMansions on vast lots at the leading edge of urban sprawl, not in the middle.

And this trend feeds on itself, because the lower density promotes greater reliance on cars, which means that people who choose to live in urban neighborhoods are inevitably beseiged by heavier traffic passing through. That depresses further any interest people might have in living in the city center. Not to mention the degradation in air quality, loss of farmland, etc., etc.

Historic preservation (at the neighborhood level) is one of just a few, small, forces toward people choosing to live in cities rather than on the fringes. Zoning and building codes make it illegal to re-create any kind of genuine neighborhood environment that doesn't already exist: streets are required to be wide and houses spaced far apart; shops and jobs are kept far away from housing. Even putting apartments on the second or third floor above stores is illegal in many or most jurisdictions (I helped legalize it in one city).

MOREOVER, in the absence of subsidies, new housing construction is almost invariably aimed at the most upscale segment of the market, not the middle, and never the bottom.

PLUS: studies of the impact of new privately financed upscale housing construction demonstrate that it does NOT lead to "trickle-down" units reaching lower income families. The "chain of moves" generated by the addition of each new high-end housing unit is short and ends with an upscale household formation. As a means of creating middle class or affordable housing, it is worse than inefficient -- it is totally useless.

Yes, we can use more housing in many areas, but that is no excuse for progressives to get behind every developer's proposal for a new condo complex. New affordable housing only happens when the government makes it happen.

Actually Larry, the problem is the same in both the suburbs and New York City-- zoning laws that raise prices in wealthy areas through enforcing low-density, while dumping the poor into zoned ghettos of crappy schools and inconvenient locations.

I doubt a bit more density would decrease any interest in living in NYC, given the fact that high-density areas have lots of demand to live there. And you just can't convince me that if the rich had more central Manhattan high-rises to move into that wouldn't take the edge off of evictions of poor people in Harlem and Brooklyn as richer folks look for housing.

The raw reality is that there is not enough money to build all the affordable housing needed in NYC, at least without federal help. But New York can control its zoning laws (as could suburbs in encouraging greater density), and encouraging greater density is to the benefit of poorer residents.

No, no, what I'm saying is that NYC, especially Manhattan, is a bizarre inversion of reality, and shouldn't be treated as if it were in any way representative of what is going on in the real world.

I'm in favor of legalizing higher density, both in existing areas and in all new construction, but Manhattan is already the densest place in North America, and building even higher high-rises will make the place look like the scenery in the Batman movie.

I wish you could export some of your affluent folks to Detroit, or Flint, or Akron, or St. Louis, or many other older Midwest cities, which desperately need more people and more economic activity, where many thousands of housing units are lost to abandonment every year.

Unfortunately, any affluent New Yorker whose job moves him to Detroit is likely to locate in a remote suburb, because there is so little support here for the idea of nonpoor living in the city.

All this wailing and intense media scrutiny of alleged "gentrification" pushing lower-income folks out of a handful of NYC and San Francisco neighborhoods tends to further stigmatize the idea of living in, say, Detroit, as if by moving there, you're displacing somebody.

While I don't disagree that New York and SF are only part of the story, there are actually a lot of cities going through "reurbanization", including older industrial cities, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and many others including odd cities like Houston. Despite being the bette noire of urban planners, Houston's downtown population rose 69 percent in the 1990s-the most for any city major city.

Check out this Fannie Mae report showing increased population in many downtown areas. Even Detroit, despite seeing lost population overall, has actually increased its density downtown.

Being in the real estate field, I live this every day. Excessive zoning and other use restrictions raise the cost of development and slow the development process. It's basic supply and demand. If new supply is squeezed and demand remains constant, prices go up and housing affordability resultingly goes down.

The folks who get hurt are (1) those holding the developable land (in a lot of cases seniors who have held property for years and years) because higher development costs result in lower residual land values and (2) those buying finished homes because all those costs are passed on. Developers are less hurt because prices things accordingly.

Rent control is similar. Revenues are held flat, while there are no similar controls on expenses. Because profits are squeezed, the incentive to build new housing is not there. The result is not enough new construction and subpar maintenance on rent-controlled buildings.

Both are more socialist in nature because, in both cases, government has a pervasive amount of control on the means of production. The problem is that the regulations raise the cost of housing so much that middle income and poor folks can't afford to live in-city.

Let be honest here the only reason why all these rules and regulations are being changed it to one thing and one thing only. And that is to accommodate the Caucasians in this city like it has been doing for all these years, and that’s the bottom line. Since 9/11 some neighborhoods have been totally revamped for the use of Caucasians in this city, Coney Island is slowly becoming a state of immigrants from Germany just for the cause of NEW REGALATIONS. No one is talking about the real problems of all these stupid rules that only to benefit one group of people in this fucking city. We just had a mayor that was almost on the same level as Hitler and a new that has money up his ASS an don’t see the real problem. Why do you talk about the real problems in this city instead of being a bunch of hypocrite hidden behind a bunch a rules and regulations.