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Stepping Up Suburban Housing Easier Said Than Done


Belmont and beyond, on Long Island (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)


To housing advocates, the solution to the New York City region’s affordability crisis is frustratingly simple enough: build, build, build, and build some more. To them, the suburbs and the single-family homeowners therein serve as selfishly guarded relics from an era long ago that aren’t doing their fair share.

But painting the long vexing issue of housing affordability with such a supply-side broad brush ignores a fundamental tenet of sound urban planning – balance, and the need to accommodate growth that is both environmentally and economically sustainable for local governments to properly manage in the years ahead.

Working towards this goal is especially important in areas that have key infrastructural limitations – a reality often ignored in a discussion regularly focused only on social justice or economic issues.

As the frenzied housing market within the New York City metropolitan region proves to be more resilient than expected when faced with threats of a looming recession and 30-year fixed mortgage rates that are north of 6%, housing advocates have more aggressively urged suburban localities to loosen local land use restrictions to allow for more residential units.

The issue that often goes unmentioned in the discussion is that many suburban localities have struggled with the environmental ramifications of the growth that was allowed in the freewheeling years following the post-war housing boom. These lasting echoes of growth that planners had warned about in the 1970s have been felt in the decades since, whether in the form of harmful algal blooms along the coasts or through the diminishing air quality that sprawl has wrought.

During the post-war years, tens of thousands of tract homes were built across the New York metropolitan area, rapidly consuming farmland and open spaces with little regard for the social, economic, and environmental challenges that would arise. The rate of growth was so frantic that forward-thinking planners who worked in local governments spent their careers preserving what open spaces were left.

On Long Island in particular, the breadth of the impacts of such growth have become more concerning as we begin to fully understand the lasting legacies of rapid suburban expansion.

Long Island’s drinking water supply, sourced from underground aquifers, remains under constant threat from both known and emerging contaminants, thanks to wide swaths of housing and industrial developments that lack proper wastewater treatment from public sewers. Worse, thanks to the hydrodynamics within these groundwater stores, we are now just seeing the environmental ramifications of development patterns that occurred during the 1980s, with more impacts from later developments yet to emerge.

Recently, I argued in Newsday that blaming local land use regulations for today’s market conditions denies the fact that zoning can serve as a powerful mechanism many local governments have used to curb the worst of sprawl by balancing necessary growth, protecting the environment, and preserving quality of life. Zoning is a tool for policymakers to wield – and a drastic relaxation of key land use regulations without a broader cohesive strategy that is regional in scope will do more harm than good - potentially resulting in the over-proliferation of sprawling higher-density development patterns. 

In turn, such unchecked development can amplify the challenges of economic stagnation and environmental decline that New York’s suburbs already face.

And as the ongoing housing crunch continues to build, localities will be pressured to further loosen land use restrictions. For many first-time homebuyers, prices have long been out of reach, which in turn threatens the attractiveness of these communities for private investment and the viability of local talent pools.

There are no easy solutions, but a sensible discussion on housing cannot be had without factoring in the very real constraints to growth that suburbs face – and the present need of suburban communities to reinvent themselves for the 21st century.

Moving forward, it’s important to remember that boosting suburban housing inventory is merely one piece of the complicated housing picture, and does little to quell  the unique factors that make the New York area such an expensive place to live or address the environmental ills that sprawl continues to bring.

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Richard Murdocco teaches within Stony Brook University’s public policy graduate program and School of Atmospheric and Marine Sciences, and writes on land use and development issues at www.TheFoggiestIdea.org. On Twitter @TheFoggiestIdea and @RichMurdocco.

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Making a Down Payment on the Future of New York City


Children get support from NYC Kids RISE (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Across the five boroughs this graduation season, students are closing out the school year and beginning a new chapter in their educational journeys. But we’re not just talking about the students eager to throw their caps in the air. For the first time in our city’s history, the vast majority of New York City public school kindergarteners are stepping up to first grade with NYC Scholarship Accounts that have an initial financial investment through NYC Kids RISE and the City of New York.

The inaugural, citywide class of the Save for College Program may not be graduating until 2034, but their toolbox now includes a financial asset for college and career training, opportunities to gain more over time, and reinforced expectations of success from across the city’s neighborhoods and institutions along the way. 

Higher education is a critical component of increasing economic mobility and reducing inequality, but for too many, the prospects of higher education have remained out of reach. For others who do pursue higher education, their decision comes at a high price. Today, 45 million Americans have $1.7 trillion in student debt. This reality can deter young people from accessing higher education, exacerbating a widening wealth gap in New York City and across the country, with communities of color shouldering most of the burden. 

There are so many different factors that impact a child’s chance of future success, and many of these factors come into play outside a student’s school. We also know that neighborhoods differ dramatically in investment and the ingredients that promote economic mobility and income growth. And research suggests that social capital -- the strength of social networks and community involvement -- plays as important a role as financial capital. 

As the White House and Congress continue to debate solutions to address the student debt crises and college affordability, New York City isn’t waiting. The Save for College Program was created to not only provide public school students with a financial asset for their higher education, but to tap into and support the set of individuals, organizations, businesses, and institutions that make up the neighborhood ecosystems and social infrastructure around a child’s life. 

Consider how Sunnyside Community Services -- a community-based organization serving students and families in western Queens -- took some of our youngest students in pilot communities on college trips, reinforcing the idea that you have to “see it to be it.” Or how Make the Road NY’s Parent Committee organized parent-to-parent education sessions so that families could hear and understand the rewards structure from a trusted source. How Seamless got its diners from across the five boroughs to “Donate the Change” directly into students’ NYC Scholarship Accounts, or how tenant leaders in Queens organized their community to raise $1,000 for each participating student that lives in Astoria Houses. Consider how the School Team led by the Parent Coordinator at PS 212 has already worked with over 85% of families in her school to help families activate and view their account for the very first time -- a critical step in helping families plan for a child’s future. In our latest example, just this month Flushing Bank is contributing $15,000 to the NYC Scholarship Accounts of 140 kindergarteners in their local community. 

Through the Save for College Program, we’ve not only created a means to invest in our students from their earliest days in school, but we’ve created a way to invest in the financial and social resiliency of New York City neighborhoods, through a platform that recognizes and supports other stakeholders and their critical and connected roles as part of an ecosystem.

Last month, Mayor Eric Adams joined NYC Kids RISE and local elected officials in the Bronx to celebrate that 97% of the city’s public school kindergarteners now have an NYC Scholarship Account and each year this number will grow. Whether you recognize your role or not, every New Yorker is already playing a part in the systems that either support or impede a student’s chance of success.

You now have an opportunity to support students in and across your community, and to get involved in building out this platform to its full potential. If you’re a parent of a kindergartener, you can activate your child’s account and learn more about the reward structure. If you’re part of a community-based organization, consider integrating the Save for College Program into your services, and if you’re part of a business or corporation, your employer can organize or contribute to a community scholarship. The opportunities to plug in are truly endless, and we can’t wait for you to join us. 

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Sideya Sherman is Commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Equity. Debra-Ellen Glickstein is the Founding Executive Director of nonprofit NYC Kids RISE. On Twitter @NYCKidsRISE.

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New Housing Blueprint Gives LGBTQ New Yorkers Another Reason to Celebrate


Pride (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


This June in New York City unfolded with a welcome, if not obviously connected, set of events: Pride Month, and the new Housing Blueprint from the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. As two transgender advocates who worked together last year on an LGBTQ+ housing plan, we see a number of ideas that our community has championed reflected in the new Housing Blueprint – a plan that will directly benefit LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.

First, it’s important to note the disparities that LGBTQ+ people in New York face when it comes to housing and poverty. As a recent report from the New York State Department of Health shows, LGBTQ+ adults are more likely than non-LGBTQ+ populations to experience low educational attainment, incomes below $25,000, unemployment, and disability. All of these factors contribute to a greater need for safe and affordable housing for members of our communities. As our housing report highlighted, LGBTQ+ community enclaves, the very neighborhoods that make New York City the LGBTQ+ haven that it is, are dependent on the availability of affordable housing.

A cornerstone of the LGBTQ+ housing plan, and the administration’s blueprint, is the dire need to eliminate bureaucratic barriers that both limit the city’s ability to create affordable housing and get people placed once that housing is built. When convening LGBTQ+ homeless community members last year to devise our housing plan, we heard heart-rending testimonies about decreasing availability of affordable units and how difficult it has been for homeless LGBTQ+ New Yorkers (disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and transgender, gender non-conforming, or non-binary) to get from shelter to housing placement. 

The blueprint includes a number of regulatory changes that would help create more affordable homes: easing burdens on legalizing basement apartments and smaller-sized apartment units and ridding ourselves of archaic parking space requirements that reduce the number of affordable units that can be included in new development. The blueprint also commits to tracking and reducing the amount of time it takes to place New Yorkers into affordable homes. For a community in desperate need of affordable housing, these are changes LGBTQ+ New Yorkers need to see. 

We noted before that LGBTQ+ enclaves can only exist where housing is affordable. Our community, disproportionately low-income as it is, finds affordable housing stock and builds strength and safety in numbers. This has been the trend for over a hundred years in New York City, and it still exists in neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, Jackson Heights, and communities in the South Bronx. But affordability in these neighborhoods is in peril.

The new blueprint’s emphasis on equitable zoning changes to distribute affordability means LGBTQ+ people can maintain footholds where they’re living now, but also find other safe neighborhoods to move to and build the kind of critical mass that has always been key to LGBTQ+ communities.

As advocates and people who talk to community members about politics and government, we also know how disinvested and jaded many LGBTQ+ people can be about government processes, especially as it relates to housing. We, the authors, have long promoted, individually and collectively, political education work. So, it is profoundly heartening to see an emphasis in the administration’s blueprint on tenant democracy – along with new capital commitments to affordable housing and incoming support for NYCHA developments. All of this – tenant democracy informing how to spend money and improve communities – means that low-income LGBTQ+ people in public housing will have real power to improve their lives.

The first Prides were celebrations of new political possibility. We see so much in this Housing Blueprint that’s aligned with our own visions of LGBTQ+ community housing needs that we’re taking a page from our forebears and, coming out of June’s Pride month, celebrating new tools that empower our communities, and keep New York City as the LGBTQ+ mecca it has historically been.

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Andy Bowen is Founder of Bowen Public Affairs Consulting. Sean Coleman is Founder and Executive Director of Destination Tomorrow, the Bronx LGBTQ+ Center. On Twitter @AndyMBowen & @RamblinRantic.

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