On a sunny 81 degree Saturday, inside a windowless room in a new 31 story glass and steel tower, historic preservationists wrestled with a key question: how can they use preservation to advance affordable housing?
Given our “build, baby, build” moment that question might seem out-of-touch or cringey, but the March 29th conference at New York Law School, sponsored by the preservationist nonprofit Historic Districts Council, offered a welcome jolt of reality.
Though top politicians may cheerlead for new construction as the sole solution to the city’s affordable housing crisis, conference panelists suggested other pathways. They described older housing stock as the bedrock that allows neighborhoods to thrive, and nonrich, nonwhite New Yorkers to call the city home.
In the first session, panelists emphasized the crucial importance of rent-stabilized housing.
Caitlin Waikman, the director of research and evaluation at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) framed the overlap between preservation and affordability.
Two-thirds of New Yorkers are renters. Half those renters live in rent-stabilized units. “The vast majority, 75 percent, of rent stabilized units are in these older buildings [built before 1974] and so that’s about 1 million units of housing with about 2.5 million residents,” Waikman explained. The rent-stabilized renter, she said, is “older, lower income, more likely to be nonwhite and within their homes longer than residents in market units.”
The average rent stabilized rent in the city is $1,500 a month, while the average market rate rent is $3,700 to $4,000.
Laboratory for what should not happen
Ronda Wist, president of Wist Preservation Associates, and a former executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission decried the current contempt for preservation, especially in her Yorkville neighborhood, which serves as “a laboratory of what should not happen.” She suggested that the city’s past success with adaptive reuse is being willfully overlooked: “The city has seen hospital buildings converted to housing, hotel buildings converted to housing, walk ups converted to supportive housing and yet now every time we hear about the housing crisis, it’s all about new, new, new—we need to demolish!”
Wist noted the vast numbers of potential new housing units touted by the city, as part of the current conviction that any large increase in housing supply will result in more affordable housing. “If we had a dearth of $200 million apartments, this would be the greatest plan because that’s what’s [being built] now,” she lamented. Those huge expensive apartments in towers are replacing many smaller, more affordable apartments, she observed.
And with the loss of row houses, tenements, and “innumerable” small businesses comes the loss of neighborhood, she asserted. “We all move to neighborhoods in New York City because we like the neighborhood, we like interacting, we agree with Jane Jacobs ‘eyes on the street’ and this ecosystem is being destroyed.” Urbanist and Villager, Jane Jacobs had famously described low-rise neighborhoods as creating a sociable street culture that promotes community well-being and wards off crime.
State Senator Cordell Cleare, a longtime activist who now represents Harlem and parts of Morningside and Washington Heights, condemned the continuing loss of rent-stabilized units, exacerbated by years of “vacancy decontrol,” which, until 2019, allowed landlords to improve rent-stabilized apartments and raise the rents—and then remove the apartments from rent stabilization once the rents hit a threshold. “Everyone said ‘oh, it will take forever to get there’ [apartments hitting the decontrol threshold], but it happened overnight.”
Recalling how little information and protection tenants have had, Cleare described how her landlord had sought to charge her three times the legal rent for her rent stabilized apartment—and that she had discovered the rent history on her apartment only because she grew up in the building and knew everyone there.
At the time, the law required a renter to challenge their rent within a year of signing the lease. Cleare compared the landlord to a bank robber with a free pass: “It’s like if you rob a bank and if you get away with it for a year, you’re good.”
Currently only leaseholders can access the rent histories of their apartments; Cleare is sponsoring a bill to extend that right to prospective renters.
She echoed Wist’s critique of the trickle-down notion that increasing the supply of luxury housing will ultimately increase affordability: “In my 35 years of community work no one, not one person anywhere in my district, has said ‘You know what, Cordell, you’ve got to work on that luxury housing.’”
She noted, “You can’t just say ‘Build housing!’ That is not going to solve the problem. We have all kinds of foreign speculators. People will [buy] these units no matter what the price is, so you have to designate affordable housing.”
A fourth generation Harlemite, Cleare mourned the real estate takeover of her neighborhood, declaring “In my community, we raise children to stay out of trouble, get education, come back and give back. We have at least three generations who have done just that. But guess what? They’ve done everything and they can’t come back. There is no room for them.”
Next generation at risk
The failure to make room for the next generation puts the neighborhood at risk, she warned. The next generation “came through a struggle. They have the answers. I need them not just because I want them. I need them to be my neighborhood’s teachers, our doctors, our social workers….That’s the ecosystem I’m worried about.”
Cleare decried the lack of good information on what it costs for a landlord to renovate an apartment, saying the responses she has received range from $250,000 to a million “which is ridiculous” because the landlord could never recoup a return on investment.
Seeking to take the job of affordable housing development away from developers, Cleare has introduced state legislation to establish a “social housing authority” that “would develop affordable housing for our workforce, our low-income New Yorkers, and for our seniors.” Winning the measure, she said, is a matter of organizing and generating “political will.”
She urged the creation of information referral resources to help homeowners and small landlords with daunting rehabilitation jobs, such as asbestos and lead paint removal, and to prevent price gouging. “We have to make preservation less scary,” she observed.
Panel 2 focused specifically on federal and state tax credits for rehabilitation, and the regulatory challenges of converting old buildings to affordable housing.
Jay DiLorenzo, president of the Preservation League of New York State, noted that tax credits have leveraged billions of dollars in private investment in preservation, and have revitalized cities such as Buffalo, where wide scale rehabilitation was “transformational,” remaking sections of the city that were “ghost towns.”
He emphasized the multiple virtues of adaptive reuse, while noting that New York State often seems to undermine its climate goals by favoring new construction: “Reusing our existing buildings is essential to the health of our communities, essential to our sustainability goals, and really make the kind of places we all want to live in….The end product is going to be far better for the community than new construction in many cases. And I can’t say enough about the climate impacts of reusing existing buildings, as the state plows forward with development projects….It seems they’re talking on one hand about the importance of climate and sustainability, and on the other hand, creating situations where we’re incentivizing demolition and loss.”
He warned that the federal tax credits will become more difficult to access if indeed it remains at all. It is currently administered by the National Parks Service, which has been targeted for cuts and layoffs.
Were the federal tax credit for substantial rehabilitation to continue, he recommended tweaking it to no longer require an investment equal to the tax basis. That high threshold appears to prevent hotel owners from attempting to convert their vacant hotels into affordable housing.
Mark Ginsberg, founding partner of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, noted a variety of big challenges, such as 45 years of deferred maintenance in the city’s public housing projects and an overall lack of money for affordable housing.
He said that when his firm designed new housing construction in Newburgh “it was taller than people wanted” because the market rate units were expected to subsidize the affordable units.
Ginsberg described a frustrating lack of alignment among regulatory agencies. For example, one consistent problem is simultaneously meeting both preservation and energy efficiency requirements—the former limit the amount you can add to an external surface to three inches, but the latter demand that you add insulation.
Jenna Breines, director of real estate development for the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing (WSFSSH) recounted her agency’s progress rehabbing the Three Arts Club, a one-time dormitory for young women, and turning the rooms into 61 efficiency studio apartments for very low-income seniors, plus a super’s apartment.
She observed that while HPD and the Department of Buildings worked well together, neither were familiar with the preservation requirements of federal and state agencies.
Furthermore, current state regulations would preclude a state tax credit for the project because it is in a too-affluent census tract, “leaving $5 million in equity on the table.” WSFSSH is hoping for the census tract limitation to be removed.
Breines joined with previous panelists in calling out a general lack of information. She noted WSFSSH had to “waste a lot of time” hiring a preservation consultant to research what energy efficient windows, insulation, and ramps would most likely be approved by state and federal preservation agencies.
The third panel, ostensibly seeking ways preservation and affordable housing can work better together, was the most contentious, and the most focused on new construction.
Leila Bozorg, the executive director of housing in the Mayor’s Office, contended “an important part of the narrative has shifted,” an acknowledgment that “new housing is part of the solution” to the affordable housing crisis.
She asserted that at least part of the solution was the construction of new luxury housing, bolstering the city’s tax base.
She also warned that the city faces an “existential” crisis if federal cuts go through—impacting Section 8 vouchers for 132,000 families, the operations of 97,000 units of public housing, and the $170 million received from HUD through a block grant, which mostly funds building code enforcement.
Bozorg conveyed frustration that preservationists defeated the City of Yes provision to allow accessory dwelling units within historic districts: “It can’t be that historic districts have no responsibility to contribute to the broader solution.”
Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti, who authored a New York Times survey on how the city could build half a million new housing units, said that his firm’s “real discovery” was that mid-rise and small-rise building is “the engine that can support lots of affordable housing.” He observed that “New York is very terrible” at constructing such buildings because land costs and construction costs are so high—and tariffs will make those costs worse.
He urged Blue states and cities to get ahead of regulatory reform. As an example of regulatory obstruction, he cited delays with the East New York rezoning and development plan, which had community buy-in nine years ago, pre-COVID. He characterized the project, promising the construction of up to 2,300 affordable housing units, as delayed by “ridiculous regulatory hurdles.”
Chakrabarti urged the city to adopt “housing as of right” (automatically approved) for anything that checks the boxes for mid-rise, middle class workforce housing: “If someone wants to build a 60-unit building near a subway stop in Queens, we should just issue them a permit.” Regulations, he claimed, serve the biggest developers because they are the only developers who can afford the lobbyists and lawyers to get through the thicket.
Sara Bronin, a Cornell University professor who previously headed the federal advisory council on historic preservation, also urged an overhaul of the city zoning code to permit housing as of right—but her favored strategy stuck in Chakrabati’s craw.
Bronin, who lives in Hartford, Connecticut—where she was head of the city planning commission and married to the mayor—promoted a “form-based code.” In Hartford, she noted, “we have 17 building types, and each of these is allowed in different formations.” This, she declared, allows you to visualize more or less what will be built on a certain block—in contrast to New York City’s amorphous Floor Area Ratio, somewhat governing height and density.
Chakrabarti chafed that “as a practitioner, I really don’t want to be told ‘this new housing project has to have a pitched roof.’ A form-based code, he protested, would prevent great architecture like the Empire State Building or the Guggenheim, and demand conformity, like “telling a tall person they can only have tall friends,” a “thing that terrifies me.”
An audience member, describing vast vacant lots left vacant for years around Penn Station, asked about creating penalties for vacant lots. Bozorg responded that there’s “a fundamental question here about what we as a city can actually compel someone to do with private property. There’s a little bit of a philosophical question here of how far we can go in compelling people to keep the property exactly as it is….I think preservationists have a certain viewpoint the city’s not in agreement with.”
