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TESTIMONY
Testimony by Jacob Anbinder, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow from Cornell University on the historical roots of NYC's housing scarcity
1:34:36
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5 min
Historian Jacob Anbinder discusses how New York City intentionally became a 'city of no' through zoning and charter changes in the 1960s and 1970s, reacting against earlier pro-growth policies. He argues these changes, driven partly by liberal ideals of community control, had unintended consequences leading to today's housing scarcity and urges the commission to reform the system while understanding its historical context.
- Anbinder studies the political history of housing scarcity and NIMBYism.
- He pinpoints the 1961 zoning code and 1975 charter revisions (creating Community Boards, ULURP) as key moments restricting housing growth.
- He connects this shift to a specific historical context and changing political ideologies.
- He emphasizes the need to address current problems stemming from past decisions without simply judging past actors.
- The goal should be to change the moral conversation around housing.
Jacob Anbinder
1:34:36
Thank you.
1:34:36
Thank you so much.
1:34:37
Can everyone hear me alright?
Richard R. Buery Jr.
1:34:40
Yes.
Jacob Anbinder
1:34:41
Perfect.
1:34:42
I wanna thank the members of the commission for having me here today, and I particularly wanna thank my fellow panelists.
1:34:48
It's really an honor to be in their company.
1:34:51
My name is Jacob Anbinder, and, I'm a historian of urban politics and housing policy, currently serving as a Klarman postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University.
1:35:00
And I'm writing a book that's due out, the year after next called NIMBY Nation, The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics.
1:35:09
That gives you a sense of my, position on this, question.
1:35:13
So so my work really deals with two, questions broadly.
1:35:17
The first is how did housing in places like New York City, New York City is one of the places I look at, but also cities in California and sort of the Northeast more broadly.
1:35:26
How did housing in these places become so scarce over the last forty, fifty years?
1:35:31
So I take sort of the long view compared to, some of the people who've spoken today.
1:35:35
And second, what does this shortage have to do with places like New York simultaneously becoming the most reliably democratic parts of the country?
1:35:44
And it's this apparent contradiction that some of our most liberal communities, starting in the sixties, seventies, and continuing through today are also the most opposed to new housing.
1:35:52
And that that's what really piqued my interest as a political historian.
Vadim Graboys
1:35:57
But I
Jacob Anbinder
1:35:57
should start by saying that my interest in this topic is not purely academic.
1:36:01
It started because I experienced the New York City Housing Crunch firsthand, not as someone a month's rent away from being on the street, but rather as one of the millions of New Yorkers who are former New Yorkers, in my case, for whom a college degree and a white collar job were really barely enough to afford a home that was sturdy and safe and spacious, in the city.
1:36:21
And yet when I would talk to my neighbors in Park Slope or in Harvard Square when I went to grad school or even here in Ithaca now, some of the most ostensibly liberal people that you're supposed to find anywhere in the country, I would find that they were at best ignorant of the housing crisis that was going on in their own backyards or more often believed that, opposing development was actually part and parcel with their identities as liberals.
1:36:46
And so I wanna start by thanking the commission not just for the work of revising the city charter in its sort of technical aspect, but for working to change the moral conversation around housing in a way that's sorely needed, not just in New York, but really in progressive cities from coast to coast.
1:37:02
Because even though it's tempting to believe that housing in the city has always been expensive, the data show, and other people spoken about this today as well, that we are at a point now that is really unprecedented in recent history.
1:37:13
The two bedroom house that Jane Jacobs owned, in the village is worth nearly a thousand times what she paid for it in 1947.
1:37:21
The Atlantic called housing recently the linchpin of the great affordability crisis breaking America.
1:37:27
And these runaway housing markets in New York City and elsewhere are having noticeable, social effects.
1:37:33
In the sixties, about one in five Americans moved in a given year.
1:37:37
Now the figure is less than half that.
1:37:39
And through their inability to buy a home in places like New York, many people are not only excluded from what has become in this day and age the dominant mode of wealth building in America, but are increasingly unable to even live in the same parts of the country as those who had the good fortune to invest in real estate decades ago.
1:37:57
And the core premise of my work is really quite simple.
1:38:00
Housing is scarce and expensive today because we made it illegal to build more of it in the places where people want to live.
1:38:07
In 1961, New York City changed its zoning code to cut the number of homes that could exist in the city by 80%.
1:38:13
In 1975, voters approved several, provisions put forward by a charter commission similar to this one, which created the modern system of community boards as well as the EULER procedure and removed, authority over the capital budget from the city planning commission.
1:38:29
And this is an episode that I address in my book, and can just, discuss more in the q and a.
1:38:35
So New York City, in other words, wasn't always a city of no.
1:38:38
It chose to become a city of no.
1:38:40
And in particular, New York liberals decided to embrace an ideology of no at a discrete moment in time in a belief that it would ameliorate the harms of the pro growth policies that remade the city in the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties.
1:38:55
And so if I wanna leave this commission with one idea, it's that we need not cast aspersions on those community control ideas that predominated in the past in order to begin remedying their unintended consequences.
1:39:08
I always tell my students that history is not about using the present to render judgment on the past.
1:39:13
It's about using the present to understand the motivations of people in the past.
1:39:17
And so we need only remind ourselves that the New York of today is a very different place from the one in which Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses lived, a place that faces an entirely different set of problems from the ones that they and their contemporaries grappled with.
1:39:30
And I think today, New York City is a city that wants to grow and prosper, if only we will let it.
1:39:36
Thank you again, and I welcome your comments and questions.