Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
TESTIMONY
Testimony by Vicki Been, Professor from NYU Law School on NYC's housing crisis and land use system failures
0:08:28
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6 min
Professor Vicki Been discusses New York City's housing affordability crisis, linking it to low rates of residential construction hampered by a risky, costly, and time-consuming land use system. She highlights the inequitable distribution of housing growth across neighborhoods and urges the commission to focus on mitigating risks and delays throughout the development process.
- Been presents data showing significant population decline driven by out-migration due to the high cost of living.
- She notes that roughly half of renters are rent-burdened (paying >30% income on housing), with over 27% severely burdened (>50%).
- NYC's housing production lags behind competitor cities, with about a third of recent units built on recently rezoned land.
- Stark disparities exist: 10 community districts housed nearly half the new housing growth (2010-2023), while half the districts added only 21%.
- She criticizes the development process for being too long (2.5-4x national average), too risky financially upfront, overly influenced by local opposition detrimental to citywide needs, and prone to misuse of tools like environmental review.
Vicki Been
0:08:28
Let me get all mic'd up here.
0:08:31
Thank you very much to, to all the members of the commission for convening the this hearing and, very much for your public service, to have a group of people with so much expertise and creativity and and raw smarts, working on this is, is really a a benefit to the city as a whole, and we are very grateful.
0:08:52
Over many decades, as you know and as, chair Bury alluded to, New York City has invested enormous amounts of resources, both money, federal, state, local money, and time and talent of of city officials to make the city's housing stock both more affordable and high quality.
0:09:13
Yet the housing affordability problem has really reached crisis proportions, and and there are a number of red flags.
0:09:22
More people are leaving the city than are coming in.
Alicia Boyd
0:09:31
Nope.
0:09:33
Nope.
Vicki Been
0:09:35
There we go.
0:09:36
Okay.
0:09:37
This is a slide that shows, that we have, between April 2020 and July of twenty twenty three, the city's population declined by more than 550,000 residents or more than 6% of the city's population.
0:09:52
That is one of the largest sustained population declines in recent history, and it's largely due to declines in net domestic migration.
0:10:01
More people are leaving the city for other parts of the country than are coming here from other parts of the country.
0:10:07
The pandemic exacerbated that trend, to be sure, but as you can see there, it was well underway, by 2011.
0:10:14
One of the major reasons that people say that they are leaving is the cost of living.
0:10:19
The share of the city's renters who are paying more than 30% of their income for housing expenses has hoovered stubbornly at around 50% for decades, and more than 27% of our families, mostly the low income lowest income households in the city, pay more than half of their income for housing.
0:10:42
One of the primary reasons for the high cost of housing is the low rate of residential construction in the city.
0:10:48
A great deal of research shows that with more supply, you get lower prices, lower rents, or lower rent growth.
0:10:55
Nevertheless, the city, built less than what what it needed in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties and has never really recovered from that, deficit.
0:11:08
The city's land use system is one reason for the inadequate production.
0:11:12
While we have the best and the brightest at our different agencies, we also have a land use system that makes building housing extraordinarily risky, costly, and time consuming.
0:11:23
It is we say that a great deal is as of right, but the truth is that a great many that we we are, permitting at way lower rates than our competitor cities around The United States.
0:11:37
And about a third of all the units that were permitted in, between, 2010 and 2023 were actually on land that had been rezoned recently.
0:11:49
The very uncomfortable fact about all this is that some neighborhoods really shirk their obligation to provide housing growth.
0:11:57
Just 10 of the city's 59 community districts with only 13% of the population housed 48% of the new housing growth over the last, from twenty ten ten to 2023.
0:12:11
And half of the community districts in the city with 57% of the population added only 21% of the housing stock growth.
0:12:22
So the disparity in which neighborhoods contribute to alleviating the housing shortage and which do not is unfair, and it makes every neighborhood less willing to allow for necessary growth.
0:12:35
I think that, one of the key things that the that the commission really has to focus on is every step in the development process and the risks that are posed and the delay and the cost that come with that risk.
0:12:49
I've outlined in my written testimony the phases of development, the key milestones of each, and the risks that each pause.
0:12:57
But I wanna draw some bigger picture lessons.
0:13:00
First of all, the process is just too long.
0:13:03
A recent study by the Federal Reserve Board indicated that across the nation, it takes about fifteen months from the announcement of a project to being shovels in the ground.
0:13:13
The time in New York is two and a half to four times that.
0:13:16
The time required imposes enormous cost, Carrying the land, the option or the option for the land, hiring all the staff can add millions of dollars.
0:13:26
It's too risky.
0:13:27
People have to put too much money on the table before the elected officials ever have to commit, or give, input.
0:13:36
And those elected officials are not giving sufficient attention to citywide needs.
0:13:41
They pay too little attention in the process to the needs of the city as a whole, and that results in individual council members being able to veto or deter housing even though that would be in the interest of the city as a whole.
0:13:55
As I said, some neighborhoods shirk, and some of the tools along the way are misused.
0:14:01
Environmental review, other kinds of of reviews add enormous litigation risk, enormous time and delay to the process, and don't really address the kinds of environmental concerns that we're talking about.
0:14:14
So I want to end there by saying I think it's really important for the commission to think about all of these different risks to evaluate the efficiency of those risks and the time and the delay that they impose, and I wish you good luck.
0:14:29
We are stand ready to help in whatever way we can, and, and thank you again for your service.