Getting to Yes: The City Council should listen to New Yorkers who back zoning plan to boost housing

The City of Yes for Housing zoning reforms now under consideration at the City Council demand passage. Finding ways to produce more homes in neighborhoods all across the city is the only sustainable path to bring down the punishing cost of living here. Fortunately, it seems like that message has sunk in among a broad swath of the city’s registered voters — 80% of whom told pollsters they support the very modest reforms to produce a little bit more housing all throughout the five boroughs, according to a survey conducted for the pro-housing group Open New York.

So to the Cassandras who showed up at hearings Tuesday to insist that passage of new zoning rules would mean the end of New York as we know it, we say: You are in the small, blinkered minority. Most New Yorkers understand that the only way to save the city’s core character as a place where strivers come and families raise kids and seniors get old is to enable it to evolve and grow.

The good news is that the need to produce much more housing has now been so fully internalized by people who care about cities that America appears to be passing a tipping point. From more and more quarters now come smart ideas to unlock places for people to live.

One example: Fresh research out this week from The Pew Charitable Trusts and Gensler, a global architecture and planning firm, charts the way forward for the conversion of office buildings into residences. As most everyone knows by now, remote and hybrid work has elevated commercial vacancies and driven down office-building values, leading to a wave of attempts to convert underutilized offices into apartments, which have been aided by new city and state policies trying to ease the transition.

But conversions are still much easier said than done — because it costs a hell of a lot of money and takes a hell of a lot of time unsticking red tape to add bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms with windows, as well as the proper stairwells and elevators, to spaces built for another purpose.

Enter the study by Pew and Gensler, which runs the numbers and finds that an especially smart approach is to convert buildings into dorm-style apartments with “private, locked ‘microunits’ along the perimeter, with shared kitchens, bathrooms, laundry, and living rooms in the center.” Once upon a time, we would’ve called these SROs — lower-cost housing generally for single people.

SROs went virtually extinct in the middle of the last century amid a shortsighted panic, but they are set to get a new lease on life if City of Yes passes. The 5Boro Institute has urged more such housing models to come to market via office-to-residential conversions, and we wholeheartedly agree.

Meanwhile, there’s new federal action to try to lower housing production costs and shorten timetables by making it easier for housing to be manufactured efficiently rather than always built on-site. That’s not always possible in a densely settled city like New York, but given how fast technology is progressing, there are sure to be an increasing number of opportunities to build apartment buildings in novel ways — saving money for developers, for the public that subsidizes affordable housing and ultimately for renters or owners themselves.

We need a lot more housing. To get it, we can’t keep trying the same old things and looking in the same old places.