The NY Times has an article as to how best to house 1 million more people. The author states:
New York City doesn’t have enough homes. The average New Yorker now spends 34 percent of pre-tax income on rent, up from just 20 percent in 1965. There are many reasons homes in the city are so expensive, but at the root of it all, even after the pandemic, is supply and demand: Insufficient housing in our desirable city means more competition — and therefore sky-high prices — for the few new homes that trickle onto the market. Some New Yorkers harbor fantasies that instead of building more, we can meet our housing needs through more rent control, against the advice of most economists, or by banning pieds-à-terre or by converting all vacant office towers into residential buildings, despite the expense and complexity. Given the enormity of the crisis, such measures would all be drops in the bucket, leading many to worry that if we were to actually build the hundreds of thousands of homes New Yorkers need, we would end up transforming the city into an unrecognizable forest of skyscrapers.
The structures the author promotes look like prisons. Have we not learned anything from the mass problems of "public housing". Try going into one. Crime, filth, decay, etc. There is in my opinion and my experience a single public housing system that works. It infects the city with a blight.
Yes, NY is expensive. We all pay the price. The new tax on driving into Manhattan is just an example. It forces people out of New York. At least those people legally here and working. I grew up on Staten Island. Two busses, a ferry, then the subway was a daily occurrence. Two hours commute each way.
Now in New Jersey, it is 45 minutes to NYC and then pray you can survive a subway ride to some short distance.
Perhaps an economic solution is best, just let the prices increase and drive the residents to wherever they can exist. Building more prison like structures will do nothing more than enhance the criminal underbelly of the city.
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