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November 5, 2024

Never Let a Crisis End

New York City’s perennial housing crisis—the city has regularly declared a housing “emergency” since 1971—is back on the city council’s agenda, with two proposals to address it. On the surface,…

October 15, 2024

Lefty NYC Council Add-Ons to Mayor’s ‘City of Yes’ Would Worse Housing Crisis

Eric Adams’ chance for a lasting legacy hinges on his ambitious zoning and housing proposal dubbed “City of Yes” — poised to come before the City Council next week.  But as some…

October 2, 2024

AOC’s “Social Housing” Dead End

New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an avatar of the progressive Left, recently shared her vision of how America’s housing shortage should be addressed in a New York Times op-ed cowritten with Senator Tina…

September 25, 2024

The Promise — and Danger — of Kamala Harris’s YIMBYism

Vice President Kamala Harris is not wrong to emphasize that the best solution to our housing shortage is the construction of new homes. She’s actually enunciated something close to a program to do so: tax…

September 20, 2024

How Public Housing Fueled Boston’s Busing Riots

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the North’s worst episode of school desegregation–related racial violence: Boston’s busing riots. Mobs hurled rocks at buses filled with black students newly assigned…

August 26, 2024

Vouching for Self-Sufficiency

It’s hard to sympathize with the Parkoff Organization, the New York real estate firm that owns some 4,000 apartments across the city. According to a new lawsuit, housing “testers” caught the…

August 23, 2024

Can Kamala Harris Learn the Housing Lessons from Her Own History?

In a biographical aside in her Thursday night nomination-acceptance speech, Kamala Harris spoke eloquently, and perhaps inadvertently, about “affordable housing” policy. She recalled the neighborhood in the East Bay where her…

August 18, 2024

Why NYC’s Most Affordable Housing May Already Be Available

Mayor Adams’ ambitious rezoning proposal he calls the “City of Yes” — aimed at encouraging new housing construction throughout the five boroughs — is filled with commonsense ideas such as…

August 16, 2024

The Harris Campaign’s Foolish Down-Payment-Assistance Scheme

On the surface, Kamala Harris’s proposal to provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers looks to be an incentive for upward mobility. Historically, homeownership has been the foundation for wealth creation for…

April 8, 2024

Accountability Comes to Public Housing

With little fanfare, the impossible just happened at the Hope Gardens public housing project in Bushwick: the management got fired. Repairs to the project’s high rises and townhouses had been…