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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 community groups seek to derail the plan, the hard-left council looks ready to undermine it — and convert it to the “City of Yes, But.” The key to Adams’…
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 Smith of New Jersey. Ocasio-Cortez’s vision resurrects the debunked Great Depression-era argument that the private housing market is fundamentally flawed and must be replaced by…
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 credits for small “starter” homes, as part of a push for 3 million new houses. It’s encouraging that the Democratic presidential candidate shows a basic knowledge…
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 to South Boston High School, set on the “heights” of that largely white neighborhood. At the time, and in retrospect, the violence was blamed on…
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 group discriminating against potential tenants whose rent would have been subsidized by housing vouchers. The Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC), which brought the suit, claims that Parkoff…
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 mother rented an apartment: In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats — A beautiful, working-class neighborhood…
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 permitting apartments to be built above storefronts and relaxing the expensive requirements for new parking. Adams, in many ways, is harkening back to the golden…
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 those of modest means. On closer inspection, however, down-payment assistance sends the wrong message — not only because already high home prices are likely to…
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 delayed, and, per an official notice, “cost-saving measures to curb ballooning controllable operating expenses” hadn’t been adopted. Such lack of foresight constitutes a typical day…
March 21, 2024
It’s Not Just Minority Neighborhoods—NYC’s Entire Property-Tax System Needs Reform
There is good reason to conclude, as the state Court of Appeals did Tuesday, that New York City’s property-tax system leads to disproportionately high tax bills for minority homeowners. But those high taxes aren’t the result of discrimination; they’re just one example of a dysfunctional tax-assessment system that burdens homeowners and discourages new housing construction —…