NYC can make more housing available for the poor — if we don’t shun the rich
New York needs more housing. Nearly everyone recognizes that, from across the political spectrum.
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In 2024, the City Council approved City of Yes, Gotham’s most significant zoning-code overhaul since 1961. And last November, voters approved — by comfortable margins — three City Charter amendments that make it faster and easier to build housing.
That’s why the council made the right call Thursday to confirm John Mangin to chair the Board of Standards and Appeals.
His confirmation had turned into a needless culture war over housing, but reason ultimately prevailed.
The BSA is the five-member body that decides zoning variances, certain special permits and other technical land-use matters.
Council members were right to scrutinize a nominee whose decisions could affect how their districts look and feel.
Many of their constituents fear rapid, sweeping change and buildings that clash with the character of their existing surroundings.
But his nomination should have been about qualifications to chair a technical, quasi-judicial body, not to relitigate housing fights the council and voters have already settled.
Mangin is a strong fit for the job. A Yale Law-educated attorney and urban planner, he has spent years mastering the city’s byzantine land-use rules, including as director of the Housing Division at the City Planning Department.
He played key roles in City of Yes and last year’s charter amendments.
Yet detractors turned to Mangin’s academic writing, especially two law-review articles from 2014 and 2018, to suggest that he is hostile to neighborhood concerns.
Mangin’s basic argument in these articles is conventional wisdom among urban planners today. When high-demand neighborhoods refuse to add enough housing, wealthier newcomers bid up older housing stock in less affluent neighborhoods.
That’s why market-rate housing must be part of the city’s approach to alleviating its supply crunch.
Yes, these buildings will be too expensive for many, if not most, New Yorkers.
But they give higher-income renters somewhere to go besides the older apartments that lower-income New Yorkers need.
Research by Vicki Been, faculty director of the NYU Furman Center, supports Mangin’s case.
New supply may be associated with rising average income and education levels, but it has not been shown to speed up the displacement of lower-income households.
New construction frees up units across the income spectrum so that existing residents have more options.
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Critics have also seized on Mangin’s description of homeowners who resist denser development as “homeowner cartels.”
Yet his article didn’t concern New York City specifically; it added to a broader literature around exclusionary zoning in suburbs, and the phrase “homeowner cartels” has been part of the academic housing literature for five decades.
As a factual matter, it’s hard to deny that for decades, the city’s affluent neighborhoods and low-density outer-borough areas have resisted development.
Something had to change to allow for more growth in these places.
This is why The Post’s editorial board praised City of Yes as a private-market solution to the city’s housing crunch and endorsed last year’s Charter amendments.
City of Yes was designed to build a little more housing in every neighborhood, better equalizing the burden of meeting the city’s supply needs; the amendments will accelerate this growth.
That said, neighborhood concerns around development are legitimate.
As chairman of one of the last civic associations in my native Astoria, I hear my neighbors’ worries about new construction all the time.
Yet over the decades, Astoria has managed to sustain rooted, multigenerational communities and remain a place of upward mobility — in no small part thanks to the growth in its housing stock.
That’s a good thing. If today’s families are to have the same opportunity to succeed that mine had, they need a place they can call home.
Council members were right to ask how Mangin would apply the law while taking community concerns seriously.
Mangin has recognized that hostility to development shouldn’t be ignored or merely outvoted.
But some members representing lower-density districts treated the confirmation process as an opportunity to force him to accept preservationist goals, rather than to assess whether he was qualified to lead the BSA.
The council deserves credit for rejecting that approach.
Now that he’s confirmed, members and their constituents should know that Mangin won’t have limitless discretion in his new role.
The BSA’s authority is limited by state and local law.
The board applies established legal standards to applications for projects on specific sites, and its approvals may be granted only if those projects meet specified criteria, including that variances “will not alter the essential character of the neighborhood or district.”
Its chair has no special voting power.
New Yorkers voted for more housing. Mangin will help deliver it in a responsible way.
John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at Manhattan Institute.
