More Homes for More New Yorkers

Housing advocate and Open New York Executive Director Annemarie Gray argues that scarcity drives New York's housing crisis, with restrictive zoning and ULURP processes empowering local opposition to block development. She reveals how both Republican states and progressive Democratic cities outpace New York in housing reform, despite recent wins like "City of Yes" legislation. Annemarie advocates for balancing tenant protections with increased supply and discusses her organization's push for the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act, which would allow religious organizations to build affordable housing on their underutilized properties.

You can listen to this episode, "More Homes for More New Yorkers," on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Jamie: You are listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City Podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.

Molly: Here's a question for you. What is your favorite city that is not New York City? 

Jamie: Does it have to be a city that I've been to? 

Molly: Well, you can give me an answer for a city you've been to and one you haven't. 

Jamie: The Emerald City. 

Molly: Tell me why. 

Jamie: Emerald City? It just seems really well run. 

Molly: Yeah, that's the pinnacle of ordinance.

Jamie: It seems clearly well run. I mean, they have a lot of good mass transit because they're able to, to gather large crowds at a moment's notice, right. A lot of the population seems to be very, very short people, so I'm assuming they have favorable accessibility rules. And I mean, architecturally, it's interesting.

Molly: What do you think the housing situation is there? 

Jamie: I mean, hard to say because I haven't had the opportunity to review all of the data. 

Molly: Mm-hmm. 

Jamie: But I'm told they have really, um, progressive zoning. 

Molly: Is it a YIMBY city? 

Jamie: Totally YIMBY. Because there's a lot of different species, sentient species, and they have different housing needs. For example, munchkins have special housing needs and so you have to be zoned for munchkins, but also, they have to have a place for the horses. 

Molly: Right. And the flying monkeys. 

Jamie: And the flying monkeys. And then they have occasional visitors who are like, lions and tin men. So you have to have accommodations for them too. Just to keep reflecting on this though, I do think that you're gonna have issues with historic preservation. Because they’re sort of ageless, so that's a problem. I don't know how you do new construction.Think about “The Lord of the Rings” by contrast, where  the elves are living in the trees. The hobbits are living in the things that look like trees, but they're houses. That's adaptive restoration or something like that, where you're using existing structures rather than tearing them down and building something new that doesn't fit with the neighborhood. You use the existing structure, but you turn it into housing. I mean, that's a really impressive use of existing structure. 

Molly: That's like what I feel like many New Yorkers wish would happen with our empty office buildings. 

Jamie: A hundred percent. 

Molly: It would be hard to beat your take on this, Jamie, but I feel like you actually have a friend who would offer some very interesting and helpful info on this.

Jamie: Yes, my good friend Annemarie Gray. Annemarie is the executive director of an organization called Open New York, which I would say is the city and the state’s only grassroots pro housing advocacy organization. They organize volunteers to advocate for more housing in their own communities, in their own backyards.They're totally separate from the real estate industry, so they really are just people who live in communities who want more housing. 

Molly: How does the grassroots piece work? 

Jamie: Grassroots in this case means real grassroots. It is a membership organization, so you can sign up to be a member of Open New York. The membership is organized into chapters, which I think are geographically located, and the chapters sort of work together with the center staff to organize campaigns around specific proposed developments. So, you know, in Brooklyn there's a multifamily housing development that's being proposed, and there's a lot of opposition. The local chapter of Open New York will come out to public meetings and speak in favor of it without people being able to say, oh yeah, but you're the developer, so of course you want it. They're just people who live in the community who think that the community needs more housing, affordable housing, whatever the development is. And then, more broadly, they have worked with legislators to introduce some really forward-looking zoning reform in Albany. I mean, full disclosure, I'm a big supporter of Annemarie and her work. I've spent a lot of time with her over the last couple of years. We move in the same sort of housing policy circles and I think that the work that she's doing is extremely high quality and very important.

Molly: So I guess tonight we all get to be part of this housing circle. 

Jamie: Absolutely.

Jamie: Annemarie. Hey, how are you? 

Annemarie: I'm doing well. How are you, Jamie? 

Jamie: So you are pro-housing. How do you align yourself with or not with the real estate development community? 

Annemarie: Our fundamental take is the root of the housing crisis is a housing shortage, that we are not building enough homes. Jamie: As opposed to other explanations like…

Annemarie: Like it's all an issue of there's not enough money going into subsidies, or it's 100% an issue of tenant protections. Our theory here is that we're fighting over scarcity. And that exacerbates every issue we care about, frankly, from economic growth, from homelessness, from racial equity, from climate change, from transit access. But we're coming at this from a policy perspective. For example, we've been organizing a lot in this one project in Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn, and it's the people that live right around there being like, I think it'd be great to have more housing here. Someone's trying to propose a building that's a little higher, but not much higher than the building that exists now. Some of my neighbors are proposing it. I'm gonna come out and say, actually I think this is great. 

Jamie: Forget why it's controversial, but the reason it's not automatically whoever it is proposing to develop the Windsor Terrace thing doesn't just have the right to do it, is…

Annemarie: We have a land use system that has been built up and changed and layered on top of for decades and decades that has basically allowed a hyperlocal veto on new homes, so sometimes we align with real estate. You need to build. We also, frankly, fight for housing of all types, some of which is not the sort of stuff that the real estate industry in New York builds. For example, we should legalize backyard cottages in single family neighborhoods. So we're really positioning ourselves such that we need a huge coalition. We partner with tenants’ rights groups, we partner with real estate, we partner with climate groups, we partner with unions — all of the above. 

Jamie:  All of the above. You're aligned with housing developers, generally speaking, but you don't take money from housing developers, correct? 

Annemarie: Correct. We are a very independent organization driven by two questions: What is the right policy solution and how are we growing the biggest coalition possible? So we're funded by philanthropy and our members.

Jamie: And philanthropy.

Annemarie: By philanthropy, I mean like, foundations.

Jamie:  Foundations. Excellent. Which foundations? 

Annemarie Open Philanthropy. They actually were the seed funder for all of the sort of YIMBY Pro housing groups around the country. And what's been really, really important is — and the funders fortunately have really recognized this — you need to empower each city and state to figure out the politics the way they need to. So we talk about the issues differently. We have different legislative strategies. We organize people in different ways, we use different messaging, but we're all fighting for the same types of policies. But the comparisons actually just recently did an episode of David Roberts’ Volts podcast with the person who runs the Texas group, comparing notes with the Texas YIMBY group. We're dealing with the opposite problems for very, very similar policies. Jamie: I was talking to somebody at a NYCHA business with a banker, and he said the Austin real estate market has completely cratered because they've just built way too much housing.

Annemarie: Rents have dropped. 

Jamie:. It's amazing. 

Annemarie: It's the reference I use when people think it's not possible. It’s like, no, that's exactly what happened. They did that. 

Jamie: Yeah. It turns out it's not great for the developer community. 

Annemarie: And this is where you have to talk about like, are you a builder? Are you an owner? Because people make money off of scarcity. There's a reason it exists for sure. That's not a good policy solution, and that's where we're coming from for everything.

Jamie: But we're sitting here in New York City, where they do not have the Austin problem. We're at 98.6% rental occupancy, which is crazy.

Jamie: Rents are obviously not going down anytime soon. I had a really interesting experience recently. I was tooling around looking for something and it turned out that NYCHA’s archives are all digitized by LaGuardia Community College. One of the really interesting things for me was that there were all these photographs of the board of NYCHA and whoever the CEO was, or whatever, standing around hunched over models of all of this stuff that they were getting ready to build from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, when we built all of the NYCHA housing. You don't see that anymore in the public sphere. Every once in a while there's a big project of some kind, but it's not getting done in bulk that way, where everybody sort of stands around and talks about 10,000 units at a time. Do you have a sense of when that started to flip at all? 

Annemarie: Yeah, we built many, many times more than we built now in the 1920s. A full hundred years ago, basically. A coup. There were a couple big milestones. There was the 1961 zoning resolution that basically put some notes on this explicitly — my favorite zoning resolution.

Jamie: It's my favorite of all the zoning resolutions. 

Annemarie: The 1961 zoning resolution was the one that I really like. It complicated the zoning code in ways that made it very hard to build housing. And then that, plus a number of process changes to what's called the ULURP process, the formal legal land use review process that we go through in New York City. In New York City, there were some changes, especially in the ‘80s, that really swung the pendulum so that the hyperlocal concerns have the ability to kill projects. 

Jamie: Why in the ‘80s did this happen?

Annemarie: ULURP was established in 1975, right? And it was trying to balance local versus citywide and boroughwide perspectives. But at that time, the final vote ended in the board of estimates. The city council didn't exist yet. Right? So in 1989, there was a charter commission that scrapped the board of estimates created by the city council. There was a lot of destructiveness from lack of representation, especially in communities of color, and so you know, what they were trying to correct for made a lot of sense, but it created this practice of member deference. The whole city council defers to the local member for a land use vote. We actually don't do this with our laws, right? 

Jamie: What do we have? 51 Council Members? Back to Windsor Terrace for a second. There's a controversial proposal to construct something that requires ULURP approval or any, basically anything in a member's district if the member decides for whatever reason. Historically they get just a deference for their preference, call it. 

Annemarie: And it's important to note in all of this, people are acting logically, but we created the community board process. Community boards are famously unrepresentative of the districts that they represent. They have an outsized voice in this. You're doing this all via hearings that are not happening at times when the majority of people can participate. Just barrier after barrier, which means that the council members end up hearing some voices far more than others. And frankly without political cover from other people, from other elected officials.

Annemarie: Thinking about this from a boroughwide or citywide lens, they're gonna pick what's gonna make their immediate constituents least mad. 

Jamie: Yeah. I mean there are so many obvious problems of public policy with this. But I hadn't thought about it exactly this way. It’s the squeaky wheel dynamic, but it's exactly what you said. Most people don't want to be on the school board. Most people don't wanna be on the community board. Most people don't wanna be on the co-op board. 

Annemarie: But our members also represent a different subset of people that actually really do want to be on their community boards and stuff. But they're not normal either, for sure.

Jamie:  It's people who really want to take the time.

Annemarie: Yeah. And that would be fine if it weren't having a really immediate impact on who can live in New York City. The problem is that that is the binding vote for any home built in New York City. Right. If the consequences weren't so large, it might not be as big a deal, 

Jamie: But you know, if I was on a community board of, for example, a West Village Preservation group, I might say, yeah, look, whoever it is that shows up to vote or shows up to say something, does their part, and the other folks don't show up. It's not my fault. You're asking a lot of your elected officials to take into account unheard voices and opinions. 

Annemarie: You are asking a lot of one particular hyperlocal elected official, and this is why we organize people in their neighborhoods on one-off projects. But we have a growing professionalized staff that is focusing on citywide policy and most importantly, statewide policy. Because what you really need to do is deal with the issue of housing in the way you would deal with other issues of such huge social and economic importance. Well, we don't deal with any of those issues very well. Jamie: We don't think about the healthcare on 90th Street. Annemarie: But you need to set citywide and statewide policy that accounts for some of these. A really good example is what was just passed at the end of last year called City of Yes. This actually just said there's a whole set of things that just make sense to just make legal. Rather than them having to go through this rigorous moral discretionary process every single time, let's just make those things legal. And then you have just negated the need for tons of hyperlocal fights. Then similarly, you know, the real level that we're trying to work on — and other states are frankly far ahead of New York at this — is at state legislation. We're talking mostly about New York City here, but New York City suburbs have some of the most restrictive and exclusionary zoning in the entire country, right?

Annemarie: We have parking lots next to train stations that are half an hour from Grand Central. And New York State is alone in completely allowing that to happen without any check. And they are the ones that actually grant zoning authority to all the municipalities, right?

Jamie: Through home rule.

Annemarie: We need to bring this all to higher levels of government also, because people don't care as much as it seems in these one-off projects. An interesting thing about this Windsor Terrace project is that the same community board that was just fighting tooth and nail over what ended up being literally a 10-story building in Windsor Terrace unanimously approved City of Yes, which does almost the same thing. 

Jamie: It's so interesting. What do you think happened? 

Annemarie: I mean, I think it was unanimous, but they might've made some recommendations and changes. But generally, it was not nearly as big a fight. I agree. If someone wants to build some massive, massive building that's like, 20 times higher, that's different, right? We're talking about stuff that's one or two stories. 

Jamie: I have this argument with people I love very much

Annemarie: And I think, sometimes people need some line. We just need to set the line way, way further away than we do right now.

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. So, New York City and New York State are both behind or way behind other places in the country. Who's the leader, would you say, who's out front? 

Annemarie: Honestly, the real answer is Republican controlled states. Democratic controlled cities and states are the ones driving people out of their state. And to be honest, this is further than your question asked, but we are projected to lose a lot of actual congressional representation and electoral college representation out of that. Frankly, places like Texas are where the future of America is growing, you know? We're in Albany trying to pass things. It's Democrats blocking stuff. Democrats, right? Always. And Windsor Terrace is one of the bluest parts of the country. However, California, Colorado, Montana, Washington, Massachusetts and Oregon have all had some sort of state intervention. The state has a really, really important role to play in this. There's been a lot of research on what policies are working and what aren't. This is all really new, right? This has all passed in the last five years. But they are engaging with the question at a state level and not afraid that the balance of power has swung way too hyperlocal. The stakes are too high; we need to intervene. 

Jamie: Let’s play a game. The game is called “Convince Me.” So I'm gonna be two people. First, I'm gonna be a dues paying member of the DSA. Anne-Marie. The rent is too high in this city. Rents are just too high. Why isn't the first order of business to make sure that rents go down? Why shouldn't we just legislate rent freezes?

Annemarie: First of all, landlords know that renters have far too few options. Your landlord should always be worried that you can find another apartment, not the other way around. And that is not how it works. Right now the balance of power is dramatically off. And guess who's making all the money off of scarcity: landlords. This is layers of policy problems decades in the making that we're not gonna solve overnight. The root cause of it is that we're fighting over scarcity. At Open New York, we actually have a policy agenda that includes a really wide range of things, including. Um, certain tenant protections that make a lot of sense because people are hurting right now. Tenant protections mean like eviction protections or different types of tenant protections, anti-discrimination protections, fair housing protections. We absolutely need all of those things that are not going to solve the problem for someone who doesn't live here now and wants to. 

Jamie: Mm-hmm. 

Annemarie: For someone that's stuck in an apartment that's too small for them. 

Jamie: Right. 

Annemarie: It's not the whole solution. And again, the root cause of it is that there's an imbalance of power between landlords and tenants.

Jamie: I think that's right. I tend to think of everything through the NYCHA lens. You know, we have somewhere between five and 800,000 people living in NYCHA apartments. We have a waiting list of 250,000 people. If you think about the NYCHA tenant who makes on average of $25,000 a year, if the person living in an apartment outside of NYCHA now lives in a rent controlled apartment, then the rent never rises a dollar. They're never leaving. That, and my friend from NYCHA is never moving in. Annemarie: You have to create more and new options for people as well as make sure that people that have been here a long time can also stay. You also need the option to stay. Sure. But that's not the history of how New York has actually retained its diversity and vitality.

Jamie: Agreed. Okay, next one. So now convince me: I live in, I don't know, the West Village. And there are these two lovely townhouses next to each other, just lovely, and they're for sale and the footprint. If you took them both down and took 'em down to the ground, the footprint would absolutely support a 10-story affordable housing development. But Annemarie. I've lived in this neighborhood for 50 years and I raised my kids here. I walked my little doggy here, Jane Jacobs lived right around the corner. It would destroy the neighborhood character. So is it really worth destroying an entire neighborhood culture for one building that'll house maybe 50 people, half of whom are paying luxury rate rents? 

Annemarie:That's a fun one. 

Jamie: Deal with that. 

Annemarie: The thing that has made your neighborhood amazing over a very long period of time is not the buildings, it's the people. You cannot freeze anything in amber, and cities that have tried to do that die. We have to be open to every way of keeping every neighborhood a place that has options for a lot of people. And the thing that makes your neighborhood exciting is the fact that it has a big mix of people. It's vibrant. This is about people that live in a city. This is not about the buildings. 

Jamie: Wow. Sounds like you hate all of us. [Laughs] I like the idea that you can't freeze in amber. 

Annemarie: Yeah. 

Jamie: Yeah. 

Annemarie: But there are a couple City-owned properties in these neighborhoods. Haven Green has been decades in the making of that project. Where is that? Ooh, this is a fun one. So Haven Green, Elizabeth Street Garden. 

Jamie: Yes. I got, I got a text from one of my daughters about this. What do you think about the Elizabeth Street Garden? I said, “gotta go.” She didn't like that very much. 

Annemarie: The story of this is that it is a city-owned parcel. That's an extremely valuable asset. It was never a garden. It is a private storage yard for a person that decided to open it to the public. When the city expressed interest in redeveloping it, it was proposed to be deeply affordable LGBTQ senior housing. It has gotten stuck in lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. A lot of these lawsuits are tied to a whole ‘nother can of worms. We could go down the process of environmental review, which is a bit of a misnomer because it doesn't necessarily measure things that have to do with climate and the environment and things that we care about. It becomes a really, really good way to create frivolous lawsuits to stop projects. And this one was a really big case of that, and it's been stalled for a full decade.

Jamie: There's a bunch of celebrities that are supportive. Name one.

Annemarie: I believe Patti Smith has signed on, which is sad because I love Patti Smith. 

Jamie: That is probably why I got the text from my daughter. Yeah. Because she's a huge Patti Smith fan, and I love Patti Smith. How do we reeducate Patti Smith so we can change the trajectory of housing development?

Annemarie: It's just the New York City that Patti Smith wrote about is a very different city right now. 

Jamie: It's so true. It really is true. It's a very different city.. Annemarie: And we're really at risk of losing the magic of it. 

Jamie: But it's hard to convince people that it's magical to have a 10-story newly constructed building that's gonna house a bunch of affordable stuff and then a bunch of kids who are gonna work at Goldman Sachs or something. 

Annemarie: It's also tough that one building's not gonna do it. 

Jamie: No.

Annemarie: I have this pet theory — and I studied architecture, so maybe it comes from that. Humans like things that feel lived in. And a new building by definition is not gonna feel that way. Right? So there are buildings that were once hated for being new or being tall at their time, but nobody thinks about that anymore. Another thing, though, is that one building's not gonna do it. If we actually had smart policy across the entire region…

Jamie: If we had a citywide housing plan. Right where you said we're gonna allocate housing across the boroughs equally, in some measure. And it was fair, we wouldn't have to build in every corner because we'd be building everywhere. Annemarie: If you did that across the whole region, all of this would feel different. It's just, how do you create a big enough movement and momentum and understanding that that's possible? Because we're never gonna solve this through one off projects.

Jamie: Alright, so tell me, with all of this complexity of politics — and I will give you credit for this — there's been a change, I think. What do you think? 

Annemarie: Yeah. Far more people across the political spectrum and far more elected officials say we need more homes. That didn't used to be accepted even four years ago. Projects I was really proud to work on when I was at the City, the Gowanus rezoning and the Soho/NoHo rezoning, started to create more momentum that everywhere needed to build something, including these places that have sort of been defacto off limits. That laid the groundwork for City of Yes, which was frankly the first pro-housing win New York City has seen. It's the only thing that I put on our tally when we compare ourselves to other states. 

Jamie: What is the next priority for you in Albany?

Annemarie: We are working on a bill with a big coalition of faith-based organizations called the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act, which is the state saying, okay, let's just legalize housing, set affordability requirements, set height requirements smart and fill housing for land owned by faith-based organizations. A really good example of a leading member of our coalition is a pastor in Rotterdam, NY, who has a parking lot on land that the church owns. For three years, they have been trying to build a three-story building of affordable housing in a neighborhood that has three-story buildings for anyone in their community. They know how dire the need is for more housing, and they figured out how to do this. They got down zoned in the dead of night by their town board  because they don't want a building. The only recourse for that is to have a higher level of government say you can't do that, right? So that is exactly the type of thing that a piece of state legislation should do and should make happen faster. It's just that this is a new thing for Albany. Frankly, getting anything done in Albany is, um…

Jamie: It is a challenge, but my experience of being in Albany is that if you don't show up, you don't get anything done. So you have to give it a shot. I'm weirdly optimistic about things in general, notwithstanding that when you wake up in the morning and you look around, it's a little hard to be. But then you look at the City of Yes. It's complex. It's politically controversial, and it was backed by a mayor who is wildly unpopular, and at the time was in the middle of being indicted, and it passed.

Annemarie: Totally. And again, I am a hopeful person by nature. Otherwise I should go to a different profession. But the movement is so young. So young. I mean, we didn't even exist in this organization four years ago. We're building an actual constituency to make it possible for elected officials to take votes on this.

Jamie: Well, you will be successful. Because you're on the right side of this and we can't continue to have this problem. And then, when you're successful and you get something passed in Albany, whether it's faith-based or something more comprehensive, it'll look like it happened overnight, but it's like everything — nothing happens overnight. It takes a long time for it to happen. So, great work. 

Annemarie: Thank you.

Jamie: That was a great conversation with Annemarie. Here are a couple of takeaways. Number one, Annemarie has actually been a lot more successful in her work over the last couple of years, and she's only been running the organization for — I think — three years, than a lot of full-time real estate developers-sponsored lobbying groups have been in a much longer time, even though they've got a lot more resources at their disposal. I think part of it is because people can tell that authenticity really matters in a lot of ways, and she is authentic. Her members are authentic. They live in the communities where they're members, and so when they get up in a public meeting and say that the community needs something, they speak from knowledge. They're often speaking against people who may either come from the community but have some other deleterious motive, or they sometimes come from outside the community. She's just super smart and she can't be attacked on the grounds that she's got some kind of ulterior motive. She just wants what she wants and again, I think people, even legislators, can pick up when somebody really is coming from the right place. And that does matter still. Number two. Open New York is part of the YIMBY movement, which is really at this point, a national movement, and they've been really successful in a lot of different places. At the same time, there's been this surge of interest in something that people are calling abundance, and it's taken off in part because influential commentators are writing books about it and talking about it on podcasts and all that kinda stuff, like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It seems like there's a lot of overlap between abundance and YIMBY, let's call it. I mean, maybe it's just me intellectually, but I find it kind of unsatisfying to think about them as if they're the same thing. The work that Annemarie does doesn't necessarily translate into deregulation, which is a lot of what abundance theorists seem to be talking about. It's not deregulation. It's often just better government. Deregulation is taking a particular sector, whatever environmental regulation or something and figuring out what is still important and what is not, thenweeding out regulations that are either not relevant anymore or conning them down or whatever it is. The kind of rezoning work that Annmarie is pushing for aims to get to a point where it's not that there's no zoning and unfettered development everywhere. It's that you can have intelligence, zoning and development that makes sense for the communities that are in question. The ultimate goal is to spread housing around, but not indiscriminately so that you have sprawl everywhere. It's to put housing where people wanna live and make for fair, equitable and sensible — economically and otherwise — housing. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.