Giving Compass Take:

• Eric Kober discusses the jobs-housing gap in New York City and how evidence suggests supply-based solutions are the most effective.

• How can supply be adequately met when job rates rapidly increase?

• Read about creating equitable affordable housing opportunities.

Even as employment grows rapidly, New York City remains stubbornly slow to build new housing. This “jobs–housing gap”—rapid gains in employment, while housing grows much more slowly—underpins the city’s continuing crisis.

A recent conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis—one of America’s most forward-looking cities in making housing more widely available and affordable—offered a good look at the evidence that expanding supply is the most effective way for economically thriving communities to deal with sharply rising rents and home-sale prices. According to NYU professor Ingrid Gould Ellen, the evidence shows that in the absence of sufficient new supply, older housing stock “filters up” to more affluent tenants, while additions to the housing supply, even if initially expensive for buyers or renters, “filter down” over time, to become the low-cost housing of the future.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo hasn’t signed any pro-housing-supply measures, and the state legislature is not proposing any. Meantime, the city’s housing debate deteriorates. Boris Santos, a Democratic Socialist primary challenger to Bushwick, Brooklyn assembly member Erik Dilan, proposed the abolition of private ownership of apartment buildings as a solution to the city’s affordable-housing shortage.

Read the full article about supply-side housing solutions by Eric Kober at City Journal.