New York City's crisis of housing affordability has reached unprecedented levels. The ratio of median rent to median household income in New York City is the second highest among the 25 largest cities in the country. Additionally, the number of single adults experiencing homelessness in New York City has more than doubled in the past ten years. These conditions arose despite concentrated policy efforts at the state and local levels to control the growth of rents and increase the supply of means-tested affordable housing units.

Fundamentally, existing state and local policies — particularly those limiting rent increases — largely do not address the root problem behind the city's affordability crisis: Housing production has not kept pace with the growing demand to live in New York City. In this report, the authors address the issue of housing affordability in New York City by focusing on the role that broadly expanding the supply of housing can play in increasing affordability. They propose six policy reforms for increasing production and estimate that if fully enacted, these policies could lead to approximately 300,000 additional units of housing relative to the status quo level of housing production.

Key Findings

  • New York City faces a near-perfect storm of housing affordability
  • State and local policymakers have not taken significant steps to address systematic barriers and cost drivers that limit housing production
  • Fully enacting the six reforms recommended in this report could lead to the production of approximately 300,000 additional new housing units over a ten-year period

Read the full article about housing affordability in New York by Jason M. Ward, George Zuo, and Yael Katz at RAND Corporation.