Housing Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

A big deal that’s not nearly big enough: what the “city of yes” will (and won’t) do

March 18, 2025 • by Center for New York City Affairs and Richard McGahey

In January 2025, Urban Matters, Center of New York City Affairs's weekly journal of ideas and opinion, wrapped up a wide-ranging two-part interview with noted urban policy expert Richard McGahey on the likely impact of New York City’s newly adopted "City of Yes" zoning package intended to jumpstart housing production. ...

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

Uncategorized

Behind Milan’s Millennial Renaissance

The hidden costs of becoming an Instagrammable global city

October 27, 2022 • by Giorgio Fontana

I love Milan. I was born in its suburbs and have been living here for fifteen years; it’s still a very special place, a unique city in Italy. But its ruling class (and its residents) must tackle the problem of architectural and social inequality seriously before this place swallows itself....

Columnists

Big Tech’s Affordable Housing Hustle

Take what you can, give a little bit back

June 23, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ Amazon announced last week that it’s going to spend $125 million on loans and grants to developers to build affordable housing near mass transit stations around its “HQ2” in Northern Virginia. It also announced similar programs in Nashville, Tennessee and its original home of Washington State. These payouts are part ...

Capitalism

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

December 10, 2020 • by Jeannette Estruth

By all measures we are living in an era defined by housing crises, a flood of human habitat destruction. The losses are both economic and environmental. Over 17 million people in 2018 alone were displaced from their homes because of climate change–associated disasters, according to the United Nations. Here in ...

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

The New School

Albert Mayer’s Urban Village: Between The New School and India

A global conversation about using design to foster community

July 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

The New School does not look like most other universities, even those in large cities. It has no college green around which buildings are situated; no common architectural style; no grand monument-like buildings with Latin phrases carved into granite. Instead, it is a disaggregated collection of buildings, most in the ...

New York City

Are de Blasio’s Rezonings a Trojan Horse for Gentrification?

Probably Not.

February 22, 2020 • by Alex Schwartz

Mandatory inclusionary zoning applies to neighborhoods that are rezoned for higher densities and also to individual sites granted higher-density zoning variances. It offers developers several options, all of which specify minimum percentages of units that must be provided to households earning various percentages of what is known as “area median ...

Are de Blasio’s Rezonings a Trojan Horse for Gentrification?

New York City

The Daunting Math of Solving New York’s Housing Crisis

January 31, 2020 • by Alex Schwartz

Since 1987, New York has invested more than $17.5 billion (adjusted for inflation) of its own capital resources on constructing and preserving more than 450,000 housing units. No other city has drawn on its own tax base to anywhere near this extent to help finance affordable housing, and no other ...

The Daunting Math of Solving New York’s Housing Crisis

Feature

Rebalancing Housing Court’s Scales of Justice

The First Year of New York’s ‘Right to Counsel’ Law

April 13, 2019 • by Oksana Mironova

A right to free legal representation in eviction cases -- combined with other important tenant protection measures -- is significantly rebalancing the scales of justice in New York City Housing Court and helping keep low-income residents in their homes. That’s the clear message of the first full year’s results of the ...

Rebalancing Housing Court’s Scales of Justice

Feature

Public Housing and Asthma

Another winter of discontent, or relief at last?

February 2, 2019 • by Kristen Lewis, Sarah Burd-Sharps and Bruce Cory

For the many thousands of New Yorkers who live with asthma -- including an estimated 174,000 children under the age of 12 -- the winter months can often be particularly painful and debilitating. Cold, dry air outdoors, and in poorly heated spaces indoors, constricts nasal passages and the body’s other ...

Feature

Can a Right to Counsel Slow Down the ‘Eviction Machine?’

New York City’s push to help working class families from eviction in Housing Court

September 16, 2018 • by Bruce Cory

Earlier this year, The New York Times gave readers a revealing look at the workings of what it labeled “the eviction machine”: The city’s Housing Court. A series of articles detailed how a court system designed to protect tenants has been hijacked by landlords using eviction, or threatened eviction, often based on ...

Can a Right to Counsel Slow Down the ‘Eviction Machine?’

Feature

How to End the Culture of Cover-up in New York City Public Housing

NYCHA needs to start providing safe public housing to deserving tenants

July 29, 2018 • by Victor Bach

Transgression followed by cover-up: This all-too-familiar scenario has played out again, this time in the disgraceful and high-profile failures to protect New York City public housing residents from decrepit and dangerous living conditions. Urgent repairs to the buildings, and restorations to the integrity and reputation, of the New York City ...