 Sponsored by University of California Press The historic turnout with which Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty is, almost, old news by now. But three of the decisions New Yorkers faced when they flipped over their ballots—to vote on whether to change the city charter to streamline the development and construction of affordable housing—have been less picked over, perhaps because, as Samuel Stein admits in his essay in the November 20 issue of the Review, “zoning can be legalistic, technocratic, and, frankly, boring.” Nevertheless, over the last few years questions of land use, and the bureaucracy that surrounds it, have escaped containment in policy papers. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling book Abundance in particular has turned formerly wonkish discussions of zoning into dinner-party chatter.  Samuel Stein; Stein, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, has for a long time been thinking and writing about the factors that restrict the availability of actually affordable housing. His doctoral dissertation identified the various public and private interests that compete for land in New York, and his first book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, describes the forces that lead to rising rent, displacement, and the housing crisis we face today. His writing has also appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, and The New York Review of Architecture, and his next book, A Right to Housing?, will publish next year. This week we corresponded over email about some third rails for New Yorkers: housing discourse, the best books about the city, and what is, or should be, in store for New York.  Advertisement Nawal Arjini: What are your pipe dreams for a Mamdani mayoralty, especially in regard to housing? Samuel Stein: Let’s say for the next four years Mamdani’s Rent Guidelines Board freezes rents for nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. Then what? To me, that’s one of the most interesting, important, and exciting questions to be asking right now. Many buildings will be just fine. The rents will continue to support the operations and maintenance of the building, and the landlords can absorb the hit. Perhaps the rent freeze will be paired with property tax reforms that benefit these landlords more than slow annual rent increases ever could. But for a subset of buildings—and there is debate about how many, in part because landlords are not known for their financial transparency—owners could fall into insolvency. The buildings could get bought on the cheap by private equity firms, but unless they can get the state to undo its rent laws, they won’t have much better luck making them profitable than their current owners do. What other options can we think of? Should these buildings become tenant-controlled limited-equity cooperatives, owned and operated by residents but with safeguards to keep them affordable for the long term? Should they become the next generation of public housing, under the purview of either the New York City Housing Authority or the recently created Preservation Trust? Should they be taken over by neighborhood nonprofits and community land trusts? Are there new permutations and housing tenures we could devise and develop? These are questions, not answers, but they will be ones the Mamdani administration may be grappling with in the years to come. Certain pundits and politicians seem eager to have NIMBY/YIMBY distinctions supplant traditional political questions, or to position zoning reform as some sort of post-political imperative. Is there something about the historical or contemporary struggles around zoning and land use that have made this possible? Today’s emphasis on zoning over all other factors or strategies in housing politics reflects two forces. The first is the atrocious land use policies in place all around the country, which have long mandated suburban-style sprawl and locked in absurdly large lot sizes for detached single-family homes. The second is the way we have largely foreclosed other ways of confronting housing crises, like social housing and rent regulation. The contemporary focus on zoning is both historically grounded, in that it seeks to undo past errors and inequities, and yet simultaneously ahistorical, in that it ignores all the other ways we might address spiraling housing costs and stagnant wages. The federal government put a moratorium on support for public housing construction in the 1970s, and most states have imposed bans on local rent regulations. If we’re not going to build social housing or enact rent controls, then rezoning feels like the only path forward. We fall into camps and pitch battles over which land use laws to preserve and which to rewrite. And in fact zoning is an important aspect of housing politics, particularly in places with egregiously exclusionary land use codes. But it is no substitute for a deeper program to empower tenants and decommodify housing, and we can never lose sight of that.  Advertisement In your review you note that Sara Bronin, the author of Key to the City, takes a “sharper tone” when it comes to the deleterious urban effects of car culture and factory farming, but is evasive when it comes to questions of affordability. Where do you think this evasiveness comes from? I think it comes from one of the central paradoxes of twenty-first-century capitalist urban planning: planners and policymakers are expected to make cities simultaneously more profitable and more affordable. These two pursuits are fundamentally in tension with each other, leading to some strange and contradictory policies and programs. If a planner were to advocate for more muscular approaches to the housing question, they would also have to deal with the fallout. In our political economy, falling housing prices precipitate another type of crisis: the maintenance of city services (including, ironically, those that address the pervasive unaffordability crisis) is structurally dependent on rising property values. The way people understand gentrification has changed significantly over the past couple of years. How would you describe this change? It’s certainly visible in how the media and politicians have begun to talk about extensive new, market-rate housing construction as the solution to—rather than a contributor to—gentrification. But I think the deeper truth is that gentrification, as both a phenomenon and a keyword, is always in motion. The London-based sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964 to describe the arrival of middle-class residents in Notting Hill and Islington. These newcomers had the money to purchase homes from the working-class households that banks wouldn’t lend to, and they often fixed up the properties according to their own aesthetic preferences, leading not only to cultural clashes but, more perilously, as property values increased, to the displacement of long-term residents. It was a peculiar and particular phenomenon at first, far from the norm in broader London or beyond. But by the 1980s, the process had become a juggernaut in London, New York, and many other cities, transforming from a marginal occurrence to an epochal shift. Some scholars began to worry that the term “gentrification” either failed to capture the scale of change facing neighborhoods and cities, or that it was being used to describe far too many shifts—including those set off by new residential development in formerly industrial areas, or by rural transformations in land ownership and agricultural production—and in so doing lost its specificity, and thus its utility. But the term continued (and continues) to be empirically relevant and politically resonant, attesting to both our discourse’s capacity to evolve and our planning systems’ incapacity to address the issue. All of this is to say: the understanding of gentrification is indeed changing, but when it comes to gentrification, change is the norm. For curious readers, what are some of the best resources for learning more about New York City? I would urge them to take in a couple of conflicting or parallax views on the same settings or subjects. So yes, pull that copy of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker from your Zoom backdrop and read it cover to cover, but also take in a work that challenges Caro’s perspective, whether it’s Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson’s revisionist Robert Moses and the Modern City or Robert Fitch’s The Assassination of New York, which positions Robert Moses as the fall guy for even more powerful forces. Pair Marshall Berman’s On the Town with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and watch two genius writers take each other to task over their shared love for very different iterations of Times Square. Read E. B. White’s Here Is New York alongside Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York; The WPA Guide to New York City with Owen Hatherley’s recent Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects; Ida Susser’s Norman Street with Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper’s A Fortress in Brooklyn. A little dialecticism can go a long way toward understanding our big, messy city. Would you share a little about your forthcoming book, A Right to Housing? The book begins with a discussion of what we mean by “a right to housing,” and then splits into two parallel paths: one a more optimistic take on the task before us, and the other a more despairing consideration of why the prospects for achieving that goal remain so remote. The conclusion calls for us to remain in the struggle, regardless of whether we are hopeful for the future. I am aiming to capture something about this strange political moment, in all its possibility and peril. With Mamdani heading to Gracie Mansion and Trump in the White House, it seems that, riffing on Luxemburg and Engels, we will soon see what happens when a transition to socialism meets a regression to barbarism.  Advertisement More by Samuel Stein at nybooks.com Reshaping the CityWhat does zoning reform have the power to change?  Musical ChairsWhy did New York City’s rents skyrocket in the aftermath of the pandemic? For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.   You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 8 de noviembre de 2025
Zoned Out
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