New York City has a housing affordability crisis. New Yorkers have as close to 0% chance of finding a safe, affordable place to live as they have ever experienced in the nearly 60-year history of the Housing Vacancy Survey.
Our city is already one of the most expensive places in the world to live, and while housing prices and rents are going up, real incomes are flat, making it harder for families — particularly low-income New Yorkers — to maintain their homes.
Recent polling finds that housing affordability is top of mind for NYC voters in this election cycle. One local law makes this all worse, depriving families of income and fueling gentrification at the expense of long-standing residents of New York City’s communities: Local Law 18, with restrictions on short-term rentals like Airbnbs. Instead of mitigating the affordable housing crisis, this burdensome regulation makes it harder for families to stay in their own homes while failing to increase the available supply of housing.
Unfortunately, today’s growing housing predicament reminds us of a horror film we’ve all seen before. In the 1960s and 1970s, New York’s neighborhoods experienced truly devastating cycles of housing abandonment. Inflation and other factors, like high fuel costs and unsustainable property taxes, spiked operating costs, and many homeowners and landlords concluded it was simply more feasible to abandon their properties rather than continue to operate them. New York City was handed the keys to 100,000 properties from tax foreclosures, making the government the largest landlord in the city. Not a borough of the city was left untouched by the tsunami of abandonment. In some neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx, entire city blocks went silent with abandoned buildings. Vacancy and abandonment allowed crime to breed freely and made life harder for New Yorkers, threatening the city’s future.
The Housing Partnership was born of this abandonment crisis. Founded by then-Mayor Edward Koch and David Rockefeller in 1983, we worked closely to transform these vacant properties into 35,000 “Partnership Homes” that became the first real pieces of the “American Dream” for Black and Latino households who had never had the opportunity, because of housing and financial discrimination, to own homes. From Staten Island to the farthest reaches of the Bronx, neighborhoods were reborn with Partnership Homes. Black and Latino New Yorkers built generational wealth via this newfound homeownership — and New York City blossomed from this grand public-private experiment throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, when those last tax-foreclosed properties were returned to productive economic use.
At present, we find New York homeowners once again burdened with the same high taxes, inflation, and out-of-control operating costs that fueled New York City’s previous housing abandonment wave. Unfortunately, this time around, we are not seeing innovative public policy that helps New Yorkers continue to afford their homes so they may pass their housing wealth to future generations. What we are getting instead is more burdensome regulation. While some scapegoat short-term rentals for rising housing costs, the data does not show that restricting them has improved either housing affordability or availability.
Short-term rental income helps New Yorkers stay in their homes and maintain them properly with extra income. Local Law 18 aims to target bad actors, but instead penalizes working-class homeowners, especially in outer borough neighborhoods already under pressure from displacement. In neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Soundview in the Bronx, where we have had a lot of success in building affordable housing, there simply are not as many hotels as in Manhattan. Without flexible short-term rental options, these neighborhoods lose another economic tool to help maintain safe housing and promote neighborhood stability. Once these properties fall into disrepair, they become targets for being replaced by pricey developments and gentrification.
Ensuring housing affordability encompasses more than just regulation. It is also about making sure people have financial support against rapidly increasing costs so they can stay in their homes and continue to build wealth in their communities. We need flexible public policy that recognizes how short-term rentals, when regulated fairly and reasonably, can be part of a balanced strategy to help struggling homeowners stay rooted.
Bill 1107, which reforms Local Law 18 and enables owners of one- and two-family homes to rent out their homes for short-term use when they’re not home, is currently before the City Council. The proposal also, for example, increases the guest cap for short-term rentals from two to four people. Current law bans these items and limits the needs of those traveling to or living in the outer boroughs — or even Manhattan neighborhoods like Morningside Heights, Inwood, and Harlem.
New York City’s homeowners deserve policies that support their goals of wealth-building and neighborhood stability through homeownership — not policies that will cause New York City to return to unnecessary cycles of physical disrepair and instability.
Jamie Smarr joined the New York City Housing Partnership in 2022. He previously served as director of tax and zoning incentives for New York City Housing Preservation and Development from 1997–2002.
This is good, sound reasoning. To be really effective the drumbeat needs to be heard from the owners of small units-1,2 4, 6 unit properties.
I have not seen a concentrated push by these property owners themselves. Let the rest of the neighborhood residents know what is at stake.
And form an association of homeowners who want to do short-term rentals.
There are members of various churches in who are owners of small properties. They should b helped to address their various congregations and church leadership.
GOD is in charge. Thank you.
Peace.
The only reason this regulation hasn’t increased the available rental units
Is if owners are refusing to rent they’re apartment long term, and would rather wait out to get short-term rental money again
Hope this bill burns and dies