This article is part of The Housing Fix, a series of dialogues that explore the intricacies and ways of tackling the affordable housing crisis in various cities around the world.
The New York housing crisis is complex, with participants not easily categorized as villains or victims. About 65–70% of households in the city rent, and 40% of rental units are rent-stabilized, mainly constructed before World War II. Rent control began in 1942, and the Rent Stabilization System was introduced in 1969 to address ongoing housing emergencies.
Rent-stabilized units are regulated by the government but owned by private entities. This operates alongside an unregulated free market, where increasing demand from new residents and investors cannot be met. Homeownership, once a realistic goal, is becoming unattainable due to rising house prices much faster than wage growth. Consequently, renting is now the only viable option for many, exacerbated by rising mortgage rates leading to a “housing lock” for current homeowners.
Recent laws, including the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act and the 2022 Short-Term Rental Registration Law, aim to address housing issues. The 2024 City of Yes for Housing Opportunity initiative seeks to increase housing availability, while the “good cause eviction” law protects tenants.
I sat down with three voices on the issue of affordable housing in New York City: Michael Johnson, Vice President of Communications and Research at the New York Apartment Association; Aditi Nair, Board Member of International Center for Community Land Trust and and fellow of the current cohort of urban leaders at Urban Design Forum; and Tony Lindsay, President of the New York Homeowners Alliance Corp LLC.
What follows is a slightly edited transcript of a conversation that took place on February 26, 2026, over a video call.
Susana F. Molina: Why has owning or renting a home in New York become an impossible goal for many New Yorkers?
Aditi Nair: Thank you for placing that question up front. It’s very important to address it. I work with a global nonprofit, so I can surely say being priced out isn’t just a New York story. We are facing a national housing shortage, so we should acknowledge it. But New York is where we feel the most pressure and most intensely. So, for decades, we’ve simply not built enough affordable housing for middle-class families. The Regional Plan Association put out a report estimating that we are in short supply of around 540,000 rooms for homeownership and housing. So when you’re underbuilt for this long, prices just don’t rise, right? They become detached from people’s wages overall. So I did this back-of-the-hand calculation. In 1969, if a middle-income family could buy a home, they would be paying roughly three times their annual income. Whereas today, the same family is facing 5, 8, or even 7, 10 times their income in high-cost areas like New York. At the same time, the median asking rent for the city is hovering around 3,500 a month.
The math of homeownership has fundamentally changed, even for renting, leaving owning aside. This just isn’t about supply. It’s also about who is being housed and to whom it is being sold. Investor purchases have also surged over the past decade. Home ownership in New York is at a 50-year low, almost. But a fundamental shift is required within this landscape to recognize that it doesn’t serve only as a financial asset but also as essential infrastructure that houses working-class families in New York.
Roughly 1.1% of the New York population is unhoused, which is five times our national average. I read this somewhere during the political campaigns: even for a rent relief lottery, more than 630,000 people applied in just one week after the program opened, whereas there were only 650 spots available. So that tells you the height of the unmet need in New York. So it’s about decades of policy choices, underproduction, declining investment in public assets, and unmet supply of permanent affordable homes.
Susana F. Molina: According to tenants’ rights organisation The Metropolitan Council on Housing, there are about 22,000 apartments covered by rent control in New York City today, down from more than 1 million in the 1970s. How is it possible that New York City has lost hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilised and rent-controlled apartments?
Michael Johnson: All the units that were rent control, which were about a million units in 1974, would transition to rent stabilization upon vacancy turnover. So what would end up happening is that you had all these rent control units from ’74 to the ’90s that, for the most part, became rent-stabilized. In the ’90s, they passed changes to the rent stabilization laws that allowed rents to be raised on vacancy if the owner did renovations, because there was severe disinvestment and physical decline in buildings. Before that, the rents were capped.
Now, that wasn’t a problem from ’74 to the ’90s as much because rent control units, when transitioned into rent stabilization, could have the rents reset. There was a process in which you would renovate the unit and rent it out. And if the tenant felt the rent was too high, they could challenge it and have it lowered. That was the system that existed. The rents of stabilized units were subject to the Rent Guidelines Board adjustments.
In the ’90s, they changed it. So there was essentially the ability to renovate the units and put them back online. But if the rents got too high, they could be deregulated. So we did lose some units from the ’90s to 2019 due to deregulation, as rents increased substantially. But that was primarily in the wealthy areas of Manhattan, and a little bit into Brooklyn and Queens. And then, in 2019, they passed laws that reversed the laws. So now you can’t raise the rents on vacancy outside of a small amount that really doesn’t cover operating costs or renovation costs.
So we’re seeing a decline in building values and a lot of vacant units in rent-stabilized buildings because the buildings don’t have enough capital to pay for those renovations and bring these vacant units to the market.
Susana F. Molina: How effective have the new regulations, such as the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, been in advancing the cause of affordable housing in the rental market in New York?
Michael Johnson: I think the impetus of the law was a reaction to that previous law that allowed some owners to push tenants with low rents out of unstabilized buildings or apartments and raise the rents on those apartments. And because of that dynamic, we saw some very egregious examples of bad behavior that triggered the legislature to say, ‘We need to change this law,’ and eliminate the ability to raise rents on vacant units. For example, they didn’t want a $2,000 unit in a gentrifying area of Brooklyn to become a $3,500 unit. The 2019 law has been very effective in stopping that from happening.
The problem is that half of the rent-stabilized units are in buildings that are basically 100% stabilized or more than 90% stabilized, with rents around $1,350 on average. The operating costs have grown to the point that they have almost leapfrogged the average rents in those buildings. Now we see about 250,000 to 300,000 units of housing in this older stock of rent-stabilized housing, where rents literally don’t cover operating costs. And so you have this very, very significant fiscal distress. There are many buildings in physical decline, and, in general, [we are seeing] worse conditions for tenants.
Private owners and nonprofits are dealing with this daily. Last December, the nonprofits issued a report stating that they would need a $1 billion bailout to save about 70,000 rent-stabilized units in immediate physical distress. They need to restructure their loans so they can get more capital to invest back in the building. The 2019 laws put controls on rent increases during vacancies, but have driven down the buildings’ valuations. That’s the trade-off that happened.
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Most of the time, to pay for renovations, repairs, new elevators, new boilers, and new roofs on the building, owners would pull equity out of the building to finance those big expenses. Because the values of the buildings are declining now, you have the situation where the only way you can keep the building and pay the mortgage and refinance the mortgage is if you cash in, if you put more money into the building. That’s what the banks are asking for now. Therefore, nonprofits specifically are asking for the billion dollars that allows them to refinance the buildings with cash and refinances. The secondary caveat of this is that the banks don’t want the buildings. So even if you stop paying the mortgage on some of these buildings, which many owners do, foreclosures have been slow because the banks understand they’re not financially viable properties. So they don’t want to actually take the buildings anymore because they’re not going to find anyone to sell them to who will then be able to pay them their mortgage.
This is a secondary conversation, but it dovetails with the fact that we don’t have good zoning and that we have an archaic, backward property tax system. Apartment buildings are taxed at incredibly high rates, while one- or two-family homes are not taxed very high at all. So there’s actually a disincentive to build more density. You lose more money if you build larger buildings in many parts of the city. This property tax system has been in place since the ’80s, and the divide just gets worse every year because the state has handicapped the city’s ability to raise assessments on buildings. The outcome has been that property taxes on apartment buildings are the only place where they can continue to grow the city’s revenue. What we see now is that all the old rent-stabilized buildings are not getting subsidies and are overtaxed.
When a unit becomes vacant, if you have no access to capital, you can’t do the renovations to put it back online. And that’s the reality that we’re seeing. Some tenant groups will argue that this is intentional, but the reality is that the majority of these units are in these older buildings in the outer boroughs, where there’s really just no capital available to do the renovation. Even if there was capital available to do it, it’d be better invested somewhere else because you’re not going to make any money on that investment back at the apartment.
The weird caveat here, though, is that all the new rent-stabilized buildings are new construction, and they get tax breaks. Their owners are paying zero taxes in most of their buildings, and yet the rents are usually closer to the average rents we’re talking about $3,000, even though they’re getting the tax breaks. As part of those deals, only a few units are set aside for lower-income families.
That’s how the housing market works. So there’s a lot of limbo right now while they wait to see what’s going to happen to this subsection of rent-stabilized housing. The dysfunction is that they’ve regulated the market to the point where they’re preserving this older housing stock with lower rents, which they feel they need to. But the only way to build new housing in a financially viable way is either to have a massive government subsidy to keep rents low or to charge really high rents. And that’s the disconnect we’re seeing in New York City more than anywhere else.
A lot of people in their 30’s and 40’s are making more money than our parents did. But even if you have a dual-income household with fairly good salaries, we have no opportunity to buy homes because of this disconnect. Our view of the 2019 laws is that they’ve actually made the housing market worse because of this decline in this part of the housing stock. Not to say that there weren’t some parts of the law that have been effective in other parts of the city.
Susana F. Molina: How effective do you think the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity has been in creating affordable housing in New York? Do you believe that zoning laws will primarily benefit large real estate developers or profit-driven developers, shifting the market towards investors and affluent buyers rather than providing opportunities for private buyers or community land trusts?
Aditi Nair: The City of YES is a bill that was passed pretty recently. It’s too early to make a direct assumption about its effectiveness, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. It finally admits what we’ve known for a long time. New York has to build more housing, but it should be across all neighborhoods. There are maps showing the disparity between boroughs where these newer housing developments are being proposed. Updating old zoning rules could help produce more units over time. But here’s the thing: this plan mostly incentivizes housing production, but it does not fully outline affordable housing for the people who actually need it.
Right now, $70,000 a year is the city’s median income, and half of this income goes to rent. So just letting developers build won’t fix that. We can’t ignore the bigger picture. And I’m a big proponent of community land trusts and social housing tools that can incentivize protections for working-class folks.
Housing is considered a financial asset. Joseph Stiglitz, the well-known economist, says that land prices today are largely untethered. They’re based on what somebody expects from it or on its value for tomorrow and future purposes. So if you just add supply without any guardrails, it can capitalize on developers who will cash in on the ride, not everyday New Yorkers. So the City of Yes has some tools, like a density bonus for projects that add more affordable housing, but they are also limited to certain neighborhoods. On its own, this policy won’t create enough homes for people who can actually afford them. So if there’s going to be real work, it needs to be paired with deeper subsidies and public land strategies. It does outline a set aside amount for community land trusts, but that’s nowhere near what is required to really put these mechanisms in place.
Recently, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act has been proposed (which grants qualified nonprofits the first right of refusal to purchase certain multifamily buildings before they go to the open market). It outlines how to combat tenant displacement by enabling nonprofits and community land trusts to convert private rentals into affordable housing, which can make a real difference.
Zoning can open the doors, but without smarter policies for working families and their lived experiences at the center of it, it might not be the most effective for working-class communities who really need it. That’s how scaling could give working New Yorkers a real chance.
Michael Johnson: The original zoning law was put in place in 1961; the fact that they updated it to some level is a good thing. The City of YES is the right step in the right direction because it now allows for more opportunities to build. It’s essentially unlocking value that exists by just allowing people to build bigger. However, there’s still the structural problem that land values are predicated not just on zoning but also on the tax system. I’ll give you an example.
I live in a two-family home in Queens that was handed down from my wife’s family, where the home is valued at, let’s say, $1.5 million. The rent-stabilized building that’s in our backyard is worthless. It’s literally bankrupt, and it’s falling apart. And we pay a quarter as much in property taxes as the building behind us, which is on the same-sized lot. The way the structure is set up is that homeowners are getting value from the tax system. In theory, zoning allows them; if it’s paired with property tax, it would force people in these situations to either pay more property taxes because their buildings are worth more or figure out ways to build something bigger on this land. And that’s, I think, what City of YES is starting to get to.
The bigger step has been the ballot initiatives last year (Ballot proposals are suggested changes to the state and city’s governing documents, the State Constitution and the City Charter. Voters get to decide on the changes they want to see passed). There is one that basically allows zoning approvals to be expedited, especially for affordable housing and for any development project. The city council members could stop pretty much any project because they had that power. Now, if the mayor and the borough president want to step in and save the project, they can override the city council member’s decision. This change has allowed many developers who want to build affordable housing to apply for projects they didn’t think the city council would approve before. So that’s why the ballot initiatives are probably going to be more effective in developing, especially affordable housing, than the City of YES policy. Still, both are very good steps in the right direction.
Susana F. Molina: Is freezing rents on stabilized apartments in New York an effective method to support tenants and protect housing stability? What suggestions do you have for stabilizing the rental market?
Michael Johnson: The biggest problem with the rent freeze proposal is that the mayor has provided only rhetoric, but it doesn’t suggest that there would be help for buildings in distress. The rents of rent-stabilized apartments in many buildings are already too low, and freezing them will only make it worse. Nothing is being proposed to lower costs. There’s no property tax reform coming and no help with water and sewer payments, which the government controls. In large part, insurance costs are going up, and they’re disproportionately targeting lower-income buildings, including those with lower rents. So if you live in a building that’s got a lower average rent, more of that rent check is going to insurance. You’re paying more in insurance than in a high-end luxury building because there are more risks in those buildings.
The rent freeze is accelerating a crisis that we already know exists. The flip side is that there is evidence that tenants are struggling to pay rent. Therefore, our argument has been to make sure these buildings are fully funded, and the best way to do that is to give vouchers to tenants who can’t afford to pay. In that way, rents would rise to a point where they would cover operating costs. Housing voucher programs in New York are already helping a large share of low-income renters. That’s the best model going forward to ensure that rent-stabilized apartment buildings don’t deteriorate.
The rent freeze, though, is the only tool the mayor has that he doesn’t need the state’s or the city council’s help to enact. He can appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board who are more likely to freeze the rents. However, he has lately changed his rhetoric on that, though, because it is in the state law that the Rent Guidelines Board can’t make a political decision. They have to review and evaluate the data to reach a conclusion. And so the next question becomes, if rents are frozen, what is going to happen to all these buildings?
Susana F. Molina: Is homeownership a viable solution to tackle the housing crisis? Why are community-led practices considered sustainable interventions for creating a housing market that guarantees a home for everyone? Are there good examples of this in New York City?
Aditi Nair: I love that question because I work with a nonprofit that primarily focuses on homeownership for Area Median Income ranges under the 30% (extremely low) and 31-50% (very low) to 80 % (low). I regularly speak with many homeowners and first-time home buyers who are preparing to buy a home across the country. And one thing that stands out is the symbolism of homeownership. What does owning a home historically mean in the US? It means an indication towards wealth, stability, and dignity. It feeds into these notions of who we are. So it’s intrinsically tied to your own self of owning a property.
There are traditional homeownership models without subsidies or shared equity restrictions, which are often out of reach for first-generation buyers and can sometimes put people with lower incomes and households at real financial risk. So there’s that flip side. We all know how 2008 panned out; the foreclosure crisis hit the city the hardest. So if people are not financially stable enough for homeownership, it can further push them into debt. Therefore, traditional homeownership is an important means to build wealth, but in high-cost cities like New York, it’s not a standalone solution.
What has proven durable through these crises that the city has been under is community-led, permanently affordable ownership models that put housing stability outside of the speculative market pressure. These models focus on long-term stewardship and preserve affordability for multiple generations. New York has a strong history of this work. During the 1970s, a homesteading movement emerged, and the city transferred buildings to tenant groups and nonprofits. They were seeding what we now know as limited equity co-ops. These co-ops were organized as housing development fund cooperatives that allowed working-class New Yorkers to collectively own and govern their buildings. But that is declining now because they’re not funded with capital to meet the increasing demand.
As a result, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have been rapidly expanding across the city, and a CTL movement is on the rise. There are at least 20 CLTs across 16 neighborhoods in all five boroughs. Most of them have only established themselves in the last 10 years. They manage land and housing to ensure affordability over a long time. For example, Cooper Square Land Trust is the longest-running CLT in New York, with around 360 deeply affordable apartments, incorporated in 1994.
El Barrio, a second CLT in the city, was incorporated only in 2014. So it took almost two decades between the two projects. The growth of housing units on CLTs has been very slow. For the CLT movement to grow and scale up, we do need to secure public land and pair public financing for development and operation, and a broader, more comprehensive understanding of land use and housing plans.
It’s essentially a subsidy retention model, but it allows its residents to govern the building collectively. There is already data showing that it reduces displacement and enables steady intergenerational international wealth-building. We do need a comprehensive understanding of what this means. When you enter conversations about community land trusts, it gets touchy very quickly because it’s tied to understanding the equity you’ve built as a homeowner.
Susana F. Molina: What are the struggles of a private homeowner in New York City or a full-time landlord? How has the “good cause eviction” law affected homeowners?
Tony Lindsay: The biggest problem that you’re seeing here is that we are in a very hyper-regulatory environment that continues to impose excessive regulations on smaller homeowners and smaller landlords, who honestly have no interest in being investors. These are just people who want access to homeownership, in line with what they’ve traditionally understood as the American dream.
In New York City, where I live, there are so many factors that disproportionately affect people like me, who are smaller homeowners. One of those things is the archaic landlord-tenant laws, which are very much framed in an extremely pro-tenant capacity. It’s okay to support renters. However, you cannot have laws and policies that are overtly hostile towards people who are trying to create some revenue value through homeownership.
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We understand that the key to wealth in this country is ownership. When you bar people from homeownership, particularly middle-class and working poor people in New York City, it advantages a lot of the larger institutional investors that have been coming in and buying up a lot of these properties, single-family homes, and not just land, spending massive amounts of money and buying up communities (who see no other option than selling). You’re not just seeing this across the country; in New York City, it’s coupled with the hyper-regulatory environment that’s making it so difficult.
People have to understand that, when it comes to smaller homeowners, many of them first of all don’t want to be landlords. They just want to buy their home. They want to live in their home and create some generational wealth for their families. But because it’s so expensive in New York City, people have to take on tenants. I’m talking about a home that you didn’t even buy for the purpose of being a landlord. Many people, just to struggle to survive, have had to do things like ‘let me become a landlord and find myself at risk of becoming a social safety net for the people that I rent to.’
You also have homeowners who were engaging in short-term rentals, which is something that I was advocating for because it became a source of supplementary income for smaller homeowners with extra space in their private homes. They needed to generate a little extra income to survive the rising costs here in New York City.
But it became criminalized by laws like Local Law 18, which disproportionately targeted private dwelling homeowners of one- or two-family properties, which, under state law, are considered your private residence. (The law didn’t add more units to the market; it only led to a rise in hotel prices.)
I just think there are so many policies that have been set not only at the state level but also at the local level here in New York City, creating a powder keg that is about to explode. But let’s just be honest, a rent freeze, what is that going to do? A rent freeze is just going to lead to more warehousing. As you move into more warehousing, you’ll decrease the supply of apartments on the market. You’re going to increase the demand. Rents are going to go up. The overall cost of living is going to go up, and that demand is going to impact everyone, including small homeowners and smaller landlords who are just trying to survive.
Michael Johnson: The biggest thing to really build off of Aditi’s point is, in New York, they rely on housing to fund the government. This is their approach, whereas in many other cities, the government funds and subsidizes housing, as in Vienna, where there is a lot of community housing. The only way you can really scale community land trusts is if the government is funding housing. But that’s a balance the city of New York has never really been comfortable with, because it relies so much on the private sector of housing, which creates wealth that then funds the government.
This is a 35,000-foot conversation that the elected officials have to have. Even if elected officials are out there claiming that they are advocating for tenants rights, they are probably not willing to make that commitment that they would switch over to a model where they would either have to reduce government spending or they would have to raise income taxes on people in order to fund that community housing because they’re going to be losing revenue from property taxes.
From our perspective as an organization, we focus heavily on regulating the rent-stabilized housing stock because that’s where we feel we can maintain the block of affordable housing that exists. The problem is that it has to be a limited-profit model in which these buildings can make money. Right now, they’ve overregulated to a point where we think roughly a third of them are essentially functionally bankrupt. And that’s the biggest problem that we see.
How that also dovetails with homeownership aspects of the city is a little tricky as well, because, as Tony said, most of the outer boroughs are one and two-family homes. That’s most of what the city is. And financially, for those people to be able to own homes and to live in New York City, pay taxes, all that stuff, it’s a different reality. So, trying to find a housing system that balances all these things is very difficult, and we’re seeing that every single day.
