New York Governor Announces Plan To Fix Housing Crisis By Building Housing Which No Previous Governor Had Tried

Bold Initiative Proposes Actually Constructing Residential Units Near Transit In Approach Economists Describe As Standard Policy

ALBANY, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report that Governor Kathy Hochul has announced a housing initiative that proposes to address New York’s housing shortage by building housing, an approach that housing policy experts describe as “correct” and that the communities adjacent to the proposed building sites describe as “concerning for a variety of reasons that are not about housing construction per se.” The initiative targets 800,000 new units by 2030, concentrating development near transit hubs in the New York City metropolitan area, and includes state preemption authority that would override local zoning restrictions preventing transit-adjacent density, which is the provision that community groups are most focused on and which housing economists have identified as the most important element of any plan that intends to produce actual housing rather than annual housing plan announcements.

The housing shortage in New York is well documented, well analyzed, and long-standing: the vacancy rate for apartments in New York City is approximately 1.4 percent, the lowest recorded, against a healthy market vacancy of 5-7 percent; median rents have increased approximately 35 percent since 2020 against wage growth of approximately 12 percent; and the waiting list for affordable housing units maintained by the city’s Housing Authority contains approximately 250,000 households, with an average wait time of approximately ten years. The causes are also well documented: New York produces dramatically fewer housing units per year than it needs, primarily because the local zoning and approval process that determines what can be built has, over several decades, been optimized to give existing residents maximal opportunity to object to proposed development, and existing residents have used that opportunity extensively to prevent housing near themselves from being built. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have covered the housing crisis in New York and London as parallel phenomena.

The Opposition: Who And What

Opposition to the initiative has come from local governments in Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties, which object to the state preemption authority on home rule grounds; from community boards in transit-adjacent Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods, which have submitted comments noting that increased density will strain existing infrastructure; and from a coalition of homeowners who have organized under the name Protect Our Communities, whose materials contain the phrase “we support affordable housing, but” followed by objections that, taken together, would prevent the construction of housing in any location their members can reach by car to attend a community meeting.

Housing economists have reviewed the community board comments and noted that the infrastructure strain objections are addressable through the infrastructure investment that increased density enables through property tax revenue, and that the transit capacity objection is addressed by the plan’s focus on transit-adjacent density, and that the general objections to density near existing single-family neighborhoods reflect preferences for exclusion that are legitimate as preferences and incompatible with housing affordability as a policy goal simultaneously.

The Plan’s Prospects

The state preemption provision requires legislative approval. The legislature includes members from the objecting communities. The vote is in the fall. For NYC housing satire at The Daily Mash.

New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition

New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.

Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.

This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.

The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

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