OPINION: Maybe it’s not the housing supply, it’s the distribution, by George Fiala

Unlike last year, the elections this year turned out more to my liking. Except for the ballot initiatives.

It’s sad for me to see that groups like Open New York have convinced a majority of otherwise progressive New Yorkers to think that taking away local land use decisions and giving them to a central executive is the right thing.

Regular readers of this paper know my position against the EDC’s plan to build luxury condo buildings around here. I have never actually believed what it seems everybody and their mother take as the gospel truth—that we are in some sort of a housing emergency. In my gut I feel that there are plenty of houses and apartments in our city—enough to satisfy all housing needs.

I see the problem as what is described in economics as the Gini Coefficient. An Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, developed this measure of income inequality in 1912. It’s a measure of income distribution that goes from zero to one – the higher the number, the greater the inequality. Zero means everybody makes the same, one would mean that a single person owns everything.

The US Gini number  has been moving higher over the past 50 years. When I entered the working world in 1975, the number was around 35. It actually dipped a bit until 1980, and then began a slow steady rise.

The Reagan revolution, which my generation ended up going along with, cut taxes for the rich, reduced both industrial and financial regulations and my peers figured out all kinds of ways to amass lots of money. The sharing society became a me generation, as accumulated wealth soared due to the lower taxes and regulations. Gini kept rising

By 2000, the number reached 40, and currently sits around 42.

So what does this have to do with housing, you ask…

Well, when I came out of college I was told that to live properly you had to budget one weeks pay for one month’s rent. Even though I never have had any sort of traditional jobs, I was able to do that all the way through the 1990’s. In 2000, I was living on Prospect Avenue, between 8th Ave and Prospect Park West, and my rent was $450. I was living just slightly under my means, although it meant living in a small studio that I shared with a ton of cockroaches. But that was ok, since I chose to invest my pay in my business, rather than my abode. Plus I had a daughter in college and was paying a lot of tuition.

She graduated a few years afterwards and I moved up to a nicer $750 apartment in Bay Ridge.

I could see the world around me changing which reflected the rising Gini. There was more wealth in the upper 20% of the population, which in NYC is a lot of people. Rents and tastes in living standards started rising, as more people could afford luxury. That opened up more profit opportunities for the real estate and construction businesses.

I worked in Carroll Gardens and saw firsthand how multi-family brownstones were being bought by the wealthy people and converted to single family townhouses. A building that once served as home to 20 or more now could house as few as two or three.

A couple of other things, like the rise of Airbnb, real estate investment trusts and using major city real estate as places to park money are what I think is making it harder to get an apartment, which now costs as much as two or three weeks pay a month.

Business oriented groups such as Open New York and the Manhattan Institute have framed this as an injustice that can only be fixed by new construction. Of course, tearing down and building makes a lot of money for those in the business.

As long as the money keeps flowing in, there’s a tremendous incentive to build, with the only thing in the way being zoning laws.

Zoning can be both good and bad. Bad in that it has been used to segregate neighborhoods, good when used for good urban planning. These new ballot changes take away the democratic part of zoning, allowing a central mayor to supercede the local elected official.

What’s ironic is that the same people who decry Trump’s cry of drill drill drill, and mock the legacy of Robert Moses’ slicing through neighborhoods to build roads, seem to believe that the only answer to the appearance of housing shortages is to build, build, build, without much care to the history of the neighborhood that gets the building.

Moses should not have favored rich neighborhoods when deciding where to put his roads, and the fossil fuel industries need to operate more sustainability.

In the same way, we should think a little more about keeping our city livable by figuring out ways to better use the housing we already have.

Everything doesn’t have to be an emergency.