The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York.
In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.
We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.
> Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
I get the challenge of existing property/buildings other states, etc - but it always seems weird to me that you can have single story buildings less than one mile from Manhattan in Hoboken, etc. (as the crow flies, I get transit, etc).
Feels like the big problem is we can't change anything easily anymore.
Hoboken has the fourth-highest population density of any municipality in the US. Although it is mostly low-rise in character, there aren't many single-story buildings there at all.
A good chunk of Hoboken was originally swampland; you can't exactly put in skyscrapers there. And even if you could, the other infrastructure (roads, water mains, sewers, trains, parking) absolutely could not support that level of development. You would basically need to bulldoze the entire town and build much wider roads etc... which would then cut into how much land could be devoted to housing.
Edit to add: genuinely baffled by the downvote. I lived in Hoboken for 7 years, and regardless of any personal opinions on the pros and cons, the town indisputably has infrastructure problems at its current density level: frequent water main breaks, flooding, over-crowded trains, buses that are too full to take on passengers, sink-holes, constant traffic jams at the few exits to town, double-parking / obstructed bike lanes, waiting lists for municipal garages (one of which is literally falling apart). The density level is objectively quite high relative to the US [1] and it's quite simply factually incorrect to list Hoboken as an example of insufficiently-dense housing in the US.
I did not downvote, but I think your comment is a good example of the "Yes We Can't" feeling that I mentioned in it being too hard to change things.
Manhattan wasn't exactly easy land to build on either.
Manhattan also has an inherent economy of scale that Hoboken lacks; Hoboken is barely over 1 square mile of land.
Meanwhile the lower-rise neighborhoods of Manhattan have roughly the same population density and building height as Hoboken. So why are you calling out Hoboken? What single-story buildings are you even talking about there, and why are you ignoring the presence of single-story buildings in Manhattan? They're rare but they absolutely do exist -- I just ate lunch in a single-story Manhattan building literally yesterday.
Left wing type policies can be very effective at producing housing in places like China where the government just says we are going to have 10,000 flats here and here and maybe contracts the construction to developers but deals with all the regulatory and permitting issues. Even in capitalist places like Singapore and Hong Kong a lot of the housing was built like that.
You build up. Which is expensive, so developers will want assurances and no "20% affordable units" bs.
There also is always going to be pain. NYC has incredible global draw, so demand runs deep. It might be that you can never build your way under $2k/mo apartments there.
In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.
We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.