. “Edward Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard University, author of “Triumph of the City, How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer” .
Yes, well, it is much easier to understand professor Edward Glaser’s criticism and solution as to just how to create affordable housing in New York if we know the title of his recent book on the subject and if we know his long article appeared in the conservative Daily News on Sunday August 24 th in which he offers Mayor de Blasio in just two words the solution to affordable housing, “Build big, Bill.”
Professor Glaeser, who I suspect is a New York boy, evokes the halcyon days of the free market of the 1920s when, “We were building in New York 100,000 new housing units accessible to people across the economic spectrum, every year. As a result the booming city remained affordable to working and middle class people like my grandparents.”
Well, I am as old as professor Glaeser’s grandfather and while I can’t speak with authority on the Twenties, I can on the Thirties during which, professor Glaeser, you will recall, was when we had the big Depression. This is when all building of apartments or anything else just stopped in New York, and sure we had plenty of affordable apartments, but nobody could afford them. I remember when our cultured landlord, Mr. Bernstein who sported an academic Van Dyke, and got out of Germany just in time to buy an apartment house on Riverside Drive would come to visit my German mother to ask politely for the delinquent rent in beautiful “high German” and my mother so enjoyed the visits she would offer coffee. The rent for our three bedroom apartment with a view of the river was $62.50.
And Professor Glaeser, the Depression continued right up to the start of the war and went on a little longer. I can remember a bizarre few weeks when my business broker father took my older brother John and me to Bridgeport because he got a “good job” in a “war plant” and my Greek father’s mechanical aptitude stopped with opening a bottle of ouzo.
So Professor Glaeser, so much for the good old days of the twenties when the city was booming and building apartments. Right here in the West Village we can see the wave of apartment houses built in the roaring Twenties and then it stopped until after the war when the developers built, as cheaply as they could, large anomalous characterless red brick blobs like the apartment houses along 6th Avenue.
Professor Glaeser decries, how could we go from 100,000 housing units being built in just one year to Mayor de Blasio demanding the 200,000 units be repaired or built over the next ten years – how did we go so wrong?
Well, of course, according to the professor, it was government that threw sand into the free enterprise gears, “Government increasingly managed development and professed to hold the keys to protect affordability.”
Perhaps, Professor Glaeser, it was not that simple. You are skipping a lot of history. Your grandparents can, as I do, remember men living in shanties in city parks and I remember reading Lewis Mumford’s “The Culture of Cities” and agreeing with his argument that government had to step in to do “slum clearance” as this city did under La Guardia with the help of Roosevelt on the lower East Side in the thirties (the Eleanor Roosevelt Houses). Should we have not done this Professor Glaeser? The urgencies of a given time dictate solutions and while it was perfectly clear in the depths of the Depression that we needed Roosevelt like socialism of the WPA, it is not clear to me that today we need luxury condos more than we need a hospital.
Now I do agree that we took a bad step in putting on rent control eighty years ago to help the returning GIs. It was an understandable gesture of gratitude and what city council member could vote against it but we are the last city in the US to have it and it has continued much too long and now we are stuck with it. You simply can’t end rent regulations. If we could, 500,000 apartments would come on the market tomorrow and compete with new market rate apartments and prices would come down and level out. As a landlord I can remember when the Archive building was opened and hundreds of spanking new apartments competed with my three small, very old ones and we had to reduce our rents.
It is, of course, impossible to conceive of a city council member voting against rent regulations. We will have it until all those enjoying it now and their children and their children’s children have passed on. It will continue into the next century.
But anyway, here is the professor’s arguments against regulation – that it is impossible to move out of a rent regulated apartment so if, for example, you are “empty nesters” you keep the big apartment you raised the kids in. OK, now I add to this – denying it to four kids just out of college who might share it as their first apartment in the city.
But what is his formula for creating new affordable housing in New York?
Make the condo towers higher and “slow the spread of historic districts” and here he is talking to us in the West Village and the efforts by the GVSHP to landmark the South Village. What the professor wants to do is make more land or square feet available to developers by building higher and on what might become landmarked areas and even tax the owner of an undeveloped property.
Last Sunday, as I sat behind the driver in the Jitney, coming up to the Midtown Tunnel, I gazed at the changing New York skyline with the black asparagus towers built by the handful of big time developers who now own that skyline. I thought of an interview with Donald Trump in which he told how they secretly gathered air rights and then put it all into one characterless skinny black super tower and sold the condos to absent global one per centers as an investment.
No, Professor Glaeser I don’t think you and Donald Trump have worked it out yet.
