By Pansy Schulman
"In a way, architects know everything about affordable housing, and very little," said Benjamin Prosky, executive director of AIA New York, as he addressed a crowded room to kick off a half-day conference titled "NYC’s Housing Crisis." Held last week at the city’s newly inaugurated Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, the event served as a stark reminder of the complexities facing the nation’s most populous city. "As a group we want to start where we know best, which is designing our way out of a situation," Prosky added.
Rather than serving as a traditional showcase of architectural renderings and floor plans, the conference—organized by AIA New York and the Center for Architecture—constituted a pre-design call to action. It brought together architects, policymakers, activists, and academics who have been grappling with the city’s housing emergency on the front lines, recognizing that spatial design alone cannot untangle decades of economic, political, and social missteps.
New York City’s housing crisis, evidenced by record rates of homelessness, a surge in evictions, and an ever-widening affordability gap, has been festering for years, if not decades. The structural disparities have deepened across successive mayoral administrations. By the end of Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year mayoral reign in 2016, the top one percent of wealthiest New Yorkers were estimated to be earning an average of 45 times more than the bottom 99 percent. Bill de Blasio subsequently entered office with a prominent promise to amend this tale of two cities. Over the course of his two terms, more than 465,000 units of affordable housing were created or preserved across the city’s five boroughs.
Despite those historic production numbers, the affordability metrics moved in the wrong direction. More than half of New Yorkers remain severely rent-burdened, spending upwards of 50 percent of their household income strictly on housing costs, while the rate of homelessness has climbed to all-time highs. Now, at the dawn of a new mayoral administration, Mayor Eric Adams has pledged $22 billion toward affordable housing development over the next ten years—a substantial financial commitment that housing advocates argue is still fundamentally insufficient to meet the staggering scale of the need.
Yet, as New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman observed in an eloquent keynote address, "crisis is an opportunity for change." That sentiment was echoed by numerous speakers throughout the morning sessions. The event, largely focused on policy, land use, and urban economics, was divided into three structured panels. The first looked back at the historical origins and steady escalation of the crisis; the second evaluated current approaches and their practical effectiveness; and the third explored future models of development and zoning reform.
During the opening panel, titled "The Past: Defining the Crisis," the three participating speakers traced the roots of today’s urban emergency back to the 1970s, a tumultuous era when a severe fiscal crisis forged a new, fragile paradigm of public-private partnerships in municipal development. Ingrid Gould Ellen of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy noted a staggering economic divergence: housing prices across the city have increased twentyfold since 1974, compared to a mere 6.5-fold increase in median household income over the same period. Ellen pointed to the compounding effects of shrinking land availability, federal divestment from public housing programs, and rapidly accelerating wealth inequality in New York City, where high-income earners continue to drive up rents and purchase prices across nearly every neighborhood.
Moses Gates of the Regional Plan Association added a crucial spatial dimension to the discussion, arguing that how urban space is allocated and utilized remains an integral part of the broader housing crisis. Gates highlighted a notable increase since the 1980s in the number of vacant housing units scattered across the city—many of them operating as luxury pied-a-terres for non-city residents who use them only occasionally—coupled with a steady decrease in protected, rent-regulated inventory.
The second panel, "The Present: What’s Working? What’s Not?", was led by Brian Loughlin, a principal at Magnusson Architects. Loughlin argued that the everyday interests of working-class residents are frequently unrepresented or sidelined in the complex public-private partnerships that have driven urban development in recent decades. Offering a legislative perspective, State Senator Brian Kavanagh pointed to recent positive developments in Albany, most notably the landmark tenant protection laws passed in 2019, which represent the strongest legislative safeguards for renters in decades, alongside the state government’s renewed capital commitment to affordable housing initiatives.
Jamie Smarr of the nonprofit developer National Housing Partnership offered a more pragmatic view, noting that New Yorkers, at the very least, possess a clear public understanding of why affordable housing laws are urgently needed. He pointed to the municipal triumph and widespread adoption of mandatory inclusionary zoning laws as evidence of a shifting public consensus.
Among the most compelling voices on the panel was Karen Blondel, founder of the Public Housing Civic Association. Blondel stressed that policymakers must fundamentally change their approach by genuinely listening to public housing residents and bringing them directly to the decision-making table. Drawing from her own lived experience, she spoke candidly of the physical decay, chronic infrastructure failures, and unsafe living conditions that she and her neighbors at the public Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn have endured over the past four decades. Blondel’s powerful presence successfully kept the panel grounded in the gritty reality of urban poverty, cutting through the hypotheticals and administrative abstractions that often characterize high-level policy conferences.
The third and final panel, "The Future: New Models of Development/New Approaches," featured Antonio Reynoso, the newly elected Brooklyn borough president, who positioned himself as part of a rising generation of city officials committed to refusing campaign donations from major real estate developers. In a sharp, brief speech delivered before the formal panel discussion, Reynoso argued vigorously against what he termed the "YIMBY/NIMBY deaf loop"—a political stalemate that consistently stifles development and blocks the production of essential new housing units across the city. Calling for a bold embrace of urban density, Reynoso stated bluntly, "We need height, we need a lot of it. Height is the way out."
Muzzy Rosenblatt, president and CEO of the nonprofit Bowery Residents’ Committee (BRC), shared a successful operational model wherein he convinced municipal agencies to subsidize the development and mortgage acquisition for a combined shelter and low-income housing project in the Bronx. With targeted municipal aid, BRC was able to generate sustainable operational revenue that directly subsidizes rent for formerly homeless individuals moving out of the shelter system and into permanent, stable homes within the 130-unit development. "We can design and build with dignity," Rosenblatt argued, "and recapture profit to subsidize more units of housing."
The conference served as the formal beginning of a larger, ongoing initiative on the part of the Center for Architecture and AIA New York. In his closing remarks, Benjamin Prosky announced that the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate will publish a comprehensive research report to accompany the advocacy effort later this year.
Ultimately, forging viable pathways toward affordable, accessible, and sustainable housing for all New Yorkers will require a complex confluence of progressive policy, grassroots activism, and rigorous public debate, bolstered by the technical expertise and creative vision of the city’s architects and urban designers. A video recording of the conference remains publicly available through the Center for Architecture.
