The Supply Is There - Someone's Just Sitting On It
A(nother) piece in The Real Deal this week described Mayor Mamdani's housing plan as a clever marriage between YIMBYs and socialists. The framing, between the lines, was pretty clear: market-rate supply is the pragmatic, grown-up idea. Community land trusts and tenant protections are the wild card. From where most New Yorkers sit, that framing has it backwards.
The Number That Matters
Start with what is actually happening on the ground. The median rent in Manhattan crossed $5,000 a month in February, an all-time record according to Corcoran's 2026 market report. Brooklyn hit $4,296 the same month. To afford the average New York City apartment at roughly $4,500 a month without spending more than 30 percent of your income, you need to be earning around $180,000 a year. That is not a renter problem. That is a city problem.
57,000 Vacant Apartments
The state's Division of Homes and Community Renewal sent a letter to the Rent Guidelines Board counting 57,421 vacant rent-stabilized apartments in New York as of April 2025, up 8,000 from the year before. The trend is going in the wrong direction. When the city Comptroller examined the warehoused subset of that pool, the office found that only about 3,000 units were too dilapidated to be habitable. That is roughly 11.5 percent. The remaining 88.5 percent do not need much to be rented out.
Those units exist. They are rent-stabilized. Families need them. They are empty. One landlord advocacy group was transparent enough about the dynamic to offer a deal: allow owners a one-time rent reset on vacant stabilized units, and those units come back to market. When you are openly offering to end a warehouse in exchange for deregulation, you have confirmed the warehouse.
There is no new construction permit that fixes any of that.
The Supply Research Is Real, and Incomplete
The research on market-rate supply and affordability is solid, and it deserves a fair read. An NYU study found that new market-rate high-rises in New York City reduce rents for mid-tier rental housing within the same census tract, as higher-income tenants move into new buildings and vacate older units for the next renter down the income ladder. Researchers at the Upjohn Institute found that new market-rate apartment buildings decrease nearby rents by 5 to 7 percent relative to comparable locations that did not get new construction. Building more housing works. Anyone telling you otherwise is ignoring the data.
What the same research consistently shows, and what often gets left out of the "build our way out of it" pitch, is that filtering is slower and weaker at the bottom of the market. In the medium term, the filtering effect does not extend meaningfully to low-end housing, which is why there is broad economic consensus that subsidies are essential for meeting the needs of the lowest-income households. In a city where the median rent requires $180,000 in annual income, middle income is already a wide gap to bridge before we get to anyone who actually needs help.
This Is Not a Theory
Community land trusts have a way of getting described as a left-field policy idea. Worth clarifying what they actually look like. The Cooper Square Community Land Trust is the oldest CLT in New York City still in active operation, born out of the struggles against Robert Moses in the 1960s, with 23 buildings on the Lower East Side held in perpetuity. The last six people welcomed into Cooper Square apartments came directly from Department of Homeless Services shelters. Today, New York City is home to more than 20 CLTs, one-third of which already own or are in active stages of acquiring land for permanently affordable housing.
Cooper Square is not a seminar. It is a building on Delancey Street that has been keeping people housed through every boom, bust, and luxury condo wave this city has thrown at the Lower East Side for 30 years.
Both, Not Either
This city needs more apartments. It also needs to stop losing the ones it already has. Those are not competing agendas. They are the same problem, viewed from two angles. That is not YIMBY socialism. That is just housing.